As soon as Alex’s mother went downstairs, Chuck knocked on the door. He’d been waiting.
“Come on,” he called softly. “I need your help. We’re going to go fix Reggie with some sugar water.”
Right off Alex knew what was up: it was in the magazine story they’d just read about some Dutch kids sabotaging a German patrol car during the war. They’d poured beet syrup into the gas tank. It gummed up the engine like burning sugar in a kitchen pan.
The night before, Reggie had taken the girl Chuck liked to a drive-in movie in his father’s new car. Going out in a car had to beat bouncing around in Chuck’s war surplus jeep. Besides, you could be private in a car; the jeep was all open.
“I’ve made the mixture,” Chuck said, holding up a bottle. “I need you to hold the funnel while I pour it in.”
Lucky for Reggie the garage was locked.
“Tomorrow,” Chuck growled. “I’ll jimmy the lock.”
The next morning Alex waited uneasily in the assembly room for Mrs. King to come in for the Pledge of Allegiance. She chewed her lips and didn’t join in the usual chatter. She pictured sparks, a big flash. People had gotten hurt with some of Chuck’s tricks.
The room was buzzing like a swarm of excited bees when Mrs. King strode in and lifted the microphone from its stand. She pushed the switch. “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot!” blared out in a high tinny voice as Mrs. King screamed and dropped the instrument. It crashed, but the singing and talking kept going until she pulled the connection from the wall. She was pale. “Dismissed,” she whispered to the gaping crowd. “Dismissed to class.”
“Did it work?” Chuck asked when Alex got home.
“Yeah, perfect,” Alex said. She didn’t let on how nervous she’d been. Chuck would have teased her for being sissy. “Tell me what you did,” she said in her cool scientific voice.
“It’s what you did. Switching those wires turned the mike into a little radio. It doesn’t take much. Remember the crystal set? I heard about a woman who got signals through the silver fillings in her teeth, thought she was crazy hearing voices all the time, so they took out her fillings and it stopped.”
“You gotta be kidding,” Alex said.
“I’m not. She got false teeth, but then she complained they hurt, and besides it was suddenly too quiet in her head, so she said she wanted her little radios back.”
Alex shook her head and changed the subject. “Did you get a flying lesson?” she asked, imagining herself Amelia Earhart at the stick.
“No, not yet, but I watched what the instructor and the student were doing. It’s a Piper Cub with a beauty of an engine, no muffler or anything so you really hear it. There’s not a lot of controls to work it with either, and you know what? There’s no key or lock—you just open up the throttle a little, turn the prop slowly a couple of times to prime it, turn on the ignition, then flip the prop hard to get her started, hop in, take off.”
He smiled at Alex the way he always did when he dared her. “Think you’re up for some prop flipping?”
“You gotta be kidding,” she said again, turning away. But what if he was flipping the Airster’s prop for me?
She went out and worked in her garden for a while, tilling and weeding as she thought about flying. A monarch butterfly coasted by, then another. Alex was delighted. Her father had pointed out their gold-dotted, bright green cocoons hanging like peanuts under the porch railing. “Hello,” she said softly.
Alex dug up some special plants for Ebbs. She loaded her baskets and headed up the hill.
“Right!” Ebbs called out when Alex knocked. “Just got home myself. And you brought more plants? Good.”
“These aren’t to sell,” Alex said. “They’re my thank-you for the space rock. They’re cuttings from a wild azalea I found.”
Ebbs looked at her, expecting her to say something more. After a pause she said “Nice” as she lifted out the plants. “When we get back inside I want to hear about that rocket you’re building.”
Alex told how they’d made cherry bomb bazookas until one of them blew up and Chuck got hurt.
“Good Lord!” Ebbs muttered, pointing Alex to the kitchen chair as she got out graham crackers.
“He tells people he got the scar on his face in a knife fight with some spies,” Alex said, “but it was really the bazooka. He told Dad he got it doing a bike trick, but Dad must have found out because all the pipes and cherry bombs disappeared.”
“So now you’re building a real rocket,” Ebbs said. “How’d you get into that?”
“It was Mrs. Knapp, the town librarian,” Alex explained. “She knows what we’re interested in. She got us the new history of rockets book with pictures and the formula for gunpowder. Moon Girl looks like the Chinese rocket in the book, but it’s a toy compared to what’s in your pictures.”
“Size doesn’t matter,” Ebbs said. “What von Braun started with looked like toys too, but they were the real thing. Go on.”
“It started out as the steam one pictured in the book,” Alex said, “but it didn’t go up, it just flopped over steaming like mad, whistling and chasing us around like it could see us. It scared Jeep so bad that when we get it out now he goes under the porch.”
Ebbs snorted. “Then what?”
“Like I told you,” Alex said, “next time we’re going to pack Moon Girl’s shell with gunpowder like it shows in the book.”
“Yeah,” Ebbs muttered, “but can it take the shock? What’s it made of? What materials? That’s what VB would want to know.”
“Copper,” Alex said. “It’s an old fire extinguisher we turned upside down and made a pointed nose and fins for.”
She started to explain how it was supposed to work, but Ebbs was after something else.
“Where’d you get it?” she demanded. “VB says the hardest part of his job is getting parts. Where’d you get the extinguisher?”
“Hector’s junkyard on Seventh Avenue,” Alex explained. “We go there with metal we’ve collected—aluminum, brass, copper. We trade him for parts for the Moon Station and for our inventions. He got us the Plexiglas when we told him the Moon Station needed a nose window like bombers have.”
Alex hesitated. Suddenly she felt uncomfortable about what she was about to say.
“And?”
“W-well, uh, see,” Alex stammered, twisting her feet under the chair, “Hector’d always let us take what we needed. He’d pay himself back the next time we came in with the metal, but this time he said no because the fire extinguisher was an antique he could sell for more than its scrap value. He wanted five dollars for it.”
Alex hesitated again.
“And?” Ebbs prodded.
“We didn’t have any money, so Hector asked Chuck what we had at home for trade. They had a talk and Hector said he’d hold it for us a couple of days.”
Alex stopped talking.
“So what’d you take him?”
“Spoons,” Alex mumbled. “Mother’s got a bunch she never uses. They were in the attic.”
Ebbs stared at her, eyes blazing. “You didn’t ask, you just took? That’s stealing.”
Alex looked away, her face getting hot. She felt bad that her new friend saw her as a thief. She hadn’t thought of herself like that before. When she and Chuck stole things—mostly from stores—he’d always used a fancy name for what they were doing: “liberating.” That made it sound like they were simply putting things where they belonged.
“Bring Chuck up here,” Ebbs ordered. “I want to meet him.”