The State is waste. Being wasteful is its nature, since it neither creates wealth nor earns it and hence has no reason to practice thrift. In a perverse way, though, this can -- in the short run -- play to our advantage through the wonderful world of government surplus. Many ærospace items are available from the government since -- as soon as a technology becomes perfected -- the State dumps it in order to buy newer toys, all at taxvictim expense. Don't think of purchasing surplus as profiting from this plunderous arrangement. Think of it as restoring goods to the private sector.
-- The Orbital Settlers' Guide
The old man bumped along the back road in a battered Ford truck that dropped flakes of rust-stained white paint almost as fast as the ancient finish picked up dust. The road was wide, but filled with potholes and gullies that larger trucks and semis easily ignored. The dust kicked up behind him like a rocket trail, blowing across the New Mexico landscape, red in the morning sun.
"Ace" Roberts maneuvered through the obstacle course with slow care. His blue-grey eyes peered at the horizon from beneath craggy folds of lined flesh. He remembered the land well, though the last time he rode this trail Eisenhower resided in the White House. The land lay unchanged, paying no heed to presidents or other ephemeræ.
The proving ground at White Sands had seen better days. He knew that -- he had lived the better days. Now, with a sad nostalgia and nervous anticipation, he approached both his past and his future.
The shuddering truck ached over one more dusty hillock. The road, such as it was, dropped away from his sight beneath the peeling hood. He stopped, tottering on the brink.
Before him spread the desert, pinkish yellow in the dawn's light, just as he had seen it so many times in the distant past. The hills hadn't changed at all. Maybe the morning air held more haze -- smog drifting north from El Paso. For the most part, though, Roberts mused, Man hasn't affected this part of Earth in much of any way.
The thought comforted him as it would any other traveler returning homeward. White Sands had been his home for nearly eight years back in the fifties. And now he intended to bring a piece of it home with him.
With a grind of gears, he set the truck into low and lumbered warily down the road, steering nearly by Braille. Less than a mile away spread a complex of unkempt buildings -- Quonset huts, T-hangers, and rusty rectangular hovels -- and open-air bins, stacks of dusty, rusting metal and faded plastic.
Ace Roberts gazed at the horn of plenty.
Somewhere in that acres-broad jungle of neglected hardware lay a trio of pearls beyond price. To him, that is. To the sergeant on duty, it represented mere surplus, more junk with a very definite price.
Roberts swerved to avoid a fissure in the road that could have swallowed his front end, then hit the brakes and skidded fifty feet down the slope.
There had to be an easier way to build a rocket ship.
The old man grinned. Not at this price, he thought.
The Ford hit bottom; he shifted into second and sped up across the flatter, though still thoroughly pockmarked, terrain. At long last he braked to a stop at the loading dock. A pair of flatbed trailers squatted quietly, loaded with what looked like industrial air conditioning units, plus some rusty machine tools and jigs. A Kenworth sat off to one side, a pair of feet sticking lazily out the driver's window. Music drifted through the still desert air: The Sons of the Pioneers. Roberts cut the engine and listened for a moment, gazing around at the perfection of it all. For a brief moment, he was forty years younger.
Suddenly, a rumble pierced the morning quiet. Roberts fumbled with the door, shoved it open, and jumped out, scanning the horizon. Then he saw it.
A blunt triangular rocket arced up from behind a hill miles away. Crackling and sputtering, it shot skyward with impressive speed. After a few seconds the nearly invisible LOX/LH2 flame died out. For a brief moment the bird kept flying upward, straining against gravity. Then -- in defiance of the ballistic behavior of other rockets -- the engines fired up again and the contraption hovered. Shaped like an elongated pyramid, the rocket ship further impressed the old man by moving sideways for several seconds.
A thrill of excitement shot through Roberts. He remembered feeling the same way four decades before, watching captured V-2's blast up over the unchanging sandy terrain.
"Easy for you guys," he muttered after a moment.
The bizarre vehicle, dropping stern-first, settled out of sight below a hill. An instant later, a small cloud of smoke and dust puffed upward.
Roberts backhanded some sweat from his forehead. Seven in the morning and already the sun began to blister the countryside. The low humidity, though, moderated the oppressive heat.
Roberts seized a well-worn black briefcase from the cab and walked over to the office, whistling along to Cool Water on the truck driver's CD deck.
The door opened on a cramped reception area consisting of a grey desk, green chairs, and walls covered with paperwork. Behind the desk sat an army sergeant studiously involved in a crossword puzzle. In his late thirties, he stood lean and gangly, with tan, leathery skin and sandy hair laced with a premature frost.
Nipping the cigarette from his lips, he said, "Yessir?"
The other put out his hand. "Ace Roberts. I'm here to pick up some engines."
"Where're you from?"
"Saratoga, California."
"Long ride for old motors," the sergeant said, rising to shake the offered hand.
"They're pretty special motors," Roberts said with a thin smile. Closer now, he could read the sergeant's name tag. "Sergeant Wells," he added. Pulling a sheaf of papers from his briefcase, he handed them to the man behind the desk.
After a moment of flipping through the stack, the military man smiled.
"Oh, yeah. Pretty special. Three Aerobee Three-Five-Oh's." He looked across at the man and grinned. "Goin' somewhere?"
Roberts smiled. "Just local."
Wells tore a few pages off the bottom of the stack, ran them through the timer stamp, and dropped them into an empty tray on the desktop. "You're that rocket guy, right? From California?"
Roberts nodded.
"How long you been working on that thing?"
"Nineteen years."
The sergeant shook his head. "I've got a friend," he said, "who's been working on a kit airplane for ten. Hasn't even got the wings on the fuselage yet." He picked up a clipboard and stepped out from behind the desk. "Let's grab a forklift and find these babies."
Sgt. Wells maneuvered the forklift between lines of rusting trucks that seemed to have been carved out of the red desert earth. Roberts followed in his truck, which looked right at home in the graveyard. They turned left at a stack of drive shafts and bounced eastward toward a grey line of Quonset huts.
Wells stopped the forklift at the sliding doors on one end of the nearest hut. Hopping out, he fumbled with a huge set of keys, trying this one and that, until at last the rusty padlock clunked open. Roberts stepped up to help. The doors rumbled apart like distant thunder to release a dry, dusty smell from inside.
Light pierced the hut through holes in the curved roof, filling the space inside with parallel lances of gold. Roberts let his eyes adjust to the partial darkness, then gazed around like Carter in King Tut's tomb.
"Over there, I think." The sergeant pointed toward a pallet halfway down the length of the building.
They hopped aboard the forklift and lumbered in, slowly gliding past stacks of aluminum and magnesium tubing, fins, vanes, and nose cones. Smaller pallets here and there supported cases of guidance equipment, telemetry devices, and vacuum tubes.
"Yep," Sgt. Wells drawled. "Here're your babies."
Ace slid out and stepped over to the pallet. On it, wrapped in thick plastic sheeting, lay a trio of identical objects about five feet long and two feet in diameter. Through the translucent plastic, Roberts saw tantalizing glimpses of tubing, superlative welds, and the graceful bell curves of the exhaust nozzles.
"Guaranteed prime surplus," Wells said with a grin.
Roberts smiled. "Let's do it."
Ace watched with boyish excitement as the forklift slowly lowered the pallet onto the back of his truck. The pickup groaned under the weight, but took the load without further protest. He climbed into the bed to lash the precious cargo tightly.
"Thank you, sergeant," he said, climbing into the cab when he had finished.
"Have fun with 'em," Wells said. "But be careful." He smiled. "I guess I don't have to say that to someone who's taken nineteen years to build something."
Roberts smiled, nodding. "I'll be careful. I'll be sitting on top of these babies. I'll be very careful."
Wells leaned against the side of the forklift and lit a cigarette. His smile turned wistful. "Hell," he said, "punch a hole in the sky for us, then."
The sergeant watched the old man pull slowly out of the junkyard. For a long while he leaned against the forklift. When he finally finished his cigarette, he flicked it to a bare patch of ground, put his hands in his pockets, and spent a long time staring up at the clear blue desert sky.
The trip back to California would be long and dull for Roberts. He appreciated the view of New Mexico, Arizona, and the Mojave, but they could not rival the excitement that pulsated within him. Three rocket engines, covered with an olive-drab tarp, lay strapped to the bed of his pickup, and they were all his. It had taken years to save up the money to buy them, years of paperwork shuffled back and forth to gain authorization to possess the small motors. Now they were his to use.
An Aerobee 350 engine can lift a six hundred pound payload two hundred miles into Space. Roberts' design called for two of the Aerobees to constitute the first stage of his rocket. The third engine would propel the second stage into orbit. The payload would consist of Ace Roberts, telemetry, life support, and whatever else he needed to ferry himself up to an orbital rendezvous if all worked as it should. Roberts spent his life making sure things worked as they should.
Born in Iowa to farming parents, Roberts was the only one of seven brothers and sisters who spent any time looking upward at the sky instead of downward to the earth. He could not explain his early fascination with airplanes and flight, nor the reason that he alone of his family was so profoundly affected by the sight of a skyrocket screaming upward on Independence Day. His family and friends watched such annual displays and saw only brilliant colors; Ace felt drawn into the sky with each ascent, experienced an explosion of heavenly glory with each air burst.
At age sixteen, he enlisted in the Army. By the time of the Second World War, he was a lieutenant in the European theater of operations. When Operation Paperclip successfully rescued Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists from the encroaching Soviets, Ace Roberts helped smuggle out V-2 parts and cartons of documents from Peenemünde to Fort Bliss, Texas. He followed von Braun to Huntsville, Alabama -- nicknamed Hunsville after the arrival of the Germans -- and eventually settled in White Sands, New Mexico, to work as a design safety officer.
The captured V-2 missiles inspired him. Test launches, whether modest successes or spectacular failures, never ceased to excite him in a way he found to be inexplicable to his fellow workers. Rockets awed them, certainly, but Ace could tell that the reactions of most of them did not rise from any deeper well than did the oohs and ahhs of his family at the fireworks displays. They possessed no sense of the religious about rockets. Ace did. He ached with a reverence for the sanctity of a rocket's flight, he yearned to rise up with it, to feel the comforting weight of acceleration, to see with his own eyes the Sun alight in the black night beyond Earth. A glimpse at the Moon filled him with an awe impossible to communicate to his friends and co-workers. Nor did he wish to. These were his dreams and innermost thoughts. As might a pilgrim in a foreign land, he kept his worship secret and spoke not of his goddess. He did not proselytize to the unconverted. To others, he was just an old prairie boy with no formal education beyond the tenth grade, who happened to build rockets, who sometimes looked up at a rocket's trail with a mist in his eyes that was no doubt an effect of the desert heat and nothing more.
Ace Roberts had met someone once who also worshipped at the altar of the stars. A man -- a boy, at first -- who burned with the dream of Space and struggled with him to get there. He could still remember the eager, hungry look in the boy's eyes as he watched Ace launch a twenty-foot test rocket. He wondered about Paul Volnos, where he was and what had become of him over the past few years.
The broad, flat interstate highway spread about him, narrowing like a sword point toward the west. Man has always moved westward, Roberts thought, always chasing the setting sun, never able to catch it. Now, just as we've reached the end of our westward journey around the planet, we must turn and head toward the east in order to leave Earth, launching into the rising sun.
His thoughts followed that line for a long while, and he forgot again about Paul Volnos and the past. Ace Roberts contemplated the future.
Marcus Aurelius Grant contemplated the future, too; a far different future. The evening of that same day, he sat behind the wheel of a luxury Jeep overlooking the gloaming darkness of the New Mexico desert less than a hundred miles from where Roberts had purchased the surplus Aerobees. Marcus Grant dabbled in surplus, too. He specialized, though, in import and export. The violet sky fading to black occulted his features, and the craggy bluff on which he parked hid most of his vehicle from view.
He gazed down at a truck and trailer rig parked incongruously in the middle of the rocky wasteland. Its lights were off, its engine as silent as the still air around it. From inside the cab came the muted sound of Gogi Grant singing The Wayward Wind. A coyote howled somewhere amid the boulders. The call received an answer, then spread to other hideaways. Grant lit a cigarette while keeping his gaze focused on the southern sky. His wristwatch chimed; it broke the calm as surely as a siren. Without a word, he flicked the cigarette to the ground, the red ember following one parabolic trajectory while Marcus Grant watched another.
The red dot in the southern sky would have been invisible over even the smallest populated area. Here in the wilderness, where no city light shone for thousands of square miles, its meager glow was just barely noticeable. The point of crimson appeared to rise upward, like a minor planet racing the stars. Long before it reached the zenith, though, its glow flickered and died. Grant's eyes moved slowly, their gaze following the remainder of the trajectory of the invisible object. It would hit a mile or so northeast of their position. He raised a pair of night vision binoculars to his eyes.
In the smeared green glow of the instrument, he saw the desert below illuminated by amplified starlight. It could have been the surface of Mars but for the occasional bold movement of nocturnal creatures unaware of their observation by man. This man was a hunter, but his quarry was not a living thing. His target appeared as a blinding, lime-hued cloud in the binoculars. A few seconds later, the sound of the crash reached him, followed by a curious crack and whistling sound that rose backward up the tone scale. The coyotes ceased their calls and scrambled for cover.
He adjusted the rangefinder on the binocs, lowered them, and gunned the Jeep into life. The truck diesel engine below roared simultaneously.
The dust still hovered around the impact crater, not completely settled yet, when the Jeep skidded to a halt, the truck still half a mile away. Grant jumped out, ran to the rim of the hundred-foot-wide hole and switched on his flashlight. In the glow, his triumphant grin revealed a line of straight, white teeth; his eyes glimmered with excitement; dark, wavy hair, tied back loosely in a queue, fell to one side of his neck. He gazed down at a billion dollars.
Actually, the two-by-eight-foot cylinder with rounded ends that looked so much like a giant drug capsule had a street value of only fifty million dollars. Marcus Grant simply liked to contemplate the future. For now, though, the immediate future depended on the prompt recovery of the missile payload and an equally prompt escape from the desert.
With a groan of air brakes, the truck stopped, turned, and backed up to the crater. Rear doors clattered open. Two muscular men jumped out and -- pulling two lines behind them -- joined Grant in a slide down the crater slope.
Grant looked quickly at the scattered remains of the rocket: only the thick payload canister had survived intact; Grant had designed the rest of the vehicle to absorb a major portion of the impact forces by crumpling. No part of the forward payload shroud was visible. The tail section that comprised engine, fuel tanks, guidance systems, and control surfaces lay all about the sides of the crater in twisted pieces of aluminum and steel.
Grant found the recessed attach points on the rear of the cylinder; they had survived the landing. The two men clipped hooks to the rings and ran back up the slope. They worked wordlessly, as though the desert possessed ears to hear what transpired in the dusty pit.
A motor squealed into life, winching in the cables to hoist the capsule out of the crater. Grant cleared a few large boulders from the path of the cargo to avoid entanglements and watched it ascend to the rim of the crater. Stars glowed sharply in the black sky.
He looked away, back toward the earth. Marcus Grant never looked at the stars. Furthermore, he had planned this operation for a moonless night. He refused to confront Moon or stars, even with a glance.
He concentrated on climbing out of the pit. Eyes focused on the cylinder, he felt a thrill of triumph surge through him, a sense both of vindication and of vengeance. He had won his first battle. He knew now that he could win the war.
The news was two months old when it landed on Joseph Lester's desk. The woman who tossed it there, Hillary Kaye, worked as a photographer for the Fort Collins Sentinel, the city's newspaper. Lester, their science reporter, stood tall -- and wide -- with dark curly hair and a broad, brooding face that did nothing to disguise a deep, ever-present anger. At twenty-eight years old, he looked much older. Few people liked him. He liked even fewer, if any.
He stared at the curling fax paper and said, "What's that?"
"There's this new fad, Joe. It's called 'reading.' " Hillary kept moving.
He glanced at the slug line, then shouted: "Hey! Did this just come over the wire?"
Hillary turned. Younger than Lester, slimmer, shorter, lighter-haired, and considerably more attractive by any criterion, her mood struck a similarly sour note.
"No, Joe, I've been hiding IT, waiting for just this moment to spring it on you. The whole office is in on it."
Lester snorted and read the wire story.
LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO -- Military officials confirmed today that a small ballistic rocket crash-landed two months ago in the desert halfway between the town of Deming and the Mexican border. NORAD/Space Command tracking equipment could not pinpoint the launch site, but sources suggest that the rocket may have been launched from as far south as the central Mexican desert.NORAD refuses to speculate on the mysterious missile, but insists it was too small to have had any military purpose, suggesting that a sounding rocket may have gone off course
An unidentified source within the Drug Enforcement Agency gave credence to the view that the missile might have been a sophisticated attempt to smuggle cocaine into the United States. "These drug lords control billions of dollars, and rockets would simply be the latest toy in their deadly game," the source said.
Investigators found a crater, missile debris, and tire tracks. There are no suspects, though the rocket fragments will be examined for any clues they might yield.
Lester's heartbeat quickened. Purely out of habit, he hid his excitement. "Who's covering this?" he asked.
Hillary shrugged. "No one. It's old news. There's nothing out there but a hole in the ground. Why get so worked up?"
"I'm not worked up. Don't you see this is news? Drug-smuggling missiles raining down on America? Who could have devised such an idea? How did they build it? Where? Why?"
Hillary shook her head of wispy blond hair. "You forgot what and when."
He ignored her attempt at humor. "There are cheaper and more reliable ways to smuggle drugs. Why go for something as bizarre as a rocket?"
"You expect sanity from coke fiends?"
"Drugs are a business, not an art form. The successful smugglers are the most level-headed and ingenious."
"Maybe this guy's not successful."
"Maybe he won't be. Maybe I'll want to be there when he screws up."
Lester slid the New Mexico article into a manila folder and put the folder into his tickler file.
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