Consoles were coming to life in the shed. Engineers were speaking to each other in their clipped jargon. Pancho watched Randolph. The man seemed outwardly relaxed as he stood with both hands jammed into his windbreaker pockets, watching the missile while the crane waddled back toward them.
Duncan buzzed around the shed like a bee in a flower bed. The tension built up; Pancho could feel it radiating from the backs of the crew standing by the consoles.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Amanda whispered.
Pancho looked up at the looming thunderheads. “Sooner or later.”
At last Duncan said to Randolph, “We’re ready to launch.”
“Okay,” said Randolph. “Do it before it starts pouring.”
Duncan said crisply, “Launch!”
Pancho turned her attention to the missile sitting out on the grass. For a moment nothing happened, but then its tail-end spurted flame and it lurched forward. Just as she heard the whining scream of the jet engine, another sound cut in: a deeper, more powerful roar. The missile leaped off the ground, angling sharply toward the cloud-filled sky, trailing a billow of smoke.
Something fell away from the climbing missile. A rocket pack, Pancho realized. They used it to get the bird off the ground.
The plane levelled off a scant hundred meters in the air and circled the field once.
“Nominal flight,” one of the engineers called out.
“Fusion drive ready?” Duncan asked.
“Primed and ready.”
“Light it.”
The missile seemed to falter for a moment, as if it had stalled in midair. Pancho saw the slightly smoky exhaust wink out, heard the jet engine’s screech die away. The missile glided for several moments, losing altitude.
Then it seemed to bite into the air, raising its nose and climbing steeply upward as it howled a thin, screeching ethereal wail.
“Programmed flight trajectory,” Pancho heard someone call out. “On the money.”
The bird flew out to sea until it was a barely visible speck, then turned back and rushed toward them, climbing almost to the base of the thunderheads, its ghostly wail barely audible, streaking past, heading inland. Then it turned again and headed seaward once more. Racetrack course, Pancho realized.
Lightning was flickering in the clouds now.
“Coming up on the two-minute mark,” said one of the engineers. “Mark! Two minutes.”
“Bring her in,” Duncan commanded.
“Automatic trajectory,” came the answer.
Pancho watched as the missile turned back toward them once again, dropped its flaps, slowed, and gracefully descended for a landing out in the area where it had taken off. The grass was scorched out there from the takeoff rocket’s hot exhaust.
Turning slightly, she saw that Randolph was standing just outside the door, eyes riveted to the approaching missile, mouth slightly open, fists clenched.
The missile was still moving fast when it touched the ground, bounced into the air again, wobbled back to the ground, and then plowed nose-first into the dirt, throwing a spray of grass clods and pebbles as it flipped over onto its back and banged down so hard one of the wings tore off. It sounded like a junkyard falling out of the sky.
But the engineers and technicians were all cheering, jumping up and down, pounding each other on the back, yelling and waving like a team that had just scored a gold medal in the Olympics. Randolph yanked off his cap and pegged it out toward the sea.
“Och, what a divot!” Duncan shouted. He raced through the open door to Randolph and launched himself into the older man’s arms, wrapping his legs around Randolph’s middle. Randolph staggered backward and they fell to the ground together, laughing like maniacs.
Pancho looked at Amanda. She seemed just as puzzled as Pancho felt.
With a shrug, Pancho said, “I guess any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”
Amanda shook her head. “I shouldn’t think you’d walk away from that one if you’d been aboard it.”
Randolph was disentangling himself from Duncan and getting to his feet. Brushing dirt from his windbreaker, grinning hugely, he walked over to Amanda and Pancho while Duncan scampered toward the shed.
“It works!” Randolph said. “You’ve just witnessed history, ladies. The first actual flight of a fusion-powered vehicle.”