Rocket Science

by Jay Lake

  “One sec,” I told him. I turned to the two men who had helped me. Both of them were staring. “Get a doctor, damn it.” The one wearing a cook’s uniform ran toward the hospital. I could hear sirens approaching, and the Mustangs finally made another pass overhead. They were waiting for Pegasus to lift off again.

  Dad wheezed and poked me in the side with a finger. “Floyd Bellamy...Floyd...”

  “Right here, Mr. Dunham,” Floyd said, kneeling to take Dad’s hand.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s all right.” I stroked the old man’s temple. His skin felt soft and doughy. It was already chilly.

  “Floyd is your brother, Vernon. You’ve got to know that. Floyd’s mine.” Dad coughed again. “We didn’t think Alonzo was coming back...Alma and I...we...” Dad collapsed flat on the pavement.

  “I think you guys had better wait for the cops.” It was the second Good Samaritan, the sandy-haired fellow, turning away from his long peek inside Pegasus.

  I punched the stranger in the kidney. It was a sucker punch, unfair as hell, but there were doctors and cops coming and a whole crowd watching and I had to get out. The poor chump fell down groaning, doubled over. Behind me, the crowd roared. I could hear them starting to run toward me.

  “Go!” I shouted to Floyd, who scrambled through the open hatch. I heaved myself up to follow as quick as I could. I was so very tired.

  Someone grabbed my leg.

  The fighters were buzzing overhead again, their big Packard-built Merlin engines snarling like a cloud of mechanical hornets. Behind me, people were cursing, and someone threw a rock through the hatch.

  “Pegasus,” I screamed, “lift off!” My hand had a death grip on a stanchion just inside the hatch.

  There was a great whooshing sound, like steam venting from a locomotive. Pegasus began to pitch and roll as it pulled up, flinging me back and forth against the outside of the hull. The hand on my leg let go, accompanied by a desperate wail. I craned my neck around in time to see the man I’d punched, the sandy-haired man who’d helped Dad, drop thirty or forty feet into the angry crowd. His hat tumbled free as he fell, whipping through the air like a little black kite. I flinched away from the man’s fall to see white-clad doctors and nuns crowding around Dad. At least my father wasn’t being trampled in the rush.

  Floyd dragged me the rest of the way into Pegasus’ cabin by main force. Even if I got out of all this without being killed, I couldn’t see any way of talking myself out of the trouble I was in. In addition to all the destruction and disruption I had caused in Augusta, I had now started a street brawl in Wichita, and maybe killed at least one man in my escape. A man that had helped my father live, at that.

  Behind me, as the hatch closed, I heard a sharp hammering.

  “You re-entered the cabin in a timely manner,” Pegasus announced. “The Mustangs have just opened fire on us.”

  The thought of what those bullets would have done to my legs blazed through my mind on wings of terror and panic. I crawled toward the pilot’s chair. “Back to the refinery,” I said as I collapsed into a resting position. I turned my head to look at Floyd, my newfound half-brother to whom I had not so long ago promised messy retribution.

  There wasn’t much for me to go back to, given the swathe of destruction I had left behind me. What about him? My half-brother had darned near killed his mother, then left behind some very angry men with very long memories, not the least of which was the man who had raised him as a son.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  There was nothing else to say.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Flying back to Augusta wasn’t as easy as flying to Wichita had been. For one thing, the P-51 pilots knew where we were going. For another, they were already above us and moving at speed when we pulled up off St. Francis Street in downtown Wichita. And they obviously had orders to bring us down. Even through Pegasus’ stout hull, I could hear the rattle and thump of their heavy machine gun fire as it struck us.

  “You won’t shoot back, huh?” I asked Pegasus.

  “Do you wish to kill them? They are doing their job in defending their homes and yours.”

  Pegasus had a point. I didn’t want to kill the Army pilots either, just discourage them. Persuade them to back off. “Can we outrun them?” I asked.

  “We will reach the oil refinery in several minutes. Additional speed would be wasteful because of the braking time involved. Counterproductive as well, because they would simply catch us on our braking maneuver.”

  There had to be another way out of this. I couldn’t imagine taking on fuel — or in Pegasus’ case, lubricant — under heavy machine gun fire. “How about forcing them down?”

  “Your airplanes are delicate machines. As I said before, the pilots’ lives would be placed at undue risk if I forced them down.”

  “Evasive maneuvers?” I asked hopefully.

  “We can fly around them in rings until they run out of fuel,” replied Pegasus, “but they will certainly summon more fighters before then. That would bring us no closer to our goal.”

  Pegasus’ goal. The oil it needed. I had run out of goals. I had no stomach for harming Floyd now. If nothing else, Pegasus had shamed me out of it. He was my brother, my father’s son. Had everyone known it when we were kids? Had my mother known it? I wondered if Floyd and I had been pushed together for that reason.

  I had never seen it that way, but what did I know as a kid?

  Whatever Floyd’s crimes and sins were, the law could handle him. Dad was safe in the hospital, out of reach of Hauptmann, Milliken and company. The publicity alone from his arrival would keep him safe — I’d bet there were reporters camped outside the operating room already. Mr. Bellamy was probably half way to Mexico by now, unless Roanoke Joe had killed him. Or Mr. Neville. There wasn’t much left for me, except to help Pegasus. And maybe my brother, if I could.

  Another series of rattling thumps against the hull reminded me what was waiting for me out there. I had to find some way to keep the Army from shooting continuously until they finally got me.

  Why the heck didn’t I just give up? If I did it publicly enough, they wouldn’t be able to kill me. There were enough players, enough problems, that this would be front page news from New York to San Francisco.

  You couldn’t hide aerial dog fights over a city the size of Wichita.

  If I gave up, if I quit, Floyd would come to justice. Which was what I wanted, right? And Pegasus...well. The computational rocket had done a lot for me, but there were limits to everything.

  “Hey, Vernon...” whispered Floyd. He was back in his straps, I realized. Trust? Or practicality? “How come you keep looking at me like that?”

  I realized that I had been studying Floyd while I thought. I was checking out his nose, his hairline, the set of his jaw. Looking for signs of Dad — or me — in him. This wasn’t the moment to spill Dad’s secret.

  “There’s something pretty funny I need to tell you,” I said, “but it will have to wait. There’s people in fighter planes shooting at us right now. I’m trying to figure a way to give us up without getting us killed.”

  “And what happens then?” He glanced around the cabin. “To your Pegasus?”

  My Pegasus, he’d said.

  “Nothing good,” I admitted.

  “You’ll do what’s right,” he muttered. “You’re the only one who always did.”

  Because I was the only chump who never knew the secrets. Well, I had a secret now. Pegasus deserved to live too. I couldn’t give it up. Me, maybe. My brother, yes.

  But not Pegasus.

  I stared at the main screen, which showed three P-51Ds chasing us. One of the side screens indicated that we were closing in on the refinery. Maybe the refinery itself would shelter us. Hopefully the Mustang pilots would stop firing in case they blew an oil storage tank or something.

  The pilots, I thought. Pegasus was right. They’re all people out there, not just machines and weapons and bad intentions. If I could get som
eone on the Army side talking, this didn’t have to end in a flaming disaster. Maybe I could get out of this, go to a nice, peaceful jail for half of forever.

  “Can you find what radio frequency they’re using?” I asked Pegasus. “I need to call that Colonel Pinkhoffer, or Ollie Wannamaker.”

  “It would be easier to tap into the telephone system,” said Pegasus. “And you have yet to secure permission for me to take the oil.”

  Right, I thought. The oil. Ethics were hell sometimes. “Just get me a line to the operator.” Another of Pegasus’ myriad engineering marvels — the computational rocket could plug remotely into the telephone system.

  There was a series of buzzing clicks in the same place behind my ear that I normally heard Pegasus, followed by a nasal female voice. “Will the party please clear the line? The telephones are required for emergency use at this time.”

  It sounded like Susie Mae Leach. She was the usual off-hours operator at the Augusta exchange. “Susie Mae? It’s Vernon Dunham.”

  “Oh, hi, Vern. Look, you gotta get off the line.” She rattled something, which generated a series of clicks on the line. “Hey, where are you calling from?”

  Her switch couldn’t tell her where my call was coming from, I was pretty sure of that. Pegasus had to have tapped the trunk line. I must have looked like an inbound long distance call.

  “Susie Mae,” I said, “I am the emergency. I’m on a radiotelephone right now.” Close enough to true, and not bad thinking on the fly. So to speak. She didn’t need to know I was circling the refinery at three hundred miles an hour being chased by Army fighter planes.

  “Huh?” Susie Mae had never been the brightest spark in the bonfire.

  “Look, I need to talk to the St. Francis Hospital in Wichita. And stay on the line, please. When I’m off that call, get me Ollie Wannamaker or that Army Colonel Pinkhoffer who’s probably at the police station. This is an emergency, Susie Mae.”

  “All right.” Susie Mae sounded doubtful, but I heard her patch the call through to Wichita. They had direct dial in Wichita, but that particular bit of progress hadn’t made it to Augusta yet.

  “St. Francis, Sisters of St. Joseph,” said a crisp female voice, picking up on the first ring.

  “Emergency telephone call for you from Augusta, Kansas,” said Susie Mae. “This is a radiotelephone patch. Operator will remain on the line.”

  That was my cue. “Look, I’m the guy that just landed a plane outside and dropped off a patient,” I said.

  The woman gasped. “Doctor must speak to you immediately,” she said. I heard a bang as she slammed down the phone, followed by a lot of shouting.

  A new voice came, male, hurried. He sounded excited rather than angry. “Hello, hello. This is Officer Krieger of the Wichita Police Department. Who is speaking, please?”

  “I need to talk to the doctor handling the new admission,” I said. I felt foolish.

  There was the sound of a brief struggle, then I heard a man’s voice say faintly, “Keep that idiot away from this telephone!” There was a pause, and the voice continued, much louder, “Doctor Rubenstein here. Who is this?”

  There was no point in lying. Enough people in August had seen me get inside Pegasus. “Vernon Dunham of Augusta,” I said. “You’ve got my father Grady Dunham in there.”

  “Grady Dunham?” I heard scratching. Rubenstein was making notes. Good. “What happened to him?” Even better. He wasn’t asking stupid questions about me. That man had a sense of priorities.

  “He got beat up real bad yesterday. Assailants unknown. Ribs kicked in, and they tried to kill him by whacking him over the head. Dad’s got a metal plate, though.”

  “We’ve noticed that.”

  “Check the records. One of your surgeons put it in there four years ago. Instead of getting treatment after his beating, Dad was abandoned to die. Then I rescued him and got him to you. How is he?” The connection was breaking up, and I didn’t have a lot of time.

  “He’s stable, and conscious. He’s been asking for you, and for someone named Floyd.”

  I realized there was one thing I desperately needed to know from Dad. “This is incredibly important. I need you to ask him something. Ask him what color Captain Markowicz’s hair is.”

  “What?”

  “Just ask the question. Lives depend on it.” Well, mine probably did, at any rate. “Please, Doctor, I’m running out of time here.”

  The phone banged down again, and there was more yelling. I heard stomping around for few moments, then Rubenstein came back on. “Frankly, I’m amazed that he understood the question. Mr. Dunham said the Captain’s hair is blond.”

  Good old Dad. Drunk as a skunk, broke the man’s arm in a fight, but he could remember what color Markowicz’s hair was. The real Markowicz wouldn’t have beaten Dad half to death and dumped him. That meant the red-headed man I had run over with the Doc’s Cadillac probably was the real Captain Markowicz, United States Army CID I’d bet my good right leg that nobody had died in Kansas City — the third, dead Captain Markowicz was just one of the lies fed to me by those two fascist sympathizers, Hauptmann and Milliken.

  “Tell Officer Krieger to keep Dad under tight guard,” I yelled into the worsening connection. “And don’t let anybody from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department see him.”

  The line went dead. I didn’t know if Rubenstein had caught the last part. There was nothing I could do about it now. I glanced over at Floyd and realized that he had heard my entire side of the phone call. He was just watching me with an expression of calm curiosity, recovered from his fit of emotions.

  I smiled at him, despite myself.

  Susie Mae came back on the line. “Vernon? I’ve got the Police Department ready to speak to you.”

  “Put them through,” I said. I looked at the various screens. The fighters still circled, but they weren’t firing at Pegasus right now. We zigzagged close to the ground, circling the towers and tanks of the refinery complex in an evasion pattern. There were police and soldiers all over the place below us. Pinkhoffer or Chief Davis must have called out the State Police, or maybe all the local cops and county Sheriff’s Deputies within driving distance.

  “Vernon? Is that you? Ollie Wannamaker here.”

  Good old Ollie. He really had tried to help me, maybe the one true blue person left in my life. “Hey Ollie,” I said. “You were right to try to warn me off. I’m in a world of trouble here.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Stupid question, Ollie. I need to speak with Colonel Pinkhoffer.”

  “He’s not here. I’ve got one of his officers here, a Lieutenant Morgan from CID.”

  Morgan? It couldn’t be the same Morgan who called me about Dad. Could it?

  “Ollie, this is real important. Trust me, scout’s honor. Only answer yes or no to what I ask you. Is Morgan’s hair blond?”

  “Uh, Vern...”

  “Yes or no Ollie! Please.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly.

  “Is his arm in a cast, or maybe a sling?”

  “Yes, he’s got a broken arm.”

  Oh ho, I thought. The false Captain Markowicz appears. Then I realized what Ollie had said. “I told you to say yes or no!” I hissed.

  Ollie sounded exasperated. “Look, Vernon, what are you getting at?”

  “Ollie, he’s the guy that tried to kill Dad, dumped him in the trunk of my car, and probably burned down Mrs. Swenson’s boarding house. I think he’s a Nazi agent.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Ollie said. “And you’re out of my jurisdiction. I’m not going to talk with you any more. Here’s Lieutenant Morgan. You can deal with him now.”

  “Morgan here,” said a new voice. A familiar voice.

  “Morgan? Deputy Bobby Ray Morgan?”

  “No,” said Morgan shortly. “I am Lieutenant Christopher Morgan.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. “And you wouldn’t have called me yesterday morning at the library about my dad, would you? I kn
ow who you are, and you’re not going to get away with it.” It was a stupid line from a dozen different movies, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Yes,” said the voice carefully, “that may be the case. But I think you’re confused about the outcome of the situation.” He was being cautious. Ollie was obviously still in the room with him. “Why don’t you land the airplane and we’ll discuss it?”

  Morgan’s sheer arrogance was bugging the heck out of me. “Why don’t you jump in the lake, you Nazi scum,” I screamed. I hoped like heck Susie Mae heard that. At least there’d be gossip after they killed me. “Pegasus, cut the connection.”

  “Yes,” said Pegasus.

  * * *

  We continued to fly tight, fast circles that wove through the refinery. I seemed to have run out of both energy and good judgment. At least Dad was safe. “Who’s a Nazi scum?” asked Floyd, interrupting my pointless train of thought.

  “Don’t you all know each other?”

  Floyd looked offended. “Hey, I’m no Nazi.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you took their money, didn’t you? What’s the difference?” I asked. I was honestly curious, and this was the first he’d said about it directly. Pegasus’ urgings not to judge echoed in my mind.

  Floyd looked uncomfortable. “I was just a guy making a buck. They wanted the airplane shipped out of Europe, I knew how to work the system to do that. I didn’t really think they would come all the way over here to claim it, what with the war over and all.”

  “So you sold it to the Mafia?”

  “Well, when Daddy told me he’d gotten word to watch out for a large shipment from Europe from Mr. Neville and those people, I knew it was valuable. The Reds wouldn’t activate their contacts here without a damned good reason. But they wouldn’t have given us much for it, and they’re hard to deal with.” He hung his chin onto his chest. “Those Reds are crazy bastards.”

  There was the pot calling the kettle black, I thought. “You mean it was just a coincidence that your father was the Russian contact here while you were working for the Germans?”