Card Sharks

bully to reach his goal.

The single biggest disappointment in his life was obvious to everyone … that he, himself, would never see the Earth as a sphere … never kick the dust of the surface of the moon. You see, Rowe had paid his way through college as a barnstormer, flying his own specially-modified Stearman in county fairs and settings even less formal all across America. It was his eyesight that forever kept him from becoming a professional pilot, a verdict he accepted gracefully, without complaint.

But even now, it was said, when the pressure got to be too much, he would sneak off to nearby El Mirage to go sailplaning.

'Mr. Thayer. I've been waiting for you.'

At first I thought I had already done something wrong. 'I came straight here from Security,' I said.

He smiled, his eyes twinkling behind the thick lenses. 'Not this morning. For weeks. Months.'

Fumbling for my sunglasses, I followed him out of the briefing shack into the noonday sun. He never even blinked. I had a quick, nod-of-the-head tour. 'Control center's over there … Aerojet office … Pratt amp; Whitney. Hangar Two.' That hangar was practically a shrine to someone like me. The JB-1, the first American jet, had been towed here, complete with a dummy propeller on its nose to confuse Axis spies. (I had seen a replica of JB-1 at Jetboy's Tomb in New York, of course, during a Boy Scout trip there when I was thirteen.) This was also where Kelly Johnson's lovely XP-80 had flown, with the ill-fated Halford engine. 'Oh, yes..' he said finally, as we approached another massive, never painted structure. 'Hangar Three.' We went inside.

It took me several seconds to realize that I was looking at the X-11A, vehicle number one. (Northrup, the prime contractor, was assembling birds two and three out in some town with the unlikely name of Pico Rivera.)

I had only seen a couple of rough sketches in Aviation Week … and they hadn't done it justice. They made the X-11A look like a slightly larger Bell X-1 — a bullet with wings.

This was a winged beast more like an eagle. Or, to shift from the aero to the nautical, a manta ray. For one thing, it was twice the size of the X-1, 55 feet long, with a delta wing forty feet across at its widest. The tail, rising above the fraternal twin engines, reached eighteen feet.

It was the cockpit that reminded everyone of the X-1. It was so cramped that Enloe — never a noted humorist — was widely quoted as saying, 'You don't climb in … you put it on.' Because most of the X-11A's volume was taken up by engines and fuel tanks, there wasn't even room enough for the pilot to float around once reaching zero-G. Later models would be bigger, with better engines. There would have to be more room … if we were going to land X-11A or its children on the Moon.

'The world's first spaceship,' I said, walking underneath it with its father.

'Is it? What's going on with the Russians?'

'My information is over a year old.'

A tight smile. 'That's not what I hear.'

My background as an analyst was no secret to Rowe — to anyone. But who knew that I'd kept in touch with the FTD, more as a hobby than anything else? My wife, maybe. 'All I have is raw data.'

'That's okay. This isn't a quiz. I just want to know if von Braun and Korolev are going to beat me.'

The fact that he knew those names told me he had access to whatever information there was. Von Braun had headed the Nazi V-2 rocket program and had been brought to the U.S. briefly after the war to build rockets for the U.S. Army. After the wild card struck, the program was scrapped. Leaving his brain — or whatever was valuable in it — behind, von Braun returned to Germany, where he was scooped up by the Russians.

According to the stories — and they may have been just that: stories — he found a soul brother in a Russian engineer named Sergei Korolev.

Korolev was a lot like Rowe … a child of aviation who burned to go beyond it. He was flying gliders in his twenties and building rocket motors in his thirties. He had come close to being shot during the purges that destroyed the Soviet air force in 1938, wound up in a gold mine in the Arctic under a de facto sentence of death … only to be reprieved. He'd built katusha rockets for Stalin during the war, and then was put in charge of finding a use for all the captured German V-2s.

I would have given anything to be present when Korolev first met von Braun.

'They've adapted one of the German designs for a multi-stage booster — '

'The A-10?'

'More or less. They call it the R-11.'

'Interesting coincidence.'

'It's a big brute — '

'You've seen it?'

Should I answer? I had seen Pied Piper photos, which were highly classified. But Rowe knew about Korolev and von Braun; surely he knew about our spy satellites. 'Yes. It's twenty stories tall, maybe thirty feet across at the base, tapering like an artillery shell. I guess it puts out over a million pounds of thrust — '

He was shaking his head, out of pleasure or annoyance, I couldn't say. 'And we have a tenth of that.'

'And they will throw away nine-tenths of that rocket.'

'The spacecraft itself …?'

'A modified missile nosecone with a blunt bottom. One pilot.'

He was thinking, almost certainly replaying endless debates over the very same issues, reaching the same conclusion. 'We couldn't have done it. We built bombers, not intercontinental missiles.' He smiled again. 'But their way is faster.'

'They haven't had a manned launch yet.'

We were interrupted by a female voice. 'Dr. Rowe?'

I turned. A woman in her early thirties wearing a white blouse and a beige skirt was walking toward us. She had copper-colored hair that was pulled back by a hairband and was wearing her sunglasses inside the darkened hangar. 'They were looking for you over in administration,' she said.

'Thanks, Peggy.' He clapped me on the shoulder. 'We'll have plenty of time to talk later.' As he went out: 'By the way, Edgar Thayer, Margaret Durand. The rest is up to you.'

Only when Rowe had walked off did she take off her glasses. I saw that her eyes were a blue so pale they looked transparent. Maybe it was the drab surroundings, maybe it was my personal situation. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

I had married a hometown girl for reasons that couldn't possibly have been any good. We both thought we were in love. We both wanted to get out of St. Peter.

Oddly enough, we hadn't been high school sweethearts: I had gone on three forced dates (to this day I can remember each excrutiating moment) … two homecomings and one senior prom, each with a different partner. I knew Deborah, of course — I knew everyone in St. Peter High — and thought her quite pretty and nice. She even had a good sense of humor. But she had a steady boyfriend, one of the Borchert boys, from a farm family east of town, with whom she was constantly breaking up. Nevertheless, most high school couples in St. Peter had, like it or not, mated for life. It never occurred to me to ask Deborah out.

Not until I came home on my second summer vacation from St. Paul. I had left St. Peter a virgin; I had returned a veteran of half a dozen sexual encounters, some of which I hadn't had to buy. Romance was in the air. And Deb was in the middle of a surprisingly long breakup with Billy Borchert.

One thing led to another, as they say. When I went back to the University of Minnesota at the end of the summer we were sort of engaged. When Deborah called three months later to tell me she was pregnant, we got married. And I, the panicked new father, worried about supporting a wife and child, joined ROTC, committing myself to five years of service in the Air Force. (The way I looked at it, I was committing the Air Force to support me for five years.)

Deb joined me in St. Paul, where Caroline was born.

We had one good year, I think, that year when Caroline was in her crib. Living in married student housing only slightly better than a Selby and Dale tenement, we had no money for baby sitters — when we did go out, even to see a movie like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it was a special occasion — but we were entertained by Caroline's antics. Deb made a stab at being the wife of an engineering student, helping me with my course work, reading some of the texts — I think she even thought about going to the U of M herself. But all she