“What was so damned interesting?” I reminded rm.
“Well, because the wing held, they were able to conduct certain tests to try to determine what caused the engine to go to pieces. And the answer they came up with was embrittlement.”
I looked at him blankly.
“Embrittlement is due to an excess carbide formation,” he said as if that explained everything.
My blank expression didn’t change.
He looked at it and then grinned. “Sorry. I guess you don’t have the technical background to dig it.”
“You’re so right.”
“I’ll try to make it simple. If graphite is heated—say by the running of the engine-—it forms carbide. Excess carbide causes embrittlement—which means just what it sounds like: the metal of the engine becomes brittle. When a jet plane is in the air, traveling at X hundreds of miles per hour, the embrittlement literally results in the engine shaking itself apart, which in turn can cause a plane’s wing to shake itself off the body. Now do you see?”
“Not quite. Where does the graphite come from in the first place?”
“That’s what I asked my friend. And the answer really blew my mind. The graphite came from a lead pencil! That’s what the lead in a pencil is made up of, graphite and clay.”
My brain telegraphed fear to the glands in my armpits and the sweat poured down my ribs. “Any lead pencil?” It was hard getting the words out past the sandpile in my mouth.
“Well, the more carbide, the more deadly the pencil is. A Number Four lead pencil would do the job nicely.”
Nicely!
I fished out the pencil the prepuberty graffiti artist had dropped. It was as I remembered. It was a Number Four lead pencil!
“What would the saboteur do with the lead pencil?” I inquired in a voice like grated peppers marinated in wood alcohol.
“Do with it? Why, write on the surface around the exhaust of the engine, I guess, or maybe draw.”
“Draw?” Jimmy Durante36 with laryngitis. “Like a caricature, maybe?”
“I guess that would do it. Any kind of line drawing around the engine exhaust would do the trick. . . . What’s the matter, Mr. Powers? You look pale.”
Pale!
Before I could answer his question there was a sound from the left wing like a washing machine into which a buzz saw has been tossed while its on its “rinse” cycle. “I think we’ve got bad trouble.” That’s what I thought I said. But the way my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth with the peanut-butter saliva of panic, the words came out jabberwocky.
“Hmm, don’t like the sound of that,” the pilot muttered, not sounding too worried yet. “Better check that engine.”
Modern technology! My mind raced hysterically. The combined genius of Nazi Germany and the U.S. develops a jet engine capable of powering a plane to travel faster than the speed of sound. And any ten-year-old Kilroy with a lead pencil can make it fall apart in flight and crash! Modern technology!
The clatter from the left wing was growing louder. “What the hell?” The pilot’s cool was heating up.
“What the hell?” The echo was Nick Dickson. The cement mixer flogging the left wing had roused him from his snooze.
With a tremendous effort of will, I sprang my tongue loose from the roof of my mouth and started to babble. Disjointed as my words were, I managed to make enough sense to rivet the pilot’s attention. Dickson’s too.
Horror spread over the pilot’s face as he listened to me tell of the lead-pencil caricature of Dickson drawn around the engine exhaust by the boy. “We’re going to crash,” he realized.
Dickson blanched. “Coming to the heart of the question, what will we do?”
“We’ll have to bail out,” the pilot decided. “There are three chutes under the seat in the cabin. Get them out. Strap yourselves into them. Call me when you’ve done that.”
“Will we have enough time?” I asked.
“I’m going to be flying this crate the best I know how to give us the time. But there’s no way of telling. Now move!”
I hurried back to help Dickson. We removed the seat and found the three parachutes. I put one aside for the pilot and started strapping myself into one of the remaining two chutes. The way it worked out, I had my back to Dickson while I was doing this. When I turned around, he was already strapped into his chute. He was holding the third chute, the one I’d put aside for the pilot, and bending over the storage compartment containing the gold.
What was Dickson up to? I had no time to wonder about it. The engine was making such a racket now that the pilot couldn’t hear me call to him. I had to go up front and tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.
He nodded and switched on the automatic pilot. Then he came back into the cabin with me. He indicated that he wanted me to help him remove the emergency-exit door to the pressurized cabin.
It wasn’t easy. The danger was that with the door removed the pressure would shoot us out of the cabin like shells from a cannon. The trick was to scuttle the door panel while holding on to something solid enough to ensure our not following it. And all this had to be done fast because the plane was losing altitude. Also, the whole fuselage was shaking along with the wing now.
Like the pilot, I put my shoulder into it. On the third try the door panel gave. On the next one it went sailing off into space. The only trouble was that I lost my grip on the cabin wall and damn near was ejected after it.
The pilot saved me. He got a grip around one of my legs and pulled me back in. I scrambled to safety head-over-ass, the chute still on my back. I sat up to find myself looking into the mouth of my very own revolver!
Dickson was holding it. He was pointing it indiscriminately at both the pilot and myself. He was standing with his feet wide apart to maintain his balance in the tossing aircraft. Between his legs something bulky loomed. I recognized it as the large metal box containing the twenty-five gold bars. The third chute, the one I’d put aside for the pilot, was strapped to it.
“I would only suggest that in terms of relative values one million dollars in gold takes precedence,” Dickson announced. “Under the circumstances, therefore, it would not be appropriate for me to say anything further on this point. I trust I’ve made myself perfectly clear.” He motioned with the gun. His meaning was indeed “perfectly clear.” He meant for the pilot and me to push the box of gold out the exit we’d created. “Don’t neglect to pull the ripcord,” he re- minded us.
With the gun on us, we had no choice. The pilot and I shoved the gold out of the plane. The pilot pulled the ripcord as we dumped it. A moment later we saw the chute billow open. The gold floated down through a low-hanging cloud and was lost to sight. We turned back to Dickson.
He was already heading for the escape hatch. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” he announced. He dove for the exit.
His luck turned Watergate. The plane gave a sudden lurch. Dickson’s feet shot out from under him. My pistol, the one he’d lifted from me without my knowing it until it was too late, went flying up in the air.
It was an easy infield fly. The pilot pulled it in almost casually. Then he stuck his foot out and kept Dickson from sliding the rest of the way out the escape hatch. “Take off the chute and give it to me,” he told Dickson.
“Now, it is necessary for us to keep this development, however, in perspective,” Dickson suggested. “I was, after all, the President of the United States.”
“And now you’re the ex-President,” the pilot reminded him.
“I would only suggest that my survival is in the best interests of everybody concerned.”