George Martin - Lowball

Gordon didn’t know if Steely Dan even had a thyroid.

At the end of the long afternoon Gordon had a substantial quantity of ammonium perchlorate, a pure white powder that when mixed with aluminum powder and a few minor additives would form solid rocket fuel, the formula used by the Air Force in the boosters of their Hornet shuttle.

The operation was carried out in the old barn, amid the scent of musty old hay and rodent droppings. By the end of the afternoon, the ammonium perchlorate was safely transferred to steel drums, then pushed on a handcart to Gordon’s storage facility, a prefabricated steel shed in the middle of a meadow, and surrounded by berms of earth pushed into place by a neighbor with a bulldozer. If anything unfortunate should befall the shed, the force of the explosion would go straight up, not out into the countryside.

Which was good, because of what Gordon kept there. The aluminum powder that would turn the ammonium perchlorate into flammable mixture. Kerosene. Tanks of oxygen. Syntin, which had driven the Russians’ Sever boosters into space. Hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which were not only explosive in combination but also highly toxic.

Gordon hadn’t quite worked out what fuel he wanted to take him to orbit, so he was keeping his options open.

The stuffed raccoon had been sizzling in the oven for two hours. Gordon sautéed new potatoes to serve with it, and he’d made a pesto of ramps, which were the only local vegetable available at this time of year; he served the pesto on linguine, with a sharp parmesan made by one of the local dairy farmers. With the meal Gordon offered a robust Australian shiraz, which Steely Dan preferred in a ten-ounce tumbler, with ice.

“Damn, man,” Dan said, after tasting the raccoon. “That’s amazing. It’s kinda like pork, isn’t it?” He had a half-comic strangled voice that contrasted with his formidable appearance.

“Tastes more like brisket to me,” Gordon said. He lowered his face over the plate and inhaled the rich aroma.

“This is a first for me,” Dan said. “If my family ever ate varmints, that was way before anyone can remember.”

“I hate to let an animal go to waste. The whole license business is ridiculous.” New Jersey required a license to prepare roadkill, which Gordon thought was simply weird. Who thought of these things? he wondered. And who would actually enforce such a law?

“So,” Steely Dan said, counting on his fingers, “I’ve had squirrel here, and possum, and rabbit.”

“Venison,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s a lot of roadkill venison out there.”

Steely Dan jabbed at Gordon with his fork. “Is there anything you won’t eat?”

“Rat. They can transmit Weil’s disease-and believe me, you don’t want that.”

“I never heard of Weil’s disease, but I believe you.” Steely Dan took a generous swig of his shiraz.

Gordon chewed thoughtfully, and then remembered the previous day’s autopsy. He looked at Steely Dan, and saw himself reflected in the joker’s glossy skin. “Do you know any other wild cards living in this area?” he asked.

“Besides yourself?” Steely Dan said. And, at Gordon’s blank expression, said, “You are a wild card, right?”

Gordon ignored the question and explained about the unknown joker found on the road nearby. Steely Dan was surprised.

“Just up 519 from here,” Gordon said.

“That’s weird,” Steely Dan said.

“You haven’t heard of any, say, sporting events involving wild cards?”

“In Warren County?” Steely Dan shook his bullet head. “Man, that’s nuts.”

“Murder isn’t exactly the most rational act.”

Steely Dan’s smooth face contorted into an expression of amusement. “Unlike trying to shoot yourself into space,” he said.

Gordon grinned. He raised his glass. “Ad astra,” he said.

Gordon had been involved with amateur rocketry since he was in his early teens. He had been an Air Force brat, and every air base had a model rocketry club where Gordon could find like-minded peers. He and his friends had built rockets and explosives while consuming vast amounts of science fiction, mostly stuff that had been in the base library for years, if not decades.

Gordon remembered George O. Smith’s Mind Lords of Takis, Leigh Brackett’s Journey to Alpha C, Dick’s Radio Free Skait, “Skait” being the secret, anagrammatical name of Takis, at least according to Philip K. Dick. All books that shared the common assumption that it was only a matter of time before Earth’s scientists succeeded in duplicating Takisian starship technology, leading an unshackled humanity to spread into the galaxy. (Though in the Dick, it turned out that humans were grub-like creatures groping along on a burned-out planet, and all human history an illusion implanted by sinister Takisian telepaths.) All these renderings of smooth, efficient Takisian technology made rocketry seem a little quaint, but Gordon was willing to settle for what he could get, at least until someone handed him a starship.

In fact Gordon still belonged to an amateur rocket club, the American Rocket League, which had a big meeting in the Nevada desert every year to fire off boosters that required the participants to have a Federal explosives license, and which regularly climbed higher than fifty miles, right to the brink of space. Gordon was not alone in wanting to send himself into orbit. He liked to think he was farther along than most of them, however.

The fact was that Earth physicists had failed to decode Takisian technology, despite regular claims of breakthroughs that seemed loudest at every budget cycle. Ever since 1950 scientists had promised whole armadas of starships in ten or twenty years.

In the meantime the Air Force and its Space Command shared Earth orbit with an underfunded Russian program. Each operated as secretly as they could, each spied on the other, each put up thousands of communications and spy satellites, each may or may not have weaponized near-Earth orbit. There was no exploration of the Moon or Mars or any of the bodies that had held the imagination of early-twentieth-century writers. Everyone was waiting for his starship. No one got them.

It was beginning to look like the solar system might be all humanity ever got. And now it was the turn of Takisian starships to seem like a quaint, old-fashioned chimera, while rocket technology was beginning to seem like the most contemporary thing in all the world. With the military program in stagnation, it was civilians who were driving rocket innovation now. There was even a cash reward now, the Koopman X Prize, for the best, cheapest, and most practical design.

Gordon figured he was an underdog in the race, but then so were the Wright Brothers. So was Jetboy. Sometimes an underdog could surprise you.

Sunday was a cool, blustery day, with low clouds that scudded urgently along, dropping lashings of rain. Steely Dan picked Gordon up in his pickup truck for a run into Belvidere, where Gordon had a delivery waiting. This was a scaled-down version of an aerospike hybrid rocket engine, a working prototype of a larger design that had never been built. Gordon had bought the prototype when the subcontractor had gone out of business following the cancellation of the Air Force project.

Gordon was beginning to think that hybrid rockets were maybe the way to go. A hybrid had certain inefficiencies, but the aerospike design would more than make up for that. He’d have to work out a way to perform static tests with the new engine, some way that didn’t involve setting his property on fire or blowing anything up. He’d have to build more berms, or maybe big trenches. And he’d have to get some HTPB, or make some.…

As windshield wipers slapped back and forth, Gordon and Steely Dan discussed the technical details on the ride to Belvidere. Around them the low mountains were green with new spring growth.