“Someday,” Kelly said aloud, “people are going to learn that the less they try to hide, the less problem they have explaining things. But I don’t expect the notion to take hold in the military any time soon.”
“Pardon?” asked Desmond, the first syllable minutely clipped by his voice-activated microphone. The scientist was Kelly’s age or a few years younger, a short-bearded man who slung a pen-caddy from one side of his belt and a worn-looking calculator from the other. It was probably his normal working garb – as were the dress uniforms of the public-affairs colonels, flacks of type which Kelly would have found his natural enemy even if they hadn’t been military.
“I’d been meaning to ask you, Dr. Desmond,” said Kelly, rubbing from his eyes the prickliness of staring into the desert of the huge Fort Bliss reservation, “just why. you think the initial field test failed?”
“Ah, I think it’s important to recall, Mr. Kelly,” interjected one of the colonels – it was uncertain which through the headphones – “that the test was by no means a failure. The test vehicle performed perfectly throughout eighty-three percent of the spectrum planned – ”
“Well good god, Boardman,” snapped the project scientist, “it blew up, didn’t it? That’s what you mean, isn’t it?” Desmond continued, snapping his head around from the officers across the bay to Kelly seated on the portion of the bench closest to the fully-opened starboard hatch. “I certainly don’t consider that, that fireworks display a success.”
Kelly smiled, the expression only incidentally directed toward the colonels. “Though I gather many of the systems did work as planned, Doctor?” he said, playing the scientist now that he had enough of a personality sample from which to work. Even among the project’s civilians, there were familiar – and not wholly exclusive – categories of scientists and scientific politicians. Desmond had seemed to be in the former category, but Kelly had found no opportunity to speak to him alone.
The public affairs officers were probably intended to smother honest discussion within the spotting helicopter the same way the administrators had done on the ground. That plan was being frustrated by what was more than a personality quirk: Desmond could not imagine that anything the military officers said or wished was of any concern to him. It was not a matter of their rank or anyone’s position in a formal organizational chart: Colonels Boardman and Johnson were simply of another species.
“Yes, absolutely,” agreed the project scientist as he shook his head in quick chops. “Nothing went wrong during air-breathing mode, nothing we could see in the telemetry, of course – it’d have been nice to get the hardware back for a hands-on.”
“I think you’d better get your goggles in place now, Mr. Kelly,” said the Air Force officer, sliding his own protective eyewear into place. The functional thermoplastic communications helmets looked even sillier atop dress uniforms than they did over the civilian clothes Desmond, and Kelly himself, wore. “For safety’s sake, you know.”
Kelly was anchored to a roof strap with his left hand by habit that freed his right for the rifle he did not carry here, not on this mission or in this world where ‘cut-throat’ meant somebody might lose a job or a contract. … He looked at the PR flacks, missing part of what Desmond was saying because his mind was on things that were not the job of the Special Assistant to Representative Bianci.
The colonels straightened, one of them with a grimace of repulsion, and neither of them tried again to break in as the project scientist continued, ” – plating by the aluminum oxide particles we inject with the on-board hydrogen to provide detonation nuclei during that portion of the pulsejet phase. Chui-lin insists the plasma itself scavenges the chambers and that the fault must be the multilayer mirrors themselves despite the sapphire coating.”
“But there’s just as much likelihood of blast damage when you’re expelling atmosphere as when you’re running on internal fuel, isn’t there?” said Kelly, who had done his homework on this one as he did on any task set him by Representative Bianci; and as he had done in the past, when others tasked him.