managed to make his face look interested and mildly amused at the same time. Yes, Lloyd, you miserable, disloyal, alarmist peckerhead, you jumped from the top of the cliff, but you seem to nave had the luck to Strike a bush a few feet below the edge, which arrested your down- ward progress. Do you wish my help in completing your suicidal plunge?
Dreyfus shook his head no.
“I suggest that you not mention this little conversation to any of your colleagues.”
“Yessir.”
“I don’t want to see you in this office ever again, Dreyfus, unless you have your supervisor with you, or unless I send for you.”
“Yessir.”
“Let’s both get back to work.” P. R. Bigelow nodded toward the closed office door and Dreyfus took the hint
By mid-May the dance of the dwarves at the Pentagon had reached a critical frenzy. A thousand details were beginning to come to- gether for a trip into the desert with the prototypes in June. The airplanes had been moved weeks earlier to the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, the same secret field where the air force had tested its stealth prototypes. Also known as Area 58, or Groom Lake, the field lay about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas on a huge government reservation with excellent physical security. Here the contractors’ field teams readied the planes in separate hangars and installed telemetry devices.
Toad and Rita would leave for Nevada two weeks before Jake and the rest of the staff. They had intensive sessions planned with company test pilots and engineers to learn everything they could about the planes and how they flew. The Saturday night before they left, Jake and Callie had them to dinner at the house in Rehoboth Beach.
“How do you like being married?” Callie asked Rita in the kitchen.
“I should have had a brother,” Rita confided. “Men are such sloppy creatures. They don’t think like we do.”
On the screened-in porch, Jake and Toad sipped on bourbon and Amy slurped a Coke. “So how’s married life, Toad?”
“Oh, so-so, I guess. Isn’t exactly like I thought it would be, but nothing ever is. Ol’ Rita can think up stuff for me to do faster than I can do it, and we only live in an apartment. If we had a town house or something with a basement and a lawn, she’d have worked me to death by now.”
Amy Carol thought this remark deliriously funny and giggled hugely.
“Why don’t you go visit with Mom and Rita?”
She stood regally and tossed her hair. “I do believe I will join the ladies, but she isn’t my mom. I wish you’d stop calling her that.” She flounced off toward the kitchen.
“The day she”—Jake pointed after the departing youngster— “gets married, I am going to get down on my knees and give thanks.”
“That bad, huh?”
“She’s about driven Callie over the edge. That poor woman had no idea what she was getting into. No matter how much love she pours on Amy, the kid still does exactly as she chooses. She inten- tionally disobeys and cuts up just to get her goat. And Callie never gets mad, never pops off, never gives her anything but love. She’s gonna go nuts.”
“Maybe she should get angry.”
“That’s what I think. And Callie insists she doesn’t want my help or advice,”
‘They’re all alike,” Toad said, now vastly experienced.
Amy was back in five minutes, hopping from foot to foot, so excited she bounced. “Can we fly the glider now, so I can show Rita? She’s a pilot.”
Toad gasped. “She is?”
“You’re teasing me,” Amy said, stamping her foot.
“The wind’s wrong,” Jake pointed out “It isn’t coming in from the sea. This evening if there’s a land breeze.”
“David said we might be able to fly the glider above the house in a land breeze. He said the wind just goes right up and over our house.”
“I never thought of that. Well, run down the street and see if he can spend a half hour consulting with us.” As Amy scampered off, Jake told Toad, “There’s an aviation expert right down the street who is kind enough to offer advice from time to time.”
The aviation expert was apparently unoccupied at the moment He showed up wearing a monster-truck T- shirt bearing the legend “Eat Street.” His shoelaces were untied, his cowlicks fully aroused, and his grin as impish as ever. He listened carefully to Jake’s plan. “Sounds to me like it might work’ Cap’n,” he said with a sidelong glance at Toad. “Might ding up your plane a little, though.”
“Ill risk it if you’ll fix the damage.”
“Callie! Rita!” Amy called excitedly. “Wre going to fly.”
Jake readied the plane for flight in the front yard under David’s supervision. Eight rubber bands were stretched to hold the six-foot wing to the fuselage. Batteries were tested and inserted, the cover closed, switch on, controls waggled to the fall extent of their travel using the radio control box: Amy checked each item after Jake performed it while David briefed Toad on proper launch proce- dure. In five minutes they were ready for the sky.
Toad climbed the ladder from the garage and scaled the sloping roof until he sat perched on the ridgepole with the plane in hand.
“Pretty good breeze up here,” he informed the crowd below, which now included Callie and Rita.
“Don’t you jump off there, Darius Green,” Rita called as Toad sucked on a finger and held it aloft
“As you can plainly see, dear wife, I’m not wearing my wings tonight,” Tarkington replied lightly. He flapped his elbows experi- mentally. ” ‘I’ll astonish the nation and all creation, by flyin’ over the celebration! I’ll dance on the chimneys, I’ll stand on the stee- ple, I’ll flop up to winders and scare all the people,’ ” quoteth he, striking a precarious pose, or trying to, up there on the ridge of the roof with an airplane grasped carefully in his right hand.
“Maybe I’d better alert the emergency room at the hospital,” Callie said, laughing.
“Oh, Callie,” Amy groaned. “He’s not going to jumpi Really!”
Toad finished his recitation with a flourish:” ‘And I’ll say to the gawpin’ fools below, What world’s this here that I’ve come near?’ “
Jake Grafton handed the radio control box to David. “You’re up first. Whenever you’re ready.”
The youngster centered the control levers and shouted to Toad.
“Let ‘er go!”
With the gentlest of tosses. Toad laid the glider into the rising air currents. The boy immediately banked left and raised the nose until the aircraft was barely moving in relation to the ground. As it reached the end of the house, he reversed the controls and flew it back the other way. The ship soared upward on the rising current of air. It floated above Toad’s head, back and forth along the peak of the roof, banking gently to maintain position and rising and falling as the air currents dictated.
“All right!” Toad shouted and began to clap. On the ground the spectators all did likewise.
“There’s just enough wind,” Jake told David, grinning broadly.
“Now. by God, that’s flying!”
“Awesome,” David agreed, his pixie grin spreading uncontrolla- bly.
After a few minutes, David handed the control box to Jake. He overbanked and the plane lost altitude precipitously, threatening to strike Toad straddling the roof’s ridge. “Keep your nose up.” David advised hurriedly. “You can fly slower than that.” As the glider responded, he continued. “That’s it! She’s got plenty of cam- ber in those wings and good washout. She’U fly real, real slow, just riding those updrafts. That’s it! Let ‘er fly. Just sorta urge ‘er along.”
He was right. The plane soared like a living thing, banking and diving and climbing, seeking the rising air and responding will- ingly. The evening sun flashed on the wings and fuselage and made the little craft brightly lustrous against the darkening blue of the sky above.
