“Pete, get the hell in here,” Delany thundered.
“On my way,” Quintana yelled back.
“Initiate power sequence,” Harry said, plucking his sticky shirt away from his chest.
“Initiating power sequence.”
“Iodine pressure on the button,” one of the technicians called out.
“Electrical power ramping up,” another technician said.
“Optical bench ready.”
“Atmospheric instability nominal.”
“Adaptive optics on.”
“Iodine flow in ten seconds.”
“Oxygen flow in eight seconds.”
“Pressurizing iodine.”
“Pressurizing oxy.”
Pete Quintana opened the door to the blockhouse.
Harry thought that Pete was cutting it awfully close. If anything goes wrong with—
The laser blew up in a spectacular blast that ripped the roof off the test shed. The explosion knocked everyone down; Harry smashed against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concrete. A jagged piece of metal crashed through the safety window, shattering it into thousands of pellets as a hellish fireball billowed up into the cloudless blue sky. Pain roared through Harry while the heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.
In the partially open doorway Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him, but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.
Groggily, General Scheib got to all fours, glass pellets crunching beneath his hands and feet. A twisted piece of pipe had embedded itself into the back wall of the blockhouse like a red-hot arrow.
Christ, Scheib thought, if the blast hadn’t flattened me that thing would’ve torn my head off.
Levy and the engineers were all on the floor, knocked flat by the blast. They seemed dazed, in shock, faces and hands burned raw by the heat of the explosion. Hartunian looked unconscious. Scheib got to his feet slowly. The guy who’d been outside lay on the floor of the shed next to the burning, twisted shambles of the laser, a huddled lump of blackened flesh.
Slowly the others got up, coughing, dazed. Somewhere a fire siren was wailing, coming closer. Two of the engineers were helping the woman to her feet. Her face was burned; a trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her scalp. Levy pushed himself up to a sitting position, his shirt and trousers covered with grit. He looked angry, resentful, as if his beautiful machine had somehow betrayed him.
“It shouldn’t have done that,” Levy muttered through chipped teeth.
Yeah, right, Scheib thought.
Through the shattered window Scheib saw what was left of the COIL: twisted, blackened wreckage, wisps of dirty reddish smoke wafting into the sky. And the body of Pete Quintana, burned red and raw.
Hartunian moaned and opened his eyes. “What the hell happened?” he croaked.
My career just went up in smoke, General Scheib thought. That’s what the hell happened.
Harry was sedated and semiconscious while Anson Aerospace medical personnel helicoptered him from the Mohave test site directly to Olympia Medical Center in Pasadena. He went into surgery the next day, then the recovery unit, and finally into a private room paid for by Anson Aerospace. Although Harry didn’t know it at first, a pair of Air Police stood guard outside his room. Later they were replaced by private security people hired by Victor Anson himself.
Sometime during that period of half-wakefulness, an officer in Air Force blue entered Harry’s room and shoved an official-looking document at him. “Security agreement,” he said, his tone as flat and clipped as an air traffic controller’s. “Sign at the bottom line.”
“Security?” Harry mumbled, still fuzzy from the sedatives.
“About the accident. It’s been classified Secret. You can’t say anything about it to anyone who doesn’t have a certified need to know.” He held the document on a clipboard six inches from Harry’s nose and pressed a ballpoint pen into his hand. “Sign it now.”
Moving his arm made Harry wince with pain. He scribbled a parody of his signature on the bottom line and the uniformed officer took his clipboard and left Harry to drift back into a drugged sleep.
When Harry awoke fully, on the fifth day after the explosion, he blinked at the almost-luxurious furnishings of the room in which he found himself. Crank-up hospital bed, he saw, but the rest of the room looked like a first-class hotel, rather than a hospital: cool pastel walls, sleek modern furniture, a big flat-screen TV on the wall. The one window looked out on city buildings. Then he realized there was an IV tube in his left arm, and a bank of monitoring instruments softly beeping on the wall above his bed’s headboard.
Harry tried to raise himself into a sitting position to see more of the outside surroundings, but his ribs flared with pain. He settled back on the bed and the pain subsided into a dulled ache. They must have me pretty well doped up, he guessed.
The door to his room opened and a nurse stepped in. She was a bit on the chubby side, but she looked cheerful. Smiling.
“We’re awake,” she said pleasantly.
“Yeah,” Harry replied, unhappy with her “we.”
“Hungry?”
“No.”
“Really?” She came to the bed, peered at the instruments over Harry’s head. “You’ve been getting nothing but intravenous for the past four days.”
“How bad was I hurt?”
“A few cracked ribs. Superficial burns on one side of your face. Nothing terribly serious.”
She’s a professional nurse, Harry thought. Indifferent to the patient’s pain.
“The others? How bad—”
She shook her head with a slightly disapproving expression on her dimpled features. “I’ll order a breakfast tray for you. See if you can take some nourishment.”
Twenty minutes later a Hispanic orderly came in with a tray of breakfast. He cranked Harry’s bed up to a sitting position slowly, carefully, obviously aware that the patient’s ribs were painful. Harry felt grateful enough to say, “
The dark-skinned orderly grinned at him. “Just doin’ my job, man.”
Harry sipped the orange juice, poked at the rubbery scrambled eggs. Every time he moved his arms his ribs flared up. By the time he’d given up on the breakfast his body felt as if somebody had spent the morning whacking his chest and back with a baseball bat.
A doctor came in briefly, took his pulse, and told him that he’d be fine in a week or so.
“The others,” Harry said. “How bad were they hurt? Pete Quintana?”
The doctor pursed his lips. “I don’t know about anyone else. The medevac chopper brought you in five days ago. You’re my patient. You’re recovering well. That’s all I know.”
It must be bad, Harry surmised. Pete must be dead. Anybody else?
Harry spent the day watching television, banal soap operas, game shows where he knew the answers that stumped the dumbbell contestants, phony courtrooms with idiotic people complaining about one another, psychologists offering advice to young couples and old married folks.
Maybe Sylvia and I ought to go on one of those shows, Harry thought. Then he remembered the marriage counselor they’d seen and the psychologist he’d gone to afterward and how pointless it had all been.
Where is Sylvia? he wondered. Does she even know I’m in the hospital? Did anybody tell her there’s been an accident?
