Over his shoulder he called, “Kiss the girls for me when they get back from school.”
“How many girls are you going to kiss out there in that damned motel?” Sylvia yelled after him.
Harry was startled by that. She’s worried that I’ll shack up with somebody else? The thought had never entered his mind. Actually, it had, now and then. But he’d never acted on it.
He was surprised again when he saw that Monk was driving a mint-new Mustang convertible, fire-engine red.
“Where’s the Chrysler?” Harry asked as he tossed his travel bag onto the narrow bench behind the bucket seats.
Monk gave an unhappy snort. “The old gray ghost’s transmission crapped out. I’ve got to use the wife’s new car and she’s plenty steamed up about it.”
Harry slid into the seat and slammed the door shut. As Monk gunned the convertible down the street Harry thought again about Sylvia accusing him of shacking up with some other woman. As if I’d ever do that, he said to himself with some indignation.
“Ten
As he stepped through the steel hatch into the blockhouse, Brigadier General Brad Scheib smiled tightly at them. “I can see none of you geniuses was ever in the military.”
Harry felt disappointed. “You’re not wearing your star, General.”
Scheib wasn’t even in uniform. He wore a checkered short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, and comfortable chino slacks.
“I don’t want to look overdressed,” he said. The civilians were all in faded denims and company-issued white T-shirts that read ANSON AEROSPACE across their backs, with the stylized
Scheib was accompanied by Jacob Levy, the chief scientist on the laser project. Like General Scheib, Levy wore a sport shirt and slacks, although his shirt was sparkling white and crisply starched, distinctly out of place in the baking desert heat. Levy was the man in charge, working directly with the newly promoted General Scheib and responsible only to Victor Anson, who owned the company.
“Are you ready to run?” Levy asked Quintana.
Nodding, the engineer replied, “We’re going through the final checkout. Be ready to fire up the beast in ten minutes or so.”
The control center had been a blockhouse years ago, when the Air Force was testing rocket engines for missiles at this remote desert site. It was unglamorous, strictly utilitarian: bare concrete walls, half a dozen desk- sized consoles with their display screens and keyboards, strip lamps across the steel beams supporting the ceiling, a panel of monitoring gauges fastened to the concrete of the rear wall. The air-conditioning was pitiful: several of the men’s shirts were already sweat-stained, and Taki Nakamura’s shirt clung to her slim bosom.
“Very well, then,” Levy said stiffly as he pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow, “let’s get down to business and show the general what our COIL can do.”
One wall of the concrete building had been punched through and a long window of thick safety glass looked out on the laser itself.
The COIL sat in its own open shed beneath a flimsy roof of corrugated metal supported by four steel beams. Pete Quintana picked up a cordless screwdriver and stepped through the blockhouse’s steel door, out into the shed.
“Where are you going, Quintana?” Levy demanded, frowning.
Harry thought maybe Pete went outside because it was cooler there—at least a little breeze was blowing, unlike in here with this crappy air-conditioning.
But Pete answered softly, his voice muffled by the thick glass of the safety window, “Tightening up the mount. Keep the vibration level down.”
“You shouldn’t be out there when we’re counting down,” Levy yelled.
“I’ll be back inside in a minute. Start the countdown, it’s okay.”
Levy frowned but turned to Harry and said darkly, “Start the countdown.”
Harry glanced at General Scheib, then shrugged. Turning to Delany, he said, “Start the sequence timer, Monk.”
The target sat half a mile out on the desert: the sawed-off end of a cargo plane, its fat round fuselage and big tailfin sticking up into the cloudless blue sky. There were several pinpoint holes in the plane’s aluminum skin, blackened from the heat of the laser’s beam.
General Scheib came up beside Harry and looked out at the laser assembly. “We can’t have fussbudgets tinkering when we’re flying that dingus. It’s got to work without last-second adjustments.”
“It will,” Harry said tightly.
“Of course it will,” Levy added. But the slight lift of his brow told Harry he was not happy.
Harry picked up the intercom microphone. “Hey, Pete, you’d better cut it short and get in here.”
Still with his back to the safety window, Quintana hollered, “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”
“Now,” Harry said. “We want to start her up.”
“So start her. I just want to check the vibration absorber on the optics platform. I’ll be inside before you get her warmed up.”
Harry looked at Levy, who frowned but said resignedly, “Get on with it.”
Scheib shook his head slightly and thought, These civilians like to play with the equipment.
Engineers—they fall in love with the hardware. But they’ve got to make this beast foolproof, so that tech sergeants can run it without a half dozen geeks tinkering with it all the time.
He heard the whine of the electrical power generator starting up as he peered through the window. Quintana straightened up and planted his hands on his hips, as if admiring the equipment he had helped to build. The COIL looked to Scheib more like a miniature junkyard than a flight-weight laser system. Scheib knew the numbers and understood that these engineers had sized the laser to fit inside the capacious frame of a modified Boeing 747. Barely. But in the eyes of the newly minted general those pressure vessels and pumps and all that piping certainly didn’t look like something that could ever get off the ground.
“Congratulations on the star.”
Startled, Scheib turned to see Hartunian, one of the engineers, standing beside him.
Scheib was tall and trim, his body honed by a daily regimen of exercise and tennis. His face was lean, too, and handsome: sandy brown hair that was just starting to show some gray at the temples, light brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Women found him attractive, even out of uniform, something that his stylish, upscale wife didn’t seem to mind in the least. Harry was roundish, almost pudgy, his wispy dark hair terminally unruly. But Scheib thought that Harry was sharper mentally than anyone on the laser team. He was just too self-effacing to push his advantage. Except on the tennis court. Harry beat the general at tennis whenever they played together. Brains over brawn, Scheib thought, although he would never admit it aloud.
“It’s about time the Air Force gave you some recognition,” Harry went on, his voice low enough that the rest of the people in the blockhouse couldn’t hear him.
Almost flustered, Scheib replied, “Thank you, Harry. I didn’t know you cared.”
Harry grinned at him. “If they passed you up and you got reassigned, we’d have to break in a new blue- suiter.”
Scheib nodded, thinking, It always comes down to what’s best for numero uno. Well, I’ve got my star. Now if these clowns can make this contraption work I might even get a second star, eventually.
“Input power ready,” called one of the technicians.
Harry turned away from the general and gave Levy a questioning look. “We’re ready to power up.”
“By all means,” Levy said.
