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always managed to match and sometimes exceed the other in his specialty. In high school, Tom wound up with a higher grade point average while Harry earned one more letter than Tom.
    It seemed to Vance that they had started to change after Margaret’s death, just before they had gone off to prepare for their respective service academies. God forbid that they would go to the same school! Vance had to scramble to get them appointments, working his industry connections with a senator and a local congressman. More than one friend had complained about Vance’s being greedy, and he knew they were right. But if the boys wanted to go to West Point and Annapolis, he was going to help them, no matter how greedy he seemed.
    It was not the money. Vance had always made a good income from his test flying and his consulting, and his and Margaret’s only indulgence had been their house in La Jolla. They had not been able to swing beachfront property, but they were only a block away, and as outrageouslyexpensive as it seemed at the time, it had been a good investment. He could have sent the boys to Stanford or even to an Ivy League school and would have sold the house and his soul to do so, but they had been determined to go to a military academy, and then enter flight training.
    Tom had whirled through Annapolis, graduating fifth in his class, while Harry had furnished a more gentlemanly thirty-ninth in his West Point class. Both had played football, Tom for three years at halfback and Harry for two as fullback, and as a parent with boys in both schools Vance was relieved when their teams happened to alternate winning in their seasonal match-ups. After graduation, they immediately went to flight school and did so well that they were now flying fighters. Tom had elected to go into the Marines, gladly accepting the basic infantry training as a challenge, and was now flying the Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat. Harry had checked out in the P-40 at Langley and was already on orders to go to work for Vance’s old friend Ben Kelsey as a test pilot at the Fighter Division at Wright Field.
    It was everything he and Margaret could have dreamed of—as long as they didn’t kill themselves.
    Harry snapped the last report shut. “Well, Dad, what do you think?”
    “You tell me; you’re the newest engineer in the family.”
    “At first I was put off. It didn’t make any sense to me at all until I saw these equations. . . .” Harry riffled through the report, pulling out a sheet showing that at 350 mph, a Spitfire with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine had a thrust of 1,000 pounds. “Take a look at that—it’s the first time I’ve seen thrust calculated that way. And Mr. Price’s engine is supposed to have thirty-five hundred pounds of thrust! That’s three and one-half Spitfire engines! That’s impressive.”
    Tom came back in the room. “I felt the same way. I’d never seen horse power expressed as thrust before.”
    Their father said, “Well, it makes more sense than horsepower anyway—we’ve been clinging to that antiquated definition for years, even though an aircraft’s power varies continually with altitude, air density, and a variety of other factors. Using pounds of thrust certainly makes sense for jet engines.”
    Vance went on. “You are exactly right, Harry; Price’s figures are impressive. I don’t know if he can make his engine work, but if he can, he’s got a world-beater. Tom, what did you think of the airplane Kelly Johnson has designed for it?”
    Gross had put a specially made box with a small model of the proposed fighter in the briefcase—it had a flashy designation, L-133. Tom extracted it and held it up.
    “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen—canard surfaces, the wing and body all blended into one shape. It looks like it’s going six hundred mph just sitting in its box.”
    “And there’s the problem, Son. The Army might let a little money loose to develop the engine, but the airframe will disturb them—just