'A guy can't disappear that completely for thirty-five years, then

suddenly turn up again at sixty years old!'

Gladys sighed. 'So far that appears to be the case. Wilson seems to

be some kind of authentic genius. He obtained his BA in aeronautics

when they were very rare indeed, he claimed to G.o.ddard that he'd

designed airships, and yet we can't find a d.a.m.ned thing on what should

have been the most productive thirty-five years of his life.' Bradley gave a low whistle.

'Would that be possible in this day and age?' Gladys asked

rhetorically. But before Bradley could open his mouth to reply, she

raised her index finger and asked, more emphatically: 'One: Would a

man with that track record be capable of designing airships? And, two:

If he was capable of doing so, could he have done it in total secrecy for

so long?'

She glanced across the busy restaurant at the group of people

arguing noisily in a cloud of cigarette smoke at a table in the middle of

the room. They included William Shawn, the a.s.sociate editor of the

New Yorker, an increasingly blind and visibly drunken cartoonist

named James Thurber, a matinee-idol theatre reviewer, Robert

Benchley, and the deceptively sweet-faced satirical writer, Dorothy

Parker. Grinning slightly and shaking her head, as if she didn't believe

what she was seeing, she turned back to Bradley.

'I'd already checked out that possibility,' Bradley said, 'and to

answer your first question, yes, Wilson could have gone into airship

design with that kind of background. Although there were no formal

aeronautical courses at MIT when Wilson was there, there were plenty

of informal courses on propulsion and the behaviour of fluids two

subjects that G.o.ddard later made his own. And certainly, by 1896,

instructors and students at MIT had built a wind tunnel and were

experimenting with it to get practical knowledge of aerodynamics. As

for Sibley College, the experimental engineering courses that Wilson

attended would have been conducted by professors Rolla Clinton

Carpenter, George Burton Preston, Aldred Henry Eldredge, Charles Edwin Houghton, and Oliver Shantz some of the greatest aeronautical thinkers of their day. Finally, Octave Chanute was the world-famous engineer who, in 1896, emulated the successful manned hang-glider experiments of the German, Otto Lilienthal, at an aerial experiment station on the Lake Michigan sand dunes near Miller,

Indiana so, again, Wilson learned from the very best.'

'But what was the state of knowledge at the time?' Gladys asked,