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to be a jet — no air screws, no place for them, and the smooth, curved lines that I had seen discussed in literature and had hashed over in late night engineering bull sessions. But this couldn’t be an Me-262. I had no idea how the Germans had manufactured this thing, but it didn’t come off any normal aircraft assembly line.
    Even more than the fabrication techniques, the metal itself bothered me. The thing had obviously taken damage, because there were fairly crude aluminum patches on the bottom. Also, some of the tubing in the landing skids looked freshly milled and much less carefully finished than the fuselage work. But the rest of the ship was as smooth as a peach, and almost warm to the touch.
    Climbing carefully down off the Mack flatbed, I went over to the f-panzer and stepped up into the cramped control box. I wanted to look around, to see if there were any more clues to the strange nature of my aircraft.

    The f-panzer was just as crowded as I had thought, looking inside it past Floyd the previous day. There were no vertical surfaces, and the only horizontal area was the floor — everything else sloped like a pup tent. And it was all Nazi gray, hard-edged and sharp. The inside smelled of old metal and sweaty socks. Floyd’s Battle of the Bulge tank story was on my mind, though it didn’t look like anyone had died in there.
    I’m not especially tall, but even I had to hunch to get into one of the operator’s seats. The sloped rear armor above them had embedded glass vision blocks that yielded a blurry, dark view of the inside of the barn.
    Passing over the control panel for a moment, I swiveled one of the chairs to look over the glass screen console. It looked just like the few American-built cathode ray tubes I’d seen — slightly bulbous with rounded corners, set in a grounded metal frame. There weren’t a lot of uses for such a thing, which confirmed my suspicion that this was a part of a German radar rig. The rack-mounted equipment on the other side was more confusing. It had obviously been hastily installed, apparently as an afterthought to the radar screens.
    I studied the racks carefully. Most of the gear was electronic test equipment — a heterodyne tone generator, test probes, similar things I didn’t recognize in detail. Next to the electronics kit there was a set of shockproof braces holding a small metal box. I unlatched the braces and opened the box.
    Inside the box was a twisted piece of metal that looked for all the world like flowing quicksilver frozen in place. I knew perfectly well mercury didn’t have a solid state under room-temperature conditions, but the glossy, gritty sheen of the thing was hard to classify. It was about six inches long by half an inch wide, with three prominent buttons. It fit snugly in the palm of my hand, the eye-bending shape as comfortable as if it had been made from a cast of me.
    I stepped to the open hatch to get better light and studied the metal piece more carefully with my magnifying glass. It was made of a similar material as the aircraft — another smooth, unclassifiable metal. And the workmanship obviously didn’t match anything else inside the radar truck. I decided to try again to get some history on the aircraft from Floyd. He’d been unhelpful before, but I couldn’t tell if he was being stupid on purpose, catty or just not paying attention.
    Then maybe I could know whether it was a good idea to do some laboratory testing.
    “Floyd,” I called, climbing with care out of the halftrack. I set the twisted metal piece on the deck just inside the open door. Floyd was still in the rafters, checking bolts. I was prepared to buy the new block-and-tackle we needed with some of my meager savings as I didn’t want to trust our prize to Mr. Bellamy’s aging hardware. It made me nervous enough to have to rely on the beams of the old barn’s roof to support the weight of the aircraft.
    “Yeah?”
    “We need to discuss this aircraft.”
    He looked