The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (24 page)

Faye gasped.

“Are you all right, Faye?” asked Miss Brett.

“I... I... Yes, I’m quite all right, sorry, thank you.” But Faye was clearly distracted, and the others watched her carefully.

“Oh, Samson will be fine. He jolly well will. I know it,” said Lucy.

“Oh, um, yes, lovely,” said Faye, grabbing Jasper’s arm and pulling him aside as the others looked at the bird. “We’ve got to
talk.”

“Miss Brett is right, Faye,” said Jasper, putting his hand on Faye’s shoulder. “The bird will be fine, really. Don’t—”

“I’m not worried about the bird, you idiot,” growled Faye. “We’ve got to talk with the others.”

“Barking mad,” was all Noah had to say.

“I’m telling you, it’s our only hope,” Faye said as she and Noah turned the jump rope for Lucy. Miss Brett had become more and more insistent that the children take exercise. She was a firm believer in walks and play as an important part of keeping the person healthy. She had taught them about cricket and baseball and tennis. She had shown them how to play kings corners, which she had learned from her mother, and she’d shown them how to jump rope and play kick the can. But now, while Miss Bret prepared supper, Faye used the afternoon exercise to tell the others her idea.

“It’s madness! We have no wings,” said Noah. “Now, if we could tie a note to little Samson’s toe—”

“Oh, shut up.” Faye tossed the rope down and Lucy stopped jumping. Then the little girl picked up the shorter rope and jumped on her own, singing the elements of the periodic table.

“I think we need to listen to Faye,” said Jasper, cautiously. “I know what I saw the other night and it was real. Those men are blackguards in every sense of the word.”

“Fine,” Noah said, sitting down and leaning against the tree. “What’s the plan for our flight to the moon?”

“You can be such a dreadful bore, Noah,” growled Faye. “Only you’re a fool if you don’t think we can do it.”

“Do what, exactly?” asked Wallace.

“Rescue our parents by using our invention—the invention we’ve all been dreaming of, the invention we’ve all been working on, piece by piece. Now it has an immediate purpose.”

She met a sea of faces whose expressions ranged from disbelief to total lack of comprehension.

“The aeroplane! The flying ship! My wings, Jasper’s propeller, Lucy’s tail... Noah’s engine!”

“An aeroplane?” Noah laughed. “What makes you think we can build something that flies when generations of men before us haven’t managed to do it? What makes you think that five children in the middle of America can do what has never been done anywhere before?”

“Because we are always doing what has never been done before,” Faye said simply.

Noah put his hand to his chin to think for a moment. “Fair enough,” he said. “I’m in.”

“Oh, me... too!” said Lucy, still jumping rope. “I’ve been... thinking... about... the tail.”

“Yes,” said Jasper, “Lucy thought about it back when we were making the flying whirligigs. She said with a proper tail, we’d be able to fly forward and not just propel up.”

Wallace looked down. He couldn’t look them in the eyes. “I’m sorry, I... It looks like I’m the one who hasn’t given you anything.”

“Well, you’re a chemist, and we don’t need a—”

“We need more than your chemical expertise, Wallace,” Jasper
said, throwing Faye a dangerous look. “You’re the most organized and critical-minded. We’ll
all
do it.”

Suddenly, it felt real. Suddenly, it felt possible. Their invention could be both an achievement as incredible as any in history, and the most outrageous, and possibly the only workable, plan of rescue. Both goals seemed real and within their grasp.

“All right, colleagues,” Noah said with a bow. “Let’s get to it.”

A
LL
P
LANS
U
P
I
N
T
HE
A
IR

OR

FAYE FINDS A SOFT SPOT

T
he glider Faye had was most aerodynamic, even before she combined forces with the other children to create a powered flight. Jasper’s propeller work was stellar and better than anything Wallace had ever seen in that field. Even Lucy, six-year-old Lucy, had developed a tail design that rivaled that of the eagle.

Wallace, meanwhile, was spending more and more time alone at the classroom’s chemistry table. One day, Jasper, who had been studying the problem of overheated engines and was sure of a cooling method that would work with very few adjustments to Noah’s overall design, found Wallace there and asked for his advice.

“There are certainly excellent combinations of chemicals you could use,” Wallace said, “but the simplest thing to do is to use water.”

Jasper looked his classmate in the eyes. “You think that’s the best idea? It’s not just the best way to get back to your individual work?”

Wallace tried to hide his hurt. Jasper had been his confidante since the first day at Sole Manner, but the more the others worked
on the flying machine, the more Wallace made himself into an outsider. He spent more hours on his polymer than ever before. At times, he found himself slipping so deep into his work, he could not even think of anything else. Only Jasper understood why—Jasper alone. But Jasper also never let him get too far away, always bringing Wallace back for advice or opinions.

Wallace removed his glasses, wiped nonexistent specks of dust from them, and replaced them on his nose.

“Water really is the best thing in this case, Jasper,” he said calmly, looking up. “I’m not trying to get out of working on a coolant or trying to do anything except help when asked. I... I know I’m not really a part of what you four are—”

“You jolly well are,” Jasper countered. “There’s loads of things we’d never have gotten right without your help.”

“It’s not the same as what you’re doing,” said Wallace. “No, don’t deny it, Jasper, Please. I know. It’s just that this polymer and... I’m running out of time, and... well...

“I know, Wallace,” Jasper said, placing a hand on Wallace’s arm. “I know how important this is.”

Wallace handed Jasper a sheet of paper on which he had drawn a diagram for the engine modification that allowed the water coolant system to work most efficiently. Jasper smiled. He knew Wallace was walking a fine line between two vital projects.

The classroom was busier and quieter than usual as the children all focused on the work at hand. And there was
something to the fact that they all were truly working as a team—even Wallace, Jasper reminded everyone. There was a proximity to their work that began to change the way they felt about one another. They had really begun to see themselves as a team.

As they used their free time in the classroom that week, it did not go unnoticed that Faye used the word “we” more often than ever before. Faye had shared all the research she had collected on her favorite figures in flight (or attempted flight), sketching the details of their own calculations (or miscalculations) for her fellow classmates.

“Imagine,” Faye said. “Any day now, man will fly over the land.”

“And you’re going to be that man, Faye?” asked Noah with a grin.

“Balloons fly,” said Lucy. “Hot air balloons have been around since the 1700s.”

“Well, man will fly like a bird,” Faye said.

“That Brazilian Frenchman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, has been flying around Paris,” Noah said. “He can steer and guide his balloons. Some say he can fly like a—”

“Well, I mean, without hot air. Even Santos-Dumont admitted he may have solved the lighter-than-air problem, but not the heavier-than-air problem. I want to really fly.”

“Leonardo da Vinci was working on this in the fifteenth century,” Jasper said. While developing his propeller, he had loved reading about da Vinci’s helicopter. “We’re in good company if we fail.”

“But he was trying to create a hanging and gliding type of craft, and a sort of whirly-bird contraption,” said Faye, “not a
motorized air vehicle. I already invented a better glider than that.”

Faye had loads of information on the experiments of Sir George Cayley, William Henson and John Stringfellow, Otto Lilienthal, Octave Chanute, and Samuel Langley. She knew that Wallace, with his uncanny attention to detail, would be able to review the notes and the data from the would-be flyers and discover where they went wrong.

“Now, Cayley, Chanute, and Lilienthal were brilliant with their gliders,” Faye said, “but Henson and Stringfellow had theories about using steam engines. I don’t think they ever got off the ground, but they believed an engine would work. Samuel Langley—”

“He’s the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,” said Wallace. “I wanted to meet him, but Father and I had no time.”

“Well, his unmanned aerodrome flew over four thousand feet,” Faye said. “His engined craft flew for ninety seconds before the engine fell out.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound promising,” said Jasper. “Let’s not follow his lead.”

“But it’s proof that it can be done,” said Faye. “Look at these sketches. I believe that the shape of the wings is one of the most important things to consider. They need to be cambered—”

“What?” said Wallace.

“Cambered. Curved like a bird’s wing. Then the air currents will be able to lift the craft. Think about how the wind can carry things much heavier than air. The wind gets beneath the thing and it planes on the air. It would be an aeroplane. We have to make it so
the wind will get beneath the wings and the motor will propel—”