LITMIR.BIZ

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is?’

      Della shook her head. ‘Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams per kilogram –’

      Emma asked, ‘Heptyl?’

      ‘Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of water, rivers and marshes …’ Della smiled thinly. ‘I’m sorry. I guess we got a little worked up, driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious.’

      Emma nodded. Right now she didn’t see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. ‘He calls you Bill Proxmire in a skirt.’ Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing Senator of the late twentieth century.

      Maura Della smiled. ‘Well, I don’t wear skirts much. But I’ll take it as a compliment.’

      ‘Damn right,’ said Malenfant easily, utterly unfazed. ‘Proxmire was an unthinking opponent of progress –’

      ‘While I,’ said Della dryly to Emma, ‘am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant is calculating, amenable to persuasion.’

      ‘I told you it was a compliment,’ Malenfant said.

      As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadows of the Portakabin’s doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant. Cornelius didn’t blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing cornea implants.

      Malenfant frowned at him, startled. ‘And who the hell are you?’

      Cornelius introduced himself and his company.

      Malenfant growled. ‘Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the compound.’

      Emma tugged his sleeve. ‘I brought him in.’ She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius represented. ‘Take him seriously, Malenfant.’

      Cornelius said, ‘I’m here to support you, Colonel Malenfant. Really. I don’t represent any threat to you.’

      ‘Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant.’ He turned to Della. ‘I apologize for this. I get these bullshit artists all the time.’

      Della murmured, ‘I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that.’

      Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. ‘You have me wrong, Malenfant. We’re not psychics. We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was formerly a mathematician, for instance.

      ‘Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s, began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our studies of the future are generally successful.’

      ‘What proof?’

      ‘We’ve become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you.’ He smiled.

      ‘Why have you come here today?’

      ‘To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,’ said Cornelius.

      Della looked confused. ‘Key Largo? In Florida?’

      The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.

      ‘This is too complicated for me,’ Malenfant said at last. ‘Get in the jeep. Please. We’ve got some hardware to see. Now that I do understand.’

      Meekly, harbouring their own thoughts, they obeyed.

      It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, further than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.

      Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.

      But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangar-like buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?

      Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.

      Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap – not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife – but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.

      In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.

      But she did wonder – if Cornelius turned out to be right – if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant …

      Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant – supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful – seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or DC. He looked like what he was, she thought – or rather what he had always wanted to be – a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.

      But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.

      They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the centre of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.

      And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a Space Shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapour was venting from somewhere in the stack and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

      Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

      Malenfant pulled up the jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

      ‘What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a Space Shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The Shuttle engines we use are obsolete: they’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old Shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.’ He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. ‘At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury …’

      They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, ‘We’ve already achieved 520-second burns

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