“Anything would be a help.”

Miller nodded. “You've heard of the Northrop flying wings?”

“Sure, I've seen pictures of them. They were the original delta-winged aircraft.”

“Jack Northrop was way ahead of his time. Take a look at the stealth bomber and fighter, and you'll know he was onto some thing.”

“What does the flying wing have to do with these cylinders?”

“They both come from flying wings. Where'd you get this, if you don't mind my asking?”

“It was found in the water off the coast of Baja California.”

“HMI. That makes the mystery of our phantom plane even deeper.”

“Phantom?”

Miller lay the cylinders side-by-side on the shelf. “Our artifact comes from a plane that was junked after the war. With the numbers on this thing we can trace its history right back to the assembly line.” He tapped the battered artifact with his finger “The numerical designation on this part doesn't match up to any plane we have record of. It came from a plane that didn't exist.”

“How could that be? A mistake?”

“Possible, but not likely. Taking a long shot, I'd say that the government ordered up a plane, but maybe it didn't want any one to know about it.” “Could you be more specific about the type of plane?”

Miller carefully replaced both cylinders in the box and retyped it. “Let's go for a walk.”

Building 20 was crammed with aircraft, bombs, and plane parts. They stopped in front of an odd-shaped single-passenger plane with a broad swept-back wing. Two propellers faced back ward from the trailing edge.

“This is the Nl-M, Jack Northrop's first project. He wanted to prove a flying wing could fly without all the drag-producing surfaces like engine housings and tail sections.”

Austin walked around the plane. “Looks like an overgrown boomerang.”

“Northrop called it the Jeep. He built it in 1940 basically as a flying mockup. It had some real problems during the tests, but it performed well enough for Northrop to talk the Air Force into building the B-35 bomber.”

“Interesting, but what does this have to do with the cylinder?”

“Northrop used this model to talk General Hap Arnold into funding bigger wings, right up to bomber size. After the war they converted a couple of big propeller-powered B-35 wings to jet power and called them the B-49 series. The plane broke every speed and distance record on the books. It had eight jet engines that gave it a cruising speed of four hundred miles per hour at forty thousand feet. Even after one crashed during a test flight, the Air Force ordered thirty with various airframes. The pilots liked the plane. They said it handled more like a fighter than a big bomber. Then in 1949, only months after making its big order, the Air Force canceled the flying wing program in favor of B-36, even though that was an inferior plane. A six-engine wing survived and was broken up. It was the plane our cylinder comes from. Yours came from another bomber”