But if Aquila could not help Geoff by talking, it could and did make the words it used as easy as possible for him to read, and on occasion both boys had found this useful. The week before, when they had been asking about the function of some of the lights, one was described as the ‘CHLORINE ATMOSPHERIC REGENERATOR’.
When Tom had asked what would happen if they tried it, Aquila said, ‘NEGATIVE SURVIVAL POTENTIAL INDICATED FOR PRESENT LIFE FORM,’ which meant very little to either of them, but when Geoff asked the same question, it said, ‘NO, NO! AGH!’ and produced a little picture of a man coughing and spluttering until he keeled over and died. Chlorine, it turned out, is a very poisonous gas. In a way, it had been rather reassuring.
Aquila could have flown back up to the top of the tower on a simple command, but Geoff preferred to do it himself. Taking the controls, he spiralled up the tower in a series of circles, stopped outside the window at the top, and carefully backed inside.
The place looked rather homely these days.
Over in the corner, Tom was sitting at a table listening to music from an aged radiogram while finishing off his maths homework. He looked up as Geoff turned off the invisibility.
‘Nearly finished.’ He pointed to a mug. ‘I got you a drink ready. It just needs heating up.’
As Geoff climbed out of Aquila, he couldn’t help thinking how much his friend had changed in the last few weeks. If you had seen him last Sunday, leaning casually out of Aquila somewhere over the Pyrenees, determinedly banging away at a lump of basalt with a hammer, you would not have recognized him. There was a decisiveness in the way he moved and spoke these days, and if you saw him with Mr Urquart, talking confidently about fossil finds or why there were different colours in limestone, it was hard to believe he was the same person.
Collecting his mug, Geoff carefully placed it under the rear fin. Aquila could heat a mug of drinking chocolate with a controlled blast of microwaves in a fraction of a second. It was only one of many conveniences, Geoff thought, and he was suddenly caught again by that strange sense of contentment. A feeling of satisfaction that came from somewhere deep inside, and that made him want to smile, for no real reason at all.
He looked around the room. Most of the furniture had come from Mrs Murphy, and it was good to know the old lady was a lot happier these days. She had decided not to take any more pills, and found she was no longer seeing or hearing things. She and Mrs Baxter had taken to going to the cinema together a couple of afternoons a week, and on Friday evenings the boys did her weekly shopping at Tesco’s. It was in return for this that she had offered them anything they wanted from the odd bits of old furniture she had stored in her garage and attic.
They had taken an elderly sofa, a carpet, a kitchen table and chairs, a table lamp, a black and white television, and the radiogram. There was no electricity in the tower, of course, but Aquila could power anything electrical up to a range of two hundred metres. It could also blanket any sound or light in the room, so that nobody outside could hear or see what was going on. Aquila could do so many things. Tom had once asked it to list them all, but abandoned the idea when it turned out the list would take three and half days to read.
On the wall along from the table was a set of shelves holding the rocks and fossils that Tom had collected over the last few weeks. There were bits of coloured sandstone from the Isle of Wight, chunks of hexagonal basalt from Staffa in Scotland, and on the bottom shelf, pride of the collection, the pointed piece of granite that had once been the top of the Matterhorn. Aquila’s laser had sliced it off like a knob of butter and one day, thought Geoff, someone was going to notice that the highest mountain in the Alps was only 4,477.2 metres high instead of 4,477.5.
The wall above the sofa was where Geoff kept his trophies. There was the photo of him standing beside the statue at the top of Nelson’s column. There was the hat that he had snatched from President Clinton on his state visit to London. There were the bails from the last Test match played against Pakistan, and a couple of fading chrysanthemums that he had picked from the gardens at Buckingham Palace.
‘All finished.’ Tom put down his pen, and stood up. Normally he liked to check his homework with Aquila, but he could do that later. He came over and stood by his friend. ‘How was the lesson?’
Geoff shrugged. ‘It was OK.’
Geoff would never admit it but, in fact, his lessons with Miss Stevenson were a lot more than OK. She worked with an efficiency that had won his respect, and a sense of humour he had come to appreciate. Above all, she was a woman who knew how to do her job, and for the first time in his life Geoff had begun to find the world of words and letters beginning to make some sort of sense. It had been a revelation. He had started reading road signs, odd words from the television, and the belief was beginning to grow that one day he would –
‘This trip this afternoon.’ Tom interrupted his thoughts. ‘I’ve got everything packed, but.… would you mind if we did America tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘It’s Mum,’ Tom explained. ‘She’s arranged to visit these cousins in Stockport, and she wants me to go with her.’
Mrs Baxter had been arranging a good many trips since she had taken delivery of her car. Most days she visited some branch of the family or an old friend, and all this on top of the cinema trips with Mrs Murphy and the evening classes in Japanese swordsmanship. It was as if she was trying to make up for three years of staying at home by doing three times as much as everyone else.
Tom looked at his watch. ‘I think we’d have to allow at least two hours for New York to be on the safe side, and I said I’d be home by half one. Of course, if you want to go on your own…’
‘No, no, tomorrow’ll be fine.’ Still holding his mug of chocolate, Geoff climbed into Aquila. ‘We’ll just go somewhere else. Somewhere closer.’
Again, he felt that curious upsurge of happiness. It bubbled up in his mind but, annoyingly, he still couldn’t put his finger on where it came from.
Tom picked up the bag with the packed lunches and swung himself into Aquila beside Geoff. Neither of them bothered with coats these days. Wherever they flew, Aquila could keep the temperature at any level you asked.
‘I’ll take her up, shall I?’ he said. ‘Till you’ve finished your drink.’
As Tom took the controls, Aquila floated gently out of the tower into the sunshine. From beneath them came the buzz of traffic from the town, the sound of the breeze ruffling through the trees, and the noise of children playing over in the park.
‘Where do you want to go then?’
For a moment, Geoff did not reply. He suddenly had the feeling that he had turned an important corner. It was as if he had been climbing a particularly perilous, steep stretch in an upward path, and now found himself on broad open ground again with the road stretching invitingly ahead. He felt he had understood something for the first time, only he couldn’t quite think what it was.
‘It’s your turn to choose, isn’t it?’
Tom waited patiently, but Geoff still did not reply. He was concentrating hard. If he concentrated, he knew he would find the answer that floated tantalizingly out of reach, somewhere in the top of his mind…
‘There’s lots of things we could do.’ Tom stared up at the sky. ‘We could fly over to the National Park if you wanted. See this axe thing Doctor Warner’s so excited about…’
He nearly had it, Geoff thought. It was almost in his grasp…
‘Or we could go to Paris again,’ Tom continued. ‘Find out if your chewing gum’s still stuck on the top of the Eiffel Tower.’ He paused. ‘We can do anything really.’
‘That’s it!’ A slow smile spread across Geoff’s face. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That’s the whole point! We can go wherever we want!’
‘Yes…’ said Tom. Frankly it seemed a bit obvious, but he decided not to say anything. For some reason, Geoff seemed to think it was important.
‘You
find yourself an eagle, and you can go where you like. Anywhere.’ Geoff seemed entranced by the concept. ‘Anywhere at all…’
‘Right.’ Tom nodded. There was a long pause, until Tom eventually asked, ‘So… where do you want to go then?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Geoff sipped his mug of chocolate. ‘But I think, first, I’d like to go… up.’
‘Up?’
‘Up high.’ Geoff nodded. ‘I want to see the view.’
Tom shrugged. ‘OK.’
Aquila started to rise. Higher and higher, gathering speed as it went, until the noises faded, and first the people and then the cars and even the buildings ceased to be separate entities, and all of Stavely became just an irregular circle in the surrounding green of the countryside and the noise faded to a deep silence.
And still they climbed. Up and up, soaring into the sky until, even if Aquila had not been invisible, from the ground it would have been too small to see. It was a perfect day, and Tom could see wisps of cloud floating far below casting tiny shadows on the ground beneath.
‘Is this high enough?’ he asked.
‘I would say…’ Geoff turned and smiled at his friend. ‘I would say that we’ve hardly started.’
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