CHAPTER 40

I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
-- William Shakespeare

15 July

"Light off four rocket engines in the middle of South Bronx?" Sam Friedman stared at Davy Crockett as if he had been pole-axed. "You've gone nuts!"

Crockett gazed levelly at his friend. They sat in Davy's dorm room surrounded by Bernadette, Natasha, Hacker, and Penny. More by default than anything else, these six constituted the inner circle of the South Bronx conspiracy. Crockett knew more about orbital mechanics than the rest, and, as the only one who had ever flown anything, became the pilot by default. Friedman assumed the responsibilities of the fuel expert. Hacker -- computer maven -- programmed the ship's cybernetics, while Natasha designed the life support system. Penny, having nearly single-handedly assembled the ship, chose to serve as the all-around trouble-shooter. Bernadette learned everything she could about the diverse disciplines that astronautics comprised. She evolved into be the project manager.

They all sat around Crockett, shocked at his pronouncement.

"We've got to test fire the engines and the rotating seal on the centrifugal pump," he said. "Simple as that. And I suggest we do it just once, since the noise and fire will attract attention, which we don't want to do twice."

"And how in hell do you plan to do it?"

Davy smiled with a sly tilt.

***

Sam stared at the massive steel stand bolted securely to the concrete floor and braced against the walls, a latticework of steel supporting the hub of the spacecraft's rotor. From its lower middle, two thick feed lines -- wrapped in layer upon layer of heat resistant aluminized Mylar -- snaked across the floor toward two large tankers -- still connected to the 18-wheeler rigs that brought them in -- one of which shed cold mist from its frosty exterior. One tank was marked LOX and the other, originally marked KEROSENE, had been re-christened BAGELS in spray paint. Both were pressure fed by a third, smaller truck carrying a tank of liquid nitrogen, painted with the appellation CREAM CHEESE.

The four rocket engines, instead of being at the end of twenty-foot rotor blades, were each attached to stubby aluminum struts only three feet long and not at all ærodynamically designed. The tight array enabled the motors to direct their combined thrust outward without scorching the walls, while at the same time ensuring that the entire arrangement did not impart enough lift to wrench the assembly free of its moorings.

"This will never work," Friedman said to Crockett.

"Why? They can't lift up the whole building. If the bolts hold--"

"They'll hold," Giannini said.

"--the exhaust will dissipate sideways. Harmlessly. We run up the engines for a two hundred second burn, shut them down, hit the quick release on the stand, and haul the whole shebang back to the factory." He gazed at the others. "What could be simpler?"

Giannini agreed with Crockett's assessment. "The thrust needed to spin the blades on the real ship is small compared to a conventional rocket, so noise and exhaust will be way low. And the LOX will burn the kerosene completely so we won't have any smoke -- just steam. And who'll notice a little extra humidity in the Bronx this time of year?"

Bernadette turned a wrench one more time to tighten down the videocam she had placed a few yards away from the engines. "And if the engines fly loose or the seal blows, we're far enough away from the factory that the ship isn't in any danger."

"Sure," Friedman muttered. "As if losing one of these parts wouldn't ground us just as effectively."

"Sam"--Davy clapped a hand around his friend's shoulder--"You've got to cheer up. I'm thinking of calling this Project Que Sera Sera in your honor. Remember -- whatever doesn't destroy us makes us stronger!"

Friedman turned a gimlet eye toward his buckskinned friend. "And if this destroys us?"

Crockett smiled and gave Sam a couple of pats. "Then remember the Alamo." He raised both hands overhead and yelled, "All right people, it's show time! Initiate burn sequence start!"

" 'Remember the Alamo,' " Sam said to Natasha between status comments. "I'm remembering the July Fourth that I stood too close to a Piccolo Pete and set my hair on fire!"

Hacker keyed in the code to begin the countdown. "T-minus six minutes," he said calmly.

"Camera running?"

"Roger!" Bernadette confirmed.

"Telemetry?"

"Flowing," Hacker said.

Davy nodded and pulled a celphone from his necessaries bag and punched in a number. Someone instantly answered on the other end.

"Fire control," a woman's voice said. "Receiving telemetry."

"Great," Davy said. "Keep the line open." Then he called out, "APU's?"

"Ready for powerup." Hacker switched back and forth between half a dozen separate functions.

"Fuel and LOX?"

"Nominal," Sam said, looking at his own computer.

"Time?" Crockett asked.

"T-minus five minutes, twenty seconds," Hacker replied.

"All right," Davy said, looking around him. "Everybody run."

Relieved, the crew turned and raced from the building, out into the midnight streets. Crush 69 and other members of SBX-13 stood guard outside with chains, bats, and guns. They fit into the street scene far more reasonably than the scrambling post-grads, several in white lab coats like mad scientists, one in a faded army jacket carrying a wireless laptop computer, and the last one rustling out in fringed rawhide with a coonskin hat the tail of which bounced crazily against the back of his neck with every long, hasty stride.

"Pull out, guys!" he shouted to the guards, who swiftly joined the others in their retreat.

Everyone raced into another abandoned building diagonally across the street. Up five flights of stairs they ran. Each landing had been illuminated beforehand with a Cyalume light stick, the faint green glow guiding their ascent. Breathless, they reached the roof and slid to a halt on the gravel-sprinkled tar. Over the waist-high cornice surrounding the rooftop, they leaned to peer at the test site.

The streets lay empty at that hour. The other gangs that roamed the borough kept their distance, too, by design of SBX-13, which had spread the rumor of a planned cop ambush. In the distance, police and ambulance sirens wailed their incessant song like cats in the heat. Locally, though, the avenue remained quiet and dark, lit only by two street lights at opposite ends of the street.

"T-minus two minutes," Hacker said.

The subsequent one hundred-twenty seconds consisted of a rapid-fire checklist conducted by computer and verbally confirmed by one of three sources: Hacker, Sam, or Carla Pulaski, the student on the other end of the celphone who sat in the safety and comfort of the dormitory watching the entire process on video and telemetry.

"T-minus ten," Hacker said. "Nine, eight--"

"Lines pressurized."

"Six, five--"

"Fire in the hole," Bernadette said, watching the video screen as igniters sent a cascade of sparks across each engine nozzle, white-hot points of light showering down to the concrete floor.

"Three, two, one, ignition!"

Outside the building, no one heard a sound at first, then the fuel flow rumbled like the sound of a distant waterfall. A dim glow radiated from the painted-over windows in the upper floors. At that instant, the night erupted with the hiss of a giant angry snake, augmented by an eerie whirring sound, as if a humongous Independence Day pinwheel had been lit off inside the abandoned hulk.

"We have ignition!" Sam and Bernadette screamed in unison, one staring at a string of numbers on a computer, the other watching the brilliant glow on a video screen.

An instant later, the video image tilted and went black as the exhaust tore the camera loose from its mount and flung it against a brick wall. Blinding white light glared through the windows an instant before shattering them completely to send thousands of shards glittering into the street. Steam erupted from inside, filling the streets with a dank, hot stench of burning fuel-oil.

"Cut it off!" Crockett shouted as the exhaust plumes sputtered out the doors and windows like geysers in a primordial hell.

Hacker's thumb frantically rolled over the small trackball, moving the cursor to a box that read ABORT IGNITION. His pinkie rammed against the enter key and just as suddenly the shrieking hiss reduced to a growl then to a sizzle as the fuel ceased to feed the ravening dervish. Slowly the throbbing whir of the rotor dropped in pitch and volume as the onlookers stood awestruck by the power of the array. Then Crockett shouted, "Pull the engines!" and the rescue team raced down the stairs and into the street.

The building housing the test stand radiated an eerie, dim orange glow that flickered through the blasted windows. Steam and smoke billowed from the rectangles like mist from a tomb. The echoes of their experiment dissipated by the time they reached the street, and the sound of car alarms and sirens reverberated through the night. From inside the test building crackled the distinctive sound of burning timber.

"We have less than five minutes to get everything to the factory," Davy yelled as he slipped on insulated Nomex gloves. "Roll out!"

He raced into the smoking building first, followed by Bernadette and the others, and checked out the engine test stand.

"Success," he said, gazing at the intact rotor and engines.

"Are your shoes warm?" Bernadette asked.

Davy looked down to see the soles of their shoes softening on the hot concrete near the test stand.

"Bring in the rig."

Bernadette trotted outside to where the engine-hauling semi waited.

The others joined Crockett at their own posts: Penny hopped into the cab of the fuel truck, Sam into the one carrying the oxidizer; Natasha disconnected the fuel lines and jumped into the nitrogen-tank truck to haul it away; Hacker gathered up the telemetry remotes, the ruined videocam, and miscellaneous equipment, threw them unceremoniously into the back of a pickup, and raced into the night, followed by Natasha and -- with a tooth-jarring grinding of gears, a double-clutching Penny. None of the trucks had endured much damage, but the tires on each of them rolled with a sickeningly sticky sound as rubber peeled away from the hot concrete floor.

Bernadette backed her rig up to the edge of the test stand following Davy's hand signals, then waited with the engine running while he hooked up the winch. Unlatching the quick-connect bolts Penny had devised, he was able single-handedly to winch the rotor assembly onto the flatbed and secure the oblong test stand into matching bolts.

"All set," he shouted, jumping into the cab. "Burn rubber!"

Bernadette ground gears and the rig lurched slowly forward. Two loud bangs erupted from the rear of the flatbed.

"I didn't mean it literally!" Davy cried. "Damn. We got too close. The tires melted!"

"We'll make it," she replied, putting the pedal to the metal and lurching forward.

"We'd better," Crockett said, "before the fire department remembers there's a South Bronx."

***

The fire department remembered. The following morning, Earl MacCray, chief arson investigator for the borough, arrived to see the engine company rolling up their hoses and securing their equipment. MacCray was a middle-aged, greying man of moderate height who carried himself with a stern pride in his Scots-Irish roots and a disinclination toward sloth. His uniform started out each morning spotless, though by the end of a good investigative day it might be sooty and water-stained. He was clean this morning, and he would stay that way.

He noted the shattered glass in the street and the minor smoke stains around the tops of the windows. Inside, morning sunlight angled in through only the uppermost openings to lend a misty, ethereal illumination. One of the other investigators peered at the floor.

"Something at the center of this warehouse burned hot enough to ignite those far walls," MacCray muttered, "yet it didn't warm up the very center."

"Backdraft?" somebody guessed.

"Too much heat for that. And look at these scorch patterns. Outward from the center, curving, as if someone had a flame thrower on a turntable."

"Illegal refuse," somebody else ventured. "The mob incinerating toxic waste?"

The chief rubbed his smooth-shaven chin. "Nope. HazMat would be dressing us in Saranex if that were the case. All I smell is kerosene." He shone the light all around the floor, muttering, "I don't think arson was the plan here, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what was." He kicked at the thick steel bolts protruding from the floor. "Something heavy and big. Something that needed to be held in place." He turned toward a husky lieutenant. "Bradley -- how long did you say the noise lasted?"

"A couple of street guys said they heard a loud hiss or scream for a minute or so. DWM workers saw the glow from the fire and called. We had it out in twenty minutes."

"Earl!" someone hollered from the far corner of the building.

MacCray turned his head to shout back, "What?"

"Take a look!"

MacCray walked over to the wall, where one fire investigator pried the unmelted half of a New Jersey license plate from where it was stuck in the crumbling mortar.

MacCray held it up in the indirect glow of dawn. "Commercial truck. Registration tag number's burnt off, but we have half the plate's digits." He handed it to his stocky assistant. "Work on it."

Someone ran in to wheeze out the results of his foot sprint. "Followed the tire... melt marks pretty... distinctive... north to the... Bruckner onramp. Lost them from there."

MacCray nodded. "We've got some sort of professional operation going on here, but we'll find them."

***

"Omigod!" Bernadette cried. "We made the morning news. We're screwed! It's over!"

Davy frowned and grasped Hacker's wrist TV to twist it away from Bernadette and toward him. Hacker continued to stare at the computer screen before him, reviewing the telemetry from the test. Davy took the earphone from Bernadette and listened.

"--lidated Edison denies that methane buildup was responsible for the mysterious fire that roared through a South Bronx warehouse last night --"

He handed the earphone back to her. "They haven't got a clue. Hacker -- are you ready to upload the flight plan to the ship's computers for launch simulations?"

"Not yet. I need more software checks before I feel confident tha--"

"Just get it done quickly," Crockett said, walking over to the spacecraft. Its aircraft aluminum skin was almost entirely in place. The scorched engine test stand sat beside the vehicle while workers carefully removed each tip engine for examination and possible repair, and a second team craned the rotor into position between the propellant tank section and the crew module, which hung above the cylinder in a tangled mesh of nylon straps and bungee cords -- a makeshift crane system devised by some engineering majors.

He climbed the scaffolding and entered the crew cabin to sit in one of the reclining seats, the same hard and narrow design as the ones for the Shuttle, and he gazed up through the trapezoidal polycarbonate window. The module lowered only an inch in response to the weight increase, the bungee web spreading the load to the nylon straps, which in turn distributed the load to scores of attachment points on the building's perimeter. Above him hung the flimsy rafters of the factory roof. He imagined the ceiling torn away to expose the sky and he and the others rocketing, gyroing -- hell, helicoptering -- upward into it. They could do it. It was possible. Then a cold dread gripped him, an unexpected emotion. This scheme might result in the sudden and startling end of his life at only twenty-four.

Davy Crockett was only twenty-seven when the Creek War broke out, he thought, and he certainly faced death there. He put his hands behind his head and pondered his ancestor and the frontier life. Even with gunfire in the streets, people my age don't face death as often as people did then. Certainly not from disease or animals or exposure, and probably not from violence, either. Maybe that's why we're all slowly going crazy. Maybe guys like Crush are just frustrated pioneers, who can't fight nature so they fight one another. Davy risked his life numerous times, and ultimately lost it at the Alamo. How could I do or risk any less?

"Davy?"

He shifted in his seat to see Bernadette, wearing a tight black jumpsuit with neon-pink trim and hash marks on the sleeves, climb into the cockpit. The small, truncated cone descended another inch, oscillated a tad, then stabilized.

"Howdy," he muttered. Outside, the sound of non-stop work carried through the thin skin of the spacecraft. Occasionally they both felt a tremor as the workers moving the rotor into place bumped into the crew module.

"What's wrong?" She slid into the seat next to his and leaned on her side to gaze at him with eyes that -- thanks to tinted contact lenses -- looked smoky grey, soft and adoring. "Are you worried, too?"

"Worried?"

"About blowing up."

Davy nodded. "Yep. Or the blades breaking off or burning away or the oxygen venting or--"

"We're all worried," she said, reaching out to touch his arm. "That won't stop us, though. We've got a great team building this thing, right?"

Crockett nodded and grasped her hand.

"And," she said, lacing her soft fingers with his, "they're building this ship out of nothing but pride of workmanship and pure love of the adventure, not out of some corporate hive mentality or desire to pull overtime pay by screwing up and redoing things. This thing has a better chance of launching on time safely than anything NASA has ever put up."

"I know that. In the rational part of my mind." He still looked troubled. "There's always that little part that I suppress, the part that says we're just a bunch of kids trying to put on a Broadway show in a barn."

She pulled close to him. "We're not kids, for God's sake. We're in our mid-twenties. That's what grad school does to people. Makes them think they're still teenagers. The whole damn' system's set up to keep us in perpetual childhood so we'll look to big daddy government for guidance and control." She put his hand to her breast. "I became an adult when I was twelve. That's simple biology. But no one wants to admit that anyone under forty can think for herself and take her own risks. I say let's do it and show them all! Let's just blast off--"

His sudden kiss changed the subject.


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