Sheng, a man of East Asian ancestry, didn’t have much to say, but did show awareness of the crowd’s dwindling attention span by opting for a truncated countdown that started at three. His rocket, the second largest, howled off the pad on a considerably larger stick of yellow-white fire and very rapidly disappeared from sight.
“Sheng’ll go out in an ATV and try to find that thing later and post the movie it took,” Lou said, as Sheng awkwardly high-fived a couple of his buddies. “But now our main event: a sounding rocket that’s gonna top out at somewhere round a hundred thousand feet and send back telemetry about winds in the upper atmosphere and lower stratosphere. Helps us calculate windage on any giant bullets that might be headed up that way.” He conferred with the radio guy again. To judge from their body language, the skies were still clear.
This rocket had a larger crew of important-seeming engineers, most of whom were in White Label logo-wear, others in Flying S livery. The distinction was a little blurry, since they all worked for T.R. When it launched, it roared and screamed and took slightly longer to get going, leaving an impressive column of smoke behind. A few seconds after it disappeared into the blue heaven, the valley resonated with a thunderclap. “Sonic boom,” Lou explained. “Get used to it!”
Get used to it. Saskia hadn’t thought seriously about the problem of sonic booms, but hearing one in the flesh focused her attention. She tapped Willem on the shoulder. “Could you pull up those images of the ranch—the whole ranch—again, please?”
A few moments later he handed her a tablet showing the view of the Flying S Ranch from space. Pina2bo was understated, largely because of the netting, which among other things served as camouflage. But once she had found it, she centered it on the screen and zoomed out until the outlying settlements—the bedroom communities, as it were—came in view. The clusters of mobile dwellings and prefabs where the employees lived. It was obvious now that these were arranged around an arc at a certain distance from Pina2bo. It was interrupted on its southwest limb by the Rio Grande—there were no settlements in Mexico. Or were there? She saw a small cluster of trailers on the Mexican side, right along the imaginary radius. “Most of these people,” she concluded, “are housed outside of sonic boom range. So they can get some sleep!”
After the launch of the sounding rocket, it was all just nerds looking at computer screens and virtual displays for several minutes. Spectators drifted to the refreshment table and to a row of oven-hot portable toilets lined up nearby. Everyone seemed well hydrated and cheerful but no one knew exactly what was going on. No one, that is, except for T.R., who was using a nearby SUV as a makeshift command center. Senior engineers were jogging back and forth to it as they were summoned or dismissed, and T.R. could be seen gesticulating, talking on the phone, consulting laptops and tablets thrust in front of him by aides. Finally he emerged from the SUV and trudged over to the PA system. His body language was heavy. He had an air of resignation. So Saskia was expecting bad news. But she was wrong about that. T.R.’s body language was that of Caesar sloshing across the Rubicon.
“As long as the FAA has been so good as to clear the airspace,” he said, “we’re gonna launch some more stuff. Might want to plug your ears.” He set the microphone down, turned his back on the crowd, and faced the complex at the other end of the valley. The crowd grew silent. An alarm klaxon could be heard in the distance. T.R. stepped carefully over the caution tape, strolled out into the open near the rocket launchers, and checked his watch.
A spark of light gleamed from the top of the head frame, then winked out. A few seconds later the valley was walloped by a sonic boom. T.R. was looking almost vertically up into the sky, but there was nothing to see. He checked his watch again, then turned back and indicated the microphone. An ELog employee snatched it from the table and ran it over to him. “Next one’s in seven minutes,” he said. “You’ll want to come out into the open if you are hoping to see anything.”
People slowly, then suddenly evacuated the bleachers and came toward T.R., stepping out of the canopies’ shade and into direct sunlight. The caution tape was severed and allowed to flutter in the breeze.
“The muzzle flash’ll catch your eye,” T.R. said. “But if you look at that, you’ll miss it. Shell’s already long gone. You got to look into the space above. Next one’s in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .”
Saskia just glimpsed it, moving straight up at fantastic velocity, as the muzzle flared and extinguished below.
A third barrel fired seven and a half minutes later, and this time she was able to track it for a few seconds before it became too small for the naked eye to see. Each launch was followed by another sonic boom equal to the first.
“Holy shit,” said the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor.
“I know,” said Daia Chand, next to him. “Even after all this, I didn’t actually believe he was going to pull the trigger.”
“It’s happening,” Alastair said. “After all this—it’s actually happening. I sort of can’t believe it. We are fixing the climate.”
“Changing it, anyway,” Eshma returned.
“This’ll bring the temperature down?” Rufus asked.
“If he can keep firing that gun,” Saskia said.
“Sounds like fixing to me,” Rufus concluded.
Not far away, the three Venetians were engaging in a round robin of embracing and kissing. Sylvester was standing with his arms folded, looking dumbfounded. After the third sonic boom, he walked up to T.R. and shook his hand, grinning broadly under the brim of his borrowed cowboy hat.
The Biggest Gun in the World fired each of its barrels three times, launching a total of eighteen shells, before it fell silent. The test lasted for a couple of hours, not counting shell recovery time. Well before the end of it, Saskia had begun to feel dizzy from the heat. She and many others retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of the train cars to watch the proceedings on video screens.
“So this is what it looks like with an N of eighteen,” Alastair mused over a bottle of Corona. Saskia had spent enough time with him to recognize this as statistician-speak. Launching a single shell—an N of 1—would have taught T.R. a lot. Launching two would have taught him a little more. An N of eighteen was big enough to do some statistical analysis and get a picture of the range of outcomes.
The positions of the eighteen shells were plotted and updated on a real-time map displayed on a big monitor. They were spread out like beads on a string along a trajectory that rose straight up from the Flying S Ranch and then spiraled down through Mexican airspace. They all seemed to be following the same basic flight plan, like cars in an aerial train. Each had two video cameras, one aimed forward and the other aimed back. The twin feeds from one shell were up on the video screens. They couldn’t have been more different. The view forward was of a black sky above a curved horizon limned in blue. The view back was an endless series of flashes, which became so visually annoying that the pane had to be minimized. But it confirmed that the sulfur-burning pulse jet had ignited and was farting away.
At one end of the car T.R. was doing an interview with a tame journalist. With a couple of beers in him, he had become amusingly and colorfully exasperated by this person’s stubborn misunderstanding of the muzzle flash. “It is just a by-product. We would eliminate it if we could. If we used helium, it wouldn’t happen at all—and it wouldn’t matter because the purpose of that gas is just to be like the air in a peashooter. Unavoidably, some of it leaks out of the muzzle after the shell has departed. We control that as much as we can with check valves and such. But it’s safer to burn it off than to just have it drifting around god knows where.” He caught the eye of an aide who seemed to specialize in media communications. “We need more animations or something to better illustrate that—it is just gonna be a chronic misunderstanding.”