“Right, they tested Skybolt and they tested it, the Air Force did,” the aide continued. “Kept reporting successes and partial successes – to the Brits, too, mind, the British government was basing its whole defense policy on Skybolt – right down to the time the Air Force canceled the program because they never once had gotten the thing to work right.”
Kelly leaned back, flexing his big arms against the wood of the chair they gripped. “Turned out on one of those ‘partial successes,’ they’d detached the missile from the bomber carrying it, and it hadn’t ignited, hadn’t done anything but drop a couple miles and put a new crater in the desert. S’far as anybody could tell, the only thing the fly boys had tested successfully was the law of gravity, and that continued to perform up to specs.”
“Which is why you’re on my staff, Tom,” said Bianci after an easy chuckle. “But you don’t think the monocle ferry’s another Skybolt?”
Kelly sighed and knuckled his eyes, relaxed again now that he was back in the present. “Well, Hughes isn’t prime contractor,” he said, “that’s one thing to the good.”
He opened his eyes and looked up to meet the congressman’s. Kelly was calm, now, and his subconscious had organized his data into a personal version of truth, the most he had ever tried to achieve. “Look, sir,” he said, “they’ve got a glitch in the hydrogen pulsejet mode they need from a hundred thousand feet to, say, thirty miles. Probably soluble, but on this sort of thing you won’t get guarantees from anybody you’d trust to tell the truth about the weather outside.”
The aide spread his hands, palms down to either side of the chair, forming a base layer for the next edifice of facts. Bianci’s eyes blinked unwilled from Kelly’s face to the pinkish burn scars on both wrists. The man himself had when asked muttered, “Just a kerosene fire, price of bein’ young and dumb,” but the file Bianci had read carefully before he’d hired Tom Kelly spoke also of the helicopter and the three men dragged from the wreckage by Sergeant E-5 Kelly, who had ignored the facts that one of the men was dead already and that the ruptured fuel tank was likely to blow at any instant.
“If they do get that one cured,” Kelly continued, absorbed in what he was saying, “then sure, there’s a thousand other things that can go unfixably wrong, all along the line – but that’s technology, not this project alone, and the one guy out there in El Paso willing to talk gave me a good feeling. Don’t think he’d be workin’ on a boondoggle. And okay, that’s my gut and I’m not in the insurance business either.”
He looked at the print on the wall before him, then added, “But I think it might work. And I think it might be nice to have an alternative to Fortress.”
“Which works very well,” said the congressman. The only sign that his own emotional temperature had risen was the way his fingers, playing with the modem beside him on the desk, stilled. Belief in space-based defense, as embodied in Fortress, had more than any other single factor brought Carlo Bianci into politics.
The framed print on the wall behind Bianci was from the original design studies on Fortress. The artist had chosen to make the doughnut of shielding material look smooth and metallic. In fact the visible outer surface was lumpy and irregular, chunks of slag spit into Earth orbit by the mass driver at the American lunar base and fused there into armor for Fortress.
The space station itself was a dumbbell spinning within the doughnut. Living quarters for the crews were in the lobes, where centrifugal force counterfeited gravity, but the real work of Fortress was done in the motionless spherical hub. A great-winged ferry, launched like an aircraft from a Space Command base in Florida or California, was shown docking at the ‘north’ pole – the axis from which the station’s direction of rotation was counterclockwise.
The array of nuclear weapons depending from the south pole had been left out of the painting. Three thousand H-bombs, each with its separate reentry vehicle, would have been too nightmarish for even the most hawkish of voters. That was often the case with the truth.