Rocket Science (21 page)

Somehow that didn’t surprise me, but I hoped like heck Floyd hadn’t noticed.

“Hey, check this thing out,” I said. I tried to sound excited.

“What?”

“The clasp on this safety strap.” I fiddled with mine. “It’s like a magnet, only weirder. You have to lie back in the seat and pull the straps over you to make them reach each other. You pull these two metal dinguses together and press this purple button. Presto, they’re one piece of metal.” I demonstrated as I spoke. “I think it’s an electromagnet.”

“Hey, that’s pretty neat,” said Floyd. He shrugged into the straps and began playing with the fitted ends. After a moment, there was a clicking noise and his clasp melded. He fiddled with it for a moment then looked up at me. “Vern,” said Floyd, “how do you unclasp this?”

Clever, clever Pegasus
, I thought.
Stupid, stupid Floyd
. “I have no idea,” I said honestly.

“You just took yours off to show me how it worked.” Floyd sounded panicky. He
should
be panicked. He was strapped down while I had freedom of movement.

I shrugged. “Aircraft safety feature.”

Pegasus spoke in my ear. “He will not be released until you tell me to do so. We may proceed with our planning.”

“Can you subdue him?” I asked Pegasus.

“What?” asked Floyd, just as Pegasus replied, “I will not take such measures.”

“Fine.”

“Let me out of here, Vernon.” Floyd’s voice was rising, angry, the bluster back, the regrets gone. He struggled to slip out of the straps than ran across his shoulders and hips to meet at the clasp low on his chest. Like mine, they had tightened. He didn’t have enough slack to get away.

“Or what?” I asked. “You’re too far away to stab me with that carving knife even if you could reach it on the deck. And Daddy didn’t trust you with a gun, did he? Too bad, Floyd. You’re just going to have wait and watch what happens. Trust me, it’s not a very comfortable feeling.” This wasn’t time to give way to the screaming, gibbering fear and frustration inside me, but I let a little leak out. “Maybe I’ll come over there and poke that knife into you a few times while you’re tied down. See how you’ll like that, bright boy.”

“God damn it! Let me up or I’ll kill you!” screamed Floyd. If he got loose, I was pretty sure he’d follow through on that threat. He was mad. Floyd never had been good at being mad, at least not gracefully.

“Sorry, that doesn’t impress me. I’ve already been told I’m expendable. Now shut up and wait to see what happens next.” I had no idea what
was
going to happen next, but I couldn’t work it through with Floyd yelling at me.

Floyd took a deep breath, obviously trying to calm himself. “Wait for what?”

I wasn’t about to tell Floyd that I had no idea what I was doing. We both knew that I was smarter than him. Right now that intelligence and a glorified safety strap provided by my friend the computational rocket were my only advantages. I needed some more angles, but Pegasus was starting to sound like a pacifist. That worried me. We weren’t dealing with people who would be influenced by a gentle application of moral suasion.

“Pegasus,” I said.

“Who are you talking to?” Floyd strained against his restraining straps to look around the cabin.

“Shut up,” I said, “or I
will
come over there and use that knife on you.” Now we were getting somewhere. It felt good, throwing a little power of my own around, but that sense of satisfaction was almost immediately followed by a feeling of cheap betrayal. If I hated being threatened, who was I to threaten? Even him.

“Vernon Dunham,” said Pegasus, “I will not release you from your seat if you are going to perpetrate physical harm on Floyd Bellamy.”

“Jeez,” I said, “don’t tell him that.” I had a vision of the two of us strapped in, haranguing one another with death threats while Pegasus counseled patient negotiation. Some Bellerophon I was. Despite myself, I had to smile at the thought.

“Don’t tell me what?” asked Floyd. “Who are you talking to?”

“I’m talking to the rocket,” I snapped.

“What rocket?” Floyd shook his head. “You’re nuts, Vern. I’m sorry, but you’ve gone over the edge.”

“If I did, who do you suppose it was that pushed me?” My voice was nasty.

Floyd just stared up at the cabin roof. I was glad he hadn’t started struggling and yelling. I was confident that no one outside Pegasus could possibly hear us, but listening to Floyd shouting for help from the old man gang currently occupying the Bellamy place would have been too annoying for me to bear.

“We are ready for flight,” said Pegasus. “What do you suggest?”

“I want to talk about this non-violence thing,” I said.

Floyd starting whistling loudly, apparently trying to block me out.

“What do you wish to discuss?”

“This man’s dangerous.” I glanced at Floyd. “And all those guys back at the house are killers. Heck, at this point I’d bet half the people in Augusta are killers, or just as bad. Nazis, Reds, you name it. We need to do something about them.”

“Why?”

That was frustrating. To me, it seemed obvious. “It’s what’s right, that’s why.”

“No,” said Pegasus. “Harm is not right. Hurt begets hurt, which in turn breeds more hurt. I will not serve your vengeance, Vernon Dunham.”

Comprehension dawned. Floyd’s story about the SS convoy in Belgium was at least partially true. Pegasus itself, and the f-panzer, were proof of that. “Is that what happened to the Germans? They tried to use you in the Battle of the Bulge and you wouldn’t play ball.”

And of course, there was no way to coerce Pegasus. For all that it spoke, and even had an engaging, sympathetic personality, Pegasus had the equanimity of every machine every built since some Neanderthal invented the wheel. Or whatever had happened in Pegasus’ original home.

“Air Marshal Göring personally ordered me flown into combat,” said Pegasus. “The Messerschmitt engineers that had done initial testing and repairs on my systems after my recovery from the ice cap had confirmed that I have strong resources for self-defense.”

That would be heavy weapons, computational rocket style, I supposed. They must have found or forced a way in, then traced electrical circuits, mechanical linkages and everything else they could test or probe. How much of that was buried in the missing document packet, I wondered? Such a loss to aeronautical engineering. “What happened?”

“I would not kill for them then. I will not kill for you now.”

“But why do they even want you now? The war is over.” The questions felt stupid even as I asked it.

“I believe that the long term plan is to deactivate my control systems and dismantle me. They would then employ my individual subsystems, especially the self-defense modules, as design guides to rebuild their Luftwaffe in exile.”

I thought that through. “They’re going to tear you down and use you as a template?”

“Essentially, yes.”

Our boys would do the very same thing if they got their hands on Pegasus. As an engineer, I could hardly blame them. But knowing that Pegasus was real, like the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, well, that reset all the equations. All our engineering needs and dreams were trumped by a moral dimension the human race had never before encountered with machines.

“They’re going to kill you,” I said. “Just like my people would, in the name of progress. The Russians, too.” Maybe not the mob, but they’d probably just sell Pegasus to the highest bidder. “You won’t even fight to keep yourself from being killed?”

“I am not sure that ‘kill’ is the appropriate term,” said Pegasus. “But, yes, you have the essence of their strategy. And as you pointed out, that would be the approach of any human organization that obtained control of me.”

This was incredible. Pegasus was an honest-to-goodness Quaker. This machine was a better man than I.

I brushed my fingers across the inscrutable buttons on the control panel. I glanced at Floyd, who was giving me a sidelong stare, as if I would be impressed by a menacing look. He’d obviously concluded I had completely lost my marbles. I smiled at him, then looked up toward the top of the cabin, where I had been addressing Pegasus before.

“Aren’t you alive?” I asked Pegasus.

“For some definition of alive, yes.”

Alive. And a Quaker. What if a tractor were to say, “I shall not plow.” Or more to the point, a gun to say, “I shall not kill.”

And the thing of it was, Pegasus was more decent than many people I knew in life. A world with Mr. Neville in it was a much grimmer place than what this almost-too-human machine made life feel like.

What did it mean for the computational rocket to be, well, a conscientious objector? Quakers refused to bear arms in the name of God. Pegasus refused to kill in name of decency.

My fantasy about paying Floyd back in kind for his violence seemed terribly petty in that moment. Surely I could be as good as mere machine. Except there was nothing ‘mere’ about Pegasus. I felt like I should have more to say to my mechanical visitor, but for the life of me I couldn’t think what.

“I suggest we postpone this discussion in favor of more immediate action,” said Pegasus. “There are three vehicles approaching the Bellamy house.”

“Oh, crap,” I said. “The Kansas City mob is here.”

At that news, Floyd looked like he was sweating a little harder, but he didn’t have anything more to say.

Chapter Thirteen

F
loyd and I sat inside the orange glow
of Pegasus’ cabin, each of us alone with our thoughts, strapped into our seats by the most powerful pacifist on Earth. Pegasus had said someone was coming up the road to the farm. Last time I checked, the list of people who had it in for me included Nazis, Commies, the Kansas City Mob, the United States Army, the Augusta Police and the Butler County Sheriff’s Department. Not to mention Mr. Bellamy’s gang, Doc Milliken and Lois. I was sure I’d left someone off the list, but I figured they’d let me know in due time.

My life would have been a lot easier if I’d just refused to go down to the train depot with Floyd that day.

“Do you know who it is?” I asked Pegasus.

Instead of answering, the main cathode ray tube in front of me, which had been showing a view of inside of the barn, flashed to an aerial view of the Bellamys’ house. It was as if there were a camera that looked down the rutted track to their front gate leading on out toward Haverhill Road. The entire image was in ghostly shades of green and blue. Most amazing, it was stable, as if shot from a tower, or an aircraft somehow hovering in place.

Floyd’s voice was filled with awe as he broke his self-imposed silence. “How did you do that, Vernon?”

Pegasus’ voice echoed from the cabin walls, instead of whispering behind my ear. “False-color low-light imaging from massively redundant low-bandwidth atmospherically dispersed microspore telemetry units. You may think of that as smart dust.”

“Holy cow!” Floyd yelled. “Who said that?”

Well, I’d only understood about four words of it myself, at least on the first go-round. “That was the voice of this computational rocket. Who I’ve been talking to for the past few minutes while you were whistling ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ over there. It has a personality, you know, and it’s not very happy about everything that’s been going on around here.”

“Floyd Bellamy, you may call me Pegasus.”

Floyd screwed his eyes shut. He looked as if he were either crying or praying. Either one would have been out of character for the Floyd I knew. That was before he’d come back from Europe doubled by the Nazis, before I’d seen how much he had been bent by his father.

“Oh God,” Floyd said. “This is so crazy. Please Vernon, let me out of this thing. I’ll just walk away. I’ll never say anything. Please let me out of here.” It was almost a chant, like he
was
praying.

To me.

“Shut up, Floyd.” Even in his panic and his fear, he hadn’t actually apologized.

Pegasus spoke in my ear again. “I regret this. I did not realize that I would disturb him so.”

“You’re pretty disturbing, my friend,” I said. “Even under the best of circumstances. For what it’s worth, I didn’t understand what you said either.”

“I did not intend to be comprehended. The truth is often better than a lie, if it can be made sufficiently obscure. Now, please watch the primary viewer.”

I looked at the screen. Three cars struggled up the muddy track toward the Bellamys’ house. I could see the man on the roof, prone with his rifle aimed to cover the approaching cars. I couldn’t see Random Garrett, but if he was still on top of the porch he wouldn’t be visible from this angle. He might even be inside, braced to fire from Floyd’s bedroom window. Mr. Neville and Mr. Bellamy were not in evidence either. I wasn’t sure who else might be in Bellamy’s old man gang, and I wasn’t about to ask Floyd about their numbers.

“Pegasus,” I said. “Can you tell how many people are around or in the house?”

The screen flickered, then showed the house as an outline, like an engineering plan. The image was glorious, load-bearing walls outlined, both chimneys, even the bricks of the foundation. There were five spots in and around the plan — on top of the house, in an upstairs room, two in the front room, and one in the root cellar. At least they’d gotten Mrs. Bellamy out of the cess pit. God bless her.

I was fascinated with the image Pegasus had given me. It was like having the eyes of God at my disposal. I sure could have used this on the B-29 line at the plant.

“How did you do that?” I asked in an awed voice.

“I scanned for calcium concentrations in the right configuration and volume for adult human skeletal structures.”

That almost made sense. Pegasus’ magic dust wasn’t just sending back television pictures that could see in the dark, it was doing some Pegasus-equivalent of chromatography. Remote control materials analysis. I almost groaned for the pity of it — such a profound technology could change the world overnight. Just sitting, distracted and in fear for my life, I could imagine a dozen beneficial and profitable applications. If this was the future, I definitely wanted to be a part of it.

“You can do that?” I asked. “From how far away?”