The fall knocked the wind out of me completely. I felt like I might have broken my left hip, too. It ached tremendously. I wanted to shriek with frustration — all the care and planning I could bring to the problem, and my bad leg just gave out on me. Floyd stepped over to reach down and grabbed my wrist. He pulled me up.
“Stupid gimp,” he growled. Now that my sense of power was gone, I regretted antagonizing him. “You almost landed on me. Now let’s get inside and check that darned thing out.”
I had muffed it. I lost my chance to get inside Pegasus and away from Floyd. He was already jumping up onto the truck bed, reaching down to drag me after him. And he’d brought the knife with him.
There wasn’t anything I could do now.
“Patience,” said Pegasus. “This will work. You are only set back, not defeated.”
I scrambled back onto the truck bed as Floyd pulled at my wrist. My hip wasn’t broken, because I could stand okay, but it hurt like crazy. Floyd bent over and stepped through the open hatch in Pegasus’ side. I followed after him, torn between a sense of profound excitement and feeling sick at heart that Floyd would be inside Pegasus with me, carrying the poison of his father and his family into this bright future.
Even though I was right behind him, I missed my best friend.
The inside of Pegasus resembled the world’s largest vacuum tube. It was much larger than I would have thought from the outside. The entire cabin glowed a dull orange. Twisted shapes as unsettling as the exterior lines of the computational rocket cast strange shadows across the entire cabin, and nothing was level or true, not even the deck.
Screens vaguely resembling large versions of the hooded radar terminal in the f-panzer outside lined the front of the cabin, dominated by a huge, flat one displaying a view of the inside of the barn. That explained the lack of cockpit windows or vision blocks. Unlike a normal cathode-ray tube, there was no curvature to its face whatsoever. There were two steeply angled chairs, big and padded, in front of the screens. They were obviously the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats.
Purple, white and orange lights flickered in patterns and sequences across the faces of curved panels gathered around the seats. There were dozens of wide, concave buttons, some of them backlit and some of them matte dark. A white column of light rose from a low platform in the middle of the cabin just behind the seats, with a shifting diagram of color-coded curves and vectors displayed within it. The whole thing looked like a three-dimensional movie, if such a thing were possible.
“Hot damn,” said Floyd. There was my buddy back, without the fear or anger or conspiracy of his father. “Hey, Vernon, what do you make of all this?”
We were in a marvel of engineering and design, surrounded by achievements of engineering principles that were years, decades, perhaps centuries ahead of anything that could be done on Earth. I was at a loss for words, at least words that would make any sense to Floyd.
The whole situation was overwhelming, flooding my eyes like fireworks going off too close. It was like what I had imagined the inside of a U-boat to be, cramped and strangely laid out, but in this case crossed with a really swank scientific research lab.
A lout like Floyd was as out of place as a cow at a college graduation.
“Preflight sequence completed in thirty seconds,” said Pegasus. “I suggest you take a seat.”
“Sit down, Floyd,” I said roughly, taking the left seat. There was no control stick where I expected it, but there was a handle set on the arm on each side of the chair.
“Why?” he demanded. “We’re not going anywhere yet.”
“Safety considerations,” I said. “You never know what I’ll touch.”
“You’d better not mess around. Daddy and Mr. Neville are still out there.”
I sighed. “I’m not messing with you, Floyd. But if I pop the wrong switch and this baby lurches hard to the left, you don’t want to be scraping your scalp off one of those weird pointy things in the corner do you?”
Floyd stared hard at me for a moment, then sat down in the right seat. “If you damage this thing before we lift it off the truck and get it outside, Roanoke Joe will not be happy.”
He’d have to take a number and stand in a very long line. “I’d say customer relations are your department, Floyd. I don’t deal with angry Italians. I’m just the mechanic here.”
“Be careful.” Leaning back in his chair, Floyd untucked his shirttail and began to clean the carving knife. It was a weird echo of Mr. Neville’s nearly obsessive pistol-cleaning. Could Neville be Floyd’s real father? Mr. Bellamy hadn’t mentioned Neville in his Russian story, and I gathered that the man was a buddy from the moonshine days. Part of the Bellamy gang.
Floyd cleared his throat and sighted down the blade. My back ached, itchy, where he had jabbed me walking out of the house.
“Preflight sequence completed. Do you wish to lift off now?”
Lift off, not take off, I realized. Pegasus had said it could fly vertically. I didn’t dare talk to Pegasus in front of Floyd, not yet anyway, so I shook my head in a tiny motion while making a “nuh-uh” low noise in my throat. I hoped Pegasus would get that.
No such luck, of course. “Do you understand me?” asked Pegasus.
“No.” I shook my head more violently, pretending to study the incomprehensible control panel in front of me.
“No what?” asked Floyd suspiciously.
“This is all very confusing,” I said.
“I understand,” said Pegasus.
“It had better not be,” said Floyd.
Listening to Pegasus and Floyd at the same time was distracting, worse than that terrible conversation in the car with Lois. At least she hadn’t been threatening my life.
I glanced over at Floyd. He was perched on the edge of his chair, looking up at an array of buttons and panels over his head. Setting his knife down on the deck, on the side of his chair further away from me, Floyd reached up a hand and brushed his fingers across some of the buttons.
“Hey!” I yelled. “Don’t touch anything until I say so. You could short something out, or worse.”
“Calm down. It’s just an airplane.”
“Look, I’m the aeronautical engineer here. Do you want me to do my job or not?”
Of course, what we really needed was a rocket scientist, which I most certainly was not. Robert Goddard would have known what to do.
“Yeah, yeah.” Floyd set his hands on his knees. “I’ll sit tight.”
Pegasus spoke again. “Get him to recline in his chair and buckle the safety straps.”
How the heck was I going to do that? “Floyd, sit back in your chair,” I said calmly.
“What are you up to?”
“Quit being so suspicious,” I snapped. “This thing’s a jet plane. It’s awfully complicated. If I hit the wrong switch and start the engines, you’re gonna be knocked down.” I couldn’t help getting in a little dig. “Wouldn’t want to lose control of the situation, would you?”
“Watch your mouth,” said Floyd, leaning back in his chair.
I ostentatiously tried to snap my safety straps, only they didn’t snap. The fastener resembled no clasp I had ever seen. After a minute’s worth of examination I figured out that the two metal clips were maybe like electromagnets. They had slightly patterned edges that fit perfectly together, a purple button just offset on the left side of the clip.
I put them close together and pressed the button. The clips flew together as if they were one piece of metal being reunited. Which, given Pegasus’ nature, was quite possibly the case. The straps were huge and loose on me, as if the chair had been built for a much larger person. Or thing. Even as I had that thought, they shrunk to a snug fit.
Somehow that didn’t surprise me, but I hoped like heck Floyd hadn’t noticed.