“Twenty-two g’s!” babbled the project scientist happily. “Almost from the point of liftoff! There’s no way Space Command’s ground-lift barges can match that – or any chemically-fueled launcher.”
The chopper rocked between paired sonic booms, a severe one followed by an impact of lesser intensity. The monocle ferry had gone supersonic even before it reached the altitude of the helicopters, buffeting them with a shock wave reflected from the ground as well as the pulse streaming directly from the vehicle’s surface. The roar of the ferry’s exhaust followed a moment later, attenuating rapidly like that of an aircraft making a low-level pass.
“All right,” Kelly repeated, disregarding the colonels, who he knew would be beaming at his enthusiasm. There was a hell of a lot more to this ‘air defense’ program than the mere question of how well the hardware worked; but hardware that did work gave Kelly a glow of satisfaction with the human race, and he didn’t give a hoot in hell about who knew it. It was their lookout if they thought he was dumb enough to base his recommendations on that alone.
Their helicopter and the other two essed out of their slow starboard orbits, banking a little to port to make it easier for the cameras and observers to follow an object high enough above them to be effectively vertical. There were supposed to be chase planes, T-38 trainers with more cameras, but Kelly could see no sign of them at the moment. The ferry itself was no more than a sunstruck bead of amber.
“Normally,” Dr. Desmond explained, “we’d continue in air-breathing mode to thirty kilometers before switching to internal fuel. For the purpose of his test, however, we’ll convert to hydrogen very shortly in order to – ”
“God almighty!” cried Boardman, the Air Force flack, so far forgetting himself that he started to lurch to his feet against the motion of the helicopter. “For the demonstration you do this?”
“We’re modifying the test sequence in response to earlier results, of course,” the scientist said, glancing over at the military man.
Kelly continued to look upward, squinting by habit, though the goggles made that unnecessary. Boardman didn’t matter. He was typical of people, not necessarily stupid ones, who cling to a view of reality against available evidence and their own presumable benefit. In this case, the public affairs officer was obviously so certain that the ferry would blow up that he preferred the test do nothing to advance the project rather than have Bianci’s man watch a catastrophic failure.
The bead of light which had almost disappeared detonated into a fireball whose color the goggles shifted into the green.
The cameraman had been only a nervous spectator while his unit’s servos tracked the ferry with inhuman skill. Now he squeezed the override trigger in the right grip and began to manually follow the shower of fragments picked out by the sun as they tumbled and danced. His left hand made minute adjustments to the focal length of his lens, shortening it to keep as nearly as possible the whole drifting mass within his field of view.
“God damn it to hell,” said Dr. Desmond very distinctly before he lowered his head, took off his commo helmet, and slammed the helmet as hard as he could against the aluminum deck of the helicopter. It bounced, but the length of communications cord kept it from flying out the open hatch as it tried to do. The two officers straightened their backs against the bulkhead with expressions of disapproval and concern.
Kelly slid his goggles back up on the brow of his helmet, sneezing at the shock of direct sunlight again. He put a hand on the scientist’s nearer shoulder, squeezing hard enough to be noticed but without trying to raise Desmond’s head from where it was buried in his hands. ” ‘Sokay,” the ex-soldier muttered, part of him aware that the scientist couldn’t possibly hear him and another part equally sure that it wasn’t okay, that even future success would not expunge this memory of something which mattered very much vaporizing itself in the Texas sky.
“It’s okay,” Kelly said, repeating words he’d had to use too often before, the words a lieutenant had spoken to him the fire-shot evening when Kelly held the torso of a friend who no longer had a head.