“Tom?” he asked expectantly, offering a hand.
“Dr. Knoll?” I returned the question, naively inserting my hand into the pair of vice-grips disguised as human appendages he wore on his arms. I’d never seen his picture, but he had told me he looked like Ichabod Crane, only taller. This fellow fit the description.
“Limo’s waiting,” he said, grabbing a trunkful of my gear. I flexed my fingers to ease the pain, picked up my suitcase and briefcase, and followed him to a rusty early-sixties pickup truck, where he pushed various cans and boxes aside and laid my trunk gently in the bed. We finished loading and hopped in.
I habitually reached for my seat belt. Just as it occurred to me a truck this old wouldn’t have one, my fingers closed on nylon webbing. I pulled, and found the vehicle was equipped with seat belt/shoulder harnesses, in good shape. I was about to tell Jake I thought that kind of safety-mindedness was a Good Sign in the rocket business, when he nodded my way. “ ’Bout to recommend that,” he said. “Door has a bad habit of popping open.” The starter clicked and whirred a few times, then caught, and we were on our way.
The short drive from the airport to his farm left little time for conversation, which mostly hinged on how to keep the battered door closed. We rattled to a stop by a newly built outbuilding, one of those soulless all-metal farm buildings that can never adequately substitute for hand-hewn timbers with mortise and tenon joints. If you looked closely, bits of charcoal were visible in the soil.
“Whatever happened with your neighbor?” I asked.
He huffed. “Bank heard he was under suspicion and figured he would probably be sued. They foreclosed on him, which he evidently had comin’, figuring he would otherwise declare bankruptcy. Some kinda prior claim rule means I couldn’t get nothing if I tried.”
“He go to jail?”
“Nah, insufficient evidence, but at least he left the state. Funny thing though, turns out he actually did me something of a favor.”
I looked at him quizzically as he hopped out of the truck and trotted eagerly to the door, moving like a teenager. “Come on, take a look at Dervish Also.”
I rolled my eyes. What did I expect, something conventional like Dervish IP. This was Jake Knoll. I got out of the truck and followed him into the barn. There, propped up at odd angles by sawhorses and dimension lumber, was the new aeroshell. The polyurethane foam shape was completed, and the surface was perhaps half coated with composites. The building reeked of plastic resins, and I knew I’d have a headache if I stayed there long. I knew roughly what to expect from his sketches, but the thing was impressive nonetheless. Jake had given me the dimensions, but I hadn’t really pictured the size of it. It was designed to just fit in a standard semi truck trailer, if placed on edge.
“So what was the favor?” I asked.
“Out back, the old shell,” he said, as if that explained anything. I followed him through the back door. Emerging back into the sunlight, I was distracted by a the sound of a tractor motor accompanied by a loud whirring, coming from a mound of earth and shed several hundred yards out in a field. “We’ll see that next,” he said, motioning me to a lean-to that sheltered what was left of the original hull. He gestured toward a broken apart section near the nose.
Approaching the charred blackened ruin, I could make out the slightly grayer charred paint of the name. “I see the problem. D-I-R-VI-S-H.”
“Now, Tom,” he said with a wink, “I believe I told you I can’t spell worth spit. But that ain’t the fatal flaw I had in mind. Check that broken area.”
I bent to examine it. “Linear seams and voids in the foam,” I commented. “Damned near full thickness at this point. Since this section is in aerodynamic compression, chances are it would have buckled inward.”
“Hated to lose that old barn,” Jake said, nodding. “Not nearly as much as I would have hated to lose a pilot and ship. Figured a way to inspect for it on the new ship. T-waves.”
“Terahertz imaging? I’m impressed!” I was. That was cutting-edge technology, on the boundary between infrared and microwave, a region where quantum mechanics just starts to infringe on radio electronics, and the distinction between photons and electromagnetic waves begins to blur. I knew he didn’t have the funds to buy the equipment, which meant he’d built it from scratch.
We trotted out to the building that had been producing the interesting noise, now reduced to a gentle slowing whine. I saw a young woman standing outside wearing chemical protective gear. The noise was coming from the mound, which was actually a large circular pit with the excess earth piled around it and a contraption situated in the center. The apparatus spinning down consisted of a large wooden wagon-wheelish looking thing attached to a vertically-mounted automobile differential rear axle. The other end of the axle was imbedded in a large concrete base, and the drive-shaft coupling had a large pulley that looked suspiciously like a wheel rim. The belt from the pulley led, through a long trench and a series of guide pulleys, to the shed, where it looped around another pulley attached to the power take-off of an old gray and red Ford tractor. I think every farm has one of those old tractors. Must be a law or something.
“Centrifuge?” I asked, noticing the evenly-spaced containers attached to the wheel.
Jake nodded. “Patti’s whipping us up a batch of secret rocket propellant. ’Bout ready, Patti?”
“Be down in fifteen minutes,” she shouted back.
“Secret?” I looked at Jake, who had a mischievous grin. “Mike Moscoe blew your secret oxidizer with ‘Touch A Star, ’ a couple of years ago. Come to think of it, I seem to recall a rocket fuel mix the Three Stooges whipped up that included it.”
We trotted back to the barn. David came down from the house to meet us, then we started gathering gear for the test burns. My apparatus, plus a test frame and the rocket motor, were loaded on an old flat-bed hay trailer, which smelled faintly of cow manure. Patti rounded the corner riding the old tractor, which she deftly backed up to the trailer. Jake had the two coupled in ten seconds.
I looked over the tractor, which bristled with added-on brackets and other home-made hardware. “My uncle had one of these. I guess 80 percent that were ever built must still be in use.”
Jake scratched his head. “Eighty percent, well, maybe it’s that low. George here is sort of a member of the family. He helped raise me. I remember when dad bought him from Three-Finger Tony. George is our loyalist tech.”
We bounced down the dirt road to the test stand beside the little lake, led by David, driving the pickup hauling several flavors of rocket fuel in small cans, and trailed at a respectful distance by Patti hauling a small, well-cushioned tank of her freshly brewed concoction on a small rack installed on the back of an old Lincoln that could only get into first gear. I’d guessed that the stuff was highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a notoriously touchy compound. No doubt they used the Lincoln because it stood a better than even chance of surviving should the peroxide suddenly decide to revert to atomic oxygen and water. That effect, by itself, was a pretty good rocket fuel, and reason enough to carry it on a vehicle with a ride as smooth as a river barge.
David and Patti parked well away from the test stand, out of sight behind an earthen wall, where I had seen several well-separated bunkers. Jake and I pulled up to the stand and began unloading equipment. Jake moved in a continual trot, usually in a slight crouch, as if prepared to spring in any direction in an instant, and I think I would have been worn out just watching him. I came to realize this was his normal pace of work, which helped greatly to explain how he had accomplished so much in so short a time.