“Not yet. I’m going over after supper. Want to come along?”
“Yes,” said the young engineer. “How about you, Bert?”
“Count me in,” replied the radio operator. “It’s too bad he’s wounded. I’d like to give him a punch on the nose after all the damage he did to my radio room.”
“I don’t blame you,” chuckled Andy. “He certainly did mess things up but if he had been very intelligent he’d have recognized the installation for the Goliath and have smashed it all to pieces. I guess we’ve been lucky after all.”
When they reached the office Andy dug some reference books on airplane design out of a box and sat down to hunt for a description of the type of craft that he had encountered only a few minutes before.
“I don’t think it was an American-made machine,” he said, “so we won’t waste time hunting there. Let’s try the foreign designers first.”
British, French, Italian and German divisions failed to furnish any designs similar to the craft he had pictured in his mind’s eye.
The Russians had a low-winged monoplane but the wing mounting was too high to answer the description of the craft Andy and Bert had seen.
Andy turned on to the section devoted to the aviation activities and designs of the Rubanian air force. Here was something nearer what he sought. Pictured on one page was a low-winged machine with a streamlined fuselage that very nearly answered the description of the machine he had seen. A footnote added that planes of this type were in production at the Blenkko works near Kratz, the Rubanian capital, but that it was possible minor changes might be made in them when they were put through actual air tests.
“How does this picture strike you?” Andy asked Bert.