Striking the Balance

Not even more of the chicory ersatz got him out of first gear the next morning, either. But, after he’d managed to heave himself up into the saddle, he said, “Today we give the Lizards a surprise.” That seemed to hearten him where rest and not-quite-coffee hadn’t.

Fordyce, Arkansas, bustled in a way Yeager had seen in few towns since the Lizards came. It boasted several lumber mills and cotton-ginning establishments and a casket factory. Wagons hauled away the output of the last-named establishment, which had never had slack time even during the lost days of peace and probably stayed busy round the clock these days.

The country south and west of Fordyce along US 79 looked to be a hunter’s paradise: stands of oak and pine that had to be full of deer and turkey and who could say what all else. They’d given Sam a tommy gun before he set out from Hot Springs. Hunting with it wasn’t what you’d call sporting, but when you were hunting for the pot sportsmanship went out the window anyhow.

Four or five miles outside of Fordyce, a fellow sat on the rusted hood of an abandoned Packard, whittling something out of a stick of pine. The guy had on a straw hat and beat-up overalls and looked like a farmer whose farm had seen a lot of better days, but he didn’t have a drawl or a hillbilly twang in his voice when he spoke to Yeager and Goddard: “We been waitin’ for youse,” he said in purest Brooklyn.

“Captain Hanrahan?” Yeager asked, and the disguised New Yorker nodded. He led Goddard and Yeager off the highway into the woods. After a while, they had to dismount and tie their horses. A soldier in olive drab appeared as if from nowhere to look after the beasts. Sam worried about looking after Goddard. Tromping through the woods was not calculated to make him wear longer.

After about fifteen minutes, they came to a clearing. Hanrahan waved to something-a camouflaged shape-under the trees on the far side. “Dr. Goddard’s here,” he shouted. By the reverence in his voice, that might have been,God’s here.

A moment later, Sam heard a sound he’d long since stopped taking for granted: a big diesel engine starting up. Whoever was inside the cabin let it get warm for a minute or two, then drove it out into the middle of the clearing. Things started happening very quickly after that. Soldiers dashed out to strip off the branch-laden tarp that covered the back of the truck.

Captain Hanrahan nodded to Goddard, then pointed to the rocket revealed when the tarp came off. “Dere’s your baby, sir,” he said.

Goddard smiled and shook his head. “Junior’s been adopted by the U.S. Army. I just come visit to make sure you boys know how to take care of him. I won’t have to do that much longer, either.”

A smooth, silent hydraulic ram started raising the rocket from horizontal to vertical. It moved much more slowly than Sam would have liked. Every second they were out in the open meant one more second in which the Lizards could spot them from the air or from one of those instrument-laden artflicial moons they’d placed in orbit around the Earth. A fighter plane had shot up the woods a couple of launches ago, and scared him into the quivering fidgets: only fool luck the rockets hadn’t wrecked a lot of this scraped-together equipment.

As soon as the rocket was standing straight up, two smaller trucks-tankers-rolled up to either side of it. “Douse your butts!” a sergeant in coveralls shouted, though nobody was smoking. A couple of soldiers carried hoses up the ladder that was part of the launch frame. Pumps started whirring. Liquid oxygen went into one tank, 200-proof alcohol into the other.

“We’d get slightly longer range from wood alcohol, but good old ethanol is easier to cook up,” Goddard said.

“Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said, nodding again. “This way, the whole crew gets a drink when we’re done, too. We’ll have earned it, by God.”Oined was what he really said. “And the Lizards over by Greenville, they get a hell of a surprise.”

Ninety miles,

Yeager thought,maybe a few more. Once it went off-if it didn’t do anything stupid like blowing up on the launcher-it would cross the Mississippi River and land in Mississippi in the space of a couple of minutes. He shook his head. If that wasn’t science fiction, what was it?

“Fueled!” the driver of the launch truck sang out-he had the gauges that let him see how the rocket was doing. The soldiers disconnected the hoses, climbed down the ladder, and got the hell out of there. The two fuel tankers went back into the woods.

The launcher had a rotating table at the base. It turned slightly, lining up the azimuth gyro with the planned course east to Greenville. The driver stuck his fist out the window and gave a thumbs-up: the rocket was ready to fly.

Goddard turned to Captain Hanrahan. “There-you see? You didn’t need me here. I could have been back at Hot Springs, playing tiddlywinks with Sergeant Yeager.”