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too radical. Wait and see. Kelly and Nate will walk this thing through the Pentagon and come back with their tails between their legs.”
    Harry was pensive. “Can Lockheed develop it on its own?”
    It had become a triangular conversation, both boys addressing their father, neither one talking to the other. He tried to change that, asking, “What do you think, Tom?”
    “The airplane, sure, it looks different, but it’s still an airplane. The papers say it uses lots of stainless steel, and that might be a fabricating problem, but Lockheed could handle it. But the engine! That’s something else.”
    Harry joined in. “The last year at the Point we had a field trip to Pratt & Whitney in Hartford. What a plant. Lockheed doesn’t have the room, and probably not the expertise, to get into engine building. It’s an entirely different industry, lots of heavy machinery, machinists with years of experience.”
    Tom responded. “We had a similar deal but went to Curtiss-Wright. Same thing: huge plant, thousands of machine tools, big payroll. They gave us a forecast for the future for their engines, and it didn’t look like it was going to be easy. They can only have so many more cylinders, and the big limiting factor is the propellers, which they make a lot of, just like Hamilton Standard does up in Hartford.”
    Vance swelled with pride listening to them. They were hitting exactly the right arguments, and they were doing it in a controlled fashion. A few years ago, Tom might have taken an extreme position, just to gin up an argument with Harry. Now they spoke like experienced engineers. Flying had done wonders for them.
    Vance was silent for a while as the images of the pilots he had known flashed through his mind, reminding him of the depth and range of the people in this demanding business. He’d trained with Jimmy Doolittle, then seen him go on to become the king of race pilots—and an astute businessman. Wiley Post had asked him to work on the pressure suit he used in the Winnie Mae for his high-altitude flights. Not as well educated as Jimmy, Post had the same sort of intuitive engineering mind. There were so many more, and too many of them had lost their lives. . . .
    Tom interrupted. “What are you thinking about, Dad?”
    A little embarrassed to have let his attention wander, he came back with, “You are both right on the ball. Piston engines, even propellers for piston engines, have become way too expensive. If the jet engine works—and it will someday, if not Nate Price’s, then someone else’s—you’re going to see a revolution in the industry. And it won’t affect just airplanes, it will knock the propeller people out of business, and there will be a whole raft of old industries that will fold and new industries that will come in. If I had the brains to pick which ones, I’d go out and do a little investing, right now. Get in on the ground floor!”
    The boys kidded him for a while on his investments of the past—the molded plywood trainer, the retractable high-heel shoe for women, the Japanese pinball machine—and he had to laugh, too; his investment record was pretty sorry.
    Then he said, “Well, a jet engine is way too expensive to manufacture from scratch, and Lockheed is so loaded with military projects now that they wouldn’t be able to do more than make a mock-up. They’ll continue to work on the engine, though—Bob Gross thinks the world of Price and Kelly. It is so revolutionary that they may be able to get some investors to back it. Or they could form a subsidiary to handle it, or license it to a big engine firm. But the airplane—it is just too weird looking with those canard surfaces and the funny wing/fuselage business. General Arnold will probably have Kelly take it out to Wright Field, but they’ll never buy it. They can’t take the risk, not now, with the war looming.”
    As he spoke, he realized that this was something he could use to talk safety to them without them