On Saturday morning Alex’s dad got her up early. She’d forgotten—she thought it was to do plants, but they were all in the kitchen waiting for her.
“Twelve!” her mother announced when Alex appeared. She’d circled Alex’s place at the table with flowers and strawberries. There was a honey cake stuck with twelve candles, and there were cards—one from John with two dollars of his tutoring money—and a small box Chuck must have wrapped. She looked for something from her parents but there wasn’t anything until “Zoom!” her dad called out, buzzing Alex with a bright yellow model biplane. He spun the prop as he landed it at Alex’s place.
“It’s Amelia’s plane!” she cried.
“You bet, just like in the photograph—Aerospace model nine Merrill-type. Made it myself down at the Institute—with Rosy’s help.”
“Quick, open my present!” Chuck exclaimed. “And I didn’t know about the plane!” He had made Alex a pair of flying goggles—big rounds of tinted glass molded into what looked like a bathing cap. AIR HART was written across the top in Chuck’s blocky letters. “I read about her,” Chuck said. “I bet she crashed because her radio broke, or she didn’t know how to work it.”
Because it was her birthday Alex was excused from cleaning up, but she helped anyway. “Now we gotta go to Ebbs’s,” she told Chuck. “I promised I’d bring you up.”
Ebbs must have seen them coming. Before they could knock she opened the door, smiling and holding out her hand.
“Like a spider lying in wait,” Chuck muttered as Ebbs exclaimed, “Come in! You’re Chuck, right? The Moon Station, weather balloons, steam rockets, and radar brother?”
“Yeess,” said Chuck slowly, giving Alex a surprised glance.
“Good!” Ebbs said. “I want to come see your Moon Station.”
“You can come right now.”
Ebbs shook her head. “First things first. Have you made the gunpowder yet?”
“No,” said Chuck, frowning. “The sulfur’s gone. Stuart must have used it up.”
A flicker crossed Ebbs’s face.
“Right!” she said, drawing out the word the way she did. “Next question: can you swim?”
“Yes,” Chuck replied, squinting at her, trying to figure out what she was up to.
Ebbs turned to Alex. “How about you?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” said Ebbs. “I’ve got lemonade. Sit down.”
Alex took her regular chair.
As Ebbs poured the glasses, Jeep started rattling his dog jewelry.
“Right, Jeep. More cheese?”
The dog ducked his head and licked his chops.
“So,” Ebbs announced once she’d taken care of the dog and handed Chuck a bomber bar and given some graham crackers to Alex. “Since you both can swim, I want you to help me take a space trip.”
Chuck’s eyebrows went up.
“Here’s the proposition,” she said. “I’ve got a sailboat and I need crew. You guys go out cruising in the Moon Station all the time, so here’s your chance to go out like you’re really in space—stars, Moon, planets overhead, dark depths below, no land in sight. Save for the water noise it’s just as silent as if you were a thousand miles up, and it’s every bit as dangerous because you can drown in space just like you can drown in water—lack of oxygen, right? It’ll get you ready for your Mars trip.
“I can sail it alone,” she continued, “but No Name was built to carry a crew of three, and since I’m new around here I don’t have any sailing buddies yet so I’m hoping I can enlist you. It’ll be a paying job. I want to sail down the Potomac and out to Tangier Island, where I’ve got an old army buddy.”
Chuck looked at Alex. “We don’t know about sailing, but I’m willing to try if Alex is.”
Alex nodded. “Sure, but that’s a funny name—No Name. How come you call it that?”
Ebbs leaned against the doorjamb. “For a few weeks during the war I was a CIC agent, Counter Intelligence Corps. Like I told Alex, as things were winding down in Europe, because I knew about nutrition I was sent to help feed the refugees, but going over I ran into the officer who’d been in charge of my high-altitude bomber work. He got my orders changed, got me assigned to help his team collect dope about the Germans’ V-2 missiles and to find Doctor von Braun himself because he and his rocket team were way ahead of everybody.”
Alex looked over at Chuck. She could tell he was impressed.
“The Russians had their people out after him too,” Ebbs said. “It was like war, so our officers ordered a ‘no name’ policy: we weren’t allowed to use our names, just numbers, so if one of us got caught, he wouldn’t be able to identify the others.
“We had luck. We found where the Germans had buried their data, and then we found von Braun—or rather he found us and surrendered. He figured he’d be better off in America than with the Russkies. We got him and most of his dope without firing a shot.
“When I bought the boat I was going to call her by my team number, G-13—but then I hit on No Name. I liked that better. It’s my personal camouflage. So that’s my story. Now you tell me yours—how you got into radio and rockets and all.”
Chuck started telling how their dad had taken him to meet Rosy to learn about radio before he got hurt with his experiments.
“It wasn’t experiments,” Alex interrupted. “Mother’d got a new radio-phonograph for her work with the German music records, and Chuck blew it up trying to find out what made the green tuning light work. He went at it with pliers and a screwdriver until there was a big flash that knocked him down and all the lights went out and Mother screamed and had to take a pill. Dad took the busted Magnavox down to Rosy to get it fixed. Rosy said he’d better teach Chuck about radio before he burned the house down or killed himself—or both!”
Ebbs’s mouth was open, half-smiling, as Alex went on gleefully: “Rosy’s supposed to be the school’s engineer, but he doesn’t look anything like an engineer. He doesn’t wear a white coat, and he doesn’t shave, and he’s got this half-smoked cigar in his mouth all the time so his pants and shirts have burn holes.”
Chuck shoved at Alex to shut her up.
“Rosy knows radio like he invented it,” he said, “and he knows about radar too. He was in the lab in New Jersey when they shot the first radar signal at the Moon. Two and a half seconds later it bounced back—four hundred eighty thousand miles in two and a half seconds!”
He looked at Ebbs.
“Sounds about right.”
“He was working on circuit-testing kits some students had sent back,” Chuck said. “The starter kits. They didn’t work because the students hadn’t put them together right. I watched him until he gave me one to fix. Without even looking at the manual I got it right.”
Alex piped up. “He didn’t look at the book because he mixes things up when he reads.” Then she blushed, thinking she’d let her brother down by saying it the way she had.
Ebbs looked at Chuck.
He shrugged and smiled a little. “I guess she told you I left Tech because of my reading. For radio work it doesn’t matter so much because if I can watch something being done, I can do it.”
Alex butted back in: “Next thing that happened was, Rosy gave him an old Signal Corps field radio to fix with a box of parts and the manual, and with my help reading it we got it going again.”
“So when are you going back to school?” Ebbs asked.
“I don’t need school,” Chuck said. “I’ve got ideas for inventions I can make on my own. What I need is your help. How about a trade for our helping you with the sailing?”
Ebbs’s eyes narrowed.
“See, when I got home from Tech, I went down to the Institute to see if I could make some money helping out. Rosy said I could stick around, but he couldn’t pay me. He said the place is going broke with the war over and no more Signal Corps work—but I’ve got this great idea: make a radar kit the Institute can sell to people like me who want to watch for enemy planes and rockets and space aliens and comets and stuff like that. Alex says you know where they’re working with radar, so if you can get me in there so I can study it I’ll make up a radar kit for everyday people.”
“Hold on!” Ebbs bellowed, straightening up. “Alex got me wrong. I work on space food, not radar.”
“But you know the radar people,” Chuck insisted. “Alex says you’ve been to Wallops, and you’ve met von Braun. I need you to get me to them, get me started.”
Ebbs’s face was dark.
“Let’s go see your Moon Station.”