None of the Black Hats could see the Titan 7. They walked through it, disappearing into the smoke and emerging the other side. Fonvielle couldn't bring himself to try the experiment. He was afraid that the smoke would be as substantial as the real rocket for him. As far as he could tell, the smoke rocket was becoming denser, more solid. The only other person on the Cape who could see the ghosts was the First Lady. She must have a touch of the Dream…
'Commander?' Addams pulled him out of his reverie.
'Yes?'
'We're dry-firing the system in twenty-five minutes.'
'I'll be with you.'
The success of the Needlepoint Ring was a vindication, at last, of the programme. With this proven, the Prezz would surely authorize more funds. The Cape would live again. The next rocket wouldn't be a ghost. Mars called, and Deep Space. Camp Glenn should be re-manned. Now America owned the skies, it was time to put on a little show.
The Black Hats were staking out an animal in the sun, and sawing at its throat. It was one of the Suitcase People, a black-hided warthog thing with yellow tusks. Blood trickled across the tarmac, following the almost- erased markings. No spirit shape was coalescing in the air above the sacrifice. It didn't count.
Fonvielle walked towards the bunker. Grissom was waiting for him by the elevator platform, his helmet off. His stocky face was still wet, his hair plastered back with seawater. He looked ill, and his suit sloshed as he moved.
'Gus?' Fonvielle said. None of the ghosts had ever talked.
Grissom nodded his head in recognition. His face was greenish, and slightly swollen.
In 1962, Virgil Grissom had gone EVA in a blaze of glory, and been automatically photographed against the rising sun, waving a confident thumbs-up at the stars. There had been much speculation around the project as to whether Grissom or Glenn would be selected to captain the moon mission. Fred Flintstone and the Clean Marine, they had been called in the press. An artificial rivalry had been generated carefully by the publicity Suits NASA was saddled with, and soon the fake contest became a real one. Fonvielle wondered whether that had been what killed Gus. The board of inquiry said it was a faulty hatch, but the Commander sometimes imagined that Grissom had been pulling some grand gesture stunt, climbing out onto the surface of the capsule to be found sitting on top of it bobbing in the blue Pacific, and had it backfire. That was the Fred Flintstone style. He knew that after the disaster, the Clean Marine had shown his first traces of humanity, getting as drunk as a skunk. Grissom's re-entry had been perfect, but a hatch had opened as soon as he splashed down, and the capsule had sunk like an anvil. By dying after re-entry, he just missed being the first American to perish in space, losing that miserable honour to poor old orbiting Richard Rusoff. Fonvielle remembered the recriminatory inquisition canning every non-essential staff member who could conceivably have touched the hatch mechanism, from the designer down to the janitor. It hadn't been fair, but the purge had gone some way towards assuaging NASA's collective guilt. But, within three months, Rusoff was off his trajectory, and America had another martyr. And Cape Canaveral had another ghost.
'Gus, can you hear me?'
The drowned astronaut shook his head, and opened his mouth. Black brine leaked down the front of his silver suit. His eyes watered.
'What is it, Gus? What do you want?'
Grissom held up his hand, thumbs-down.
'Commander?'
It was Addams. Grissom was transparent, and fading fast. Addams was treating him like an idiot.
'Are you ready?'
Grissom was gone.
'Yes,' Fonvielle told Addams. 'Take us down.'
Addams worked the mechanism, and the platform sank towards the bunker.
The oblong of the sky receded above them.
The Prezz was waiting for them in the bunker, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Board of General Motors, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Walt Disney and Frank Sinatra. It was the full tum-out. They all saluted.
'Ah, Fonvielle,' said the Prezz, 'good to see you. I've reported to the Elder. He is well pleased with our progress.'
Fonvielle expected he would get the Congressional Medal of Honour for this.
The First Lady exchanged looks with him. There was something about that one. She was hardly more than a girl. And she was wise to the Cape.
She could see Griffith, Mihailoff and Kuhn clustered in the corner, smouldering.
'Now Keystone is responding,' Fonvielle told the Prezz, 'it's vital we establish that the inter-satellite communications lasers are angled correctly. We took a certain amount of deviation into our original calculations, but no one has looked at the system for fifteen years.'
The Prezz understood. He was up on Needlepoint. He didn't need the lecture really.
'Okay, let's reach for the skies.'
VI
Hiroshi Shiba looked at the Op for the thousandth time, and had to force himself to believe that this really was Elvis Presley. He remembered the old films and television programmes he had watched in his dormitory in Kyoto. He remembered the time Inoshira Kube had made Shiba, Sonny Shamada and Tetsuya Ito abase themselves in front of the entire trainee corps after they had been caught greasing each other's hair into 'Elvisu Pu-res-lieh' quaffs. Later, while taking the American culture courses all GenTech East execs had to qualify in before they were sent overseas, he had been able to put Elvis in context, tracing the influences on his work. The blues, country and western, Carl Perkins, Dean Martin, Chuck Berry, Al Jolson.
Still, for Shiba, the Elvis of the '50s represented the apex of America as a cultural force. When he vanished into the army, the cutting edge of rock 'n' roll was lost to the USSR and the United States began its long descent into its current position as the warring ground for gangcults, multinats, lunatic factions and desperate psychopaths. So much vitality applied to so little effect. It was frightening.
He wished he could reach out and touch Elvis. The man contained within him all that was great and potentially great about the country. Ideally, he would have liked to recruit the Op as a member of the Blood Banner Society—he felt sure Elvis would appreciate the purity of its ideals, its motives—but that honour was open only to pure-born Japanese.
They were working on Visser's half-track amphibians, converting them to assault vehicles. Elvis was with Captain Marcus, checking under the hood. Raimundo Rex hefted the half-track up by its prow, lifting it at a forty-five degree angle so Elvis and the Captain could take a look at the hull. The saurian was a one-mutant combination tank, trash disposal system, fork-lift truck and Spanish lesson. After Elvis, he was the hero of the compound.
Marielle brought Shiba some papers to sign. He tried. His signature was getting problematic now that his fingers were almost fused. He would soon have to revert to the oriental practice and start favouring his personal seal. Marielle sped away. Since the change began to affect her, she had been veiled with thick mosquito netting. She had never been an extraordinarily attractive girl, but evidently her vanity was affronted by the creeping greenness, the thick scaly plates and the yellowing eyes. That was a shame. The Suitcase People would have to learn to appreciate their own form of beauty.
There had been burials in the swamp earlier, and Shiba had said a few words over Reuben and the others. Reuben had been much loved by the indentees, and his heroic death had bound them to the Suitcase People. Even
