"When was that?"
"About 1896. Thereabouts. My memory"s not all that good, you know. It"s as flimsy as I am."
Bradley grinned. "And did you actually design some workable airships?"
The man inhaled more smoke, nearly choked and coughed vigorously, stubbed the b.u.t.t of the cigar out in an ashtray, then wiped his watery eyes with shaky fingers.
"He sure did," he confirmed, nodding emphatically. "Five in all, with one uncompleted by the time the project closed down."
That figured, Bradley thought. All the reports about Wilson during the Great Airship Scare had reported him as saying that five or six airships had been constructed in Iowa, near the Illinois border. So five had been completed, one left unfinished, in Mount Pleasant, Iowa.
"What were they like?" he asked.
"Dirigibles," Goldman replied. "The most advanced of their time. The hot-air balloon was contained inside a cigar-shaped aluminium structure and powered by Wilson"s internal combustion engine and propellers, all of which were fixed ingeniously to the gondola. The five completed models were secretly test-flown throughout the second year of the project I think, 1897 but of course we couldn"t keep "em invisible, so they caused quite a stir."
"The Great Airship Scare of 1897."
The old man shook again with silent mirth. "Right," he said, when he had managed to control himself. "Those test flights were made about three years before Zeppelin flew his first model and over six years before the first heavier-than-air flight of the Wright brothers but they were undertaken in as much secrecy as was possible under the circ.u.mstances. Wilson nearly always took the airships up at night, but he often had to land to ask for water for his airship"s engine and in doing that he scared a h.e.l.luva lot of people. Of course, some of his crewmen really enjoyed the whole thing you know, reading about themselves as possible invaders from Mars and so on. It was all a bit of a joke to them."
"Not a joke to the nation," Bradley observed, remembering what he had read about the scare.
"Right," Goldman replied. "Someone even managed to get some photographs when one of Wilson"s airships flew over Rogers Park in Illinois. Those photographs were reproduced in a couple of newspapers
the Chicago Times-Herald and The New York Times, as I remember
and that really turned the airships into a sensation."
"Yet they weren"t seen after 1897. Why?"
"Wilson destroyed them."
"Pardon?" "You heard me. That mad b.a.s.t.a.r.d destroyed his own creations. He was utterly ruthless."
Bradley was just starting to wonder if Goldman was insane when the old man glanced furtively left and right, then leaned forward with a sly grin on his face.
"You don"t believe me, uh?"
"I"m beginning to believe this Wilson was capable of anything... but that seems a bit too much."
"You want me to show you something really special, Mr Bradley?"
"Show me?"
"Yeah, show you. I could do with a day away from here and it"s still only morning. If you"re willing to drive eighty miles and back I"ll show you what he was up to."
"Where would we be going?"
"To Mount Pleasant, of course, where my construction plant was located."
"I"ve already checked it out," Bradley said, "and didn"t find a d.a.m.ned thing. Your plant"s long gone, Mr Goldman. Every last sign of it."
Goldman grinned again and winked, then shook his head from side to side. "No," he said. "Not there. You looked in the wrong place. Wilson had this other hangar, his secret place, that even I didn"t know about until he was long gone. You want to see what Wilson was doing behind our backs? Then let"s head for Mount Pleasant. I could do with a day out."
"It"s a deal," Bradley said.
They had a pleasant drive, out of Des Moines and along a seemingly endless straight road, past the rambling farmsteads that dotted the green and brown hills, toward where an azure, white-clouded sky met a silvery horizon. Abe Goldman loved it, beamed with pleasure beside Bradley, and kept leaning sideways, to put his weathered face near the rolled-down window, all the better to receive the rushing wind, fresh air, and hot, burning sun.
"This is what I left New York for," he explained, breathing deeply and gratefully. Though Bradley was burning with impatience, he didn"t press the old man to talk anymore about Wilson and his airship project, but instead let him engage in routine conversation about the weather, the changes in the country in general and New York in particular, and anything else that took the voluble Abe Goldman"s fancy. They were on the highway to Iowa City, which made an easy drive, but turned off an hour later and took a road that ran as straight as an arrow between golden fields of wheat and corn, to Montezuma, where Wilson had been born.
As Abe Goldman now wanted lunch, Bradley stopped at a diner on the edge of town.
Helping Abe out of the car, Bradley recalled his visit to this town a few years back, when he had gone to the farm that had once belonged to Wilson"s parents and found it still operating, its clapboard house recently repainted and gleaming white in the sunlight.
"The man now running the Wilson farm," he explained to Abe as they entered the diner, "is the son of the people who bought it from Wilson"s father shortly after his wife, Wilson"s mother, died and he decided to move to Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, where he"d been born."
"A lot of people need their roots," Goldman replied.
"Not Wilson," Bradley said.