Free Uncrashable Dakota by Andy Marino Page B

is empty,” she said. “Go open it in there.”
    Hollis hesitated, imagining some ingeniously accordioned homemade critter springing forth from the pages, making him shriek as Delia and Rob doubled over in laughter.
    “I’m not falling for this again. And now’s really not the time.”
    “It’s not that ,” Delia said. “Trust me.”
    Hollis didn’t, but he retreated to the empty room anyway and sat on the bed with the book in his lap. He felt trapped in a highly suggestible state—happy to let Delia and Rob move him around, seat him in chairs, give him little tasks. This only made him more ashamed: there was no room at the top of Dakota Aeronautics for someone who lacked initiative in critical situations. Hollis had recently come to realize that thinking about thinking only led deeper into anxiety and hand-wringing. And yet he often found himself powerless to break the habit.
    Slowly, he lifted the dictionary’s cover to reveal a meticulously razored-out hollow the size of a large brick. It contained the telegraph key, two coils of wire, the battery, and two curious metal rods separated by a tiny gap. Carefully soldered wires snaked through the hollow, connecting each instrument in a circuit except for the telegraph sounder—a spool connected to a weighted lever—alone in the corner.
    “Um…,” Hollis said, examining the unfamiliar machine up close. It looked like a bomb. Maybe Rob was right: maybe Delia was an anarchist.
    Suddenly, the sounder began to click. Hollis almost flung the book onto the floor in surprise. From the other room, a series of loud, crispy sparks matched the clicks from the sounder bolted to his machine. He looked through the open door across the hall, where Delia was clicking the telegraph key on an identical contraption in her lap.
    Hollis looked for the hidden telegraph cable, something Delia was surely using to connect her transmitter to the sounder in Hollis’s. But there was nothing: the two dictionaries were talking through the air. He listened carefully, trying to decipher Samuel Morse’s code in his head. It had been some time since he’d been forced to learn the alphabet of dots and dashes, and at first the sounds were meaningless. But the basics were fairly well ingrained—his father had seen to that—and after a little while, the taps arranged themselves into words:

    GREETNGS HOLLS
    He might have missed “I,” but the other letters were clear enough. Hollis worked frantically at his own key. Each tap closed the circuit and sent a sparkling charge of miniature lightning across the gap between the metal rods. His body quivered in awe, like the first time he watched the launch of an airship, an impossibly bulky tub of wood and steel lifting gracefully into the sky.

    YOU ARE A GENIUS
    After a brief pause, his sounder clicked again.

    THNKS
    He heard Rob’s voice from the other room: “I think you just sparked us into the history books, Delia.” Hollis clicked two short dits , one long daaahhhh , and three more dits. He added an emphatic dit dit daaahhh daaahhh dit dit as punctuation.

    US?
    Rob again: “Obviously we’re equal partners in this endeavor.” Hollis listened to Delia’s indignant taps.

    DISCUSS LATER
    Hollis pictured the future in a supersonic flash: communication towers on every airship; wireless transmissions to control centers on earth; advance weather reports. A greater sense of things, the vast world made smaller by little blips of electricity.
    He brought his wireless telegraph book out of the empty room to join its counterpart on Delia’s table. “This,” he said, “is exactly what we need.”
    “Hope so,” Delia said. “I was up all night.” This wasn’t a boast disguised as sly understatement—it was merely a fact that when she was obsessing over a project, she tended to go without sleep. “So listen, I know they’re heavy, but I have these two satchels…” She rummaged through the mess on the table until she produced two