The days at Wright Field settled into a tense, unnatural rhythm. Robert was given a small, shared office with a drafting table and a stack of blank paper. His official title was "Technical Consultant," a vague term that gave him access and implied expectation, but no real authority. He was a puzzle they were trying to solve by watching him work.
His "colleague" was a young, brilliant, and intensely skeptical engineer named Philip Lawson. Philip was everything Robert was supposed to be: a graduate of MIT, fiercely patriotic, and possessed of a towering confidence in the power of American engineering. He viewed Robert, the "hobbyist" from nowhere, with a mixture of curiosity and thinly veiled contempt.
Their first assigned task was a theoretical one, a test disguised as busywork: review the cooling system schematics for the new P-40 Warhawk and "note any observations."
Philip slid the large blueprint across the table. "Don't strain yourself," he said, a smirk playing on his lips. "It's fairly straightforward thermodynamics."
Robert unrolled the schematic. He knew the P-40 intimately. In his games, he'd flown it, fought in it, and knew its weaknesses by heart. The cooling system was the problem. The radiator was poorly positioned, causing drag and providing insufficient cooling at high power settings, a flaw that would cost pilots dearly in the coming war.
He could have drawn the improved design from memory. Instead, he spent two days staring at the blueprint, making small, meaningless notes in the margin. He had to be seen to be working, but not too effectively.
On the third day, during a coffee break, he used the oldest trick in the book. He "accidentally" spilled his coffee cup, sending a brown stain across the corner of the blueprint.
"Oh, blast! I'm so sorry, Philip!" he exclaimed, feigning clumsiness.
Philip sighed in exasperation. "For God's sake, Vale. Those are originals." He began dabbing at the stain with a rag, muttering about the radiator intake design being blurred.
Robert watched him, his heart pounding. "The intake?" he said, his voice carefully casual. "You know, it's funny. My uncle had a old truck with a overheating problem. He fiddled with it for weeks. Finally, he just moved the radiator down a few inches, gave it a clearer shot of air. Fixed it right up. Seems like a similar principle."
He held his breath. It was a ridiculously simple analogy, almost childish. But it was also the core of the solution.
Philip stopped dabbing and looked from the stained blueprint to Robert's face, his expression shifting from annoyance to thoughtful calculation. "A clearer shot of air..." he murmured. He grabbed a fresh piece of paper and began sketching rapidly, his earlier disdain forgotten. "Relocating the radiator... angling the intake... the drag reduction alone..."
He didn't thank Robert. He barely acknowledged him. But Robert saw the spark of the idea catch fire in the young engineer's mind. It was done. A seed had been planted. It would be Philip Lawson's idea now, a brilliant young MIT graduate's innovation. Robert would remain in the background, the clumsy hobbyist who got lucky with a folksy anecdote.
This, he realized, was his only path forward. He had to become a ghost in the machine, a subtle poltergeist that nudged pens and sparked ideas in others, never claiming credit, never showing his full hand. He had to make the brilliant men around him just a little bit more brilliant, without them ever knowing why.
The strategy was exhausting. It required constant vigilance, a performance more demanding than any exam he'd ever taken. He had to listen to debates about engine superchargers and pretend to struggle with concepts he could have lectured on. He had to nod blankly at discussions of aerodynamic flutter, a phenomenon he understood on a computational level these men couldn't yet imagine.
John Albright watched it all. He was a constant, shadowy presence, drifting in and out of the hangars and offices, his sharp eyes missing nothing. He saw Robert's clumsiness, his hesitant questions. But he also saw the strange coincidences that followed him. The spilled coffee that led to a breakthrough on the P-40. An offhand comment about metal fatigue that prompted a junior engineer to re-check a stress calculation on a bomber's wing.
One evening, Albright intercepted Robert as he was walking back to the barracks.
"You're a very careful man, Mr. Vale," Albright said, falling into step beside him. The sky was streaked with the orange and purple of dusk, the air vibrating with the distant sound of a engine test.
"I don't know what you mean, sir," Robert replied, keeping his eyes forward.
"You play the part of the humble novice perfectly," Albright continued, his tone conversational. "But I've been watching you. You listen to men like Lawson with a strange kind of patience. Not the patience of a student, but the patience of a teacher waiting for his pupil to catch up."
Robert's blood ran cold. He said nothing.
"You're not here to learn, are you?" Albright said, stopping and turning to face him. The last of the sunlight glinted in his pale eyes. "You're here to... curate. To guide. You're like a master watchmaker who has walked into a shop of apprentices, and you're gently, quietly, correcting their mistakes without them ever knowing."
The analogy was terrifyingly accurate.
"That's a very imaginative theory, Mr. Albright," Robert forced out.
"Is it?" Albright smiled his thin, bloodless smile. "I deal in information, Mr. Vale. And the information I have is that you are the most valuable, and the most dangerous, man on this base. Because you know things you shouldn't. And you're afraid to show us how much."
He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. "The question is not if you will help us, Robert. The question is how long you can pretend that you aren't."
He turned and walked away, leaving Robert standing alone in the twilight, the roar of the engines now sounding like a chorus of accusing voices. The cage had just gotten smaller. Albright wasn't just his warden; he was his audience, and he was growing impatient with the performance. The delicate instrument was being tuned for a song he dared not sing.