"Like a dream," said the driver of the sky car.
"It should," said Thomas, covering his ignorance with monosyllabic
agreement.
"Handles well, too. I think we could stand a bit more positivity of
control, though."
"I'll look into it."
"I wish you would. We've got the jump on the whole world with this.
We'd like to keep it. But the thing doesn't answer to the wheel too
solidly."
"Uh-huh."
"The chief engineer said, 'Jim, take that crate over to Lionel and see
if he will beef up the control force a bit.' So here I am."
"O.K., Jim," said Thomas, offering a prayer for the name that had been
given unwittingly. The engineer must have been a busy boy! "How are you
going to get back?"
Jim looked up into the sky. "Jerry is following in the pilot model.
He'll pick me up and we'll go on back thataway."
Jim nodded skyward, and Thomas looked at the growing speck that must
have been the pilot model.
Thomas forgot about the pilot model. What he wanted to know was the
whereabouts of the five tons of equipment that had been an integral
part of this idea. He looked at the model. He wondered whether the
engineer had installed the whole thing, stepping up the power and using
the main part of the power to support the equipment. That did not seem
possible. Any failure would cause the little sky car to collapse of its
own dead weight. Besides there was not enough room in the little crate
to pack all that equipment-tonnage.
The engineer had achieved the impossible. He had done away with the
main part while retaining the effect.
The pilot model landed. It was not the finished job of the prototype.
The cabin was squarely functional and the landing wheels were not
faired into the hull. The rear end, instead of tapering gently into a
narrow paraboloid of revolution, was a truncated four-sided pyramid.
Jerry did not emerge. He merely tossed the door open and shouted: "Come
on--we ain't got all day!"