Hench jammed open the bus window. “Natural air-conditioning,” he said, cackling.
She glanced back. One or two of the youngsters behind them stirred.
Hench shrugged. “They’ll sleep.”
At the site the bus passed through the security fence and pulled over, and Emma climbed down cautiously. The light glared from the sand that covered everything, and the heat was a palpable presence that struck at her, sucking the moisture from her flesh.
The test site had grown. There were a lot more structures, a lot more activity even at this hour of the morning. But it was nothing like Cape Canaveral.
There were hardly any fixed structures at all. The place had the air of a construction site. There were trailers scattered over the desert, some sprouting antennae and telecommunications feeds. There weren’t even any fuel tanks that she could see, just fleets of trailers, frost gleaming on their tanks. People — engineers, most of them young — moved to and fro, their voices small in the desert’s expanse, their hard hats gleaming like insect carapaces.
And there was the pad itself, the center of attention, maybe a mile from where she stood, bearing the Nautilus: Bootstrap’s first interplanetary ship, Reid Malenfant’s pride and joy. She saw the lines of a rust-brown shuttle external tank and the slim pillars of solid rocket boosters. The stack was topped by a tubular cover that gleamed white in the sun. Somewhere inside that fairing, she knew, a Caribbean reef squid, disoriented as all hell, would someday ride into space.
Hench said gruffly, “I’ll tell you, Ms. Stoney—”
“Emma.”
“Working with those kids has been the best part of this whole damn project, for me. You know, these kids today come out of graduate school, and they are real whizzes with Computer Aided This and That, and they do courses in science theory and math and software design — but they don’t get to bend tin. Not only that, they’ve never seen anything^M before. In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. No wonder this country has fallen behind in every sphere that counts. Well, here they’ve had to build stuff, to budget and schedule. Some of the kids were scared off. But those that remained flourished.”
And here came Malenfant. He was wearing beat-up overalls — he even had a wrench in a loop at his waist — and his face and hands and scalp were covered in white dust patches. He bent to kiss her, and she could feel gritty sand on her cheek.
“So what do you think ofNautilusl Isn’t she beautiful?”
“Kind of rough and ready.”
Malenfant laughed. “So she’s supposed to be.”
An amplified voice drifted across the desert from the launchpad.
“What was that?”
Hench shrugged. “Just a checklist item.”
“You’re going through a checklist? A launch checklist?”
“Demonstration test only,” Malenfant said. “We’re planning two tests today. We’ve done it a dozen times, already. Later today we’ll even have that damn squid of Dan Ystebo’s up in the pay-load pod, on top of a fully fueled ship. We’reready. And Cruithne is up there waiting for us. And who knows what lies beyond that. As soon as you can clear away the legal bullshit—”
“We’re working on it, Malenfant.”
Malenfant took her for a walk around the booster pad, eager to show off his toy. Malenfant and Hench, obviously high on stress and adrenaline, launched into war stories about how they’d built their rocket ship. “The whole thing is a backyard rocket,” Malenfant said. “It has space shuttle engines, and an F-15 laser gyro set and accelerometer, and the autopilot and avionics from an MD-11 airliner. In fact the BOB thinks it’s an MD-11 on a peculiar flight path. We sent the grad school kids scouring through the West Coast aerospace junkyards, and they came back with titanium pressure spheres and hydraulic actuators and other good stuff. And so on. Assembled and flight-ready in six months.”
He seemed to know every one of the dozens of engineers here by name. He was, by turns, manipulative, bullying, brutal, overbearing. But he was, she thought, always smart enough to ensure he wasn’t surrounded by sycophants and yea-sayers.
Maybe that’s why he keeps me on.
“How safe is all this, Malenfant? What if the ship blows up, or a fuel store—”
He sighed. “Emma, my BDBs will blow up about as often as a 747 blows up on takeoff. The industries have been handling lox and liquid hydrogen safely for half a century. In fact I can prove we’re safe. We’ve kept the qual and reliability processes as simple as possible — no hundred-mile NASA paper chains — and we put the people on the ground in charge of their own quality. Qual up front, the only way to do it.” He looked into the sun, and the light caught the dust plastered over his face, white lines etched into the weather-beaten wrinkles of his face. “You know, this is just the beginning,” he said. “Right now this is Kitty Hawk. You got to start somewhere. But someday this will be a true spaceport.”
“Like Cape Canaveral?”
“Oh, hell, no. Think of an airport. You’ll have concrete launch-pads with minimal gantries, so simple we don’t care if we have to rebuild them every flight. We’ll have our own propellant and oxi-dizer manufacturing facilities right here. The terminal buildings will be just like JFK or O’Hare. They’ll build new roads out here, better rail links. The spaceport will be an airport too. We’ll attract industries, communities. People will live here.”
But she heard tension in his voice, under the bubbling faith. She’d gotten used to his mood swings, which seemed to her to have begun around the time he was washed out of NASA. But today his mood was obviously fragile, and, with a little push, liable to come crashing apart.
The legal battle wasn’t won yet. Far from it. In fact, Emma thought, it was more like a race, as Bootstrap lawyers sought to find a way through the legal maze that would allow Malenfant to launch, or at least keep testing, before the FAA inspectors and their lawyers found a way to get access to this site and shut everything down.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow I have to confront him with the truth. The fact that we’re losing the race.
As the sun began to climb down the blue dome of sky, Emma requested an army bus ride back to her motel in Mojave. There she pulled the blinds and spread out her softscreen. She fired off mails, ate room service junk, tried to sleep.
The phone rang, jarring her awake. It was Malenfant.
Go to your window.
“What?”
I’m simplifying a few bureaucratic processes, Emma.
He sounded a little drunk. And dangerous. She felt a cold chill settle at the pit of her stomach. “What are you talking about?”
Go to the window and you’ll see. I’ve been talking to Cornelius about Doctor Johnson. Once Johnson was asked how he would refute solipsism. You know, the idea that only you exist, all else is an illusion constructed by your mind.
She opened her shutters. In the direction of the test range, a light was spreading over the bottom half of the sky: a smeared yellow-white rising fast, not like a dawn.
Johnson kicked a rock. And he said, “I refute it thus.”
“Oh, Malenfant. What have you done?” They came to shut me down, Emma. We lost the race with those FAA assholes. One of those smart kids of George’s turned out to be an FBI plant. The inspectors arrived. They would have drained the Nautilus and broken her up. And then we’d never have reached Cruithne. I decided it was time to kick that rock. Emma, you should see the dust we’reraising!
And now a spark of light rose easily from the darkened horizon, climbing smoothly into the sky. It was yellow light, like a fleck of sunlight, and it trailed a pillar of smoke and steam that glowed in the light spark.