Striking the Balance

“Yeah, when everything goes good, it goes great,” Hanrahan agreed. “But when it’s snafu, you like having the guy who dreamed up the gadget around, you know what I mean?”

“Sooner or later, you’ll be doing it without me,” Goddard said, absently scratching at the side of his neck. Sam looked at him, wondering how he’d meant that. Probably both ways-he knew he was a sick man.

Hanrahan took the statement at face value. “Whatever you say, Doc. Now whaddaya say we get the hell out of here?” Before Hanrahan could do that, he had to make a connection at the base of the rocket. Then, trailing a wire after him, he loped for the cover of the woods where the rest of the crew already waited. Goddard’s trot was slow but dogged. Sam stayed with him. When they were out of the clearing, Hanrahan gave Goddard the control box. “Here you go, sir. You wanna do the honors?”

“I’ve done it before, thanks.” Goddard passed the box to Sam. “Sergeant, why don’t you take a turn?”

“Me?” Sam said in surprise. But why not? You didn’t need to know atomic physics to figure out how the control box worked. It had one large red button, right in the middle. “Thank you, Dr. Goddard.” He pushed the button, hard.

Flame spurted from the base of the rocket, blue for a moment then sun-yellow. The roar of the engine beat at Yeager’s ears. The rocket seemed to hang unmoving above the launcher for a moment. Sam nervously wondered if they were far enough away-when one of those babies blew, it blew spectacularly. But it didn’t blow. All at once, it wasn’t hanging any more, it was flying like an arrow, like a bullet, like nothing on God’s green earth. The roar sank down toward the merely unbearable.

The blast shield at the base of the launcher kept the grass from catching fire. The driver sprinted out toward the cab of the truck. The launcher sank back toward the horizontal once more.

“Now we get the hell outta here,” Hanrahan said. “Come on, I’ll take youse back to your horses.”

He set a brisk pace. Yeager needed no urging to keep up. Neither did Goddard, though he was breathing harshly by the time they reached the soldier in charge of the animals. Yeager had just swung one foot into the stirrup when a flight of helicopters buzzed by overhead and started lashing the clearing from which the rocket had flown and the surrounding woods with gunfire and little rockets of their own.

None of the ordnance came close to him. He grinned at Goddard and Captain Hanrahan as the helicopters headed east, back toward the Mississippi. “They don’t like us,” he said.

“Hey, don’t blame me,” Hanrahan said. “You’re the guy shot that thing off.”

“Yeah,” Yeager said, almost dreamily. “How about that?”

“This is unacceptable,” Atvar declared. “That the Deutsch Tosevites fire missiles at us is one thing. That some other Big Uglies have now acquired the art presents us with severe difficulties.”

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “This one impacted uncomfortably close to the17th Emperor Satla,

and would surely have destroyed it had the targeting been better.” He paused, then tried to look on the bright side: “Like the Deutsch rockets, it is very inaccurate-more an area weapon than a pinpoint one.”

“If they fire enough of them, that ceases to matter,” Atvar snapped. “The Deutsche have killed a starship, though I don’t believe their intelligence realizes as much: if they knew such a thing, they would boast of it. But those losses we absolutely cannot afford.”

“Nor can we hope to prevent them altogether,” Kirel said. “We have expended the last of our antimissile missiles, and close-in weapons systems offer only a limited chance of a target kill.”

“I am all too painfully aware of these facts.” Atvar felt uncomfortable, unsafe, on the surface of Tosev 3. His eye turrets nervously swiveled this way and that. “I know we are a long distance from the nearest sea, but what if it occurs to the Big Uglies to mount their missiles on those ships they use to such annoying effect? We have not been able to sink all of them. For all we know, a missile-armed ship may be approaching Egypt while we are holding this conversation.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, this is indeed possible, but strikes me as unlikely,” Kirel said. “We have enough genuine concerns to contemplate without inventing fresh ones.”

“The Tosevites use missiles. The Tosevites use ships. The Tosevites are revoltingly ingenious. This does not strike me as an invented concern,” Atvar said, adding an emphatic cough. “This whole North African region is as salubrious to us as any on the planet. If all of Tosev 3 were like it, it would be a far more pleasant world. I do not want our settlements here to come into danger from Big Ugly waterborne assaults.”