“Hey, now wait a minute.” Skid glared at him. “You didn’t tell me you were gonna stick me with…”
Lloyd was already laughing, and Harry was grinning as well. “Jack, you haven’t changed,” Lloyd said. “Same warm, friendly guy.”
“Was he this way in Worcester?” Skid asked. “I thought it was just me.”
“Naw, Jack’s got a chip on his shoulder for everyone. I mean, the night he showed up…”
“Look, you can tell all the lies you want about me once we get some chow.” Jack Cube headed for the door that would take them outside. “Or maybe you’d rather have the nickel tour, first.”
“No,” Harry said. “First food, then tour. We haven’t had a decent meal since we left New England, and I’m definitely not counting the ham and cheese sandwiches they gave us on the plane.”
“Trust me,” Jack said, “the food’s not any better here.”
In only a few months, the Blue Horizon compound at Alamogordo Army Air Field had grown from a small collection of Quonset huts and prefab buildings to a full-fledged military research installation where more than fifteen hundred people lived and worked. Machine shops, assembly sheds, laboratories, test facilities, and warehouses shared room on narrow dirt streets with barracks, cottages, PXs and commissaries, mess halls, clubs for both enlisted men and officers, even a bowling alley. And on the outskirts of the compound, a launchpad was being built. The blockhouse was complete, and now the pad itself and its rollaway gantry tower were under construction.
As they walked to the officers’ club, stepping aside every now and then to let a jeep or truck rumble by, Lloyd and Harry brought Jack and Skid up to speed on recent events in New England. The two lieutenants had already heard about the attempt on Dr. Goddard’s life, but not in any great detail; however, they weren’t surprised by the revelation that the Nazis were probably behind it.
“No one else would have wanted Bob dead,” Jack said.
“Except maybe one of us,” Lloyd added.
What was more unexpected was the news that the rest of the 390 Group—with the exception of Harry and Lloyd themselves—had been relocated to a hunting lodge just across the Massachusetts state line in New Hampshire. Jack Cube had believed that the entire team, Bob and Esther Goddard included, would have been packed aboard a military transport plane and sent to New Mexico, so he was stunned to learn that they were being kept in New England.
“It’s this whole compartmental… y’know, whatever… the War Department has got us locked into.” Lloyd threw up his hands in frustration. “It’s never made any sense to me, putting the R&D team on the other side of the country from the rest of the project, but you’d think they would’ve learned their lesson by now.”
He glanced at Jack Cube, as if silently begging for an explanation. Jack acknowledged his friend’s bewilderment with a commiserating nod and shrug, but otherwise remained quiet. Criticizing decisions made by the brass wasn’t his style, especially not when it was possible that anything he said might be overheard and make its way up the chain of command.
“It’s not all bad news,” Harry added. “From what I heard, Bliss finally knuckled under and agreed to relocate main-engine assembly and testing to Massachusetts, where the team can get their hands on it.”
“He did?” Jack gave him a sharp look. “Where in Mass?”
“A defense factory just outside Worcester… Wyman-Gordon, I think it’s called.”
Jack smiled. It was the same place he’d been begging the colonel to consider since last winter. “That’s good,” he said, quietly deciding not to claim credit for helping change Bliss’s mind. “I’m sure it’ll work out.”
“Yeah, well, it better,” Skid murmured. He still hadn’t changed out of his flight suit, but it didn’t matter. Jack would probably march him straight back to the simulator after lunch. “Hate to say it, but unless someone gives us a rocket that won’t blow up as soon as we light the candle, this whole thing’s gonna be a waste of time… and me,” he quietly added.
Everyone knew what he meant. So far, three prototype engines had exploded during static tests. The fact that each engine had run a few seconds longer than the last one was of little comfort to the pilot being trained to ride it in space.
“We’ll get it built.” Harry was confident, as if they were discussing nothing more than a university research project that had developed a few kinks. “Don’t sweat it.”
“Really? Don’t sweat it, huh?” Skid suddenly came to a halt, causing everyone else to stop as well. He raised a hand, crooked a beckoning finger. “C’mere… I want to show you something.”
Lloyd stared at the test pilot as he turned to walk away. “I thought we were going to get lunch.”
“We’re still going to eat,” Skid said over his shoulder. “C’mon… this will take just a second.” Lloyd and Harry gave Jack Cube a questioning look, but he only shrugged and gestured for them to follow him.
Skid led the other three men back toward a massive hangar they’d just passed. The largest building in the compound, it was built of steel-reinforced concrete and had no windows. Instead, it was cooled by a huge air-conditioning unit in its flat roof. The double doors at the end facing them were closed, but an MP stood guard in front of a smaller side door. Recognizing Skid and Jack Cube, he stepped aside to let them pass, but Skid stopped just before he opened the door.
“You guys have been stuck in a lab all this time, playing with slide rules,” he said to Lloyd and Harry, “so maybe this whole thing has become just a little abstract. Kind of a thought experiment, if you know what I mean.”
“We haven’t forgotten…” Lloyd began.
“Yeah, well”—Skid opened the door, walked inside—“lemme show you something anyway.”
The hangar was a cool, well-lit cavern, its concrete floor illuminated by rows of fluorescent fixtures suspended from the steel rafters high above. In the center of the hangar, resting within a mobile cradle and surrounded by scaffolds and catwalks, was what appeared to be an unfinished aircraft, yet one that had never been seen before. Long, swept-back wings, already covered by unpainted steel plates, jutted out from a skeletal frame that would eventually become a fuselage, while at the far end of the room, workmen in welders masks used acetylene torches to assemble a long, sleek nose.
As Lloyd gawked in amazement, Harry whistled just under his breath. “Damn,” he said quietly. “So this is the X-1.”
“That’s what you guys call it, sure.” Hands on his hips, Skid regarded the spacecraft proudly. “Me, I call it the Lucky Linda. The day Jack and Colonel Bliss asked me to fly her, I told them I would, so long as I got to name her after my sweetheart. She’s kind of hard to please, so… well, never mind.”
He turned to Harry and Lloyd again. “She’s a beauty, my Lucky Linda, and I’ve got to hand it to you guys… you’re giving me a real sweet flying machine. There’s only one problem…”
“No engine,” Lloyd said quietly.
“That’s right… she ain’t got no engine. And if Lucky Linda ain’t got no engine, she ain’t going nowhere except the junkyard. And worse than that, if she doesn’t fly but the Silver Bird does, there won’t be nothing to stop the Nazis from dropping bombs on New York. Which would really break my heart, because I’m from Brooklyn, and my baby lives there, too.”
As he spoke, Rudy Sloman slowly walked toward them, never raising his voice but not looking away either. Neither Harry nor Lloyd said anything, even as the test pilot stopped just a foot away from Harry and stared him straight in the eye, his gaze cold and unwavering.
“So, yeah, I am going to sweat it,” he said. “And I’d appreciate it if, the next time you talk to your friends in New Hampshire, you’d tell them to sweat it, too, and gimme an engine that won’t blow up under my ass. Okay?”