Free The Boy Who Could Fly Without a Motor by Theodore Taylor Page A

gone by so far.
    Jon did have things to keep him occupied. He'd gone through primary school in San Francisco, and now his mother taught him five mornings a week, with textbooks and exams from the mainland. They also had a radio, and after he listened to the many programs, Jon had dreams that carried him around the globe. New York, London, Tokyo, Paris. Anywhere but Clementine.
Anywhere!
    To amuse himself during his free daylight hours, Jon kept an eye out for big ships passing Clementine Light. He'd run up to the tower, Smacks at his heels, and watch them through his father's powerful telescope. If they came close enough, Jon would wave and record their names in his logbook. Anything to entertain himself. Anything to stay busy.
    In good weather, private planes on Sunday joyrides would come out from shore and circle the lighthouse. Jon would again run to the light platform and wave. The pilots would often wave back. The open-cockpit biplanes were his favorite. Jon also built model airplanes, mostly world war I fighters, to pass the time and take his mind off the Clementine ghosts.

TWO
    LAST YEAR JON'S GRANDPARENTS IN NEW Mexico had given him a subscription to
Popular Science
magazine, and he read every issue cover to cover. Calling himself Mr. J. Jeffers, he'd written to various advertisers about mail courses for bodybuilding, being a detective, and careers in aviation and electronics.
    It was 1935, and a time of great scientific advancements. Charles Lindbergh had flown alone across the Adantic, radio and talking pictures had been invented, and the first liquid-fueled rocket had been launched. Jon made notes about all these amazing events. He'd even written to Lindbergh, asking him to be a pen pal, but he hadn't yet heard back.
    There was one particular article in an issue
of Popular Science
that Jon kept reading and rereading. Written by a doctor of parapsychology, someone who deals in psychic phenomena, it was about telepathy, or sending and receiving messages using nothing more than the mind. Hoping to cure his loneliness, Jon began to practice telepathy, sending messages all over the place, sometimes concentrating so hard he got headaches. But, so far, he'd never received a mental-wave message back from any listener. Perhaps he was too young, he thought, and his brain wasn't developed enough
    Before becoming involved in telepathy, Jon had stuffed messages into bottles, giving his exact latitude and longitude, and cast them into the ocean:
Help! Help! I am shipwrecked and stranded on a terrible rock that is full of ghosts.
Signed:
Jon Jeffers, Seaman First Class. U.S. Coast Guard
    He'd also make up stories and tell them to his parents during supper, stories like "Albie, the Albatross," about how Jonathan Jeffers rode the back of a big bird to Paris, or "In the Ice," in which he and Smacks were adrift on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean. He told stories about cowboys and pirates and bandits. They weren't long, but they were stories with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
    "Someday you'll be a writer," his mother said proudly.
    But at the moment, Jon was only interested in getting off Clementine Rock. His problem was very simple: Except for Smacks he had no playmates, no friends, and no one to talk to except his mother and father and the seals and seabirds surrounding Clementine.
    The best time on the island was when the Coast Guard supply boat came to the rock. Even Smacks would bark joyfully as the boat approached. It steamed out twice a month, weather permitting, with fresh vegetables, milk, meat, mail, and back issues of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
    The Coast Guard crew usually brought Jon candy and a book or two when they came, but when the tug pulled away from the small dock at the base of the rock, bound back to San Francisco, Jon always felt die same old sadness.
    Once a year, thankfully, the Jeffers family had shore leave—sixty days on the mainland. On their first trip, they visited relatives, went to