“Do you wish to kill them? They are doing their job in defending their homes and yours.”
Pegasus had a point. I didn’t want to kill the Army pilots either, just discourage them. Persuade them to back off. “Can we outrun them?” I asked.
“We will reach the oil refinery in several minutes. Additional speed would be wasteful because of the braking time involved. Counterproductive as well, because they would simply catch us on our braking maneuver.”
There had to be another way out of this. I couldn’t imagine taking on fuel — or in Pegasus’ case, lubricant — under heavy machine gun fire. “How about forcing them down?”
“Your airplanes are delicate machines. As I said before, the pilots’ lives would be placed at undue risk if I forced them down.”
“Evasive maneuvers?” I asked hopefully.
“We can fly around them in rings until they run out of fuel,” replied Pegasus, “but they will certainly summon more fighters before then. That would bring us no closer to our goal.”
Pegasus’ goal. The oil it needed. I had run out of goals. I had no stomach for harming Floyd now. If nothing else, Pegasus had shamed me out of it. He was my brother, my father’s son. Had everyone known it when we were kids? Had my mother known it? I wondered if Floyd and I had been pushed together for that reason.
I had never seen it that way, but what did I know as a kid?
Whatever Floyd’s crimes and sins were, the law could handle him. Dad was safe in the hospital, out of reach of Hauptmann, Milliken and company. The publicity alone from his arrival would keep him safe — I’d bet there were reporters camped outside the operating room already. Mr. Bellamy was probably half way to Mexico by now, unless Roanoke Joe had killed him. Or Mr. Neville. There wasn’t much left for me, except to help Pegasus. And maybe my brother, if I could.
Another series of rattling thumps against the hull reminded me what was waiting for me out there. I had to find some way to keep the Army from shooting continuously until they finally got me.
Why the heck didn’t I just give up? If I did it publicly enough, they wouldn’t be able to kill me. There were enough players, enough problems, that this would be front page news from New York to San Francisco.
You couldn’t hide aerial dog fights over a city the size of Wichita.
If I gave up, if I quit, Floyd would come to justice. Which was what I wanted, right? And Pegasus… well. The computational rocket had done a lot for me, but there were limits to everything.
“Hey, Vernon…” whispered Floyd. He was back in his straps, I realized. Trust? Or practicality? “How come you keep looking at me like that?”
I realized that I had been studying Floyd while I thought. I was checking out his nose, his hairline, the set of his jaw. Looking for signs of Dad — or me — in him. This wasn’t the moment to spill Dad’s secret.
“There’s something pretty funny I need to tell you,” I said, “but it will have to wait. There’s people in fighter planes shooting at us right now. I’m trying to figure a way to give us up without getting us killed.”
“And what happens then?” He glanced around the cabin. “To your Pegasus?”
My Pegasus, he’d said.
“Nothing good,” I admitted.
“You’ll do what’s right,” he muttered. “You’re the only one who always did.”
Because I was the only chump who never knew the secrets. Well, I had a secret now. Pegasus deserved to live too. I couldn’t give it up. Me, maybe. My brother, yes.
But not Pegasus.
I stared at the main screen, which showed three P-51Ds chasing us. One of the side screens indicated that we were closing in on the refinery. Maybe the refinery itself would shelter us. Hopefully the Mustang pilots would stop firing in case they blew an oil storage tank or something.
The pilots, I thought. Pegasus was right. They’re all people out there, not just machines and weapons and bad intentions. If I could get someone on the Army side talking, this didn’t have to end in a flaming disaster. Maybe I could get out of this, go to a nice, peaceful jail for half of forever.
“Can you find what radio frequency they’re using?” I asked Pegasus. “I need to call that Colonel Pinkhoffer, or Ollie Wannamaker.”
“It would be easier to tap into the telephone system,” said Pegasus. “And you have yet to secure permission for me to take the oil.”
Right, I thought. The oil. Ethics were hell sometimes. “Just get me a line to the operator.” Another of Pegasus’ myriad engineering marvels — the computational rocket could plug remotely into the telephone system.
There was a series of buzzing clicks in the same place behind my ear that I normally heard Pegasus, followed by a nasal female voice. “Will the party please clear the line? The telephones are required for emergency use at this time.”
It sounded like Susie Mae Leach. She was the usual off-hours operator at the Augusta exchange. “Susie Mae? It’s Vernon Dunham.”
“Oh, hi, Vern. Look, you gotta get off the line.” She rattled something, which generated a series of clicks on the line. “Hey, where are you calling from?”
Her switch couldn’t tell her where my call was coming from, I was pretty sure of that. Pegasus had to have tapped the trunk line. I must have looked like an inbound long distance call.
“Susie Mae,” I said, “I am the emergency. I’m on a radiotelephone right now.” Close enough to true, and not bad thinking on the fly. So to speak. She didn’t need to know I was circling the refinery at three hundred miles an hour being chased by Army fighter planes.
“Huh?” Susie Mae had never been the brightest spark in the bonfire.
“Look, I need to talk to the St. Francis Hospital in Wichita. And stay on the line, please. When I’m off that call, get me Ollie Wannamaker or that Army Colonel Pinkhoffer who’s probably at the police station. This is an emergency, Susie Mae.”
“All right.” Susie Mae sounded doubtful, but I heard her patch the call through to Wichita. They had direct dial in Wichita, but that particular bit of progress hadn’t made it to Augusta yet.
“St. Francis, Sisters of St. Joseph,” said a crisp female voice, picking up on the first ring.
“Emergency telephone call for you from Augusta, Kansas,” said Susie Mae. “This is a radiotelephone patch. Operator will remain on the line.”
That was my cue. “Look, I’m the guy that just landed a plane outside and dropped off a patient,” I said.
The woman gasped. “Doctor must speak to you immediately,” she said. I heard a bang as she slammed down the phone, followed by a lot of shouting.
A new voice came, male, hurried. He sounded excited rather than angry. “Hello, hello. This is Officer Krieger of the Wichita Police Department. Who is speaking, please?”
“I need to talk to the doctor handling the new admission,” I said. I felt foolish.
There was the sound of a brief struggle, then I heard a man’s voice say faintly, “Keep that idiot away from this telephone!” There was a pause, and the voice continued, much louder, “Doctor Rubenstein here. Who is this?”
There was no point in lying. Enough people in August had seen me get inside Pegasus. “Vernon Dunham of Augusta,” I said. “You’ve got my father Grady Dunham in there.”
“Grady Dunham?” I heard scratching. Rubenstein was making notes. Good. “What happened to him?” Even better. He wasn’t asking stupid questions about me. That man had a sense of priorities.
“He got beat up real bad yesterday. Assailants unknown. Ribs kicked in, and they tried to kill him by whacking him over the head. Dad’s got a metal plate, though.”