The confrontation with Albright left Robert feeling flayed open, his carefully constructed persona rendered transparent. The following days at Wright Field were spent under a microscope of a higher magnification. Albright's silent, observing presence was a constant pressure, a reminder that the leash was short and his handler was losing patience.
The work, however, became his only refuge. He leaned into his role as the "idea poltergeist" with a desperate fervor. He spent hours in the base's technical library, a treasure trove of period-specific engineering journals and reports. He wasn't researching; he was building an alibi. He would find a obscure paper on European metallurgy, then days later, "stumble" upon a connection to a stress fracture problem in a new propeller design. He would overhear engineers debating fuel mixture ratios and later, in a casual conversation, mention a "forgotten" study he'd "read somewhere" about optimal combustion at different altitudes.
It was a high-wire act of intellectual forgery. He was translating his anachronistic knowledge into the language and limitations of 1938, carefully citing (or inventing) sources that could plausibly exist. He became a ghostwriter for progress, his own genius disguised as a phenomenal talent for synthesis and cross-referential thinking.
His "partner," Philip Lawson, remained a challenge. The young engineer's initial contempt had been replaced by a frustrated respect. Robert's ideas, while always presented as hesitant suggestions or clumsy analogies, were too often correct to be dismissed as luck.
"You're like a... a dowsing rod for engineering problems, Vale," Philip said one afternoon, throwing his pencil down in exasperation after Robert had indirectly solved a tricky issue with landing gear hydraulics. "You wander around muttering about your uncle's tractor, and somehow it points to the answer. It makes no sense."
Robert just shrugged, offering a weak smile. "Lucky, I guess."
"It's not luck," Philip retorted, his eyes narrowing. "It's a pattern. It's like you already know the answer and you're just waiting for us to ask the right question."
The observation was dangerously close to the truth. Robert quickly changed the subject, pointing to a fresh set of blueprints on his desk. "What's this?"
Philip, easily distracted by a new technical challenge, brightened. "Ah! This is the real thing. The XP-47. The Thunderbolt. They're having stability issues at high speed. The tail section is generating buffeting, shaking the plane to pieces. They're thinking of a complete redesign."
Robert's breath caught in his throat. The P-47 Thunderbolt. One of the great, rugged workhorses of the war. He knew this problem. The initial design did have a smaller, less effective tail. The solution wasn't a complete redesign, but a specific, calculated enlargement of the vertical stabilizer. It was a fix that would be discovered through costly trial and error. He held that error in his mind, fully formed.
This was different from a cooling system or a wing spar. This was a fundamental aerodynamic flaw in a major weapons program. The cost of getting it wrong wasn't just a failed test flight; it was delays in production, lost pilots, a setback in the air war he knew was coming.
He couldn't spill coffee on this. He couldn't mumble about an old truck. The stakes were too high.
For two days, he wrestled with the dilemma. He watched the project engineers grow increasingly frustrated, their faces drawn with worry. He saw the full-scale wooden mock-up in a hangar, a beautiful, powerful beast grounded by a single, solvable flaw.
Albright found him there on the evening of the second day, staring up at the mock-up's troubled tail.
"Quite a problem, isn't it?" Albright said softly, appearing at his shoulder like a phantom. "Millions of dollars, years of development, and it's shaking itself apart. One wonders if a fresh perspective, an unburdened mind, might see something the rest of us are missing."
The pressure was explicit now. This was no longer a test. It was a demand.
Robert said nothing. He just looked at the aircraft, this future legend that was currently stillborn. He thought of the pilots who would one day depend on its rugged strength. He thought of Jimmy Miller, falling from the sky in a flawed machine.
He walked back to his office in a trance. Philip was gone for the day. The room was silent. On his drafting table lay the complex stability calculations, a sea of equations that were, to his more advanced understanding, trying to find a square peg for a round hole.
He picked up a pencil. His hand was steady.
He did not write down the answer. Instead, he began to annotate the calculations. He didn't change the numbers. He added notes in the margin, questions posed in a hesitant, student-like script.
'If the center of pressure is shifting here... wouldn't that require more authority from the rudder?'
'This damping ratio seems low. Is the tail surface large enough to provide stability?'
'Just a thought—what if we modeled a larger vertical fin? Not a redesign, just... more of it?'
He wasn't giving the solution. He was pointing a giant, blinking arrow at it. He was using the language of their own calculations to lead them to the water. He was creating a trail of breadcrumbs so obvious that even the most proud engineer would have to follow it.
He left the annotated papers on Philip's desk and went back to his barracks. He had done it. He had intervened directly, significantly, in the development of a world-changing weapon.
The next morning, he found the office in an uproar. Philip was waving the papers, his face alight with excitement.
"Vale! You brilliant idiot! You've done it! It was staring us right in the face! The fin! It just needs a bigger fin! We've been overcomplicating it for weeks!"
He clapped Robert on the back, a gesture of genuine, ungrudging camaraderie. Other engineers crowded around, slapping his shoulder, their relief and excitement palpable. Robert smiled, a hollow, brittle thing. He had won their respect. He had advanced the war effort.
He had also taken another irreversible step into the light. He had moved from being a poltergeist to a consultant in truth. The unspoken war between his need to hide and his desire to help had just seen a major battle, and the part of him that remembered the future had won a costly victory. He had saved the Thunderbolt, but he had damned himself a little further. Albright, watching from the doorway, gave him a slow, deliberate nod. The performance was over. The real work had begun.