Ben Bova - Able One

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

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.

Sometime during that period of half-wakefulness, an officer in Air Force blue entered Harry’s room and shoved an official-looking document at him. “Security agreement,” he said, his tone as flat and clipped as an air traffic controller’s. “Sign at the bottom line.”

“Security?” Harry mumbled, still fuzzy from the sedatives.

“About the accident. It’s been classified Secret. You can’t say anything about it to anyone who doesn’t have a certified need to know.” He held the document on a clipboard six inches from Harry’s nose and pressed a ballpoint pen into his hand. “Sign it now.”

Moving his arm made Harry wince with pain. He scribbled a parody of his signature on the bottom line and the uniformed officer took his clipboard and left Harry to drift back into a drugged sleep.

When Harry awoke fully, on the fifth day after the explosion, he blinked at the almost-luxurious furnishings of the room in which he found himself. Crank-up hospital bed, he saw, but the rest of the room looked like a first-class hotel, rather than a hospital: cool pastel walls, sleek modern furniture, a big flat-screen TV on the wall. The one window looked out on city buildings. Then he realized there was an IV tube in his left arm, and a bank of monitoring instruments softly beeping on the wall above his bed’s headboard.

Harry tried to raise himself into a sitting position to see more of the outside surroundings, but his ribs flared with pain. He settled back on the bed and the pain subsided into a dulled ache. They must have me pretty well doped up, he guessed.

The door to his room opened and a nurse stepped in. She was a bit on the chubby side, but she looked cheerful. Smiling.

“We’re awake,” she said pleasantly.

“Yeah,” Harry replied, unhappy with her “we.”

“Hungry?”

“No.”

“Really?” She came to the bed, peered at the instruments over Harry’s head. “You’ve been getting nothing but intravenous for the past four days.”

“How bad was I hurt?”

“A few cracked ribs. Superficial burns on one side of your face. Nothing terribly serious.”

She’s a professional nurse, Harry thought. Indifferent to the patient’s pain.

“The others? How bad—”

She shook her head with a slightly disapproving expression on her dimpled features. “I’ll order a breakfast tray for you. See if you can take some nourishment.”

Twenty minutes later a Hispanic orderly came in with a tray of breakfast. He cranked Harry’s bed up to a sitting position slowly, carefully, obviously aware that the patient’s ribs were painful. Harry felt grateful enough to say, “ Gracias.”

The dark-skinned orderly grinned at him. “Just doin’ my job, man.”

Harry sipped the orange juice, poked at the rubbery scrambled eggs. Every time he moved his arms his ribs flared up. By the time he’d given up on the breakfast his body felt as if somebody had spent the morning whacking his chest and back with a baseball bat.

A doctor came in briefly, took his pulse, and told him that he’d be fine in a week or so.

“The others,” Harry said. “How bad were they hurt? Pete Quintana?”

The doctor pursed his lips. “I don’t know about anyone else. The medevac chopper brought you in five days ago. You’re my patient. You’re recovering well. That’s all I know.”

It must be bad, Harry surmised. Pete must be dead. Anybody else?

Harry spent the day watching television, banal soap operas, game shows where he knew the answers that stumped the dumbbell contestants, phony courtrooms with idiotic people complaining about one another, psychologists offering advice to young couples and old married folks.

Maybe Sylvia and I ought to go on one of those shows, Harry thought. Then he remembered the marriage counselor they’d seen and the psychologist he’d gone to afterward and how pointless it had all been.

Where is Sylvia? he wondered. Does she even know I’m in the hospital? Did anybody tell her there’s been an accident?

Late in the afternoon Monk Delany came into his room. Harry was glad to see the big, shambling engineer, although he thought Monk looked awkward, sheepish, almost embarrassed.

“How ya doing, Harry?”

“It only hurts when I breathe.”

“Come on,” Delany said. “Seriously.”

“Banged-up ribs. I’ll be okay.”

“Your face is kinda burned. Like you got too much sun.”

Harry nodded. The movement sent a twinge of pain along his back.

“You look okay,” he said to Delany.

The engineer pulled one of the petite wooden chairs from the wall and sat down beside Harry’s bed. The chair looked almost too frail to hold his bulk.

“I got a couple bruises,” Delany said. “The blast knocked me down, that’s all.” “Pete?”

Delany’s face fell. “I told that dumb spic to get his ass inside the blockhouse.”

“Is he dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody else?”

“Naw, they’re all okay. You got it worse than anybody. Except Pete, of course. General Scheib tore out both knees of his pants. Levy got a black eye. A real beaut of a shiner.”

Harry knew that Monk was trying to cheer him up. “What caused the explosion? Any idea?”

“Six dozen guys are going over the wreckage, including a gang of blue suits.”

“And?”

Delany shrugged. “Looks like it mighta been some grease got into the oxy line.”

“We checked that line,” Harry said.

“Yeah, I know. But that’s what it looks like.”

Harry closed his eyes and saw his job going down the drain. Grease in the oxygen line. That shouldn’t have happened. Somebody’s going to get blamed for it. Me. Maybe all of us. Maybe the whole damned program will get shut down.

“The investigation isn’t over,” Delany said. “Maybe they’ll find something else.”

Harry started to shake his head, thought better of it. “What’re they going to find? Spies? Foreign agents planted a bomb?”

Delany sat and stared at him in silence for several long moments, his normally cheerful face looking pensive, almost mournful.

At last he got up from the flimsy chair. “Take care of yourself, Harry. I gotta get back out to Mohave, help with the investigation.”

“Thanks for coming by, Monk.”

“Nothing to it.” Delany stopped at the door. “Anything I can get you, Harry? Anything you need?”

“My laptop,” Harry answered immediately. “I’ll go nuts in here without my laptop to work on.”

“You got it, pal.”

It wasn’t until after Delany had left that Harry wondered when Sylvia would be allowed to visit him. He found that he didn’t really care when she came, or if she came at all. And he realized he wasn’t surprised by his feeling.

Victor Anson sat behind the gleaming broad desk of his private office and gave the three men sitting anxiously on the other side his coldest, hardest stare.

Anson was totally bald but sported a natty little pencil moustache. He was athletically slim and wore an impeccably tailored Italian silk suit of silvery gray, with an off-white shirt and carefully knotted sky blue tie.