The Secret of Zoom (15 page)

When they got to the big square door and the lighted tunnel, Christina unrolled the drawing and read the instructions again.

“After initial activation, sustain tone until replicated.” Well, she had already done that; the plane was humming nicely.

“Lights. Fundamental Frequency.” What on earth was a fundamental frequency?

“Prime Fuel Chambers: Raise to the Third. Set Internal Switches: Raise to the Fifth.”

She paused. She
knew
she had heard those terms—a third, a fifth—used together recently. Where? When?

She looked down at the paper and read the next line: “Ignition: Raise to the Minor Seventh,” and then she knew.

It was a chord!

“Hey!” She thumped Taft on the shoulder. “I've got it!”

“Got what?”

“The instructions. It's a chord. The fundamental frequency is the root, the first note in the scale—like
do
in
do, re, mi, fa, sol
, you know. The third is three notes up, the fifth is five, and then the seventh tone, down one half step, is the minor seventh—”

Taft looked annoyed. “You are making
no
sense at all.”

Christina grinned. Taft looked as confused and bored as she felt every time her father talked about math. But this wasn't math, it was music; it was fun, it was
easy
.

Christina shut her eyes, the better to think. Okay, she had the plane activated. Which note would be the root of the chord? She went right up the scale, singing C, C-sharp, D, D-sharp, E—

The plane bucked slightly, as if it had a hiccup.

“Maybe you're supposed to sing into this.” Taft grasped the funnel on its striated metal tube and pulled it toward her.

Christina bent over and sang an E into the funnel. The control panel lit up like a Christmas tree. Two lightbulbs in the tunnel went dark.

Of course. Just like her mother's lullaby was written in the key of E.

“Hold that note!” Taft shouted. “Keep singing!”

She couldn't get enough air for a strong tone, bending at the waist. Christina threw a leg up over the plane's curved silver side and scrambled into the front seat. The speaker-funnel was in front of her. She pulled it toward her mouth, sat up straight, and held the note, loud and long. Just as she was about to run out of breath, the plane's hum became two-toned, taking over Christina's E and making it stronger, deeper. The plane's rosy glow changed to a fiery orange.

Taft laughed out loud. “Now the next note!” he crowed, and Christina sang it. The orange color shifted subtly into golden, with a gurgling sound of liquid. Three more lightbulbs blinked out.

“Now sing the fifth,” Taft prompted. “Set internal switches.”

Christina took in another deep breath and sang a B. She could hardly hear anything over the deep sonorous humming, but she could feel through the leather seat a multitude of simultaneous clicks. The yellow color turned greenish. The plane's hum took on a third note, high and harmonious. The tunnel grew darker as the string of lightbulbs flickered one by one down the line, but Taft didn't seem to notice or care.

“Now ignition—the minor seventh!” Taft crackled the paper in his hand, his eyes wide with excitement.

Christina gasped for breath, but she sucked in yet another lungful of air and let loose with a high D.

The chord took on an added tension, a piercing musical
urgency that made Christina long to sing a final E for resolution. The plane trembled beneath her knees, gave back her note with deeper resonance, and the green color shifted to blue. With a soft
whoosh
of air, the craft rose gently and hovered a foot off the floor, in a shimmer of color and expectant sound.

“D
ON'T
leave without me!” Taft scrambled over the tail fins and slid into the back seat with a thump. “Okay, I'm ready. Let's go.”

“Go where?” Christina raised her voice over the plane's musical drone. “Anyway, I don't know how to fly this thing.”

Taft leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “Use the instrument panel. Punch that button.”

Christina pressed the circular spot of light with
GO
across its face, but nothing happened.

“Maybe we missed a step.” Taft bent over the drawing again, following the numbered lines with his finger in the vivid violet light.

“Lights, fuel chambers, check. Switches, ignition—ditto. Here we go—Takeoff.” He was silent for a moment as he read, and his expression changed.

“What does it say?” Christina turned in her seat and tried to read it upside down.

Taft's mouth twisted sourly. “It says, ‘Thought vibrations
complete the fuel circuit. Place helmet on head and strap securely.'
Thought
vibrations,” he repeated in disbelief. “It's nothing but a
toy
. It goes up and down, it has pretty colors—and that's all.”

Christina didn't want to believe it. She searched the cockpit. There was no side pocket, no glove compartment, and no place big enough to hide a helmet, anyway. Maybe the helmet—if there was one—was still back at the far end of the cave.

She suppressed a shudder. She didn't want to have to go back
there
. It might be easier to just assume Taft was right.

But her father had said that Leo Loompski had been working on the frequency of thought. Maybe he had done it. Maybe he had actually figured out a way to make a person's thought vibrations line up with sound vibrations, and together with the liquid zoom create some sort of power.

She reached under her seat. Were there more instructions there? Yes, there was something; she could feel it but she only succeeded in pushing it farther back.

“I see it.” Taft pulled out the object and gave a derisive snort. “Yeah, this is
just
what we need for all our happy thoughts!” He held up a soft, padded helmet, with a strap that went under the chin and two clear, flexible tubes that hung down, ending in couplings.

“Maybe it's for real,” Christina suggested. She grasped the ends of the tubes and looked for a place to plug them in.

“Of
course
it's real!” Taft said grumpily, from the back seat. “And so is fairy dust and talking rabbits and magic lamps that grant wishes—”

“Just try it,” said Christina. She had found two slots at the base of the speaker tube and pushed the ends in.

“If you insist,” said Taft, strapping on the helmet, “but it'll never work. Go. Go. Come
on
, you stupid plane, GO!”

Christina held on, just in case.

Nothing happened.

“See? I told you.” Taft took off the helmet. “I mean, give me a break.
Thought
vibrations?”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Christina. “Give it to me if you think it's so stupid.”

“It
is
stupid,” said Taft, unbuckling the strap. “Leo Loompski might have been a genius, but he was off his rocker with
that
theory.”

Christina looked at the clear plastic tubes. Thought vibrations did sound pretty lame. How could your thoughts have power? For power, you needed things that moved, like water or wind, or things that were explosive, like gas and gunpowder . . . or zoom.

But sound had power, too—they'd just proven that. Why not thought? Her father had said that, on a molecular level, surprising things happened all the time. She hadn't understood everything he'd said about quantum physics, but certainly thought waves, if there were such a thing, would be made up of even tinier particles than anything else in the world. And if incredible things happened all the time on a molecular level, then how much more amazing and strange would be the things that happened if you went to the level of
thought
?

She strapped on the helmet. All right. If something in the
zoom could respond to the invisible vibration of her thoughts, then she was going to think about nothing but flying. She didn't understand how to do it, not yet, but she wasn't blocking it out of her mind—she wasn't starting by saying it was impossible. She plugged her ears against the sound of Taft's laughter, and focused.

And then Taft stopped laughing. He tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at the flexible tubing hanging from the left side of her helmet.

Christina watched wordlessly as a deep blue liquid moved slowly up its length. She felt the fluid spread through the helmet's padded pockets, cool and with a slight additional heaviness that was not unpleasant. Then, slowly, the blue liquid flowed down through the tube on the right, and back into the plane.

“Try it out,” whispered Taft. “Think something.”

Christina looked at the control panel, at the button she had pushed.
Go
? she thought tentatively.

The plane stayed still, floating gently above the tunnel floor.

Taft rustled the drawing behind her, holding it open with his elbows. “Wait. Here's one more thing at the end. It says, ‘To engage, resolve the chord.' What does that mean?”

Christina knew. She had been longing to finish the chord ever since she had sung the D. She opened her mouth and sang a high E. The blue liquid turned violet. With all her might, she thought,
Go
.

And the plane
went
. It zoomed along the tunnel—blink,
blink, blink-blink-blink went the rest of the lightbulbs, fizzing out as they passed—faster and faster, a rushing wind in their faces and the walls screaming by.

“STOP!” cried Christina, panicked, and almost flew over the windscreen as the plane halted suddenly in midair, just short of the tunnel's end.

There was a sound of rapid breathing behind her as Taft fell back in his seat. “Don't think anything else for a while,” said Taft, “okay?”

Christina unstrapped the helmet in a hurry. Just ahead of them was the dark opening into the forest, covered by vines, etched now with violet light. If she hadn't stopped, they would have gone crashing through, maybe lost a wing.

She took a deep breath and studied the instrument panel again. She wasn't limited to just
GO
and
STOP
. There were buttons that said
SLOW
and
UP
and
DOWN
, and directional arrows, too.

Maybe those buttons were just to show the possibilities. She hadn't had to push the stop button to stop. She had just shouted it, instinctively.

Slowly, tentatively, she strapped the helmet back on. She patted the side of the plane with a soothing hand.

“It's not a dog,” said Taft's strained voice from behind her.

“I'm just getting used to it.” Christina looked at the mouth of the tunnel and the hanging vines ahead.
Go on
, she thought gently.
Go slow, don't bump yourself. Give me time to move the vines aside
.

The plane moved forward slowly. On the instrument
panel, a button glowed suddenly brighter—
RAISE LANDING GEAR
.

Christina repeated the words in her mind and felt a little hitch as the wheels lifted into the body of the plane. She smiled to herself. Maybe the plane itself would teach her what to do, if she paid attention.

The airplane inched through the vines and out into the night, lurching slightly as it cleared a last stubborn branch.

Seat belts
? thought Christina, and from the inside wall of the plane, a plastic belt came curving over her midsection and snicked into a port on the opposite wall. Behind her, a second
snick
followed.

“Unreal,” murmured Taft. “He thought of everything.”

Christina grinned. Inside the cockpit, the instrument panel glowed violet. The plane itself gleamed silver in the moonlight, hanging weightless in the air a few feet above the forest floor. The wood around them was alive with soft night sounds—an owl's distant call, a tiny scurrying in the underbrush, the hushed whisper of leaves rustling in a quiet breeze. The sound of the humming plane was not nearly so loud as it had been in the tunnel.

But it was still too loud for safety. Christina glanced through the trees at the yard light of the orphanage, fifty yards away past the high electrified gate.
Could you be any softer, please
? she thought at the plane, and immediately the hum diminished to a musical purr.

She almost laughed aloud. She could hardly believe her luck. A little plane just her size that would do anything,
go anywhere—and a friend to share it! They could fly over the town, they could loop over the river, they could land on the playground at the elementary school and jump on the swings . . .

“I don't
believe
this,” Taft said. “It's some kind of weird dream. And why does it work for you and not for me?”

Christina had a moment of doubt. Was it just a dream? It did seem as if it couldn't be real—

The plane dipped suddenly. The pulsing hum skipped a beat. Behind her, Taft sucked in his breath.

No, she couldn't think it wasn't true. The zoom would react.