The Black Hats had been pumping swampwater out of the bunker, and repairing or replacing the rusted equipment. The damage was surprisingly slight. NASA had built to last back in the '60s, before it lost its guts and balls to the Suits. Fonvielle would miss the knee-high warm brine he had been sloshing around in for twenty years. He had rigged himself a hammock between two of the old central consoles, and become an extremely expert spear-fisher.
The locals had all been driven away by the creeping waters, and the few die-hard swamp-dwellers who stuck around on the peninsula had stayed clear of him. They called him the Mad Old Man. He didn't give a damn. He had always known that some day the Prezz would be back, and that he would have to get the Cape operations ready at short notice. He hadn't been lonely. After all, the ghosts were all his friends.
At first, he had thought the figures—manshapes in charred spacesuits, lumbering around as if weightless—were hypnagogic visions, and had had to caution himself against going crazy. He would be no use to the Prezz if his mind went out on him. Then, he had started to recognize them. The one with the red-smeared visor was Collins, whose helmet had ruptured during EVA, and the one leaking water from the suitseals was Gus Grissom, who had gone down with his capsule. All the other names came back to him: Shepard, Capaldi, Griffith, Mildred Kuhn, Mihailoff, Lindsay, Breedlove. All the other lost-in-space victims. Even the Russians were there, CCCP stencilled on their cosmonaut suits. Gagarin, the re-entry burn-up, was a man-shaped mass of mobile ash, with a bulbous helmethead. Fonvielle hadn't known the Soviets personally, but he had picked up their names over the years. Victorov, Netelkina, Sementsova, Dvorshetsky, Lazarev, Klimov, Ledogora, Rakan.
Sometimes, the ghosts would congregate in a crowd on the launchpad, standing on the water surface as if it were solid concrete, looking up at the abandoned gantry. Fonvielle understood what they wanted. If the Cape remained abandoned, then their lives and deaths were meaningless. If all this activity was for anyone, it was for the ghosts.
Black Hats with mops were drying the concrete floor. They went about their work with strange smiles on their faces and didn't say much except when they wanted to tell you how wonderful everything was since they saw the light. Fonvielle wasn't used to live people any more, but the Hats didn't seem worse than any of the others.
One thing that was good was that the Black Hats had a full security staff with some heavy hardware. Fonvielle had been getting tired of bucking the odds in his one-man war with the Suitcase People. They had started showing up about two or three years back, slithering out from the inland swamps, tails lashing, jaws grinding. They would eat anything that came their way, including human limbs. Fonvielle had been potting them whenever he got the chance, but he was only one guy and the swamp was getting thick with the Suitcase People. The Hats had already had a tussle or two with the creatures, and had got over the initial shock of their 'gator faces. Now, the problem was being contained. The Prezz had taken one of the things out personally as soon as he arrived. Fonvielle was interpreting that as a policy statement.
Black Hats were working over the consoles. One or two were in poor shape and had been dismantled, tangles of multicoloured wire spilling onto the floor as screwdrivers and soldering-irons were wielded in their insides. Others were operational, and the staff were transmitting test signals. The Black Hats were using a decomissioned but still-functioning satellite for the tests, bouncing messages off it to their HQ in Salt Lake City. Fonvielle was proud that the technology had lasted so well, so long.
The monitors began to hum, and an operator began tracking the target objects. Fonvielle stood over her and looked at the screen, recognizing the familiar ring of dots in their regular orbits. The operator had taken off her Black Hat to get her phones on. Without their hats, they were just ordinary people, if a bit more perfect-faced. Fonvielle laid a hand on her shoulder, and she smiled up at him, displaying white, even rows of enamel.
The target objects circled the globe projection. A printer began to emit a sheet of graph-paper, recording the twelve regular passages through space. Fonvielle looked across the room and saw Grissom, standing unnoticed amid the scurrying Black Hats. The astronaut gave him the thumbs-up, and Fonvielle shakily returned the gesture. He tried to hold back the tears, but they trickled anyway.
The Great Days were back again. At last, the Dream was shared.
They had had a big meeting in the old conference room, the dustsheet coming off the round table with the NASA symbol inlaid into it. The Prezz and his advisors had yanked out a whole mess of spec sheets on imperishable plastic, and outlined the aims and intentions of the project. It was the one he had expected. He still knew all the plans by heart, and he had been itching for another crack at this for better than two and a half decades.
Mars was more romantic, the Moon had more practical applications, and Deep Space was where the scientific data the whitecoats wanted could be scooped. But this was the one that ate him up from the inside. It had never been right, and Fonvielle didn't like leaving it that way. It could be made right, and he wanted it so.
The Prezz gave orders. And Commander Lawrence Jerome Fonvielle snapped off a precise salute.
There was a schedule. There were targets.
And within a month it would finally be done. The Needlepoint System would come on line.
And down here on Earth, the Arms Race would be over.
VI
It was just a couple of swamp shacks on poles, but it had a diner. They had been in an amphibious mode for thirty or forty miles now, the Cadillac's wheels sealed off and the rear motors kicking in. The machine displaced quite a bit of water as it cruised through the thick swampland, and they were leaving a foamy wash behind them. Progress was slower than it had been on the road, but Elvis liked being on the water—if the thick mud and chemical stew that made up the Florida swamps could be called water—and the Cadillac handled, as always, like a streamlined dream. His only worry was that there'd be something toxic in the swamp that would eat the paint off the car's hull. They hadn't crossed streams with anything alive and large enough to be dangerous.
Thanks to an old friend at T-H-R, Elvis' onboard computer had a hook-up into the Gazeteer, the map-making-cum-census-taking service underwritten by the big Agencies. Wacissa was recorded as being still barely populated. The diner was called Casper's Chow-Down, and the trilobite thermidor was triple-starred. But the date of the last check on the entry was eighteen months ago. You couldn't rely on things staying the same for five minutes out here, let alone a year and a half.
Since their tangle with Chamberlain, Krokodil had been sitting quietly, rarely talking. He was intently conscious that the obstruction had been his fight, not hers. In her place, he would be wondering whether hiring the Op had been worthwhile. After all, as she had shown, she could certainly take care of herself in a fight. Elvis was beginning to feel the strain of so much driving, the familiar ache in his neck and shoulders. And he was tired of their road rations.
He pulled the Cadillac up by the diner's jetty, and used the automatic grapple as an anchor. The ve-hickle settled down, waters lapping around the sides.
Krokodil started, as if jolted out of a waking daze. Elvis had noticed the girl occasionally seemed to lapse into vague trance states. That was what cyborgs did instead of sleeping, he knew. The trances were functional. You could live without sleep, but if you didn't dream you went crazy. Sooner or later, the GenTech brain-meddlers would find a way to burn out the dreaming synapses, and Elvis reckoned the whole human race would just have to give up and die, because it wouldn't be worth carrying on. There were some things the brain boys should just leave well enough alone.