Todd hesitated, not sure what to say. This didn’t make sense. He turned away, feeling his face flushing bright red.
Iris giggled at his reaction. “You’re cute, Todd.” She grabbed his bedroll and started unrolling both bags, searching for the zippers. “I can’t tell how much of this Big Lunk routine of yours is an act and how much is real.”
“What Big Lunk routine?” he asked, genuinely baffled.
“Oh shut up and get inside the sleeping bag,” Iris said. Her smile seemed to sparkle in the smoky light. “Would it help if I sang Country & Western?” She crooned in a warbling drawl, “Aaahm so lonesome Aaah could craaah!”
Todd stared doggedly. “You’re teasing me, aren’t you?”
“Me?” Iris looked shocked. “I’m dead serious about that massage. My butt feels just as sore as you said it would.”
Confused, Todd snatched his bedroll away from her. “Either that’s the first thing you’ve said that isn’t sarcastic, or I’m missing something. Good night, Professor. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.” He stomped off without waiting for her reaction.
Minutes later, as he spread his sleeping bag out across the dry grass, he debated going back to her. He couldn’t figure Iris out. One minute she’d lash out at him, the next she wanted to jump in the sack. Weird.
He listened for any sound that she might still be up, maybe even waiting for him. But besides the fire crackling and one of the horses snorting, he didn’t hear a thing.
Chapter 46
On the equipment table at the microwave farm, Spencer glanced over the components they had outfitted with fiberglass and ceramic: diagnostic sensors, a switching cable, and fiber-optic relays. In the oppressive heat, useless computer monitors stared like lifeless eyes; the hard plastic housings had sloughed aside, leaving heavy glass cathode-ray tubes canted among wires and the debris of circuits.
At the rate they were going, his small team would have the entire microwave farm fully converted within the next two weeks.
“Supply wagon’s coming!” Rita Fellenstein shouted from the doorway. She sprinted out into the desert sunlight.
Spencer watched with amusement as Rita hurried to the wagon, her braided hair dangling beneath her Australian hat. By now her infatuation with the pair of ranch hands was common knowledge.
He tugged on his own floppy hat and followed her out of the blockhouse. He squinted in the glaring brightness of the desert, but without air conditioning inside the building, the temperature differential wasn’t much of a shock.
The two young ranch hands guided the horses that pulled the old wooden-bed wagon. From the short-wave radio, Spencer knew that some of the ranches around Alamogordo had donated barrels of water and boxes of MRE rations from storehouses they had looted from mothballed Holloman AFB. Wiry Juan Romero, sweat dripping down his back, started unloading, stashing boxes of dried beef and aluminum containers in the shade beneath the blockhouse.
A small Hispanic man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a narrow chin rode in the back of the supply wagon. Spencer didn’t recognize him. “A visitor?” he asked Rita.
Rita flipped her braids over her shoulder and pushed her lips together like a small wad of paper. “Not sure.”
Spencer kept his expression neutral as he walked to where the short stranger was getting off the wagon. The man held out a small, narrow hand to him. “Are you Spencer Lockwood?” he said in a way that showed he was accustomed to taking control. “I’m Gilbert Hertoya. Lance Nedermyer insisted that I come see you.”
Spencer shook the man’s hand, feeling a surprisingly rough and leathery grip, and suppressed a scowl, wishing he could just turn the wagon around and send the man back home. He carried himself with the air of an executive with nothing left to manage. “Yeah, Lance is always looking after our best interests—according to him. How can I help you?”
Hertoya smiled, apparently without malice. “Actually, I think I can help you.”
“Oh?” He waited for Hertoya to spring the bad news on him. “I need all the help I can get. I hope you came to lend a hand.”
“Well, I got tired of sitting on my butt in Alamogordo. I left my family there for now so I could get to work. You know we’ve got the potential here to—” Hertoya hesitated, then raised his dark eyebrows. “I guess I shouldn’t blame you for not recognizing me. I’m from the Sandia Lab in Albuquerque. I head up, or headed up, the electromagnetic launcher up on Oscura Peak.” He let that sink in.
“The satellite launcher? Now that’s interesting.” Spencer broke into a wide grin. If this guy knew how to run the EM launcher, he might be useful after all.
“Hey, Rita and Juan!” he called, “you guys finish unloading the wagon—we’ll need it for a trip to Oscura Peak.”
Spencer watched eagerly as Gilbert Hertoya opened the door to the stuffy bowels of the railgun controls. Sunlight pouring through the ceiling windows left pale patches of illumination in the control area. Dust motes settled through the air.
Spencer looked along the railgun corridor. Parallel steel beams extended to a vanishing point in the distance up the slope of Oscura Peak. He lost all sense of perspective. On either side, blue-painted boxes containing high-energy-density capacitors crowded the rails. Their footsteps echoed on the concrete floor.
“The EM launcher was a smaller project even than your antenna farm,” Hertoya said. “At least you started out with serious funding—we got zip from DOE, a little from NASA. To keep going we had to beg money from Sandia’s in-house research fund, mostly because we had our roots in the weapons community.”
“Well, we had to pinch a few pennies ourselves,” Spencer said, trying not to sound defensive. With the world irreparably changed around them, he noted with annoyance that he was still falling into old political patterns.
Rita squeezed next to him looking down the long rails. “Wow.” She coughed in the dusty air, but didn’t say another word.
Gilbert ushered them along the corridor. “You can only see the first two miles of the launcher. It extends another three miles up the foothills—for peak performance we need to install another mile and a half of railing. We can launch small payloads to low-Earth orbit with what we have; we need the additional mile and a half to get us up to the higher, useful orbits.
“My team has been steadily putting this together for the past six years. Before the petroplague, that is. We used mostly grad student labor from New Mexico State—cheap and enthusiastic.” He shook his head sadly. “We’ve got piles of railing and capacitors stored near the top of the peak, more than enough to finish putting it together. If we were funded like other Sandia projects, we could have become a real launch facility years ago.”
Hertoya stepped under the twin rails and pointed to the first bank of capacitors. Spencer ran a hand along the rail. The steel felt cold and slick. The wheels in his mind spun furiously, trying to figure how they could get the launcher up and running.
“We place the payload on these rails in a conducting shell called a sabot. We charge the capacitors and fire them off, one after another in a sophisticated timing operation. Each one adds to the total magnetic field that pushes the sabot up the launcher, nudge after nudge after nudge. By the time the payload reaches the end of the rails, it’s traveling over ten klicks a second—more than enough to reach low-Earth orbit.”
Spencer nodded with continued interest. “The payload weighs what, a couple hundred kilograms, if I remember right?”
“The entire package can weigh a thousand kilograms. Three hundred of that is pure payload. Most of the rest is the guidance system and a small rocket to insert the payload into orbit.”