Ghosts of Engines Past (21 page)

All for William to be with me.

I cannot say how long we stood in each others' arms, then we returned outside to where Sir Steven was waiting with Edward.

“He knows enough of the Journal's secrets to be dangerous,” I warned the Tynedales.

Edward motioned him into the craft's hatch with his weapon, then William and I were alone.

“We shall set him downe, safe with a wise and goode star folk, to have out his lyf in a temple,” said William.

“You—you have met aliens?”

“We have walked their lande, and had council with their elders.”

“And me?” I asked. “What of me? I have seen some secrets of your journal. They are in my memory.”

“As you will, you must do,” he said very softly, as if fearful of my answer.

He did not trust Sir Steven, but he trusted me. He was also giving me a choice, as the knight had done with his bride in
The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe.

“If you go, my heart will go with you,” I said sincerely, “and I must go wherever my heart goes.”

We stood outside for a few minutes more, farewelling the Earth of 2004 by the light of the burning Range Rover. Presently we heard sirens in the distance, and saw the spotlight of an approaching helicopter. That seemed like a good cue to pick up the Tynedale Journal and Don Alverin Sword, and climb into the Tynedale's spacecraft. Then we vanished.

It is 1985, and I have written a steampunk story before steampunk was invented.

This is the very first story that I sold, and while rereading it I was surprised by its sophistication. Then I remembered that I had been writing for six years by 1985 and had loads of rejections from professional magazines, but I also had eight unpaid stories published and had won the 1985 World SF Convention's writing competition. So, the sophistication came from six years of trying harder every time I got a rejection—aspiring writers, take note. The Pharoah's Airship is a study of the sort of person who could achieve such an incredible breakthrough as the Phroah's engine. I chose to make the inventor rather punk and obsessive. As for the engine, it had “two large batteries, a bank of solar cells, four small gas tanks, and a refrigeration unit”. In short, my unwritten idea was that it was a steam engine that worked by potential accumulation. Why did I not call it a steam engine? Back in 1985 steampunk had not been invented, and I thought that the idea of a steam-powered spacecraft would be laughed at by editors. A decade later, and it would have been a selling point.

It is not often that a former astronaut is called upon to be an amateur detective, but the investigation of the Pharoah seemed to require the skills of both. My orders were to find out everything that I could about Stephen Cole's background while I was in Australia. Who had helped him build the Pharaoh? Had he talked about its principle to his friends? Did any of his childhood interests provide a clue to its principle? Had he made any other discoveries? Was he a genius?    

What is genius, and how can it be recognised? Mozart was playing the harpsichord before royalty at an age when Einstein had not yet learned to talk. Stephen Cole had been an undergraduate student when he built the Pharaoh. He was barely eighteen years old.

When we arrived at the Amberley Air Force base, the wreckage of his machine had been collected in one of the hangars, along with the remains of the F/A-18 Hornet fighter that had killed him. My  companion was Adele Taylor from the CIA, and one of her agents waited in the car outside.

A guard checked our passes at the hangar door then sent for Dr Richards, technical adviser to the inquest into Stephen's death. I picked him for an academic as he hurried over to greet us, a short, greying man, a civilian who coped badly with the guards'  deference to his authority. I toyed with a small, black rock in my pocket. It had jagged edges, but the surface was mirror smooth where one corner had been sliced away.

“Welcome, welcome,” Richards said excitedly as we shook hands. “I'm so glad to see such important people taking an interest in Stephen's work.”

The government of the United States was taking Stephen's work a lot more seriously than he could ever have guessed. Taylor was posing as a propulsion engineer, while I represented the services. In a sense both identities were technically correct.

“You preliminary report did cause some interest,” said Taylor non-commitally.

The report on his report had had my seniors gasping for breath and reaching for their 'TOP SECRET' stamps. I fingered the rock in my pocket again.

“I suppose the military potential of Stephen's craft is what interests you most,” said Richards as we entered the hangar and approached the piles of wreckage.

“What military potential?” snapped Taylor, alert and alarmed.

“Why, a submarine with a limited flight capacity could have quite a number of applications, I
should imagine. Surprise attack, sabotage, even nuclear weapons delivery.”

That had been a bad moment, but clearly Richards still had no idea what Stephen Cole had really done. He had indicated no suspicions at all in his report. The man was a hack, he did not know how to dream. The Pharaoh had been shattered by its collision with the jet fighter, and all that had been recovered from the sea bed was the cabin, a tangle of wires and tubes, some small gas tanks, a cheap industrial robot arm, and a metal container full of rock samples. The cabin was a modified propane gas tank, and it had been partly split by the impact.

Richards had built a mockup based on what had been recovered. It resembled nothing more than a small submarine, the type that is used for prospecting on the sea bed. An access hatch had been cut  in the main tank, and a frame for the robot arm welded on just below the window. The whole assembly rested on two steel tubes that served as skids.

“Welding marks on the original cabin indicate that quite a lot more was attached,” Richards explained. “The red circles on the mockup indicate where we think the propulsion unit was attached. And see this, the cylindrical container welded to the left skid. It was an external sample carrier, and was full of rock samples when our divers found it.”

“Just a simple little machine for prospecting on the sea bed, except that it could also fly,” I observed.

“Yes, yes, but there are several design faults, too,” he said with that pedantic obsession that one sees in some engineers. “See here? The access hatch hinges inwards, and the seals compress in the wrong direction: dangerous under water, you know.”

Except that Stephen had never intended it to operate under water. A collection of items from the cabin was laid out beside the mockup. There were several plastic food and drink containers, some garbage bags, an air re-cycling unit, a sleeping bag, and a device that had been identified as a makeshift toilet. I peered inside the hatch. Just below the window was a control panel with several dozen lights and switches. There were six small joysticks wired to the missing propulsion device outside, and the whole cabin was heavily padded and insulated.

“Have you any idea how much of the original vehicle is missing?” Taylor asked.

“Ah yes, I... conducted some tests to determine that just after I submitted my report. The night that he left Stephen moved the Pharaoh out of the garage and left it sitting on the lawn for about an hour, according to his mother. From the indentations that it left I estimate that it weighed nearly a ton. The wreckage recovered,  plus Stephen's weight and the rock samples, comes to about two thirds of that.”

“Yet ninety-eight percent of the jet fighter was recovered,” I pointed out.

“Well yes, and that does indicate that the drive unit should have been found if it had sunk near the crash site. The pilot's report suggests that it was still functioning after the crash, so it probably flew quite some distance before coming down. Getting back to what we did manage to find, though, Stephen's consumption of food and, ah, use of that toilet device indicates that he had been sealed inside the cabin for the whole three days from when his mother last saw him to when his craft collided with the jet. Oh yes, and the condition of the catalyst in the air purifier bears out this estimate, too.”

Taylor walked over to the pile of twisted metal that was the original Pharaoh and knelt beside the sample container. Releasing a spring loaded cap she reached in and withdrew a small, dark rock. It had jagged edges, and gleamed wet in the hangar's floodlights.

“Dr Richards, I must be frank with you,” she said, turning the rock over in her fingers. “The material in this cylinder is of great strategic importance.”

“Really? What is it?”

“I'm afraid I can't say, but we need to know where he got it.”

“But Stephen left no maps.”

“The microflora attached to the rocks will give us an idea of the depth and latitude, but we need all the material available.”

Richards began to nod reflexively in agreement, then stopped.

“You want to take
all
the material?” he asked suspiciously.

“That will be necessary, Dr Richards. I've checked with your government and we have permission—as long as you think it has no direct bearing on the inquest.”

“Well, ah... I suppose not.” He was reluctant, but he still signed the papers releasing the rocks to us. “How did your people in the US come to learn about the rock samples so quickly?”

“One of our specialists just happened to be in Australia on secondment. He recognised a rock sample for what it was and had it sent back home for analysis.” I peered into the container at the jagged, pitted rocks. “What puzzled us, though, was why you included it with your report.”

Annoyance darkened his face for a moment.

“It was a mistake,” he said quickly. “A new assistant misunderstood his instructions.”

Taylor could barely conceal her excitement as we returned to the car. She had snatched the key to a fantastic secret from under the very nose of a foreign government's top investigator. Because she had achieved her primary objective already, the rest of the trip would be just my backup work. Oddly enough I was looking forward to this, as I was fascinated by Stephen.

“He must have had help, Adele,” I said as we walked. “There was some very skilled welding in the Pharaoh, and a lot of other high quality work that a short-sighted undergraduate could never have done alone.”

“High quality? The seal on the sample cannister was not even watertight.”

“It didn't have to be.”

We sent a coded report to Washington over the car's radio, then drove out to Stephen's home. It was a timber house in one of Brisbane's inner suburbs, a small shack on stilts in a huge, overgrown yard. Stephen had built the Pharoah in a free-standing garage at the back. Richards had been out there already, looking for clues to the secret of the Pharaoh's propulsion unit. There were none. There were no drawings: Stephen had known exactly what he wanted to build. There were no offcuts: Stephen was meticulous in cleaning up after himself.

Mrs Cole met us at the front door, a thin, tense woman in her fifties. She had a heavy cough and she chain-smoked for the whole time that we were there.

“I took him a cup of chocolate milk every night at nine,” she said as she showed us the garage.

The remaining tools gave us no clues. Outside, I could see two deep grooves in the lawn where the Pharaoh had rested for an hour before its first and only voyage.

“So you saw it for the whole six months it took to build,” said Taylor, covering old ground for my benefit. Mrs Cole wheezed, then coughed violently before she could reply.

“Yeah, that's right, but I don't understand mechanical things. That Dr Richards has already asked me about all that.”

She had seen the Pharaoh every night as Stephen built it. I groaned inwardly at the thought that she might develop lung cancer and die—as her husband had.

“Mrs Cole, would you agree to undergo further questioning under hypnosis?” Taylor asked.

“I've already told you all I know,” she said impatiently. “I don't remember any more than that.
I'm not a technical person, Dr Taylor. He could have been building an atomic bomb for all I know.”

“Under hypnosis you often remember things more clearly,” Taylor explained. “The US government will compensate you for your time and trouble, of course.”

If Stephen had been building an atomic bomb it could not have caused more consternation. At the mention of a four figure compensation payment Mrs Cole agreed to undergo hypnosis, and to having her house and garage searched yet again. Taylor, efficient as ever, produced the forms from her briefcase at once.

I wandered into Stephen's old bedroom while I waited. There was nothing out of the ordinary among the books and notes remaining there. The furniture was sparse, and everything was almost military in neatness. A photograph above the desk caught my attention. It was of an impossible contraption, a collection of large balloons supporting a deckchair, which in turn had an engine and twin rotors beneath it. It was several feet above the ground, and there were uniformed police in the watching crowd. When I asked Mrs Cole about it she tried to be evasive.

“Ah, yeah, he did get into trouble over that thing, but he was only fourteen at the time. He flew it to school as part of a science day, but the police arrested him when he landed. Something about flying through the airport's flight path, I think.”

“He probably committed half a dozen breaches of the local air traffic laws,” laughed Taylor.