Late in the afternoon Monk Delany came into his room. Harry was glad to see the big, shambling engineer, although he thought Monk looked awkward, sheepish, almost embarrassed.
“How ya doing, Harry?”
“It only hurts when I breathe.”
“Come on,” Delany said. “Seriously.”
“Banged-up ribs. I’ll be okay.”
“Your face is kinda burned. Like you got too much sun.”
Harry nodded. The movement sent a twinge of pain along his back.
“You look okay,” he said to Delany.
The engineer pulled one of the petite wooden chairs from the wall and sat down beside Harry’s bed. The chair looked almost too frail to hold his bulk.
“I got a couple bruises,” Delany said. “The blast knocked me down, that’s all.” “Pete?”
Delany’s face fell. “I told that dumb spic to get his ass inside the blockhouse.”
“Is he dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Anybody else?”
“Naw, they’re all okay. You got it worse than anybody. Except Pete, of course. General Scheib tore out both knees of his pants. Levy got a black eye. A real beaut of a shiner.”
Harry knew that Monk was trying to cheer him up. “What caused the explosion? Any idea?”
“Six dozen guys are going over the wreckage, including a gang of blue suits.”
“And?”
Delany shrugged. “Looks like it mighta been some grease got into the oxy line.”
“We checked that line,” Harry said.
“Yeah, I know. But that’s what it looks like.”
Harry closed his eyes and saw his job going down the drain. Grease in the oxygen line. That shouldn’t have happened. Somebody’s going to get blamed for it. Me. Maybe all of us. Maybe the whole damned program will get shut down.
“The investigation isn’t over,” Delany said. “Maybe they’ll find something else.”
Harry started to shake his head, thought better of it. “What’re they going to find? Spies? Foreign agents planted a bomb?”
Delany sat and stared at him in silence for several long moments, his normally cheerful face looking pensive, almost mournful.
At last he got up from the flimsy chair. “Take care of yourself, Harry. I gotta get back out to Mohave, help with the investigation.”
“Thanks for coming by, Monk.”
“Nothing to it.” Delany stopped at the door. “Anything I can get you, Harry? Anything you need?”
“My laptop,” Harry answered immediately. “I’ll go nuts in here without my laptop to work on.”
“You got it, pal.”
It wasn’t until after Delany had left that Harry wondered when Sylvia would be allowed to visit him. He found that he didn’t really care when she came, or if she came at all. And he realized he wasn’t surprised by his feeling.
Victor Anson sat behind the gleaming broad desk of his private office and gave the three men sitting anxiously on the other side his coldest, hardest stare.
Anson was totally bald but sported a natty little pencil moustache. He was athletically slim and wore an impeccably tailored Italian silk suit of silvery gray, with an off-white shirt and carefully knotted sky blue tie.
Two of the three men before him were corporate executives in proper business suits and ties; the third was Jake Levy, one of his top physicists, dressed in sloppy, unpressed slacks and a white open-necked short-sleeved sport shirt. Typical scientist, Anson thought: every day is casual Friday for them. At least Levy knew better than to wear denims in his presence, Anson told himself.
Looking closer at the physicist, Anson saw that his left eye was swollen and bruised bluish. The man looked faintly ludicrous; Anson had to suppress a smile.
Anson had made the company what it was and he knew it. Starting with nothing but his father’s few millions and a humdrum aircraft-repair operation, Victor Anson had spent his life, his well-known shrewdness, and his single-minded determination to create Anson Aerospace Corporation and make it into one of the most successful industrial research and development organizations in the world.
Now he glared across his desk at the man whom he’d trusted to make that goddamned laser into a winner. All he had to show for six years of work was a tangled mess of smoking wreckage.
“You realize that SDB has already submitted a formal proposal to the Air Force for their version of a high- power laser?”
Before they could do anything more than nod miserably, Anson went on. “And Vickers has its whole Washington team bending the ears of every major congressional committee chairman, telling them that
Jacob Levy, who’d been born in Liverpool, replied in his studied Oxford accent, “Vickers couldn’t possibly handle the task, and everyone knows it.”
“Those congressmen don’t,” Anson snapped. “Those senators don’t.”
The two men sitting on either side of Levy were James Dykes, the corporation’s chief financial officer, and Milton Haas, who headed Anson’s Washington office. Dykes was built like a fireplug: thick torso, short limbs, a thick mop of dirty blond hair. Haas was as slim and graceful as a ballerina, with the most beautiful dark eyes Anson had ever seen on a man.
“It’s not all that bad, V.R.,” said Dykes, his voice rough and throaty, as if he’d been hollering at people all morning. “Our contract isn’t up for renewal until—”
“The goddam Air Force can cancel our goddam contract whenever it goddam wants to and you know it, Jimmy!” Anson snarled.
Haas raised a slim finger. “There’s no movement in the Pentagon to cancel our contract.”
“Not yet.”
“We can rebuild the laser in three months,” said Levy. “Perhaps less.”
“Not until you find out what made it blow up,” Anson replied.
“We know what caused the explosion. A speck of grease got entrained in the oxygen line. Once the oxygen was pressurized it ignited—”
“A speck of grease?” Anson roared. “How in the name of all the devils in hell did a speck of grease get into the oxy line?”
Unconsciously touching his swollen eye, Levy replied with deliberate calm, “The important thing, Mr. Anson, is to look ahead. I’ve instituted procedures that will make certain all the feed lines are purged with nitrogen before we power up the laser. That will ensure that the lines are clear.”
Anson scowled at him. “One of your technicians screwed up. Fire the bastard.”
“I’m not certain—”
“Find out who’s responsible and fire him!” Anson insisted. “You don’t have to be certain. Pick the likeliest chump and throw him out on his butt. Make an example of him so the others shape up.”
“But I can’t simply fire someone at random like that.”
Anson stared at Levy for several heartbeats. Then, “Well, if you can’t—or won’t—I’ll find somebody who can.”
Levy’s face went white.
“Find a scapegoat,” Anson said, his voice cold and hard. Then he smiled thinly. “It ought to be easy enough for you. You Jews know all about scapegoats, don’t you?”
