The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (31 page)

“What is it, Faye?” Jasper watched her up there. She seemed petrified. “Faye?”

Faye looked down and smiled. “It’s been ninety seconds and they still haven’t passed. I think we need to wait until they pass again. Then we’ll know how long between patrols.”

“But Lucy said it was every nine and a half minutes,” Jasper said.

“Yes, well...” Faye considered her words. “Let’s be sure, shall we? It’s only a few minutes to be sure it is always nine and a half minutes.”

They waited. And waited. And waited.

Nine and a half minutes after the carriage passed, another black carriage driven by what appeared to be a black banana circled the block, then drove off to a wider patrol farther away.

Partially hidden by the trees, Faye looked around and, taking aim with her outstretched arm, launched the aeroplane.

As it flew from her hand, five faces shined in the speckled sunlight twinkling through the trees. They watched for what
felt like long, long minutes as the tiny model aeroplane and its porcelain doll pilot soared through the air, flying on its own power.

The craft stayed aloft for twenty-eight seconds before crashing, nose first, into the willow in Wallace’s backyard.

“Twenty-eight seconds!” Faye shouted from her perch. “Twenty-eight marvelous seconds! That’s wonderful!” She practically danced down, from branch to branch to ground.

“But we’d all be dead if we were on board,” said Wallace, pushing his glasses upon the bridge of his nose as he retrieved the model from the willow branches. It was fairly crumpled.

“Perhaps Wallace is right,” said Noah, picking up the head of the doll that had rolled away from the wreckage. “‘Wonderful’ might not be the most appropriate word.”

Wallace tossed him the rest of the doll he’d salvaged from the wreck.

“My dolly!” Lucy exclaimed.

“Sorry, Lucy,” Noah said, handing her the doll and its severed head, “but it’s all in the name of science.”

Lucy took the pieces in her arms and hugged them.

“I’ll fix your dolly, Lucy,” Jasper said. “We’ve got glue in the nursery. She’ll be as good as new, and you can put her in the hospital bed next to the dollhouse.” He quickly received a hug from Lucy.

“We need more room to fly, to really fly our prototype,” said Faye. “This was fine for a doll, but for our engine-powered aeroplane, we’ll need running space. If we only had more room—”

“It wasn’t just the room,” said Wallace.

“What do you mean?” Faye turned to Wallace.

“We need to have something that allows for—”

“What is it?” said Faye. “What are we missing? We’re so close!”

Suddenly, Lucy jumped up, knocking Wallace over, pencil and paper still in his hands, her broken doll falling to the ground.

“I know what went wrong!” Lucy cried with mounting excitement. “I know what it is! I know it, I know it, I know it!” She was skipping around in circles.

“What is it, Lucy?!” shouted Faye. “Will you stop whirling like a dervish and tell us?!”

“It’s the tail!” she cried, picking up the folder and waving the papers in the air. “It’s the whatsit! It’s the thing, the moving thing, the thing that—”

“The tail?” said Jasper, Wallace, Noah, and Faye together.

“It has a tail, Lucy,” said Wallace, “or have you—”

“Forgotten?” Noah said, glancing at Wallace.

“I just don’t know the word for it,” Lucy said. “Funny, that. I know what it is but I don’t know what it calls itself.”

“The tail? The parts of the tail?” asked Wallace.

“But it’s not the right tail, of course,” said Lucy. “The tail must be able to wiggle along with the wings.”

“I know the word!” cried Wallace. “I know the word, Lucy. I know what she means!” Wallace seemed stunned by his own lack of observation. “It a rudder! We’re missing a rudder.”

“Like a rudder on a boat,” Jasper said, realizing exactly what Wallace meant, “to help it steer.”

“A rudder! It’s called a rudder!” cried Lucy.

“We have to be able to steer the craft,” Noah said.

“Of course, we can’t just give it lift,” said Faye. “We have to
control the lift
and
the loft.”

“Lift and loft!” cried Lucy, laughing and clapping her hands. “Lift and loft!” And she whirled again to the chant of “lift and loft.”

“I hate it when she acts her age,” Faye said, but she smiled just the same.

“Not only that,” said Jasper, looking at the drawings, “but we have to control and coordinate the up-and-down movement—you know, the pitch. Also, the roll of the wings—when one wing goes up or down against the other—and the movement of the nose from side to side.”

“That’s called the yaw,” said Noah.

“Yes, the yaw!” shouted Lucy, who whirled some more, chanting, “Yes, the yaw,” much to Faye’s bemusement. In fact, Faye was in love with Lucy and her brilliant discovery. This would surely make it all happen.

“And then,” said Faye, “with propelled air and an engine to drive it, we’d have total control of the driving.” She looked up to the sky. “We’d be able to fly.”

The children brimmed with plans and secrets and what felt like pure magic. But they also knew that, like their homes, the farm was under constant surveillance. Casually, Faye asked Miss Brett if she knew about patrols.

“Well,” Miss Brett said, thinking hard about the question, “on Fridays, I have noticed a patrol, if that’s what you call it, but only in the morning, then none until the drivers come to fetch you for
the weekend. I always just assumed it was a carriage checking to see that all was well, as when they came for the honey. Or perhaps just a carriage coming from a different direction.” She shrugged. “I never really thought about it. As for the weekends, I’ve never seen anyone patrolling. Come to think of it, I rarely see anyone, and certainly no one when you are away for the weekend.”

Miss Brett did most of her gardening and outdoor work over the weekend, so she would have seen the men in black patrolling if they did.

That confirmed it: It was the children, and the children alone, they were guarding. This made launching the aeroplane—a manned, wooden, real aeroplane—right out in the field a dangerous thing to do during the school week.

Back at the schoolhouse, the children spent most of Sunday afternoon and Monday timing the carriages’ tours around the farm. During the day, it seemed, they were not as diligent—they passed any given spot once every eleven minutes. If they were careful, the children would be able to launch the plane and hide it again before the men in black could catch them in the act.

The birdwatcher seemed to be on no specific schedule, although by luck he never ran into the patrolling men in black. He appeared to be following some bird that moved around a lot, with no apparent pattern, and he was away whenever the patrol came by the farm. On Fridays, he missed the sporadic patrols entirely. The children wondered what might happen to the poor funny man if the men in black found him there.

“He could be our ticket out of here,” Faye said.

“What do you mean?” asked Wallace, nervously.

“With all our packages, how else can we get away from the
farm without being caught? We’ll have to move so slowly that we’ll be caught red-handed out in the middle of a field.”

That’s how they came to decide that their only hope for a quick, clean departure from the farm was in the back of the birdwatcher’s truck. It was, after all, the only vehicle that did not belong to the men in black.

In the schoolyard, with bramble and blankets they had collected to help hide what they were actually doing, the children had been putting together the flying machine. This one would be large enough for a child, even a large child, or a fair-sized young woman, perhaps, laying face-down in the center. It had wings that spanned twelve feet. Adjustments were made to Faye’s calculations when Noah found a problem with the way she had attached the wings and the tail-controlling mechanism. Lucy reminded everyone that several of Lilienthal’s gliders had lift problems because of control.

She also suggested that they paint the aeroplane what she considered to be a lovely shade of pink. (This elicited, from Faye, a sound very similar to a cat trying to extricate a hairball from its throat.)

Wallace discovered a ratio problem between the length of the wings and the body of the machine, but Faye said she had already corrected it. The biggest problem of all was that there just wasn’t much wind. As the weather grew cooler, the calculations had to be reworked again.

“Maybe we could use a bicycle,” Noah suggested. “Maybe Katharine has one—Cousin Katharine who lives in Dayton, right? With a bicycle, we could drag the craft and give it a chance to get going.”

“I don’t think we’d be able to explain our departure to the nannies,” Faye said. “They’d want to come, or else tell the men in black.”

“I say we should make a bicycle ourselves,” Jasper said.

Wallace shook his head. “But making the wheels and everything would take time.”

“We can ask the birdwatcher,” Jasper said.

“Before we involve anyone else any more than we have to,” Wallace said, “let’s see what we can do on our own—something that won’t take too much time.”

“And remember what your parents said?” Noah said. “I’m sure they were speaking for our parents, too. It’s dangerous. For us and for them. They wanted us to be invisible.” Noah looked around at his classmates. “Now, who’s going to invent
that
serum?”

“Oh, me!” shouted Lucy. “Pick me!”

“We can use the wheels from those rusted old wheelbarrows in the garden shed,” said Wallace. “They’re small, but if we run down a slope with the machine for speed”—Wallace looked at his notes—“perhaps we can use the air friction to get lift without much wind.”

By Wednesday, they had finished construction on not a full-size aeroplane large enough for a pilot and passenger, but rather a child-size, pilot-ready, engine-powered aeroplane. Even at child-size, the pieces were impossibly large and difficult to keep hidden. They used the potting shed to store the parts. The small incline behind the schoolhouse led out into the backfields, mostly unused by anyone other than crows. Out of sight from Miss Brett, who was busy making supper in the kitchen, the children decided to try out their creation.

“The craft will be attached to a rope,” said Wallace. “It’s not really ready to be piloted.”

“I want to be in the pilot’s seat,” said Faye. Faye immediately wished she had said this differently, but try as she did to believe that they each played an important role in the invention, Faye still felt that, at heart, the aeroplane was hers, and she alone deserved to be in the pilot’s seat, sink or swim, crash or fly.

Besides, although she could not admit it to herself, she would never have been able to bear the burden of guilt if anything happened to one of the other four.

Strapped in place with cushions from Miss Brett’s chair, with all of the pillows from their beds under her stomach, around her arms and legs and even attached to her head, Faye lay facedown in the craft, looking as if she could float up and fly without it. When she gave the signal, the others ran, pulling her along behind them.

She pulled the lever and engaged the engine.

“You’re in the pilot’s seat now, Faye!” Jasper said, smiling. Faye could barely hear what he said, but her heart swelled. She smiled and gave him a salute.

“Just remember Sir Isaac Newton and his law of gravity,” Noah said.

Faye gave him a wink. She had not heard what he’d said at all.

Their breathing grew heavy as the craft motored along behind them, but just as they felt their legs weakening, they ran
down the small hill at the edge of the grove. First, Noah tripped over a stone, and then Wallace fell into Noah. In a jumble, the four runners tumbled and rolled, pulling the rope along with them.

Suddenly, there was a gust of wind. The propeller turned. The wind picked up.

And Faye was in the air! She was only two and a half feet in the air, but she was in the air, and safely back on the ground shortly thereafter, in one piece, her head still firmly attached to her shoulders.

“We did it!” Faye shouted as the others scrambled to their feet and ran to her. “We actually flew!” They all embraced and jumped and shouted and laughed. They made one big bundle, with Faye like a huge marshmallow on the inside.