by Dean Ing
“Nothing! He doesn’t want to talk about the maglev work. Maybe I should ask what’s going on that you aren’t supposed to know about.”
“Oh, relax, Vangie. It’s just some tests on the maglev. You remember when the Santa Fe man called last week?”
“Sage? Of course. I had to hunt you down in the plant.” “Well, they wanted me to verify some canard tests that Tom and Rogan scheduled. Rogan’s cleared to run the unit now without those deadheading union people, so . . . well, I got the schedule and flew down Monday, and, well, uh . . .” Her lovely mouth twitched and, for the first time that evening, Wes basked in her good humor. “You drove that stupid locomotive, is what you did. Illegally.”
He made a parody of outraged innocence. “A man who’d do that would, uh - he’d play footsie in a fine restaurant.” “So you did,” she nodded, now studying some vague point
in space near his head. “But Schultheis didn’t check with you before he scheduled those tests?”
“No reason he would, necessarily. What’s eating you?” She shook her head. “I’m not sure, but - Schultheis and Kaplan both put in for a week’s vacation. And then they canceled it. Why?”
“Ask them, Vangie. They’ve been trying to find time for a fishing trip ever since that close call with Delta One in Arizona. The canard tests just set ’em back again, I guess.” She nodded, and seemed satisfied, and then he asked her about her contact with Joey Weatherby. She was still awaiting a callback on her condo’s answering machine, she said. Weatherby was not the easiest man to reach.
Wes realized that she was still gnawing on a suspicion only after they’d been served. Vangie usually had a longshoreman’s appetite, but tonight even antipasto was more than she wanted. At last, watching him devour his scampi, “Here’s the sequence,” she said without preamble. “Kaplan and Schultheis ask for a week’s vacation. Then the Santa Fe people ask you to verify the need for some more maglev tests. You give the okay, and then you check up on those runs. Who gave you the schedule?”
“Allington. The data reduction is his, so - ”
“But you had to ask Boff for it?”
“Well, Tom and Dave weren’t around Friday. Sure; Boff has to know what’s up.”
“I guess he does, doesn’t he,” Vangie said, her gaze turned inward. “But you don’t.”
She had never seen him look at her with such displeasure. “I don’t hire men at that level who need close supervision, Vangie.”
“I’m trying to do my job at the moment. Let me finish this sequence, and then I’ll shut up.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” he said, starting to chew again.
“Finally you fly down to Barstow on Monday. When did they know you were coming?”
“Mm, I guess on Monday morning, when I called to say I was coming before noon.”
He thought she’d finished because she took so long before saying, “But Boff Allington knows your ways. He could have suspected on Friday that you’d take a quick run down there. ” “I suppose. So what?”
“So Dave Kaplan called Personnel late Friday afternoon from Barstow to cancel the vacations for him and Schultheis. All top management duty changes get flagged to me, but Kaplan probably doesn’t know that. Anyhow, I wasn’t snooping. But whatever they had planned, they changed it fast when they realized you might be coming down for the new maglev runs. ’ ’ He sighed. “Finished?”
“I hope so.”
“So do I. It might look funny to you, Vangie. But in their shoes, I’d probably do the same thing if my boss made a sudden decision to look my project over. Remember, I was there, and the only one who did anything out of place was me! What the hell do you think they might do, sell the maintenance unit?” “I don’t know. Certainly not that, but - ”
“You’d have Tom and Dave, Rogan and Allington and Christ knows who else, in some conspiracy. You know what I think?”
Her smile was bleak. “Yes, my love. You think I’m a nervous nag since I found out what Mr. Joey dirty-hands Weatherby wants to do to my lover.”
“That’s pretty close. But thank you,” he added, stretching out his hand to hers.
“All the same,” she began.
“I’ll remember what you’ve said,” he interrupted. “Kaplan and Schultheis will be back tomorrow anyhow, so you can watch ’em all you like.”
“Their secretaries have been putting off vendor appointments all week,” she said. “What’re they doing still in Barstow?”
“Resetting those canards, letting Rogan try short runs. And if you don’t want that anchovy, how’s about giving me a shot?”
“Lips that touch anchovies will never touch mine,” she murmured. So Wes left a perfectly good anchovy on her plate and strolled outside to the parking lot with Vangie, where long shadows heralded the nearness of evening.
At that moment, three hundred and eighty miles to the southeast, Glenn Rogan tried to ignore lengthening fingers of shadow as he slid downward into the cockpit of Highjump.
* * * *
The huge old truck that Kaplan drove onto Ivanpah Dry Lake in late afternoon had seen many a year of service before Exotic Salvage picked it up as surplus. It had once been Air Force blue, with twin spotlights the size of kettledrums mounted atop its towering cab. One of those big sizzlers still perched there, mounted backward, toward the flatbed. Above the flatbed trailer, a crane arm jounced lazily between limiter cables. A Porsche-engined dune buggy, Rogan’s personal property, squatted on the flatbed, secured by cables. Flecks of yellow paint still adhered to the crane and to the stowed jack pads. Some men could still smile to recall when the C-2 wrecker was their burden-beast of choice, the biggest lifter on many an Air Force base. David Kaplan had smiled when writing out the laughably small check because, as the seller said, the whopping six-cylinder Hercules in that ol’ hummer would run until the second coming, but the only thing on earth a C-2 was good for was hauling crashed aircraft.
With no load and twelve forward speeds, the C-2 could rumble down a highway at exactly thirty-seven miles an hour.
With a groaning load that bowed its flatbed, the C-2 would rumble down that same highway at exactly thirty-seven miles an hour. If the C-2 was good only for retrieving crashes, it might be superb for Exotic Salvage because Highjump, as Rogan put it, had all the earmarks of a dry-lake posthole digger.
Kaplan pulled to a stop on Ivanpah’s hard flat alkali, a natural raceway lying in this vast depression between mountains of the high Mojave. Like other dry lakes it was resurfaced by seasonal runoff from nearby ridges, the nearest thing to a perfect landing field that Highjump’s creators could have found. Somewhere across that vast open stretch lay Highjump’s hangar, below Kaplan’s line of sight.
Staring hard below the ridge of Clark Mountain some miles to the west, he could see the gleam of high-tension lines. From the miles-long depression of the dry lake bed he could not identify anything that far away in any detail. Neither could the occasional driver whose car might be crawling along the Interstate IS corridor between the lake bed and Clark Mountain.
Kaplan checked his digital clock; turned off the Hercules ignition; flicked the tightband radio to their scrambled channel with fingers that trembled. They had lost an entire day because of Wes Peel’s visit, rescheduling Highjump and losing considerable liquid hydrogen from the storage tanks, and without these long summer days they would have canceled the test. Only four men for the launch, one of them a septuagenarian! But one who had fueled vertical-flight interceptors with hydrogen peroxide in 1945, and who had fifty years of steadiness at control consoles.
They hadn’t been sure they could fire Highjump until mid-afternoon with all four men sweating and straining, and while driving the C-2 across from Clark Mountain, Kaplan had cut his own timing nearly too fine, though his role would be only as observer and photographer until the test was complete. Afterward he would have one of two roles: retrieval of Highjump if it worked, or material witness if it didn’t. Kaplan grabbed the video camera with one han
d, his mike toggle in the other, and leaned from the cab.
He mentally paced the measured, accented bass of old Wolf Schultheis through the checkoff ritual, and knew that Highjump was already in motion somewhere on the backside of Clark Mountain. “First stage systems?”
Allington: “Go.”
“Comm systems?”
His son’s reply: “Go.”
“Range operations?”
Kaplan toggled the mike button with his free hand: “Go.” “Highjump second stage?”
The rasp of Glenn Rogan: “Let’s go.”
Old Schultheis went on, implacable, perhaps with a rising tone of excitement. “All prestart power lights correct; ready light is on. Eject Highjump umbilical.”
Rogan could not see the umbilical from the quartz windows of his tiny cockpit. It was Boff Allington, after the briefest of heart-stopping pauses, who exclaimed, “Highjump umbilical clear!”
“Recorders to fast, T minus twelve seconds and counting,” said the old man. Now Kaplan strained to spot any sign of movement high on the northwestern flank of the mountain.
At T minus three, Wolf Schultheis said, “Second stage ignition.” Still no visible movement against the mountain.
“I have ignition,” Rogan confirmed a count later, and, “Separation,” after two more seconds. Even with adaptive geometry, scramjets produced marginal thrust below Mach one.
Kaplan cursed, realizing that he had forgotten to aim the video camera, and found the eyepiece as he leaned far out of the C-2, bracing with his feet. And now, on full zoom, Kaplan could see a surge of flame lancing just above a miles-distant berm of alkali dirt, now two flames, as a tiny silver dart climbed against a slate-blue horizon. It slid upward, slanting across the sky, its velocity now more startling because it was approaching Ivanpah Dry Lake but also because Rogan had the little vehicle’s throttle firewalled, and two scramjets running on liquid hydrogen could send the tiny craft bellowing across this broad desert bowl at twice the speed of sound within seconds. If they hadn’t lost so much hydrogen in the boil-off, they might have hoped for Mach three.
“One point seven - one point niner,” said the voice in Kaplan’s speaker, intoning the machmeter’s readout firmly, but with a buzzing vibrato. Oh yes, that little screamer would be shaking the pilot like a bird dog on point, not ruinous high-amplitude shakes but a hard vibration throughout the ship. Then, “Second-stage cutoff,” Rogan said, as Kaplan followed the passage of Highjump no more than two thousand feet above the lake bed. The twin lances of flame winked out, and Rogan began to bank his tiny silver dart, testing its controls deadstick at thirteen hundred miles an hour.
Only then did the slam and roll of scramjet thunder reach Kaplan, who thought for one instant that Highjump had exploded in midair. He leaped from the wrecker’s cab to keep the craft in sight; saw that it had slowed significantly. Rogan kept the vehicle in a shallow turn, never rising high enough in this natural bowl to make a blip on distant radar, and without the zoom lens Kaplan would not have seen Highjump, a silvery speck against distant peaks, begin to extend its wingtip panels.
It was one thing to boost upward on outsize scramjets and steeply angled delta wings, and quite another to land with those same flight surfaces. Highjump’s delta wings were the same titanium surfaces that Peel Transit had tested for the maglev, then sold as scrap to Exotic Salvage. Tom Schultheis had, in fact, designed them for Highjump, knowing that the maglev would be far less sensitive to the precise shapes of its canards.
But those stubby surfaces that made Highjump resemble a tiny hypersonic cousin of Delta One would never give her the lift she needed to land at only two hundred knots. For that, she needed slender extensions to those wings, and the loads on those extensions had been a nightmare for David Kaplan. Static tests said they would survive. Rogan’s flight test, after a Mach two ride, might say otherwise.
Kaplan saw the fat little craft oscillate slightly, then steady during its long descent toward the flattest, deepest part of Ivanpah Dry Lake. Through the faint whirr of desert wind, Kaplan heard the eerie whistle of a massive titanium dart approaching. “Sloppy response below three hundred knots,” Rogan’s voice echoed from the C-2 cab’s speaker. “Pitch-up may be out of the . . But he tried; God knew he tried. As the tiny craft settled, Rogan seemed to be testing its stall sensitivity, and then its nose dropped sharply, at a lethal angle, while only five hundred feet above the alkali.
Tom Schultheis had explained his fears of a knife-edge stall before; had planned wing slots to lessen the danger. But there had been no time, and Rogan knew to expect trouble. He was getting it.
Dave Kaplan screamed, “Jesus; NO!” The littlecraft knifed steeply downward toward deadly unforgiving alkali and then, with the added velocity of its dive, obtained enough lift to flare out at fifty-foot altitude in a path that was almost horizontal at well over two hundred knots. Highjump was sinking fast, now, heading slightly crosswind, in a path that would bring her uncomfortably near the C-2, and her landing gear was still up because gear extension adds drag while it subtracts lift.
“Do it, Mr. Goodrich,” boomed from the cab speaker, and Kaplan understood now why Schultheis had built pneumatic boosters into the “gear down” rams. All three wheels popped from their wells. ‘ ‘Gear down and locked,’ ’ Rogan announced. Now it was up to those three little Goodrich twenty-ply, tube-less tires which Tom Schultheis had scrounged from a Rockwell salvage sale. The raised legend on each of those tires warned, “2 1 7 KNOTS, MAXIMUM SIX LANDINGS.” They had been used by Rockwell, and one had been scuffed down to the first layer of cord, perhaps by one of Rockwell’s little remotely piloted ramjet vehicles. David Kaplan bared his teeth as Highjump’s rearmost two wheels slammed hard into alkali, leaving a glisten of salt dust trails and smoke in the sunlight.
Then, “Range ops, get on it,” Rogan suggested, and Kaplan realized that the pilot could see him standing beside the C-2 when he should be up in that cab. Highjump had no power, and precious little in the way of brakes. If one of those tires caught fire, the nearest extinguisher would be on the C-2. Kaplan vaulted into die cab and felt the rumble of the Hercules just as Rogan passed, less than a quarter-mile away but still doing over a hundred miles an hour. Smoke was trailing the nearside wing, but that might have been only something inside the scramjet nacelle. It wasn’t.
By the time the C-2 rumbled up with a sigh of its air brakes, Glenn Rogan was already out of the cockpit, kneeling to face the portside wheel. Kaplan leaped down, knelt, and stared.
“Yes, I’m pissin’ on this tire,” Rogan snapped. “Reckon you can find somethin’ better?”
David Kaplan wheeled toward the big carbon dioxide extinguisher mounted behind the C-2’s front fender well and brought it into play seconds later, laughing despite the stink of urine on smoking rubber.
“Thanks. I was just about all out,” Rogan said over the rush of cold gas, and began to rearrange his fly. Five minutes later, they swung the dune buggy to the lake bed with the crane, then brought the sling hovering over Highjump’s silver hide. They ignored the outrigger jacks because when empty the tiny craft weighed no more than a small sedan.
Rogan helped Kaplan position the little aircraft on the flatbed before reaching for his helmet. “I’ve got another ride,” he said dourly, gazing westward into shadows that grew longer by the minute. “Can you get the tiedowns?”
“No problem,” Kaplan grunted, wrestling the big hook from its sling. He watched Rogan warm up the old Porsche and set off across the lake bed with gear changes brisk as the song of a chain saw.
David Kaplan paused, smiled, and patted the still-warm tip of a scramjet tailpipe. It would be another ten minutes before he could haul a tarpaulin over this bird. Postflight inspection would tell the main story, but from a cursory look at the belly of Highjump with its Fresnel lens and thrust chamber, all systems appeared to be “go.” “No problem,” he echoed, his smile fading as slowly as the sun. But then, for Highjump, this had not been much of a jump
. . . .
TWENTY
Wes called a staff meeting the following Monday, and found both Kaplan and Schultheis “cautiously optimistic” with the canard tests - which Allington had carefully faked. It did not occur to Wes that those computer simulations might be simulating events that never occurred, while hiding events that did. Kaplan claimed that a foam injection into the canards could solve the vibration problem; Schultheis insisted that this would require one more set of tests with the maglev. Since neither of them seemed willing to set a date, Wes agreed to that test and left the date open. One thing sure: It should be prior to the beginning of the Santa Fe’s maglev service between
Los Angeles and Las Vegas, in mid-September. They assured Wes that it would be. Privately, they knew it had damned well better be.
If Wes did not question this vagueness, perhaps it was because he had another problem on his mind. He became more restive whenever he left the plant, impatient to face Joey Weatherby so that, one way or another, he could escape that friendly surveillance.
* * * *
After another fruitless call to Weatherby and ten more days of waiting, Vangie called her brother, Thibodeaux. The following morning at the office, she passed her findings on to Wes. “I,” she announced grimly, “seem to be Cajun non grata in Weatherby’s outfit. In any case, Tib claims Mr. Himself won’t be receiving calls ’til he gets back from some trucker powwow in Dallas.”
“Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten; we’ve got an exhibit there,” he replied, pursuing other matters.
It was fifteen minutes later when Vangie, continuing her normal work, suddenly vented a “Huh! Glenn Rogan is taking two days of sick leave. Guess where he can be reached.” “Halfway up the outside of the World Trade Center,” Wes joked.
“At the Market Center Marriott. In Dallas, Wes. I wonder just how much I believe in coincidence.”
He looked up; put down his pen with a half-frown of surmise; and then burst out laughing. “I’ll let you check this one for yourself. Get me Alma Schultheis, will you?”