Amateurs

by Tom Ligon

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

This is a work of fiction.

More of it is real than you think!

Jake Knoll stared in the general direction of the fire, his eyes focused at a point in the darkness a hundred meters beyond the charred timbers, which were still spouting tendrils of flame.

“Shame about your boat,” Fire Marshal Fredricks offered, indicating the blackened outline of a sleek, finned hull amidst the embers. “Would’a liked to see it go.”

Jake continued to stare blankly for a few seconds, before the words sank in. “Boat… oh, yeah. Thanks,” he replied dispiritedly, shrugging against the evening chill, and shifting his focus to the ruins of his project.

“Um, you covered by insurance?” the fire marshal asked.

Jake let out a long sigh. “Let it lapse a couple of months ago. Stupid, I know. Needed the money to finish the hull.”

The fire marshal looked strangely relieved. “There’s a sunny side to that, if you care to hear it.”

“You mean because it’s arson?” Jake asked.

Fredricks raised an eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

Jake shrugged. “Strong smell of kerosene. Pattern of blackened puddles around the barn. Spread fast. Building was engulfed before my alarm went off. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.” He managed a thin smile at his little joke.

Fredricks nodded. “Do me a favor, stick to building boats. You make my job look too easy. But, I’m glad to say, at least this puts you way down on the list of suspects. Any idea who’d want to do something like this?”

“Yeah,” Knoll replied, shifting his gaze to the left, toward a shallow lake at one corner of his property. “Told Johannson I’d be conductin’ tests on the lake, and it would be too dangerous for him to water his cattle there for a few months. He said somethin’ nasty. Guess I warn’t exactly cordial neither. I told him he’d be trespassing if he let his critters on my land again, and I’d have him slapped with papers. He stomped off swearin’ revenge.”

The fire marshal gave him a quizzical glance. “You couldn’t let him water his cattle while you were testing your boat?”

Jake shook his head. “It ain’t… warn’t… some fishing skiff, you know. I needed to test the engine. The tests would’a been a little dangerous, and even if they wasn’t, the noise would’a terrified his cows.”

Fredricks nodded understandingly. “Sure would’a liked to see it go.”

Back at the house, Knoll slumped into the recliner, aware for the first time that his clothes reeked of wood smoke and burned plastic. He was working up the will to get up and take a shower when the phone rang.

“Jake, it’s Baker Bret,” said the voice on the other end. “Just got your call. What happened?”

“We’re ruined,” Jake answered. “Wiped out. Finished. Barn is burned to the ground, workshop’s a total loss, nothing left of the lab but a concrete pad. Got my computers, my library, my notes, my drawings, everything.”

“The ship?”

“Nothing left but a big, crispy shell.”

“Jeezus.”

“Exactly.”

“Guess we just have to start over.”

Jake sighed deeply. “Listen careful, Bret, I said we’re finished. Out of business. Broke. No capital. Nothing to start over with. We re out of the rocket business. Kaput. Capish?”

“Oh.”

“I gotta get this stink off of me,” Jake said impatiently. “If you don’t mind, we can argue about pointless foolishness later, after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.”

Jake didn’t sleep though, and the following morning he began rebuilding his project. He pulled a venerable Commodore 64 home computer from the closet, and simply started over. By the end of the week, he had funds committed to an escrow account by a customer who needed a cheaper alternative for lofting small payloads to Low Earth Orbit, and had a new consulting job to generate a little ready cash.

I get to tell this story from my perspective because Jake can’t spell worth spit, and he flits from one idea to another so fast no reader can follow him. I was there, and I saw it happen, but I was really only a minor player. Jake and his Loyal Techs should get all the blame, and the accompanying glory.

I first met Dr. Jacob Knoll about a year after the fire. He had sent a letter commenting on a story I had written, and we had struck up a long correspondence. In the interim, I had started my own consulting service (consumer product safety and industrial troubleshooting, with space technology and nuclear research on the side). I’d offered to help Jake any way I could, realizing there was no money in it.

Through our correspondence, I’d learned, in detail, how Jake intended to build a single-stage-to-orbit, or SSTO, rocket in his barn, on a shoestring budget. It would take off and land on a runway like a plane, and was intended to be so cheap to build and operate it made the Delta Clipper look like a Golden Fleece. It sounded like a nutty idea at first, but he gradually won me over.

Nephew David, and David’s wife Patti, moved in after the fire to help with the rebuilding. David was a physicist, and Patti was a chemist, both victims of federal rifs. Four additional Loyal Techs, including “Baker Bret,” “Barefoot Jim,” and “Star Spangled Sam,” worked on various technical problems via the Internet. Loyal tech Dr. Gore was lined up to pilot the prototype, and was doing a little fusion research on the side. Nobody was getting paid a dime. The project was being funded by an assortment of consulting jobs and invention royalties, with a government subsidy for not growing crops helping to pay the taxes on the land, a generations-old working farm Jake had inherited.

I could describe the prototype spacecraft to you in detail, but perhaps you would do better to visit the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. There is a pretty close approximation of it hanging from the ceiling near the Apollo/Soyuz display. Once you’ve seen one high velocity lifting body you pretty much get the idea. The sleek, tapered fuselage was wider than high and provided the aerodynamic lift. A pair of winglets produced a modicum of steering while landing. Jake named the original prototype Dervish. That’s Whirling Dervish, as in orbiting, sensible when you understand how Jake names things. The prototype lost in the fire was a little larger than the one at the Smithsonian. Had to be. Dervish was a four-seater.

Built of a foam core coated with high-performance composites and ceramics, Dervish’s aeroshell was feather-light, yet incredibly strong. I’ve worked with several rocket outfits, and seen plenty of designs, and it was unlike any spacecraft design I had ever seen. The usual designs involve complex aluminum frameworks, with stainless steel, inconel, and titanium used abundantly, a little graphite composite, and a tremendous amount of labor and money. The designers are quite proud of how light their birds are, but they are like lead bricks compared to Knoll’s ship. Dervish’s construction was, in fact, closer to some experimental home-built aircraft designs.

Jake had always been very mysterious about the engines, for which he had some pretty fantastic expectations. Since my visit was to assist in a series of test burns, I was itching to get the chance to eyeball them firsthand.

I managed to piggy-back my first visit onto a business trip to Seattle. The money-making part of my trip over, I rented a Cessna 182 and headed east through the Cascades to visit Jake. Hauling my modest equipment was well within the capabilities of the tatty old workhorse. The town had a decent airport, not too much grass growing through the cracks in the runway, and plenty long enough to suit my rental bird. I pulled up to the FBO shack, and climbed out as a tall, gangly, gray-haired scarecrow of a man approached the plane.

“Tom?” he asked expectantly, offering a hand.

“Dr. Knoll?” I returned the question, naively inserting my hand into the pair of vice-grips disguised as human appendages he wore on his arms. I’d never seen his picture, but he had told me he looked like Ichabod Crane, only taller. This fellow fit the description.

“Limo’s waiting,” he said, grabbing a trunkful of my gear. I flexed my fingers to ease the pain, picked up my suitcase and briefcase, and followed him to a rusty early-sixties pickup truck, where he pushed various cans and boxes aside and laid my trunk gently in the bed. We finished loading and hopped in.

I habitually reached for my seat belt. Just as it occurred to me a truck this old wouldn’t have one, my fingers closed on nylon webbing. I pulled, and found the vehicle was equipped with seat belt/shoulder harnesses, in good shape. I was about to tell Jake I thought that kind of safety-mindedness was a Good Sign in the rocket business, when he nodded my way. “ ’Bout to recommend that,” he said. “Door has a bad habit of popping open.” The starter clicked and whirred a few times, then caught, and we were on our way.

The short drive from the airport to his farm left little time for conversation, which mostly hinged on how to keep the battered door closed. We rattled to a stop by a newly built outbuilding, one of those soulless all-metal farm buildings that can never adequately substitute for hand-hewn timbers with mortise and tenon joints. If you looked closely, bits of charcoal were visible in the soil.

“Whatever happened with your neighbor?” I asked.

He huffed. “Bank heard he was under suspicion and figured he would probably be sued. They foreclosed on him, which he evidently had comin’, figuring he would otherwise declare bankruptcy. Some kinda prior claim rule means I couldn’t get nothing if I tried.”

“He go to jail?”

“Nah, insufficient evidence, but at least he left the state. Funny thing though, turns out he actually did me something of a favor.”

I looked at him quizzically as he hopped out of the truck and trotted eagerly to the door, moving like a teenager. “Come on, take a look at Dervish Also.”

I rolled my eyes. What did I expect, something conventional like Dervish IP. This was Jake Knoll. I got out of the truck and followed him into the barn. There, propped up at odd angles by sawhorses and dimension lumber, was the new aeroshell. The polyurethane foam shape was completed, and the surface was perhaps half coated with composites. The building reeked of plastic resins, and I knew I’d have a headache if I stayed there long. I knew roughly what to expect from his sketches, but the thing was impressive nonetheless. Jake had given me the dimensions, but I hadn’t really pictured the size of it. It was designed to just fit in a standard semi truck trailer, if placed on edge.

“So what was the favor?” I asked.

“Out back, the old shell,” he said, as if that explained anything. I followed him through the back door. Emerging back into the sunlight, I was distracted by a the sound of a tractor motor accompanied by a loud whirring, coming from a mound of earth and shed several hundred yards out in a field. “We’ll see that next,” he said, motioning me to a lean-to that sheltered what was left of the original hull. He gestured toward a broken apart section near the nose.

Approaching the charred blackened ruin, I could make out the slightly grayer charred paint of the name. “I see the problem. D-I-R-VI-S-H.”

“Now, Tom,” he said with a wink, “I believe I told you I can’t spell worth spit. But that ain’t the fatal flaw I had in mind. Check that broken area.”

I bent to examine it. “Linear seams and voids in the foam,” I commented. “Damned near full thickness at this point. Since this section is in aerodynamic compression, chances are it would have buckled inward.”

“Hated to lose that old barn,” Jake said, nodding. “Not nearly as much as I would have hated to lose a pilot and ship. Figured a way to inspect for it on the new ship. T-waves.”

“Terahertz imaging? I’m impressed!” I was. That was cutting-edge technology, on the boundary between infrared and microwave, a region where quantum mechanics just starts to infringe on radio electronics, and the distinction between photons and electromagnetic waves begins to blur. I knew he didn’t have the funds to buy the equipment, which meant he’d built it from scratch.

We trotted out to the building that had been producing the interesting noise, now reduced to a gentle slowing whine. I saw a young woman standing outside wearing chemical protective gear. The noise was coming from the mound, which was actually a large circular pit with the excess earth piled around it and a contraption situated in the center. The apparatus spinning down consisted of a large wooden wagon-wheelish looking thing attached to a vertically-mounted automobile differential rear axle. The other end of the axle was imbedded in a large concrete base, and the drive-shaft coupling had a large pulley that looked suspiciously like a wheel rim. The belt from the pulley led, through a long trench and a series of guide pulleys, to the shed, where it looped around another pulley attached to the power take-off of an old gray and red Ford tractor. I think every farm has one of those old tractors. Must be a law or something.

“Centrifuge?” I asked, noticing the evenly-spaced containers attached to the wheel.

Jake nodded. “Patti’s whipping us up a batch of secret rocket propellant. ’Bout ready, Patti?”

“Be down in fifteen minutes,” she shouted back.

“Secret?” I looked at Jake, who had a mischievous grin. “Mike Moscoe blew your secret oxidizer with ‘Touch A Star, ’ a couple of years ago. Come to think of it, I seem to recall a rocket fuel mix the Three Stooges whipped up that included it.”

We trotted back to the barn. David came down from the house to meet us, then we started gathering gear for the test burns. My apparatus, plus a test frame and the rocket motor, were loaded on an old flat-bed hay trailer, which smelled faintly of cow manure. Patti rounded the corner riding the old tractor, which she deftly backed up to the trailer. Jake had the two coupled in ten seconds.

I looked over the tractor, which bristled with added-on brackets and other home-made hardware. “My uncle had one of these. I guess 80 percent that were ever built must still be in use.”

Jake scratched his head. “Eighty percent, well, maybe it’s that low. George here is sort of a member of the family. He helped raise me. I remember when dad bought him from Three-Finger Tony. George is our loyalist tech.”

We bounced down the dirt road to the test stand beside the little lake, led by David, driving the pickup hauling several flavors of rocket fuel in small cans, and trailed at a respectful distance by Patti hauling a small, well-cushioned tank of her freshly brewed concoction on a small rack installed on the back of an old Lincoln that could only get into first gear. I’d guessed that the stuff was highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a notoriously touchy compound. No doubt they used the Lincoln because it stood a better than even chance of surviving should the peroxide suddenly decide to revert to atomic oxygen and water. That effect, by itself, was a pretty good rocket fuel, and reason enough to carry it on a vehicle with a ride as smooth as a river barge.

David and Patti parked well away from the test stand, out of sight behind an earthen wall, where I had seen several well-separated bunkers. Jake and I pulled up to the stand and began unloading equipment. Jake moved in a continual trot, usually in a slight crouch, as if prepared to spring in any direction in an instant, and I think I would have been worn out just watching him. I came to realize this was his normal pace of work, which helped greatly to explain how he had accomplished so much in so short a time.

The first step in my equipment setup was for me to replace the old-fashioned spring-scale force-measuring kludge with an electronic load cell I’d picked up surplus. It fit nicely with the help of a battery-powered drill and a box of bits I’m never without. Then we mounted the rocket motor, a remarkably compact contraption wrapped with a tangle of wires and tubing.

“Ceramic?” I looked up quizzically when I noticed the material the engine casing was made of. “I presume there are some reinforcing fibers in it.”

He smirked. “Just you mind your own business and hook up them wires.”

“How do you cool it?” I asked, remembering a study of the Space Shuttle Main Engines I’d reviewed. NASA had been working on a nearly pure copper nozzle liner cooled by liquid hydrogen.

“MHD and thermal emissivity,” he replied cryptically. “Hurry up, I want to run about a dozen tests this afternoon.”

I installed ten thermocouples in wells he had provided in the motor casing and nozzle, found a spot on the concrete pad to mount a radiometer calibrated to act as a radiant energy thermometer so I could measure exhaust plume temperature, and ran the wires and cables back through a trench to a bank of well-shielded signal conditioners, and from there back to the control bunker, where I set up my computer. I also set up three video cameras, one normal, one infrared, and a special ultraviolet unit I had developed myself using some tricks from a NASA technical brief. These were tied to the computer, overlaying the images with synchronized time and data. I installed filters on the infrared and visible camera lenses to protect them from the intense light Jake expected, then calibrated the system, checked all the channels for function, and was ready to go.

First Patti, then David, came from their respective bunkers carrying small tanks of rocket juice. “You indicated you were going to use a tripropellant,” I noted. “What combination are you using?”

“Ah-well, that thar would hafta be a secret,” Jake said with a mysterious grin. “Call this mix Wallbanger.”

I rolled my eyes. “OK, be that way. Let me guess. I know you use hydrogen peroxide, I’d guess about 95 percent concentration, as an oxidizer.”

“Well, let’s just say it ain’t the stuff that comes from Clairol,” he replied with a confirming grin. “Course, that don’t mean I won’t also be trying liquid ozone.”

“Yeah, right,” I said recognizing a quickly dismissed possibility we had discussed in our letters, and retaliated with an even scarier possibility he’d suggested. “Or maybe tri-fluorine.”

“Or di-lithium,” he replied.

“Naming it after a drink probably means you’ve got some alcohol in it.”

He shrugged. “Could just mean you’d only dream up this mix with a couple of stiff drinks in you.”

I patted my equipment. “I’ll have a pretty good idea of the third component when I see the color of the exhaust, anywhere from near infrared up through ultraviolet B and then some.”

Patti and David scanned the area for unexpected visitors, then scurried back behind the earthworks to the control bunker. Jake primed the system and ran down a simple checklist, all remarkably informal to someone used to elaborate NASA test rituals. It was more like a mechanic planning to start a rebuilt gas engine.

I started the computer and video recordings, and he flipped the “fire” switch. At first, the little bunker sounded like the Concorde was parked just outside doing a run-up check with full afterburners, but the sound quickly changed to a piercing shriek.

“Damn,” I said as he switched the thing off about three seconds later, “I’ll need to zoom back for the next test. Exhaust plume went way off screen.” I glanced at the computer screen. “And the radiometer went off scale. Hell, I had that thing set for eight thousand degrees Kelvin, the hottest rocket exhaust I’ve ever heard of.”

“Well, now that’s what comes of conventional thinking,” Jake said with a self-satisfied grin. “Don’t worry, that was just a little blip. We can run it again. Can you get an estimate of exhaust temperature from the UV video?”

“Yeah.” I rewound the tape. “I’ll reset the radiometer range higher on the next test. I’ve measured plasma spray temperatures over twenty thousand, but nothing that high from a purely chemical reaction.”

Jake shook his head. “There’s that conventional thinking again. What sort of nozzle temperatures did you get?”

I stared at the display. “Crap, the thermocouples must have slipped out. The hottest is only 148 degrees.”

He nodded. “Sounds about right.”

I stopped the tape and pressed play, then turned to stare at him. “How the hell do you keep it so cool? A laminar flow boundary layer?”

He shrugged. “MHD and Thermal Emissivity. What’s the tape show?” One side of the screen had a computer-generated color-temperature scale corresponding to the false-color images made by the camera. I shook my head. “Man, the calibration has to be off. I’m getting around 12,000 degrees.”

Jake whooped and jumped in the air, then came down, slapped his thighs, and did a little dance. “Right on target,” he sang, then he froze, looking at me like a kid at Christmas about to get a package from a rich relative. “What kind of thrust did it make?”

I read the figures, and he punched them into a calculator. “Bull’s-eye,” he rejoiced. “Tom, if you want specific impulse, you gotta have exhaust velocity. If you want exhaust velocity, you gotta have pressure. If you want pressure, you gotta have temperature.”

I nodded, tolerating the lesson in basic thermodynamics. “But temperature is limited by available materials,” I observed. “You have to have a way to hold the reaction. You told me you were trying to build a ship that could be turned around in half a day. Gas it and fly again. You need a conservative design that won’t eat itself alive every time it runs.”

Jake smiled patronizingly. “You’ve been looking at too many old chemical rocket engine designs, m’boy,” he said. “And not enough at nuclear designs. Come on, put another quarter in that video game and let’s do it again.”

The second run with Wallbanger went flawlessly, a full thirty seconds, then we switched to a fuel system called “Meringue.” Jake was a little disappointed with it, as it produced about 12 percent less umph than he had expected, but said the name came from the mixture being exceedingly touchy, and figured that had something to do with it. “Popcorn” worked satisfactorily, but the performance was lower than the others, as expected. Then we tried “Baked Beans,” also an unimpressive performer which, I gather, used some hydrogen sulfide to try to boost reaction rate. “Cream Puff” was even better than Wallbanger.

I asked him where he got his fuel system names, and he admitted his loyal techs dreamed up most of them. I suggested that his loyal techs were probably underfed.

“Now,” Jake announced with a flourish as Patti scurried back into the bunker after depositing her empty fuel canister, “we will try my favorite… Pan Galactic Gargleblaster, nothing less than the most potent rocket fuel ever designed by humankind. Everybody ready?” We nodded. “Drum roll.” David drummed his pencils on the bench. “Lift-off!” He pressed the ignitor button.

The ground shook, there was a terrific bang, and the engine simply disappeared from my monitors, followed by what looked like a little rain squall with a bit of fog.

There was a moment of silence as we stared in disbelief at the monitors.

“What the hell happened?” I asked at last.

“You tell me,” Jake replied. “What’s the computer say?”

“The computer says all channels open-circuited about seven hundred microseconds after the main propellant valves opened.” I rewound the normal video and stepped through the ignition sequence frame by frame. In one frame the engine was there, in the next it wasn’t, just a handful of cables and thermocouple wire exiting stage left, and a few pieces of angle-iron support structure vibrating at odd angles.

Patti opened a locker and extracted four disposable hazmat suits plus four pairs of heavy rubber galoshes and gloves. David opened a couple of packages of chemical detector strips, and clothespinned them on the end of a long bamboo pole. Jake reached into the back of the locker and pulled out a three-lobed plastic boomerang.

David frowned. “You’re not actually going to try that cockeyed idea, are you?”

Jake grinned. “Hell, everybody knows I’m a crazy rocket scientist. I’ll try anything. Where’s the tape?” He proceeded to tape a couple of detector strips to the boomerang, then opened the bunker door.

David led the way as we headed outside. We cautiously rounded the earthworks, waving the pole ahead of us and checking the indications of the test strips frequently. As soon as he had a clear shot at the test stand, Jake hauled his arm back and let loose with the boomerang, which sailed over the stand, arched up, and returned neady a few yards away.

“There, see,” Jake inspected the strips and showed them to each of us, “not a trace. It works.”

David shook his head. “If I ever see a positive indication from that silly thing, I’ll believe it. I still don’t think it stays in the area long enough.” He resumed his slow advance with the pole.

Jake winked at me. “He ain’t never got a positive indication from the pole, neither,” he whispered.

The front half of the rocket motor had evidently torn loose from the mounts, propelling itself, the valves, the control system, the small propellant tanks, and my load cell into a strategically located arrangement of sand and plastic trash cans filled with water. The fuel left in the tanks was consumed when they burst on impact. The crater was impressive.

“Well,” Jake said as he fished the remains of the motor from the far end of the wreckage with a loop of cord he had rigged on the end of the bamboo pole, “rocket fuel is kinda like a chain saw. If it warn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t be very useful.”

Patti and I picked up a few shards of nozzle, which were all we could find of the rest of the motor. We secured the site, tossed the components into buckets of water to remove any traces of propellant, and drove in silence back to the barn.

Gathered around a battered but solid old oak table, I pointed to the wire imbedded in the nozzle fragments. “MHD, you kept saying—magnetohy-drodynamics, I kept thinking. You’re using the rocket thrust to develop considerable amounts of electrical power, if I am not mistaken.”

Jake nodded sullenly. “Something like that.”

“Electric power for what?” I demanded. “Thermal Emissivity, whatever that means?” I eyed the rest of the motor fragments, from which dangled a profusion of wire and electrical gizmos.

“Electric fields,” Jake said cryptically. “Just leave it at that. I don’t want to give any more away.”

I considered the evidence for a moment, and things began to connect. I nodded. The tiling was like some designs I had seen for thermonuclear propulsion systems that had yet to be built, yet it was clearly fueled by conventional chemistry. Or was it? Whatever his secret, clearly this engine was decades ahead of the engines being used to put anything else into space. The Shuttle main engines had some interesting turbo pumps and cooling systems, but were otherwise little different from those of the V2. Most other launch systems were merely refinements of engines developed in the ’50s or ’60s. Pegasus used solid rockets, the DC-X and Black Horse used Pratt and Whitney RL-10 engines from the Centaur, the X-34 would probably use Rocketdyne MA-5 engines from the Atlas, last I heard Conestoga was also using old engines, and the Air Force was launching most of its stuff on old Titans.

“Sorry about your equipment,” Jake said mournfully, indicating the load cell, about five centimeters shorter now than when I had installed it.

I shrugged. “Two hundred bucks on the surplus market. It wasn’t one of my good ones. It’s a tax write-off, like renting the plane. Make it up to me by getting to orbit, so I can brag I helped. However, if you don’t mind, I’ll just give you the address of the surplus outfit, and you buy and keep the replacement.”

“Fair enough,” Jake agreed. “How about the radiometer?”

“Looks like it survived untouched, although the cable was severed in three places. I’ll need to replace the cover window, but it’s cheap. The thermocouples are expendable anyway, of course.”

Jake shook his head as he looked at the shattered motor. “Who the hell do I think I’m kidding, tackling something like this, anyway?”

“The actual engine will have a forty to fifty centimeter nozzle, I think you said,” I pointed out. “This was your ten-centimeter prototype, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you read the piece by G. Harry Stine where he said something to the effect of you have to blow up the prototype, or you don’t learn anything?”

His face brightened for the first time in an hour. “Yeah.” Then he scowled again. “What exactly did I learn?”

I shrugged. “To take it easy the next time you try Pan Galactic Gargle-blaster.”

“Right,” he nodded. “Any chance you’ll be out this way again?”

“My customer in Seattle asked me to perform the same test for them in about a month. You take a crack at figuring out what went wrong, and let me know if you need any additional data taken, and we’ll try this again.”

We shook on it. By the time I took off for Seattle the following morning, the swelling in my hand was almost gone.

One of my customers back home in Virginia builds small satellites. My usual work for them is far more mundane than what I was doing for Jake, just proof-loading satellite handling fixtures, but it was enough to let me know the size and shape of their machines. They were well within the expected launch capacity of Jake’s proposed second-generation workhorse design. They had been paying something like $15,000 per kilogram to get the things launched, compared to the $600 or less per kilogram Jake expected to charge, so I agreed to approach them to see if they were interested in backing the project.

I showed their project director photocopies of some of the sketches and data Jake had sent me over the years, with projected costs and performance. Perhaps that was a mistake. In the space business, a lot of people don’t take you seriously if you don’t have money for slick four-color brochures.

“Just sketches? Not very far along, is he?” the project director said with a disdainful sniff.

“He’s nearing completion on his prototype aeroshell,” I pointed out, “and is running engine test burns. Compare that to those guys up in Vancouver who just offered a prospectus for a new launch service based on preliminary drawings alone, but who have yet to even decide on an engine design or a fuel system. Or the folks down the road who just announced their new rocket. Lots of slick brochures and art, but they don’t yet know if the engine will be parts from the Atlas or Russian Truds.”

“Looks like a rank amateur to me.”

“I watched that ‘rank amateur’ get 580 seconds of specific impulse on a test burn last week,” I replied.

His eyebrows went up. “Jeezus, what is he burning?”

“He is reluctant to say. I can tell you it is a tripropellant, with an extremely sophisticated engine design.”

“He’s feeding you a line of crap,” the project director retorted. “Specific impulse of over 460 seconds just won’t work.”

“Used my load cell and data acquisition system, so I know the calibration was kosher,” I said, reaching into my briefcase for a copy of The Starflight Handbook and opening it to a page 1 had marked. “And if you’ll notice, liquid ozone with liquid hydrogen is known to give specific impulse of over six hundred seconds.” He looked at me with alarm. “Though that’s not the oxidizer he uses,” I added.

He flipped the book over to look at the title on the cover, and snorted. Evidently he was not familiar with it. “He’s building a damned bomb. What in hell makes him think he needs that kind of performance?”

“The technology Dr. Knoll is building is horizontal takeoff, horizontal landing, SSTO, fully reusable, quick turnaround, with a very high payload fraction.”

He laughed. “Another for-sure crackpot crazy amateur rocket scientist! He can’t possibly have any idea of what it costs to get into space if he thinks it can be done for six hundred bucks a kilo. Yeah, it’s possible to build an SSTO. You can use the hottest stuff you can find and the engine will blow up on half your launches, or you can lighten the structure until it breaks up on the pad, and you still won’t get a decent payload fraction. It has been conclusively demonstrated that the best SSTO design has two stages.”

“So you’re saying you won’t even take a serious look at a technology that might cost a twentieth or less of what you are paying for launch services now?”

He shrugged. “In the first place, launch services don’t cost me anything. The government pays to launch these satellites. What costs me is if the damned rocket blows up and Congress decides to cancel the program. I’m not ready to try any unproven launch system with a cockeyed new engine that hasn’t been used successfully at least ten times, and preferably more like a hundred. In the second place, I don’t buy from amateurs. Call me after you’ve launched our competitors’ satellites a dozen times.”

That was the end of the meeting.

I stewed all the way back to my lab. I realized I was being irrational by taking the rejection personally. After all, I was just a contractor, a peripheral figure, in the project. In fact, not only was I not making a dime on it so far, it was costing me money. Any reasonable view of new businesses in general, and space businesses in particular, would show 90 percent or more odds the venture would fall flat on its ass, with no skin off my back. And the project director was right, the project was amateurish, underfunded, and an order of magnitude or two below everybody else’s assessment of the problem.

Back home, I checked the mail, and found a copy of Flying magazine amidst the bills and junk mail. On the cover was a Lancair, a sporty composite kit-plane that had just won another cross-country race. The close runner-up, another sleek composite kit-plane, was flying formation with it. Third place, a half-million dollar, three hundred horsepower, twenty gallon per hour, commercially-built aluminum machine whose ancestor had first flown in 1947, had tagged along half an hour later, about sixty knots slower. Honorable mention went to another kit-plane that had been right behind number three, propelled by an eighty horsepower engine burning less than four gallons an hour.

I stared at the Lancair, whose graceful lines had taken shape in a garage or hangar somewhere. Not only was this plane home-built from a kit, its design was a refinement of a plane that had started from a clean sheet of paper, the dream of a knowledgeable “amateur” who had rejected the ancient designs offered by “professional” aircraft companies, and opted instead for higher performance at lower cost, using modern materials and aerodynamic theories.

From somewhere out of the back of my mind rolled a television expose of a small remote-piloted aircraft designed for battlefield recon, the prototype for which was built by a couple of amateur model aircraft enthusiasts for a few thousand dollars. The project had been usurped by a large corporation, who spent tens of millions developing a high-tech version that didn’t work as well.

Then, of course, there were the other amateurs, like Wilbur and Orville Wright, Robert Goddard, Werner Von Braun… Oh, just go through any good aerospace history book, and you’ll see bunches of good examples.

That was what had me so offended, I realized. My personal stake in this was a system that wasn’t ready to take a serious look at revolutionary new technologies, particularly if they were developed by amateurs, i.e. amatori, i.e. people who do what they do because they love it. My stake was also that access to space, and its incalculable bounty, was hog-tied by the enormous cost of getting into orbit. Even if Jake Knoll failed, his concepts were sound, and his results were promising. He, or someone else, could try again. When they finally succeeded, the payoff would be enormous.

And that gave me an appreciation of other amateurs: people like aviation pioneers Otto Lilienthal and Percy Pilcher, and the countless nameless others who had tried and failed. Their names are in the same good aviation history books. Others learned from their mistakes and succeeded.

The follow-up tests, on a new engine with connections to allow me to monitor the mysterious “electric fields,” worked well. We uncovered the probable cause of the previous explosion, came up with a tune-up protocol that avoided it, did a number of full-power runs using Pan Galactic Gargleblaster, and got a specific impulse a smidge over 600 seconds. Then we did what G. Harry Stine said we must, we blew it up. Quite deliberately, we duplicated the conditions of the previous test, and turned the engine into smithereens, just to be sure we understood the problem. This time, we removed the expensive instrumentation first.

Shortly thereafter, Jake got lucky at an auction of damaged aircraft. The sale featured some cherries that got all the attention, and Jake drove away with the remains of a Learjet for $500. The plane had been involved in a fire during maintenance, which had burned the back half of it to unidentifiable junk, and took out the hangar in the process. The cockpit was intact, although it was an older model, and its maintenance logs were lost in the fire. Without a paper trail, the plane was essentially permanently unairworthy. Awash in better prospects, none of the other bidders bothered to look at it, even for parts, suspecting the ancient thing was equipped with junk. In fact, it had some very nice modern instruments and radios. Jake made his $500 back selling the nose landing gear to a South American parts depot, and equipped the cockpit of Dervish for free.

Some months later, I returned to witness glide tests of the aeroshell. The FAA had little problem with Jake’s request to do the unpowered tests under existing Experimental Class rules, especially with Dr. Gore, a qualified test pilot, at the controls. Of course, nobody said anything about eventual installation of rocket engines to them in the application. Jake sweet-talked a friend of his into towing Dervish behind a DC-3 cropduster that turned out to still have the original towing hardware it had used to pull a pair of Waco gliders to Normandy on June 6, 1944.1 got to fly as unofficial co-pilot of the old warbird, though I spent most of the time operating a video camera. We conducted the tests in Nevada, away from the curious eyes of neighbors, especially Fire Marshal Fredricks, who was still under the impression Jake was building a jet-powered speedboat.

I was impressed with Dr. (Captain) Chuck Gore. He’d flown F-4s in Viet Nam, in a flight that included Lt. Blood, Lt. Goetz, and Major Coffin. Sort of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, burning JP-4.

Jake couldn’t afford a series of ground tracking stations or access to NASA’s TDRS data relay satellites, and was hoping to use cellular phones and modems to communicate with Dervish over the Internet. Barefoot Jim and I managed to quash that idea, which was mega-illegal. Together, we hatched a scheme to use the network of amateur radio “digipeaters” to track the ship. Ah, radio hams, I forgot to mention them. Yes, another bunch of true pioneers who were the original developers of a number of modern technologies, who also love what they do. No strangers to space technology, they have put up a series of amateur-built “Oscar” satellites, at very low cost and low weight. They were becoming excited over an idea of Jake’s to build a 45 kilogram orbiting radio telescope to beat NASA at their own game, and were also keen on the idea of free launch services in exchange for the digipeater favor. They sweet-talked the FCC into acknowledging that since Jake was obviously an amateur, his ship qualified for an amateur radio station license. The Amateur Radio Relay League lined up a database of frequencies, access codes, and locations for digipeaters whose operators had volunteered, which was nearly every digipeater operator on the face of the Earth.

About this time, a friend of mine finished his all-wood, home-designed, home-built plane, the pride of fifteen years of loving work. I was prospering, and was able to buy his GlasAir, a composite home-built kit-plane he had put together when problems with the wooden design seemed insurmountable. I flew cross-country out to Washington to test the digipeater system, which worked with only a few, easily-remedied glitches. Jake studied my pride and joy intensely, declared it to be “OK for a start, but heavy as a brick. Soon as I have time, I think I’ll show this business how to build these things.”

Having proved Dervish’s basic airworthiness, Jake began installing life support and other systems. The term “off-the-shelf” has been applied to a number of “low-cost” space projects lately, with $150 million qualifying as cheap. Jake broke new frontiers in cheap, and deserves a new term. I propose “out-of-the-basement.” Funding what he knew should be a million-and-a-half dollar project out-of-pocket, every scrounging and cost-cutting measure possible was needed. Besides the stuff from the trashed Lear, pieces came from surplus catalogs, scuba diving catalogs, solar home suppliers, camping suppliers, amateur radio “hamfest” tailgate sales, and a cou-pie of local yard sales. Kenton Thurman had a plumbing and hardware store down the road in Wenatchee, and had written in response to a story entitled “The Pattern,” bragging about how his stores adapted to local needs. I called him on it. He found himself adding nickel tubing and aircraft-grade bolts to his inventory.

Testing the aeroshell and its systems in a vacuum was a tough nut to crack. Jake and his crew turned most of the inside of the barn into a huge test chamber by building a foam-cored composite vessel large enough to hold the craft. The test chamber was covered with cheaper automotive-grade fiberglass and polyester, and a slathering of concrete, but was otherwise similar in construction to the aeroshell. It sealed with silicone and bolts, the end cover dragged into position by George. The high-capacity vacuum pump was made from an old big-block V-8, turned by the power take-off of the old tractor. The chamber couldn’t come anywhere near the vacuum of space, but it tracked down the leaks, revealed an outgassing problem with the foam that could be compensated for, and proved the systems would continue to function to at least one hundred thousand feet.

We moved the engine test site to Nevada for the tests of the big engine. The little one had drawn too much attention from Jake’s neighbors. We had finally mounted the little engine on Dervish, which floated like a cork, and staged a demonstration on a large lake near town. Jake came up with a low-potency fuel mixture called “Molotov Cocktail,” especially for the purpose. It produced plenty of flame and fury, to the delight of Fredricks and the other town-folk, but Jake deliberately kept the speed down. We learned Dervish was an awful race boat. In spite of the truck load of sandbags we’d ballasted it with, it wanted to fly.

Then the problems started. No way was the FAA going to let us test a rocket plane. NASA just laughed and handed us a bunch of test requirements that would have cost a hundred million dollars to comply with. Jake tried the FAA again, proposing to put a jet engine on Dervish instead. No dice. We looked into moving to another country, but the cost was out of reach.

The project was technically well along at that point, but apparently up against a bureaucratic brick wall, the problems something I couldn’t help with. I drifted off to other projects, though I kept up the correspondence. Jake wrote less and less frequently, and seemed more inclined to discuss starship designs than SSTO development. I feared he was losing heart, but understood. It had been a hell of a long shot from the start, and the final obstacles were predictable.

The phone rang late one Friday night. It was Jake. I clearly remember his exact words. “Tom, get your ass out here right now, or you’ll wish you had.” Further, he would not elaborate, except that I was needed, with gear, on Sunday morning.

I bought a ticket on a commercial jet. I hated to let somebody else do the flying, but I evidently needed to get there fast. I rented the same old Cessna in Seattle, and boogied through the mountains to Jake’s farm. Jake met me at the airport again, this time trotting from a door in a hangar I had thought was abandoned.

He gave me a bear hug. “You made it! Let’s go. Lots to do.” I trotted to keep up as he headed back to the hangar at his usual pace. There, in the pale light from four brand-new explosion-resistant fluorescent fixtures, was Dervish. It seemed different somehow, almost… alive. Lights and soft noises emanated from it, and tangy and oily chemical scents filled the hangar. I noticed a patina of wear on its sleek skin.

I recognized Patti, David, and Dr. Gore. There were two strange faces. “Wired Tom,” Jake announced, “meet Baker Bret and Star-Spangled Sam.” Oooh, a nickname. I was actually a bona-fide Loyal Tech. I shook hands all around.

I gazed at Dervish. Dr. Gore was ducking, peering, and prodding all around it, a pre-flight inspection if ever I’ve seen one. “You’re going to fly it! From here?”

Jake nodded.

“This legit?”

“Hell, no!”

I noticed the registration number N214PW painted on the fuselage. “The FAA approved it to fly?”

Jake led me to the crew hatch, above which was stenciled “EXPERIMENTAL SPACE ROCKET—DANGEROUS AS HELL.” The aircraft dataplate from the Learjet was attached to the frame. “You’ve heard of outfits that build an airplane around a dataplate?

That’s basically what we’ve done. That’s the tail number of the original Lear.”

I shook my head. “That can ’t be legal.”

Jake grinned. “Sure cuts down questions when you file a flight plan, though.”

I shook my head. “Wait a minute, you’ve done this before?”

He nodded. “Flown it a buncha times down in Nevada. Found this little desert down in between the mountains that’s all Class G airspace. Class Go For It, uncontrolled, no nosy radar coverage, no traffic except the occasional drug smuggler, nothing but miles and miles of sagebrush and pinion pines.”

“Class G, OK, but that’s low altitude. Speed limit of 250 knots, and it ends at 14,500 feet max, right?”

Dr. Gore joined in. “Right. Keep in mind, the area is so remote, controlled traffic stays much higher to maintain radar coverage and radio contact. With almost no traffic and no cops, well, let’s just say nobody out there drives the double nickel, either. On occasion, we act like normal traffic and pop up a little higher. We’ve even filed in-flight IFR flight plans a couple of times and taken it up to 58,000 feet.”

I frowned. “But you’d have to act like a Learjet, right?”

Gore nodded. “Right, but at least we got some flight time in on it, and a little altitude. Handles nice. Lands a little fast.”

Jake slapped Dr. Gore on the back. “Sounds like another Yeager, don’t he, Tom? Don’t think Yeager ever flew a plane he didn’t like, even the ones that scared everybody else spitless.”

Dr. Gore blushed. “I’m no Yeager. I’m ready, though.”

Jake’s eyes twinkled. “We re going for it, Tom.”

“Orbit?!!” My eyes must have about popped from their sockets.

“Lee-Oh, lee-hee-hee-oh,” Jake sang. “Low Earth Orbit and then we come home.”

“Be a little hard to hide that,” I observed.

“Sure hope so,” Jake said, the grin contorting his lace like a Greek mask. “ We’ll take off out of here like private IFR traffic, fly south a little to get well clear of Canadian airspace while we clear the Cascades, then turn west and request clearance to flight level 600. Spot we picked rarely has any traffic, especially Sunday morning. If there is, we can abort, dump the fuel, land, and try again, though that would be bound to draw a crowd. If we get clearance, we point the ship almost straight up and pour on the Gargle-blaster. When we pass 60,000 feet, we’re back in uncontrolled airspace, only need to maintain visual separation with the Aurora, and can give air traffic control the razz-berry.”

“Now, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I argued. “You’re taking off to the west, against Earth’s rotation.” Jake shrugged. “Well, more to the south-west, actually. No problem. Light load, plenty of fuel. Be a great demonstration of what we can do. Besides, it puts us over water quicker, gives Vandenberg a real good look at us, and we don’t pass over nobody with nukes until everybody knows what we’re up to.”

“Jake, they’re gonna throw you in jail for sure.”

He nodded. “Probably. But they’ll pay attention.”

After a late night, we rose early to finish launch preparations.

Most of the data acquisition would be handled over the Internet through a couple of old computers Jake had bought when I finally convinced him a Commodore wasn’t a proper machine for rocket science; never mind he did most of the design with it. My computers weren’t needed, but my video system and rental plane were. My job was to fly a chase plane mission.

“Like a 182 is going to keep up with a rocket,” I quipped.

“You’ll get a nice fly-by, and maybe even get the takeoff,” Jake said. “And we’ll try to work it out so you can track the main climb. Patti will go with you to work the camera. One way or another, we’ll make the evening news. Film at six!’”

“You’re in the Civil Air Patrol, right?” Dr. Gore asked.

“Yeah. So far. If this doesn’t get me kicked out.”

He pulled an emergency locator transmitter from a pocket on the right leg of his flight suit. “Can you track an ELT from the Cessna?”

I nodded. “No DF equipment, but I can do it with wing shadow method.” “Good. If something goes wrong I can bail out. If I’m still over land, get a fix on me, OK?”

“No problem.”

The launch had been planned for Sunday morning because the good people of the surrounding farms and communities would be in church, and paying no mind to unusual aircraft showing up at the airport. We drove to the airport just after dawn to check the systems and fuel the ship, waited for everyone to get to church, and rolled Dervish out to the run-up pad, with the help of that faithful old tractor, George.

Dr. Gore climbed in, wearing a skintight home-made pressure suit with a helmet that looked a little like something you’d see in a movie from the ’30’s. His nomex flight suit was worn over the pressure suit. I took off in the Cessna to get into position, while the preparations continued, and checked in with Center, a local courtesy due to the nearby Canadian border. I suppose the best way to describe the launch is to give you what I recorded on the radio.

“Pasayten traffic, Lear 214 Papa Whiskey, taking the active on 16 for immediate takeoff.”

“Pasayten traffic, Lear 4 Papa Whiskey, departing to the south.”

“Lear 4 Papa Whiskey, Cessna 2 Golf Sierra, ten south at ten five has you in sight.”

“Cessna 2 Golf Sierra, roger, no joy, beginning climb.”

“Cessna 2 Golf Sierra, Lear 4 Papa Whiskey, tally-ho, commencing flyby.”

“Four Papa Whiskey, roger, 2 Golf Sierra has camera rolling.”

“Pasayten traffic, Lear 4 Papa Whiskey leaving frequency for Center.”

“Seattle Center, Lear 214 Papa Whiskey, over Loomis at ten five, opening flight plan.”

“Lear 4 Papa Whiskey, Center, roger, squawk 1722.”

“One-seven-two-two, roger, 4 Papa Whiskey.”

“Lear 4 Papa Whiskey, radar contact over Loomis, approved on course as filed. Clear above, climb to flight level 600 at your discretion. Flight level 600??! Uh, what model Lear is that?”

“Oh, Lear 4 Papa Whiskey is a real special model, as you are about to see. Id like to climb pretty quick. You sure it’s clear above us?”

“Four Papa Whiskey, Center,” the controller answered testily, “nobody above you for two hundred miles in any direction. You could take off straight up if you wanted. You came awfully close to the Cessna traffic that departed ahead of you a few minutes back, though.”

“’S’OK, we coordinated it. Straight up? That sounds like fun. Think I will. Thanks, Center.”

At that point, Gore opened the throttle and showed the controller just how special his little business jet was. Patti still had him clearly on the video. The previously invisible exhaust suddenly turned to a streak of flame like a welder’s torch, but white-violet hot and a whole lot longer. Dervish pitched up and accelerated for the sky like, well, a rocket. In eighty seconds, it had passed its assigned altitude.

“Center, orbital rocket 214 Papa Whiskey is now clear of your airspace. Just go ahead and cancel that flight plan, will you? And after that, maybe you could call NORAD and let them know a crazy bunch of amateur rocket scientists has just launched a manned flight southwest from the Pacific Northwest for retrograde orbit. They should be hearing from us over the Internet about now, but they’ll probably think it’s a prank. I’ll give Hawaii a buzz in about sixteen minutes, and be back with you in about an hour and a half”

I will not print the controller’s reply, in the interest of his continued employment. We tracked Dervish until it was out of sight, then stayed on-station until there was no chance we could be of any assistance, which took only a few minutes. We returned to the airport.

The departure had been noisy. Not many young boys, or girls, for that matter, have enough self-discipline, even in church, not to run to a window when a shrieking rocket plane takes off from the local airport, nor are they likely to return to their pews when they notice the rocket is their favorite speedboat. By the time of the big climb, pretty much the whole valley was watching. We beat a hasty retreat back to the farm to track the data. Jake hid down in the cellar with his computer, tracking the flight, while we fended off the curious neighbors who were pouring down the driveway. We held nothing back. They were too dumbfounded to know if they were thrilled, angry, or terrified. Unfortunately, in the process, we couldn’t keep track of the flight.

The reporters from the local newspaper and radio station arrived, and I got pushed into the role of impromptu Public Affairs Officer, explaining what had happened and making sure they had everyone’s names spelled right. Patti scurried inside to make copies of our video, which we passed out to their considerable delight.

The commotion was building rapidly when Jake slipped out on the porch, his face ashen, and pulled me inside. “Tom, take David and get back out to the Cessna. We’ve got a problem.”

“Jeezus,” I said, struggling to keep my voice down. “What happened?” “We reached apogee, 900 kilometers as planned, and the engine failed. No circularization burn. It’s coming back down.”

“Is he all right?”

Jake nodded. “So far. Since the flight profile started with a big climb, and was nice and high, he’ll make a full orbit. We think just a wee bit more, in fact, thanks to aerodynamics. Course, his trajectory will be over the Pacific due to Earth’s rotation, but he can do a reentry surfing maneuver to bring him back near here. He’s going to try to land at Seattle. Best emergency facilities around, and he can ditch it in the water if it’s a miss.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I commented. “You want me to chase inbound in case something goes wrong, then?”

“Right. Here’s the frequency he’ll try to reach you on.”

“How long will he be in radio blackout?” I asked, remembering the problems NASA had.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Jake answered. “Dervish don’t streak back like some burnt-up space junk, it flies back, light as a feather and cool as a cucumber. OK, maybe cool as a baked potato. I’ll keep you updated, same frequency. You act as a relay if we need it.”

I saluted, grabbed my flight kit, and was out the door.

Ten minutes later, we were airborne. I contacted Jake. “Any news from the Good Ship Dervish?”

“Seattle is fogged in. He’ll try diverting to Spokane.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Should be OK, unless something goes wrong. If it does, there ’s no water to ditch in.”

“Roger that.”

“Can you position yourself near Republic? He’ll pass over there at around twenty, maybe thirty thousand feet.”

“Wilco.”

We flew toward the designated point, climbing to 12,000 feet, about as high as the Cessna or I was really comfortable. David scanned the sky, searching for Dervish, and wished we were in the bubble-canopied Glasair, instead of the high-winged 182.

“Doesn’t matter so much if we see him pass over,” I noted. “You probably wouldn’t see something that small with no contrail at 30,000 feet anyway. If we’re looking for him on the ground, this is a superior search plane.”

Just then Dr. Gore’s voice came over the radio. “Cessna 2 Golf Sierra, this is 214 Papa Whiskey, over.”

“Four Papa Whiskey, 2 Golf Sierra copies, loud and clear, over.”

“Got a problem here, fuel dump system isn’t operating. Feels like maybe the cable has seized up. Spokane says we can’t land, and I don’t blame them.”

“What’s your alternate?” I asked, anxiously.

“No alternate, and since I’ve already diverted, I can ’t reach open water.”

“What about a lake?” There were several fair-sized ones about.

“Too many boaters, especially on a Sunday. My best bet is to bail out and let it crash in the woods.”

The thought horrified me. Dervish had no ejection system, just a hatch. “What about a dry lake bed?”

“Rained last Wednesday. I’d crack up in the mud. Same if I tried to land in the desert. This thing is like a Styrofoam cup full of rocket fuel, and it needs a smooth landing area. Gotta go now. I’m turning on my ELT. See you on the ground; 214 Papa Whiskey out.”

“Four Papa Whiskey, 2 Golf Sierra, over?” I tried several times, with no response. “Mission base, 2 Golf Sierra, did you copy that?”

“We copied. Your ball, 2 Golf Sierra. Track him.”

I habitually leave my second radio on 121.5, the aircraft emergency frequency, and just then I began to pick up a dew-dew-dew alarm signal from an ELT. “That’s him, David. Sounds like he’s not too far away. Hang on.”

I put the plane in a steep left turn, noted the heading as the signal dropped out, and straightened out.

“OK, David, we’re over Havilah. Got it on the chart?”

“Got it.”

“OK, now draw a line 135, no, make that 150 degrees from there.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Go ahead and start scanning for him. You know the color of his parachute?”

David nodded, turning his attention to the sky. “It’s a purple and gold balloot. Very distinctive.”

I headed west the short distance to Ellisford to take another bearing for triangulation, and put the plane into another brisk turn. “OK, that’s 175 degrees.” I looked at the line David put on the chart. “Crap, something’s wrong, they don’t converge.”

We took another bearing from the same point. This time we got two hundred and ten degrees. “Damn! That’s a moving target. Westbound and fast. Jeezus, I hope he didn’t get hung up trying to bail out.”

“I think the signal is getting weaker,” David observed.

“I think you’re right. I’m taking us west. Keep your eyes peeled. He may have aimed it for the National Forest.”

A few minutes later, the ELT signal disappeared suddenly, in mid-bleep. David pointed, open-mouthed. I saw it too. About fifty miles southwest of us, a large, orange fireball erupted from the side of a mountain.

We reached the site about fifteen minutes later, and circled over it in absolute silence. Dervish had hit on the rubble near the base of a small cliff on the east slope of a crescent-shaped mountain. Fragments of the lightweight aeroshell had been thrown from the shallow crater, and were readily identifiable. There was no sign of a chute.

“Two Golf Sierra, Mission Base, do you have him yet?”

“Mission Base, 2 Golf Sierra, Dervish is down, four eight degrees, ten minutes, niner seconds north; one two zero degrees, seventeen minutes, ten seconds west. The ELT was apparently with it.”

There was an uneasy silence from the other end, then a subdued enquiry. “Any sign of a survivor?”

I tried to remember some of the polite ways of delivering bad news over an open radio channel. “Hair, teeth and eyeballs all over the place,” is rough on any family members listening in. I’d heard a medical technician use “no vital signs” once, after a plane had hit sixty degrees nose-down at three hundred knots.

“Survival unlikely,” I replied.

We touched down at the airport and pushed through the throng of reporters with no comment, taking David’s car back to the farm. The scene was a zoo, but not as bad as it would be soon, when the caravan of satellite news trucks we had seen coming up highway 97 arrived. With some doing, we made it into the house, just in time to hear a loud pop. I jumped. Then I recognized sounds of glee amidst the turmoil.

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.”

Jake stared at the slip of paper in disbelief. “Sorry. Counting the zeros. Be easier if you just used scientific notation. Damn, you’re serious.”

“Quite. I suggest you knock off another quick copy of Dervish, and, at the same time, get started on the full-sized model. Pretty obvious you’re on the right track, and know what you’re doing.” She reached in her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “And here, a tube of silicone seal and some motorcycle cables, on me.”

I came around the table to oogle all the zeros on the check. “That’s a lot of money,” was the cleverest thing I could think of to say.

“That’s chump change in the rocket business,” she said. “Practically petty cash. You could blow up a hundred Dervishes and still qualify as a cheap project. I doubt you’ll blow up more than two or three more before you get it right. Don’t you realize that flight was 99 percent successful?”

Jake and I exchanged glances, then blinked as it suddenly dawned on us she was right.

“What’s your angle in this?” I asked.

“I broker launch services. Trouble is, I’m locked out of large segments of the market. The big boys run the show. I’m left picking over the scraps, spot-marketing little pieces of leftover launch capacity. I could make a mint if I had a reliable, cheap, low-lead-time launch service to market. This isn’t just my money, by the way. Several of my clients put up the bulk of it. Some of ’em are having to wait years to get their payloads up. At this point, paying you to develop a new system is just as quick, maybe quicker, than waiting in line, and the development costs are less than they’d have to pay for a single launch with anyone else.”

Jake broke out another bottle of apple fizz, and we toasted the rebirth of Dervish. Then, Clarissa announced she had business in Vancouver the following morning, and had to be on her way. We shook hands, and she left. As she pulled out of the driveway, Jake reached for his tool kit. I walked beside him as we headed for the barn.

“What ya think we should call this one, Tom?”

“The Phoenix?”

“Fee Nix? I don’t think so.” He patted the shirt pocket with the check. “How bout ‘Taz’?”

I nodded. “I like it. Easy to spell, too.”

Jake took a mock swipe at me. “I wonder if Warner Brothers will license the nose-art?”

All of the characters in this story are fictitious, including fake and Tom. Some have real-world counterparts. The author gratefully acknowledges the tremendous contributions of James Victor-Hugo Hill, whose correspondence over the past year has provided much of the technical detail, color, and even a bit of dialogue.

Content

Amateurs
by Tom Ligon