there was nothing between him and the subzero stratosphere out there except a thin sheathing of aluminum.
Teetering on a makeshift ladder that Sharmon had created by stripping one of the crew’s relief cots and leaning the metal frame against the bulkhead of the flight deck, Harry wormed one arm up into the shadowy housing and played the beam from his pocket flashlight down the length of the carbon dioxide laser. Everything seemed okay. No loose connections. Seals looked tight.
Turning carefully to inspect the forward end of the laser, Harry froze. The forward lens assembly was gone. Where the fist-sized unit of collimating lenses should have been there was nothing but a gaping emptiness.
Somebody’s taken the lens assembly out of the laser, Harry realized. He stared, trembling, at that empty space where the lens assembly should have been. Somebody’s taken the lens out of the laser, he repeated to himself. Without the lens assembly the ranging laser can’t work, and without the ranging laser, the big COIL can’t be aimed properly. The whole system—the whole plane—will be useless.
There’s a saboteur on the plane! The thought made Harry’s knees weak. But there was no other explanation. That lens assembly didn’t remove itself from the ranger; somebody deliberately took it out. Then he remembered the explosion at the test rig, the accident that had killed Pete Quintana and nearly broken his own back. It wasn’t an accident, Harry realized. It was deliberate sabotage. By one of my crew.
As Harry stood there, wondering what to do, how to handle this terrible new knowledge, he heard Victor Anson’s voice in his mind:
Harry Daniel Hartunian
Harry Hartunian had never been a fighter. He wasn’t a take-charge guy. Instead, he had a quiet, persistent, relentless determination to finish whatever he started. Born and raised in the Boston suburb of Medford, in high school Harry took a lot of ribbing for his flyaway hair and his passive, almost invisible presence in the classroom and outside. The bullies picked on him, of course, but Harry befriended the biggest guy in the school by offering to do his homework in exchange for his protection. The bullying stopped. And his bodyguard even taught Harry a few moves that were down and dirty but effective in an emergency.
He didn’t go out for sports—the mindless pressure to win turned him off. In his sophomore year Harry made the chess team, barely, but by the time he graduated he was the best chess player in the school.
Engineering appealed to him; Harry liked the idea of building things and making mechanisms work. He got a partial scholarship to Lehigh University and went into its electrical engineering program. On campus he met Sylvia Goldman, who was in the teacher’s college. She was from Media, Pennsylvania. Sylvia was attractive, buxom, with flashing dark eyes. Harry felt flabbergasted that she was interested in him.
For her part, Sylvia saw in Harry a steady, dependable man who could be led rather easily. He had this funny hair that flew every which way at the slightest breeze, but he wasn’t that bad-looking and he was doggedly determined to do well in class and get a rock-solid job after graduation. He was quiet, and so shy he wouldn’t get fresh with her, so after a few dates she got fresh with him. After nearly a year of dating they moved into a tiny studio apartment together.
Harry married Sylvia in a simple civil ceremony in Bethlehem’s city hall. Neither her parents nor his saw fit to attend the wedding. Both families were infuriated by their marriage. Sylvia’s mother feared that this
As graduation neared Harry was recruited by a firm in California, Anson Aerospace Corporation. The company was developing lasers and Harry had worked summers in the university’s laser lab to make enough money to support himself and his bride.
With their diplomas in their hands, they moved to Pasadena, leaving their disapproving parents thousands of miles behind them. Sylvia got part-time work as a substitute teacher while Harry threw himself into his job as a laser technician.
Anson Aerospace was a happy haven for the young engineer. All his life he had been an oddball, a nerd, a quiet, studious boy who was shy with girls and respectful to adults and preferred reading books to getting involved in teenaged pranks. At Anson, Harry was surrounded by people just like him. Geek heaven. There was a pecking order, of course: scientists were above engineers, even though the engineers all felt that physicists should never be allowed to touch any of the equipment in the lab.
“It’s easy to make a laser that’s idiot-proof,” the head of Anson’s safety department told Harry. “Making it Ph.D.-proof is just about impossible. Those guys think they’re brilliant, see. They poke into the lab and fiddle with this and twiddle with that until they either give themselves a ten-thousand-volt shock or burn the place down.”
Harry knew he was not brilliant. But he worked hard and steadily for long hours and little recognition. Yet he loved it. He loved the technical challenges, the camaraderie that slowly developed among his fellow engineers, the bowling league he helped to organize, even the physicists who unconsciously lorded it over the engineers as if it was their right to look down on the guys who got their hands dirty. Indeed, Harry was not brilliant, but he was dependable. He got the job done, no matter how difficult it was, no matter how long or hard he had to work at it. Quiet and steady as he was, gradually he was recognized by his supervisors, and even by the scientists who ran the lab. To his own surprise, Harry got salary raises almost every year: small ones, but he didn’t complain.
Sylvia did. They had two daughters now and a sizable mortgage on their home. She felt Harry wasn’t aggressive enough about his salary.
“You should be getting more,” she would say. “Gina Sobelski’s husband hasn’t been with the company half as long as you have and he makes twice as much.”
“Sobelski’s in the legal department,” Harry would counter. “Different pay scale.”
Logic did not move Sylvia.
“You’re
He didn’t argue. He just let her vent and the next morning he went to work, where the only pressure on him was to do his job.
Anson Aerospace landed a juicy contract to build a megawatt-plus chemical laser for the Missile Defense Agency. The whole company was abuzz with the news. Victor Anson himself called a meeting of the entire staff in the company cafeteria to tell them that this program would be the most important contract the firm had ever received.
Harry was surprised when he was picked to be part of the small, select group of engineers who would build the device.
Dr. Jacob Levy was chosen to head the laser group, with Pete Quintana as the chief engineer under him. Monk Delany complained to Harry that Quintana only got the job because he was Hispanic and the company wanted to look good to the affirmative action busybodies.
A couple of the guys began calling Quintana
Sylvia took the news of Harry’s new assignment strangely.
“I suppose that means you’ll be working longer hours, doesn’t it?” she asked that evening, after their daughters had gone to their rooms to do their homework. Harry could hear the thumping beat of the music they listened to while they were supposed to be studying.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he said.
Sylvia grumbled and Harry wondered why she got sore at the fact that he was successful at his work.
“Look, Sylvie, I’ve got a big responsibility now,” he tried to explain. “I know I’m not a genius. I’ve got to put in long hours and work as hard as I can. These scientists I’m working for are really brilliant; I’ve got to give it
