Jake came to us with a couple of jelly glasses with a generous dose of some sort of bubbly amber liquid in each. “He’s alive! Just got off the phone with him. Came down in a Walmart parking lot in Omak and called us from a pay phone. Collect, if you can imagine the nerve! He’s hitching a ride to the airport just north of there. Think you can go pick him up?”
I looked dubiously at the glass of fizzy stuff, and started to put it down.
“Drink up! Carbonated apple juice was all we had.”
I downed the concoction, which tasted pretty good. “But what about the ELT? How—”
“Almost forgot,” Jake apologized, ducking momentarily into a bedroom. He emerged with a pair of jeans. “These ought to fit, if he rolls the legs up a mite. He lost the bottom half of his flight suit coming out the hatch. Says people are staring at his plastic union suit.”
The next morning, we arrived bright and early at the crash site, via National Guard helicopter. The CAP had done a nice job of securing it against die-hard reporters who had hiked all night to. reach it. NASA and the Pentagon had been vying for access, but, since Dervish was registered as a Learjet, the National Transportation Safety Board won out in the jurisdictional pissing contest. I recognized their representatives immediately.
“Jean, Joe, they got you out of the lab for this one, did they?”
They waved and started over. “Tom, how did you get mixed up in this?” Jean asked.
“Um, I’m just a consultant, honest.” That was once, and I hadn’t heard a rooster crow yet. I handed Joe a removable hard disk wrapped in antistatic blister pack. “Here’s the flight data record. Dr. Gore put it in his vest pocket before bailing out. We’ll need a copy of it, and I can help you decipher it when we get back to DC.”
Jake looked at me. “You know these two?”
I shrugged. “Former co-worker and an old motorcycle riding buddy. Damned competent people. I’m glad to see them.”
Joe turned to take in the surroundings. “He couldn’t have picked a better spot if he had tried. Talus slope at the bottom of a cliff. Nobody for miles. Barely even damaged any trees.”
“Hitting this spot was no accident,” Jake said. “Well, maybe a little. See that big rock over there about thirty meters? That’s what he set the autopilot for. It’s his favorite sitting rock. He knew this was the best place to put it down—in fact, it was our take-off worst-case abort alternative.”
Jean shivered, nodding toward the smashed remains of a Global Positioning System receiver. “Cruise Dervish. GPS-linked autopilots scare me.”
I shrugged. “Lots of planes are equipped that way. Pretty soon, most will be. Nothing particularly sinister about Dervish.”
Jean looked at me squarely. “Exactly”
There was little indication of dangerous chemicals, but we donned hazmat gear just to be sure. Jake’s formula makes surprisingly non-toxic residue, and the reactants are so reactive there is unlikely to be much left after a blast. We picked our way into the crash site, identifying and photographing debris, until we came to the center of the shallow crater. The aeroshell had been reduced to hundreds of small pieces, but it was obvious that nothing had come off before impact. Jean and Joe found some smashed cockpit instruments, and noted an indicated airspeed of only 260 knots at impact.
Jake and I found the engine, barely damaged, exactly in the center of the crater.
“If Dervish went in nose-first, the fuel tanks would have ruptured, producing a soft explosion,” I noted. “There’d be a pretty intense Leiden-frost layer between the tanks, and mixing zones as you get farther out on that plane, but most of the energy would be expended in a pretty diffused fireball. The engine was directly behind the tanks. Probably dropped the impact velocity considerably, sort of like an airbag going off.”
Jake pointed to the various sheared-off connections. “I believe you’re right. We’re in luck. Probably learn a lot from this.”
Two weeks later, Jake and I were sitting at his kitchen table, vacantly staring at a spread of photographs of burned and broken debris. On the counter were various newspapers and clippings, with headlines using words like “CRASH” and “FAILURE.” There was a knock at the door.
Jake looked up. “It ain’t locked. Come in.”
A stately woman in a conservative business suit stepped in. “Dr. Knoll?”
He nodded, and slowly rose from his chair.
She offered a hand. He accepted it gently. “You haven’t met me, but you have some of my money in an escrow account. I’m Clarissa Morton, Morton Launch Brokers.”
Jake nodded again. “You’ll be wanting your quarter million back, I reckon. I’ll sign the papers.”
“Not just yet,” she said. “How’s your pilot, Gore?”
“Feeling pretty glum, if you’ll accept an understatement. Probably never fly again when the FAA gets through with him.”
“Don’t bet on it,” she said, pulling a business card from her purse. “This guy’s an aviation lawyer, and he’s still pretty steamed with the FAA over the Hoover incident. He thinks he can get the penalty down to about a ninety-day suspension. He’ll do it pro bono.”
Jake raised an eyebrow as he took the card. “I sort’a figgered they’d throw the book at the bunch of us.” She shrugged. “They probably will, but the book didn’t anticipate most of what you did.” She glanced at the pile of newspapers. “I have a feeling this initial mess will blow over, and the press will start asking a different sort of question pretty soon.” She stepped over to the table to look at the photos. “Figure out what went wrong yet?”
“Tell her what you found, Tom.”
I picked up a photo of a small crushed box with several electrical connectors. “This is the engine control computer. See the little burned mark on the case? High voltage arc. Got in and zapped the computer.”
“Do you know where it came from?” she asked.
Jake spoke up. “There’s the rub. Came from the magnetohydrodynamic generator. Had a weakness in the electrical insulation that had never been detected before. Altitude related. In the atmosphere, air acts as an insulator. In rarefied atmospheres, or a vacuum, sometimes arcs can form that you wouldn’t get otherwise. Could’a prevented this with a dab of silicone seal, if we’d known.”
She pointed to a picture of a couple of cables, similar to lawn mower throttle cables. “Those the fuel dump cables that froze up?”
I nodded. “Vacuum welded.”
Jake shook his head. “If we’d used Teflon-lined motorcycle cables, would’a worked perfectly. You know, we probably could’a landed just fine at any airport around, even with fuel aboard. Near as we can tell, everything else worked fine. What can I say? We tried. We failed. Where are those papers?”
“Aren’t you going to try again?”
He looked at her. “Lady, I’m so flat broke I can’t pay my light bill. I’m runnin’ off the windmill out there.”
“What would it cost to build another copy?”
“A million and a half.”
She pulled out a check book and started writing. “Seriously. Ten million be enough?”
Jake dropped back in his chair like a sack of coarse cracked corn. “Wha?”
“Dr. Knoll, I’m tired of waiting for you to build this thing,” she said. “I was about ready to ask for my money back. You’ve been making silly excuses about your barn burning down, red tape, how you were saving money by doing it all yourself and on the cheap.” She tore off the check and handed it to him. “No more excuses. Hire some people, buy some parts, and get on with it.”