The soft glow came on in the interior of the cube. Montgomery hesitated and drew a deep breath. Then he projected an image of the Ninety-one.
He almost cried at the result. A fuselage that looked somewhat like a contorted carrot sprang into being — minus wings and engines. He tried to straighten out the shape and the tail disappeared. He let it go and attempted a wing. The whole fuselage vanished and one wing, with a single engine flaming, turned slowly end over end in the cube.
Montgomery leaned back in sick discouragement, and removed the headpiece. He had thought it would be so easy once his pattern of action ceased to inhibit his creativeness. The lesson of his pre-natal threat of miscarriage was gone. The lessons of Mr. Carling, who had taught him to hate beautiful geometric forms, were gone.
Professor Adams, who permitted standard engineering practices only — and those no more recent than 1908 —
They were all gone, and he was like a child, crawling on the floor, stacking his first blocks. He had to learn skills with the unused faculties and in that there was agony.
He tried again, building a wobbly plane with melting wings and twisted fuselage. But no panic swept him as he persisted. He was free to learn and create for the first time in his life. He forgot time, and the sun was tinting the beach when he finally looked up from the cube with a small degree of satisfaction with what he had produced. The plane was recognizably a miniature of the XB-91, and it didn’t melt and wobble as he tried to maintain its image.
But he had been wrong in his statement to Spindem. Today was not the day he would create a revolutionary new airfoil. He could put it on paper, of course, but that would be a last resort. He wanted to provide a solid model that could be checked in a wind tunnel.
He went to the hotel and caught a few hours sleep. Then he came back to the Institute and resumed work to improve the accuracy of his visualization. For another forty-eight hours he sweat over the project, breaking up the long sessions with the shadow box for only brief intervals of eating and sleeping.
But at the end of that time he was satisfied with his achievement. He had a foot-long model of the Ninety-one with a wing such as no one had ever seen before. He solidified it in plastic.