Racing the Moon

by Alan Armstrong

  “Simple! No more tricks like climbing the radio tower, borrowing airplanes, stealing toy motors, or fiddling with people’s cars. Get a police record—which that car caper would have gotten you for sure had Mr. Comstock not noticed some gooey stuff by the gas flap—get a record and I’ll never be able to get you the security clearance you’ll need for what I have in mind.”

  “What would I ever need a security clearance for?”

  “You know as well as I do. For me to get you anywhere near Wallops, you’ll need a security clearance.”

  “Why?” Chuck asked. “Why are you bothering?”

  “Because I think you’ve got some special fire, and because when I make a friend I hang on to him. Maybe you didn’t choose me, but I’ve chosen you, and I’m not going to let you go ruin yourself if I can help it.”

  She stared at Chuck for a long moment. “So those are my rules.”

  She turned to Alex. “As for you, starting now you’re going to say no when he starts going wrong. And absolutely no more stealing!”

  Alex backed away, shaking her head. “No more stealing—OK. But I can’t stop him from anything. Not even Dad can.”

  “Can you say no to him?” Ebbs asked. “Can you say no to yourself? To try and save his chance and to save yourself, can you say no and at least try to stop him?”

  “I guess,” Alex whispered.

  Chuck lifted his head slowly to stare at his sister, wide-eyed, expressionless, like someone in a fever.

  “Right!” said Ebbs. “We’re on a new page here.”

  15

  STOWAWAY

  That night in the Moon Station, Alex didn’t feel like talking. She felt bad, the cause of everything coming to a head. Chuck was grim-faced.

  “All this Ebbs stuff is like Mother saying I’ve got genius in my hands,” he muttered. “They don’t know. They don’t know who I am. I’m different, I’m dark, I don’t look like anyone in the family, I’m left-handed—I’m not like the rest of you. When my hand got big enough—I was seven or eight—Mother gave me this ring,” he said, taking it off and showing it to Alex. Alex knew it. It was a gold ring with a deep-set sapphire.

  “Look what’s written on the inside,” he said. “It’s Carlus, my name in Latin. She told me it was a gift from someone when she was in Europe. It’s really old.” It looked old. The stone was worn, its bevels dulled. “That’s all she knows about me. My first name.”

  He grew silent.

  They sat there for a moment. Finally, Alex picked up Ebbs’s manuscript. Without asking, she began reading aloud again from Smith’s journal.

  The first day out, cramped and hungry in my hiding, I fed myself on what I imagined I’d see and do in Rome, but then the ship began to pitch so hard and the sailing got so rough it drove me out from my hiding.

  When they discovered me a stowaway, and worst of all a Protestant, they threw me overboard, the sailors swearing God would drown them all if I stayed on board. Not a voice was raised to save me as they told their rosaries loud to be spared my screams as they pitched me in like another Jonah.

  When I hit the water I counted myself dead, but then my luck, which always comes to me in threes, came on in the form of a pirate ship that had been tracking my pilgrims just over the horizon. They picked me up as a slave to sell. When I told them what sort of ship their quarry was, they let it go, not out of mercy but because pilgrim luggage wasn’t worth their trouble.

  I was with them all that summer learning their pirate tricks of surprise, our faces made up fierce and reckless like actors, screaming and roaring as we boarded to drown our own terror.

  My tutor was a jagged three-inch piece of mirror glass I could use as a weapon if need be. I studied in it for hours to cast fire from my eyes so you’d know that once you took me on, if you didn’t kill me I was going to do my best to kill you. I was small but quick, and I could wrestle better than anybody. The scars I earned in that trade soon made me look older than my years.

  The night we landed at Marseille I dropped off the side naked as a fish, my boots and clothes in a tarred bag at my side. I swam to shore with a gold coin in my cheek and a sailor’s knife in my teeth.

  I hung around the port, watchful lest my old shipmates see me and try to get me back, juggling and cartwheeling in the dark and poorer places to pick up food and news until I snared what I needed: stale bread and word that the King of Hungary had work for soldiers. I set out to the northeast. Having now my scars and pirate knowledge, I hired on to fight the Turks attacking Vienna.

  I was some years in that business, learning the work of a journeyman soldier and teaching my fellows the tricks of fireworks for signaling and terrorizing until, to show off my bravery to my employer, I volunteered for single combat against the Turks’ champion.

  We fought in an open field in sight of both armies. I killed my man with a lucky stab to the eye, but then the Turks put forward a second champion saying I hadn’t fought fair, as if any Turk ever does. No choice and no matter, I dispatched the second one as well by cartwheeling around him to chop at his heel strings. As he fell my slash sent his neck gushing blood like a bilge pump. Then the Turks called forth their third champion. This one was timider, a slow, cautious dancer as he sought to avoid me. I tripped him with a wrestling trick—a quick side step—and took his head too for my pile. They had many more champions, I’m sure, but no more volunteers.

  For this service the Hungarian king awarded me the title Captain and a coat of arms featuring my three Turks’ heads. Now I, a poor man’s son, was a Captain in the Austrian Imperial Guard with a coat of arms and a chamois leather bag of gold as well.

  I counted that adventure my third piece of luck, but that bag of gold and all that’s passed through my hands since I’ve never liked as much as some men do because I seem to smell the stench of dead flesh on every piece. Gold remembers; it is the one metal that never tarnishes.

  There I was, by reputation the terror of Turks who swarmed before us, but then my luck turned as it always has for me: three bads following three goods. In what was meant to be a minor skirmish I went down with a gash deep in my leg. That night I lay faint and cold, bleeding to death when the pickers found me—the folks who come out after battles to strip the dead for clothing and treasure. By what I wore they recognized I was no common soldier, so they staunched my wound and cleaned me up for ransom, but unfortunate for them and me they stripped and shaved me so bare that no one believed I had any significance at all, so I ended up bald as an egg, sold as a common slave in the Constantinople market.

  Constantinople, that magic-sounding place I’d dreamed of in my dull merchant’s shop back in England: it was now all mine to see, but it didn’t look so fine through a prisoner’s eyes.

  The pasha who bought me riveted a heavy iron ring around my neck with an outsticking spike shaped like a sickle to grab me by and haul me about. He used me badly. I was the lowest of the low, but I kept up my spirits by thinking of nothing but learning the Turk language.

  One afternoon my pasha came alone to where I was working by myself threshing grain. He spat on me for being a Christian. In a black rage I hurled my threshing bat into his gut. He went down doubled. My next blow did for his head.

  I stripped him, put on his Turk clothes and knapsack, buried his body in straw and was off on his horse with the heavy spiked iron still around my neck.

  As I rode off I remembered other times I’d escaped in another man’s clothes and wondered if someday someone would slip into mine to make his escape smelling my stink of fear and feeling the last of my own damp warmth.

  I rode for my life. Wherever one road crossed another there were arrows with pictures: to Persia, a black man with white spots; to China, a sun; to Russia, a cross.

  For sixteen days I rode for Russia, afraid of being identified as a runaway by that iron around my neck with its spike sticking out, my shaved head and my ignorance of the land and language. For food I played the beggar, juggling, cartwheeling, and grinning like
an idiot until I reached the Russian garrison on the River Don, where my newly grown red hair and freckled skin caught the eye of a Russian lady. She had my iron removed.

  For a time the lady Calamata befriended me. When she finally turned me out it was with a piece of news and a jewel to remember her by, a diamond. Before she told me her news she taught me how to test if a diamond be true: a true one pressed against ice will melt it. Glass will not, nor will any other jewel.

  Her news was of a means to get back to England: a group of English merchants had come to the czar at Moscow seeking permission to trade English woolens for sables and timber. Sure that I knew the Russian tongue better than anyone else in that group and certain that the czar was after warmer stuff than cloaks and blankets, she sent me to Moscow to make myself useful. I went in the guise of a priest. The high-collared shirt hid the scar of the iron ring I’d worn.

  Her hunch paid off. It was how to make guns and gunpowder the czar was after, and I knew that business from my pirate time. So you see now how my hands are still stained black from kneading sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal with old urine to make fire signals, smoke bombs, lightning, and blasts to blow down walls and forts.

  In disguise I finally made it back to England. I was twenty-five when I got home, scarred for life from that ring—a body mark that was to fascinate my Native American captors, as did my black-veined hands. To my former neighbors’ surprise I now had a title, a coat of arms, a sable collar to hide my mark, and some gold, not that they sneered at me any the less. New titles and new gold did not count as much with them as old.

  Alex put down the manuscript and looked over at Chuck. “Smith was starting out new like you.”

  “You think I’m like him—like that?”

  “Yes.”

  Alex slid down the rope and headed across the lawn toward the house with Jeep at her side. She stopped when she heard a low, whistling owl call. Her father said a single owl called when someone died, but if another owl answered it meant good news for anyone who heard. Alex held her breath. There was an answering call. She sighed with relief.

  16

  THE NO NAME

  The next morning Alex helped her father weed. Working with dirt and plants made her feel better. She told her dad about getting caught stealing. He already knew. “Hold to your pledge, Alex,” he said. “Stealing leads to a world of trouble.”

  That afternoon Ebbs said the weekend weather looked promising, so they should go sailing on Saturday. “Old clothes,” she ordered, “the oldest you’ve got, and your most beat-up sneakers. If your dad’s got any old white shirts he can spare and some old hats, bring those along too. And dog food. I’ve got everything else.”

  On Saturday morning Alex, Chuck, and Jeep rode with Ebbs down to the river to see the No Name. Ebbs fumbled and bumped into things on shore, but on board her moves were exact. She handed out heavy kapok life vests that made them all look like red blocks. For Jeep she’d rigged a harness belowdecks, a sort of hammock that held him dangling like a carcass, his paws barely touching the bilge boards. He grumped and grunted as she fitted him into it. It offended his dignity to ride that way, but Ebbs was firm. She was firm about everything. Jeep could have escaped. Ebbs left it loose enough for him to get out if they capsized, but he felt it his duty to stick with them.

  “Shipshape is more than housekeeping,” Ebbs explained as she showed them how everything had its special place. “It’s survival. We’re on our own out there, nobody can help us; we might as well be a mile down in a cave. Something goes wrong, it’s on us to fix it—replace a broken halyard, stitch up a torn sail, jury-rig a snapped mast. We’ve got to be ready for anything, so you’ve gotta learn the four basic sailors’ knots: reef, square, bowline, and half hitch. They’re not easy. It took me a lot of practice to get them right, but like my father said, ‘Patience is never wasted.’ If I can manage ’em with my clumsy fingers, you can too.”

  Ebbs pushed them off from the dock and ordered Chuck to raise the mainsail. A slight breeze swelled it and they were off. Alex was surprised how just that wisp of wind could make the heavy boat heel as it glided them along.

  Ebbs showed Alex how to set the anchors and check the tide chart. “And pump,” she added, reaching down for a black tube the length of her arm with a handle on top. “You’ll stick the bottom end into the bilge and pump it as dry as you can. In weather and rough water we’ll take turns.”

  The current and the outgoing tide carried the No Name along, but they were going faster than the water, as Ebbs proved by tossing out a chip that they shot past. The river had a strong smell, something between old salad and wet dog.

  “Smith mapped all this,” Ebbs said, one hand on the tiller, the other pointing to the shore. “The chart he made shows that point over there. He knew it would prove useful. It’s where barrels of tobacco the later colonists called Virginia gold got loaded on ships to London. Helps you understand the connectedness of water, how it links up everywhere. Stick your hand into the Potomac here and you’re connecting with London docks, or whatever port you name.”

  Suddenly the river wasn’t empty. A cruise ship came toward them heading up to Washington. Ebbs shifted the mainsail, tacking and working the tiller to steer them away. They waved, the ship’s captain tooted, and soon they were dancing in its wake, Jeep swinging like a clock pendulum in his harness. He gave Alex a baleful look as she laughed and rocked. Chuck stayed forward, leaning against the mast, silent.

  “Mount Vernon,” Ebbs announced as they glided soundlessly past a long green sloping meadow that led up to a large white mansion with columns. “George Washington’s plantation. There’s his tobacco pier. Story goes, he once tried to skip a silver dollar across the river from that pier.”

  Alex scrunched up her face to judge the distance. She shook her head. “Bet it wasn’t his dollar.”

  “Check the tell tail,” Ebbs ordered.

  “The what?” Alex asked.

  “The wind indicator. That strand of horsehair tied to the mainstay.”

  Alex looked. The tell tail had begun to droop. Gradually the wind stilled to nothing.

  Ebbs turned to Alex. “Looks like we’ll be drifting for a while, so tell me, do you know what Quo vadis means?”

  Alex shook her head. It sounded like something John would ask.

  “It’s Latin for ‘Where are you going?’ ” Ebbs explained. “Tell me where you’re going.”

  “Doctor von Braun told me I’m going to fly in space someday. He said maybe I’d go with him.”

  “Great!” Ebbs exclaimed. “But how are you going to get ready? What are you going to study? What’s your work going to be? The test pilots I work with—the people who are going to be our astronauts—they didn’t train to be passengers. They’re medical doctors, physicists, chemists, biologists. You’ve told me where you’re going—now I want to know what you’re going to do to get yourself there. Chuck’s talking about doing electronics, but right now he’s luffing, which is a sailing term meaning his sails are flapping idle so he’s not going anywhere. I’ll get to him. What I want to know from you is, how are you going to get to liftoff? What are you interested in?”

  “Rockets, space, radio …”

  “Right,” said Ebbs. “So what are you going to do with your life?”

  Alex squirmed. It felt like she should have nailed that down by now.

  When the wind picked up again they came about and started back upriver. Suddenly Ebbs winched up the keel, handed Alex the tiller, and pointed to a pier. “Get us there,” she ordered.

  Alex swung the tiller, but the boat didn’t respond. She tried fishtailing it. Nothing happened. The No Name turned like a leaf in the current and started drifting downstream at a pretty good clip.

  “It’s like you,” Ebbs said. “Drifting with no plan. Having no life plan is like having no keel, no control over where you’re going. You don’t have to hold to it, but it’s high time you both start mapping out where you’re going in life, what you mi
ght do. You can always change course later on, but it’s good to have a starting point—something to measure your progress against. So here’s a project to start you both off,” she announced as she let the keel down and brought the boat about again.

  “I need deckhands for a cruise—one-way down the Potomac and out into the Chesapeake to Tangier Island, where I’ve got a friend who will put us up. It’s my vacation. I want to spend it on the No Name, but I can’t do it without crew. If you two say OK, and your parents agree after they come and check things out—your mother especially, since she’s the sailor—your pay will be a dollar a day each. I’ll get you back home before school starts. As we go, we’ll make like we’re Captain Smith’s crew, mapping the shoreline as we follow the chart he made and searching like he did for the lost Roanoke colonists I’ll tell you about. We’ll carry all our food. I’ve got some great new recipes going.”

  Chuck caught Alex’s eye and raised his eyebrows.

  “I saw that,” Ebbs said with a laugh as she got out the navigation chart. “As we go along we’ll tuck in here and there for ice-cream cones, bread, and suchlike, but you guys will be my food testers. I’ve been living on my new stuff for months now, and I’m not wasting away, am I?”

  Ebbs rolled out a much-thumbed sea chart and pointed to the upper left corner. “Here’s where we are, Washington,” she said. As the heavy paper curled tightly over her left hand she pointed down to its far right. “And here’s where we’re going. You’re going to mark our progress, Alex, so hold the chart,” she said as she reached for a pair of dividers that looked like heavy tweezers with sharp points at the ends. “You’ll use these to work out our distances,” Ebbs explained. “You spread them against the miles scale to set the distance, then swing them point to point down our course. We’ll follow Smith’s course from here at Washington downriver to the bay. As a crow flies it’s about a hundred and thirty miles to our jump-off at Smith Point.