"Seventy-nine point six four."
Brim looked Valerian in the face. "Will this bucket of bolts do better than that?" he asked.
"My calculations say she'll top eighty-eight," Valerian answered.
"And hold together?" Brim demanded.
"I think so—unless you run into resonance flutter, of course."
"Well, eighty-eight M's is a Vootload past the eighty-one you referred to as safe."
"Yeah, it is," Valerian conceded. "But then, nobody knows if that flutter will even happen." He shrugged.
"I guess it's pretty well up to you, Wilf."
Brim took a deep breath and nodded. "Yeah," he said, "I guess it is." He looked out over the lake and sniffed the grass and the water. On the far shore, four obviously new destroyers had just joined the Leaguer battleships while Inge Groener taxied her Gantheisser into a gravity pad. Almost eighty M's, he considered with a sick feeling—and she was only the number two Leaguer Helmsman. Abruptly, Kirsh Valentin's arrogant face filled his mind's eye, and he smashed his fist against the old racer's hullmetal.
"Have them clear the apron, Mark," he said, starting for the ladder. "I'm taking her up!"
Valerian raised an eyebrow, then grinned ebulliently. "That's more like it, Wilf," he said, "—and we'll have extra rescue ships standing by the race course."
"Couldn't ask for anything more than that," Brim called from the ladder, "but I do hope we don't have to bother those nice people. They're always so busy during race season anyway." With a quick thumbs-up, he then crawled through a hatch and wriggled into the little ship's single recliner while sirens wailed outside and a cordon of marshals herded straggling spectators from the apron. Sliding open a side Hyperscreen, he was just about to close the master switches when he spied an embassy limousine coasting through the cordon at high speed. Anna Romanoff was at the wheel.
"Wait—don't go!" she called as she braked to a halt beside the gravity pad and leaped to the pavement.
Moments later she was on her way up the boarding ladder, slippers, windblown skirt, and all. "Wilf," she panted breathlessly, locking her elbows over the hatch coaming and gasping to catch her breath, "I just heard about the Groener woman and her new Gantheisser. You're not going to try and beat that kind of speed in this antique are you?"
"This is the only ship I know of that's faster, Anna," Brim answered. "I have to."
"You don't have to, Wilf Brim," she said anxiously, toying with the buttons of her white sweater. "The ISS can't ask anyone to risk his life—no trophy in the Universe is worth that." She frowned indignantly. "I don't care if this is the fastest ship in the whole xaxtdamned Universe, even I know that it was never designed to go that fast—and when I called old Bos Gallsworthy, he wasn't even sure it would hold together. He doesn't want you to fly it either, and..."
Brim placed his hand gently on hers and peered directly into her troubled brown eyes. Like a typical civilian, she'd forgotten the CIGAs, Fluvanna, Beta Jagow, and all the rest. But he hadn't. He couldn't.
"Anna," he said, "please try to understand. The fact is that I do have to race this ship. There are much bigger issues at stake than the ISS, I'm afraid."
Romanoff looked at him for a moment, then closed her eyes and grimaced. "I was afraid you'd say something patriotic like that," she said, drumming her fingers on the hatch coaming. She took a deep breath and shook her head. "I don't suppose there's anything I can say to stop you, is there?"
"No," Brim said, still holding her hand. "But I'd be a lot more careful up there if I knew that I were going to spend an evening with you when I get back." The bold words surprised even himself.
"What was that?" Romanoff asked.
Brim grinned in spite of a sudden onslaught of shyness. "I said that I'd be a lot more careful up there if I knew that I were planning to spend an evening with you when I get back."
She suddenly looked surprised. "With me?" she asked.
"Your name is Anna Romanoff, isn't it?" Brim asked facetiously.
Romanoff placed her hand over her mouth. "Yes," she said, "it is." Then she shook her head again. "Oh Universe, Wilf. Can't I somehow reason with you?"
"I'm afraid not," Brim said. "But I do want that evening with you when I get back."
She shut her eyes again. "I give up," she whispered in exasperation. "I absolutely give up." Taking a deep breath, she looked him directly in the eye. "All right, Wilf Brim," she whispered, "if you do manage to come back in one piece, by Universe, you can have any evening you want." With that, she pulled her hand from beneath his, shook her head, and started down the ladder without another word.
Grinning like an idiot, Brim watched until her embassy car disappeared along the cableway, heading back to the city. By Voot, he thought as he turned to the master switches again, an evening with Anna Romanoff might just be worth the risks of a highspeed ride in Mark Valerian's old bucket of bolts.
He went through the ship's preflight checklist in short order, then with plasma pressure steady in the green, he turned on the gravity brakes and shunted energy boost to the grav, kicking in power flow, energizer, and antimatter on queue from the auto-sequencer. After four sharp beeps from the interrupter, his big R2600 caught with a limousine-sized belch of gravitrons that shimmered on the apron like midsummer heatflutter. He grinned. If the Napier Drive crystals ran half so well, the remainder of his morning promised to be interesting indeed. Then, gulping down his transition to internal gravity, he released the brakes. As he moved off the gravity pad, he flashed a thumbs-up to Moulding, who had just shown up in the midst of the HighSpeed Starflight Society cheering section—with the redhead. The blond aristocrat waved back apathetically, obviously content to stay where he was.
Precisely one click later, the Carescrian discovered one of Valerian's only faults. In his zeal for maximum performance from everything, the designer had set the ship's brakes so delicately that merely thinking about the actuator was sufficient to send him crashing into the forward Hyperscreens. Subsequently, his taxi to the takeoff vector was enough to make the greenest student writhe with embarrassment—it must have resembled a Syngallian In'ggo dancer doing a winter mating shuffle. At the strand, he drew to a halt for a moment while a technical crew from Lyon Industries activated his Drives—safely away from the grandstand area—then he set off across the water toward the morning's launch vector.
Centering the ruby takeoff vector in his forward Hyperscreen, he collected what nerves he had left, got clearance from the tower, and completed his checklist. Then running up the grav one last time, he dropped quarter lift enhancers and poured on the energy, gently keeping his steering engine amidships.
The bow lifted at first, then fell as the little ship began to rise free from her gravity gradient. Just before transition, he eased back on the controls to overcome a slight heaviness forward and carefully raised the bow again. At a speed of about eighty-three cpm, only the slightest urging on the elevator control was needed for lift-off, while he practically leaned on the steering engine to check an immediate swing to port.
The M-4 roared upward.
Even with the nagging fear of impending danger hanging over the flight bridge, Brim felt the rush of exhilaration that comes from flying a true thoroughbred starship—albeit an overpowered one. It was a feeling that he had yet to duplicate in any way. With velocity building rapidly toward LightSpeed and a near vertical climb, he settled back to start the twin Napier StarDrives and another checklist. He'd discovered early in the game that one-man starships made for busy drivers.