BOUNDARY(17)

Sutter. Hey, hope you enjoy the e-mail I just sent! Bye!"



"Goodbye, A.J." she said, but he'd already cut off. Her portable pinged, signaling that A.J.'s message had arrived. She saw it contained an animation file, which she opened.



A flying saucer floated down the screen, disgorging a rather disquietingly cute Bemmius: squat, overly short, with exaggerated eyes and a completely anatomically wrong smiling mouth under the three forelimbs.



Bemmie scuttled in its odd way across a simple landscape, coming upon a bunch of similarly overcute raptors. Bemmie held up a sign: TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER. The raptors leaped at him, there was a struggle, and over the now unconscious body of Bemmie one of the raptors held up another sign: LEADER? I THOUGHT HE SAID LARDER!



She laughed again, even though the joke was pretty lame. He'd clearly put some work into that one. Bemmie might have been given a sort of face against his anatomical realities, but it had taken some thought to create a cartoon version of his actual locomotion style.



She dictated a quick, appreciative thank you, and then stood up. It was time to start working again. For the next year and a half, she wouldn't have much chance for relaxation.





Chapter 7




Jackie Secord gripped the frame of the observation port tightly, staring at the strange assemblage of spherical tanks, tubing, and massive bracing structures within the almost unbelievably huge enclosure before her. Behind, a calm voice continued the countdown. "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. . . Firing."



From the center of the assemblage a monstrous tongue of flame reared up. Even through the soundproofing and vibration-absorbing material of the test facility, there came a deep-throated, thundering roar that shook the room. The sound went on and on, an avalanche of white noise that overwhelmed even her shout of triumph. It also wiped out the continuing counts and updates of the engineers, who had to resort to electronic communication rather than attempt to make themselves heard over the force of that unbelievable sound.



Finally, when it seemed to Jackie that even her bones were vibrating from the unending song of power, it cut off. Then she could hear the yells, the whistles, and leaped into the air herself with a cowboy whoop.



"It worked, it worked!" she shouted, ears still ringing with that impossible noise.



"And why should it not?" the deep, sonorous voice of Dr. Satya Gupta inquired calmly. "The concept was proven decades ago. It was merely a new design that needed to be tested."



"Dr. Gupta, you can't stand there and tell me you didn't feel anything—any nervousness, any anticipation—while we were counting down to the first firing!"



The dark eyes twinkled. "Well . . . Anticipation, certainly. The success of such a project, this is the reward of an engineer."



Jackie loved that considered, deliberate delivery, with the exotic combination of Indian and English accents flavoring Dr. Gupta's precise and well-crafted speech.



There was nothing unusual about Gupta's appearance—dark skin, black hair, symmetrical and well-molded face with a hooked nose over a brilliant smile, and he always dressed as though attending a formal dinner. Nothing unique at all, unless you counted the sharpness of those black eyes. It was Satya Gupta's voice that caught one's attention.



Everyone remarked on it, sooner or later. When A.J. Baker had met Gupta, he'd said: "So that's what Saruman is supposed to sound like."



Being A.J., he'd said it right in front of Gupta, too. Fortunately, the Indian engineer had a good sense of humor and hadn't been offended.



"So you never worried about something going wrong?"



Gupta gave an elaborate shrug. "It is always possible for there to be a failure, of course. Why else do we engineers always try to allow for all possibilities—and then add more reinforcements, just in case? On the other hand, a machine that is designed correctly should work. It will work. On this premise, Ms. Secord, our entire civilization depends."



Jackie almost laughed. Coming from anyone else, Gupta's little speeches and saws would just sound pompous; coming from him, they were simply right.



"Still—a nuclear rocket, Dr. Gupta! We just fired the first nuclear rocket since NERVA shut down!"



"Speaking for myself," Dr. Philip Moynihan said from his chair near the observation port, "I knew perfectly well it would work, and I still feel the same way Jackie does." The very elderly researcher was the only living man in the room who had participated in the original NERVA tests in the 1960s. "It's wonderful to see the new rocket fired for the first time."



Steven Schiffer, as was his way, added a cautionary note. "If the scrubbers don't make the outside air as clean as it was before the firing, it may be the last firing, too. The licensing hassles to permit this were something hellish. If one of the counters outside the range so much as hiccups, they'll probably come in and seal the whole complex." Gloomily: "With us in it, under a million tons of cement."