Able One

by Ben Bova

  Harry didn’t mind Sylvia’s hobbyhorses, as long as they didn’t interfere with the increasingly long hours he had to put in at the lab. He settled into middle-class Americana, his wispy hair thinning even more, his kids growing up amazingly fast, his wife slowly becoming more distant. Harry could never understand why Sylvia was resentful that his job absorbed so much of his time and interest, and that he enjoyed it.

  “We never go anywhere,” she would complain.

  “We took the kids to Disney World, didn’t we?”

  “Last year.”

  “So?”

  “I was thinking about an ocean cruise. Maybe to Hawaii.”

  Harry scratched his head. “The four of us? Do you know what that would cost?”

  “We could leave the girls with the Sobelskis. Just you and me, Harry. On a beautiful ocean liner.”

  He thought about how much time that would take but knew better than to mention that out loud. Besides, she knew he had amassed lots of unused vacation days.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  Nearly a year later he finally gave in to her drumbeat of hints and accusations. They took a cruise to Hawaii. It wasn’t really romantic, just a different setting for the same pair of them. Hawaii actually depressed Harry with its obviously phony facade of tropical splendor and the locals debasing their native culture for tourist dollars.

  As their cruise liner left Honolulu for the trip home, Harry stood at the rail and watched the pier gradually slipping away, more and more distant, the gulf of oily, trash-laden water separating the ship from the land slowly, slowly widening. Turning to Sylvia, standing beside him with tears in her eyes, he thought that the same thing was happening to them— they had already drifted apart, and the gulf between them was getting wider every day, every year.

  Once they got back to Pasadena, Sylvia threw herself even deeper into neighborhood politics, circulating petitions and phoning city hall over this Cause or that. Harry worked longer and longer hours at the lab. The high-power laser project was moving along smartly. They called it the COIL: chemical oxygen iodine laser. Powerful stuff.

  He knew he and Sylvia were becoming strangers to each other, but he didn’t know what to do about it. At her insistence they went to a marriage counselor, who recommended they both see a psychologist. Reluctantly, Harry agreed to it, secretly terrified that somebody at the lab might find out.

  “You’re boringly normal,” the psychologist told him.

  The marriage counselor recommended they take a romantic ocean cruise. Harry stopped going to her, although Sylvia continued weekly sessions for more than a year. Harry wondered what she found to talk about every week.

  The years slid past relentlessly. Jacob Levy was one of the more supercilious physicists on the lab’s staff, but he got along pretty well with Harry. Levy knew how to keep his nose out of places where it shouldn’t be.

  “I’ll do the thinking,” he often told Harry’s team of engineers. “All you have to do is make it work.”

  They made a good team. With Jake’s brains and our hands, Harry thought, we’ll make this laser actually work.

  Inevitably the COIL program moved into the testing stage, and they had to transport all the hardware out to the Mohave Desert.

  Pasadena, California: Hartunian Residence

  Harry sensed Sylvia’s eyes boring into his back as he packed his soft-sided travel bag. He turned and, sure enough, his wife was standing in the bedroom doorway, looking distinctly displeased.

  “So you’ll be gone for a week?” Sylvia asked. She had that accusing stare on her face; her district attorney look, Harry secretly called it. In school she’d been on the student council, combining earnestness and winning smiles to gather votes and move molehills. It had been a long time since he’d seen her smile—except when they were out with other couples. Then Sylvia could be the life of the party. At home, though, she was the district attorney.

  “Maybe a little more than a week,” he said, feeling almost guilty about it. He brushed a hand through his thinning hair. Maybe I ought to get a crew cut, he thought idly. Save a lot of time trying to keep it looking neat.

  “Vickie’s birthday is a week from Wednesday,” Sylvia said. “You’ll be home by then, won’t you?”

  “Should be.”

  “Should be? What do you mean, ‘should be’? It’s your daughter’s birthday, for god’s sake. Don’t you have any feelings for your own daughter? I know you’d rather play around with your buddies than be with me, but you’d better come back in time for her birthday!”

  Harry fought down an impulse to throw something at her. Zipping the travel bag, he said tightly, “I’m not playing around out there. It’s strictly business, and it’s important.”

  “Important. Sure. More important than me. More important than your daughters. They hardly ever see you! You’re out of here at the crack of dawn and you don’t come home until after dark. Now you’re traipsing out to the desert.”

  “It’s my job, for Chrissakes!” he said, trying to keep his voice down.

  “Your job,” Sylvia said, dripping acid.

  “It’s important.”

  “So important you can’t tell me anything about it.”

  “That’s right. The program is classified, military secret.”

  “Out in the desert.”

  “Right.” Harry glanced at his wristwatch. Monk should be driving up soon.

  “Where will you be staying out in the Mohave?”

  “The Air Force is putting us up in a motel.”

  “A motel?”

  “That’s right.” He lifted his bag off the bed and started for the door. Sylvia stood in the doorway like an armed guard.

  “What’s the name of this motel? The phone number?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll keep my cell phone on. You can call me on it if you need to.”

  Sylvia looked up into his eyes. He saw resentment smoldering in hers, and anger, and plenty of suspicion.

  “So you’re walking out on me.”

  “Sylvia, it’s only for a goddamned week! Ten days at most.”

  “Leaving me and the girls to fend for ourselves.”

  He grasped her shoulder and pushed her back from the doorway, out into the hall. As he reached the stairs he heard the toot of Monk Delany’s car horn.

  “I’ve got to go now,” Harry said, starting down the carpeted stairs.

  Sylvia stayed in the upper hallway, glowering at him. Harry felt enormously relieved to be getting out of the house and away from her.

  Over his shoulder he called, “Kiss the girls for me when they get back from school.”

  “How many girls are you going to kiss out there in that damned motel?” Sylvia yelled after him.

  Harry was startled by that. She’s worried that I’ll shack up with somebody else? The thought had never entered his mind. Actually, it had, now and then. But he’d never acted on it.

  He was surprised again when he saw that Monk was driving a mint-new Mustang convertible, fire-engine red.

  “Where’s the Chrysler?” Harry asked as he tossed his travel bag onto the narrow bench behind the bucket seats.

  Monk gave an unhappy snort. “The old gray ghost’s transmission crapped out. I’ve got to use the wife’s new car and she’s plenty steamed up about it.”

  Harry slid into the seat and slammed the door shut. As Monk gunned the convertible down the street Harry thought again about Sylvia accusing him of shacking up with some other woman. As if I’d ever do that, he said to himself with some indignation.

  Mohave Desert: Anson Corporation Test Facility

  “Ten-hut!” The seven engineers and test technicians turned from their control boards and, grinning, arranged themselves in a ragged line. Several of them gave sloppy salutes.

  As he stepped through the steel hatch into the blockhouse, Brigadier General Brad Scheib smiled tightly at them. “I can see none of you geniuses was ever in the military.”

  Harry felt disappoint
ed. “You’re not wearing your star, General.”

  Scheib wasn’t even in uniform. He wore a checkered short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck, and comfortable chino slacks.

  “I don’t want to look overdressed,” he said. The civilians were all in faded denims and company-issued white T-shirts that read ANSON AEROSPACE across their backs, with the stylized A of the corporation’s logo on their chests. Pete Quintana’s shirt was emblazoned with EL JEFE sewn just above the logo.

  Scheib was accompanied by Jacob Levy, the chief scientist on the laser project. Like General Scheib, Levy wore a sport shirt and slacks, although his shirt was sparkling white and crisply starched, distinctly out of place in the baking desert heat. Levy was the man in charge, working directly with the newly promoted General Scheib and responsible only to Victor Anson, who owned the company.

  “Are you ready to run?” Levy asked Quintana.

  Nodding, the engineer replied, “We’re going through the final checkout. Be ready to fire up the beast in ten minutes or so.”

  The control center had been a blockhouse years ago, when the Air Force was testing rocket engines for missiles at this remote desert site. It was unglamorous, strictly utilitarian: bare concrete walls, half a dozen desk-sized consoles with their display screens and keyboards, strip lamps across the steel beams supporting the ceiling, a panel of monitoring gauges fastened to the concrete of the rear wall. The air-conditioning was pitiful: several of the men’s shirts were already sweat-stained, and Taki Nakamura’s shirt clung to her slim bosom.

  “Very well, then,” Levy said stiffly as he pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his brow, “let’s get down to business and show the general what our COIL can do.”

  One wall of the concrete building had been punched through and a long window of thick safety glass looked out on the laser itself.

  The COIL sat in its own open shed beneath a flimsy roof of corrugated metal supported by four steel beams. Pete Quintana picked up a cordless screwdriver and stepped through the blockhouse’s steel door, out into the shed.

  “Where are you going, Quintana?” Levy demanded, frowning.

  Harry thought maybe Pete went outside because it was cooler there—at least a little breeze was blowing, unlike in here with this crappy air-conditioning.

  But Pete answered softly, his voice muffled by the thick glass of the safety window, “Tightening up the mount. Keep the vibration level down.”

  “You shouldn’t be out there when we’re counting down,” Levy yelled.

  “I’ll be back inside in a minute. Start the countdown, it’s okay.”

  Levy frowned but turned to Harry and said darkly, “Start the countdown.”

  Harry glanced at General Scheib, then shrugged. Turning to Delany, he said, “Start the sequence timer, Monk.”

  The target sat half a mile out on the desert: the sawed-off end of a cargo plane, its fat round fuselage and big tailfin sticking up into the cloudless blue sky. There were several pinpoint holes in the plane’s aluminum skin, blackened from the heat of the laser’s beam.

  General Scheib came up beside Harry and looked out at the laser assembly. “We can’t have fussbudgets tinkering when we’re flying that dingus. It’s got to work without last-second adjustments.”

  “It will,” Harry said tightly.

  “Of course it will,” Levy added. But the slight lift of his brow told Harry he was not happy.

  Harry picked up the intercom microphone. “Hey, Pete, you’d better cut it short and get in here.”

  Still with his back to the safety window, Quintana hollered, “Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”

  “Now,” Harry said. “We want to start her up.”

  “So start her. I just want to check the vibration absorber on the optics platform. I’ll be inside before you get her warmed up.”

  Harry looked at Levy, who frowned but said resignedly, “Get on with it.”

  Scheib shook his head slightly and thought, These civilians like to play with the equipment.

  Engineers—they fall in love with the hardware. But they’ve got to make this beast foolproof, so that tech sergeants can run it without a half dozen geeks tinkering with it all the time.

  He heard the whine of the electrical power generator starting up as he peered through the window. Quintana straightened up and planted his hands on his hips, as if admiring the equipment he had helped to build. The COIL looked to Scheib more like a miniature junkyard than a flight-weight laser system. Scheib knew the numbers and understood that these engineers had sized the laser to fit inside the capacious frame of a modified Boeing 747. Barely. But in the eyes of the newly minted general those pressure vessels and pumps and all that piping certainly didn’t look like something that could ever get off the ground.

  “Congratulations on the star.”

  Startled, Scheib turned to see Hartunian, one of the engineers, standing beside him.

  Scheib was tall and trim, his body honed by a daily regimen of exercise and tennis. His face was lean, too, and handsome: sandy brown hair that was just starting to show some gray at the temples, light brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Women found him attractive, even out of uniform, something that his stylish, upscale wife didn’t seem to mind in the least. Harry was roundish, almost pudgy, his wispy dark hair terminally unruly. But Scheib thought that Harry was sharper mentally than anyone on the laser team. He was just too self-effacing to push his advantage. Except on the tennis court. Harry beat the general at tennis whenever they played together. Brains over brawn, Scheib thought, although he would never admit it aloud.

  “It’s about time the Air Force gave you some recognition,” Harry went on, his voice low enough that the rest of the people in the blockhouse couldn’t hear him.

  Almost flustered, Scheib replied, “Thank you, Harry. I didn’t know you cared.”

  Harry grinned at him. “If they passed you up and you got reassigned, we’d have to break in a new blue-suiter.”

  Scheib nodded, thinking, It always comes down to what’s best for numero uno. Well, I’ve got my star. Now if these clowns can make this contraption work I might even get a second star, eventually.

  “Input power ready,” called one of the technicians.

  Harry turned away from the general and gave Levy a questioning look. “We’re ready to power up.”

  “By all means,” Levy said.

  “Pete, get the hell in here,” Delany thundered.

  “On my way,” Quintana yelled back.

  “Initiate power sequence,” Harry said, plucking his sticky shirt away from his chest.

  “Initiating power sequence.”

  “Iodine pressure on the button,” one of the technicians called out.

  “Electrical power ramping up,” another technician said.

  “Optical bench ready.”

  “Atmospheric instability nominal.”

  “Adaptive optics on.”

  “Iodine flow in ten seconds.”

  “Oxygen flow in eight seconds.”

  “Pressurizing iodine.”

  “Pressurizing oxy.”

  Pete Quintana opened the door to the blockhouse.

  Harry thought that Pete was cutting it awfully close. If anything goes wrong with—

  The laser blew up in a spectacular blast that ripped the roof off the test shed. The explosion knocked everyone down; Harry smashed against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concrete. A jagged piece of metal crashed through the safety window, shattering it into thousands of pellets as a hellish fireball billowed up into the cloudless blue sky. Pain roared through Harry while the heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.

  In the partially open doorway Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him, but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

  Groggily, General Scheib got to all fours, glass pellets crunch
ing beneath his hands and feet. A twisted piece of pipe had embedded itself into the back wall of the blockhouse like a red-hot arrow.

  Christ, Scheib thought, if the blast hadn’t flattened me that thing would’ve torn my head off.

  Levy and the engineers were all on the floor, knocked flat by the blast. They seemed dazed, in shock, faces and hands burned raw by the heat of the explosion. Hartunian looked unconscious. Scheib got to his feet slowly. The guy who’d been outside lay on the floor of the shed next to the burning, twisted shambles of the laser, a huddled lump of blackened flesh.

  Slowly the others got up, coughing, dazed. Somewhere a fire siren was wailing, coming closer. Two of the engineers were helping the woman to her feet. Her face was burned; a trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her scalp. Levy pushed himself up to a sitting position, his shirt and trousers covered with grit. He looked angry, resentful, as if his beautiful machine had somehow betrayed him.

  “It shouldn’t have done that,” Levy muttered through chipped teeth.

  Yeah, right, Scheib thought.

  Through the shattered window Scheib saw what was left of the COIL: twisted, blackened wreckage, wisps of dirty reddish smoke wafting into the sky. And the body of Pete Quintana, burned red and raw.

  Hartunian moaned and opened his eyes. “What the hell happened?” he croaked.

  My career just went up in smoke, General Scheib thought. That’s what the hell happened.

  Pasadena, California: Olympia Medical Center

  Harry was sedated and semiconscious while Anson Aerospace medical personnel helicoptered him from the Mohave test site directly to Olympia Medical Center in Pasadena. He went into surgery the next day, then the recovery unit, and finally into a private room paid for by Anson Aerospace. Although Harry didn’t know it at first, a pair of Air Police stood guard outside his room. Later they were replaced by private security people hired by Victor Anson himself.