entire performance would overshadow a slave auction was an inspired twist that Lloyd could not resist. The whole deranged caper sparkled in his mind.
Mulrooney would forgive him the fright he had caused and grasp the commercial opportunities the stunt would create. Although not everyone (fortunately enough!) would believe that Urim and Thummim came from the Red Planet, their singular appearance and bizarre mode of arrival would cause a sensation. Mulrooney’s future as a famous showman would be assured. Lloyd himself would be hailed as a god of invention and adventure. There would be no more broadcloth and boiled-leek broth. He would have a Villa of Wonders and roast duck, and every night a lascivious lady would come to him. His father would have a workshop again, and his mother a garden, roots, herbs, sweet-smelling leaves, and healing teas always brewing.
The possibility that even if the aeronautics went off without a hitch—which was hardly likely, given the many unknown and unforeseeable factors involved—the appearance out of the sky of such outlandish-looking individuals as Urim and Thummim, and the disruption of a significant slave auction, might instigate something more like a riot rather than endless rounds of applause did not occur to the boy with anything like the clarity it should have. He was blind to everything but his own ambition and his desperate craving for adulation—the sanctuary of money and freedom he hoped would descend upon him as soon as he descended into the thoroughfares of the city. This was his moment, his chance to reverse the fortunes of his family and establish a place for himself in the history of transport, science, and entertainment. The world.
Then a sudden rogue gust rose up as they crossed through the hotter air of the cityscape. The thermal blast destabilized the Miss Viola after its smooth drift over the cooler water. Lloyd’s parawing ripped free and swept him up to breaking point above the kite nest, the perforated panels bloated with air. Mulrooney’s stomach leaped up into his throat at what he saw next. Brookmire nearly fell from his perch.
The spiral kite cell caught the updraft and surged up to graze Lloyd’s swinging legs and then veered off back toward the Mississippi, the Ambassadors clicking and squealing like hysterical animals in a drowning cage. The tether that Lloyd held to the kite now threatened to drag him out of control and he was forced to let go, releasing the deformed brothers to the mercy of the sky. Meanwhile, he was rising higher than he had intended, the figures below seething like ants before a rainstorm. The power of the wind billowed out his homemade wings and filled his belly with the butterflies that a normal person would have felt long before. His whole being was alive, and terrified at the volatile elements now determining his fate. The kite was but a speck in the air. He felt the world slipping away. Then he remembered that he could steer. He had to steer—for his life. And yet even now—ruptured from the Miss Viola, with the Ambassadors from Mars doomed to some terrible crash in heavy timber—he felt the psychological as well as the physical force of the wind lifting him, calling him upward.…
Years before Sir George Cayley’s hapless coachman was compelled to make his historic glider flight (which inspired him to defecate in his trousers and resign his post). Long before Lawrence Hargrave and Alexander Graham Bell experimented with their kites and Otto Lilienthal broke his neck. Before Samuel Pierpont Langley catapulted his Aerodromes—and before the bicycle-repairing Wright brothers from another small town in Ohio took their fifty-nine-second flight into history over the dunes of Kitty Hawk—Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd was flying, fulfilling the dreams of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, Norse, and Greeks. Not falling. He was riding the wind in a winged vehicle that, while neither heavier than air nor machine-powered, possessed a capacity for maneuverability that would not be achieved by others for another fifty years.
But herein lay the great shortcoming of his undertaking. Wilbur Wright’s critical insight was that the secret of controlled flight lay as much in the skills of the pilot as in the capabilities of the craft. It was not enough for the machine to have the ability to maneuver; it was essential for the pilot to have the experience to utilize this potential. Without control, the solutions of lift and propulsion were meaningless. Despite the feverish pace at which he had been working, Lloyd had not had time