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Chapter 7

Jackie Secord gripped the frame of the observation port tightly, staring at the strange assemblage of spherical tanks, tubing, and massive bracing structures within the almost unbelievably huge enclosure before her. Behind, a calm voice continued the countdown. "Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one. . . Firing."

From the center of the assemblage a monstrous tongue of flame reared up. Even through the soundproofing and vibration-absorbing material of the test facility, there came a deep-throated, thundering roar that shook the room. The sound went on and on, an avalanche of white noise that overwhelmed even her shout of triumph. It also wiped out the continuing counts and updates of the engineers, who had to resort to electronic communication rather than attempt to make themselves heard over the force of that unbelievable sound.

Finally, when it seemed to Jackie that even her bones were vibrating from the unending song of power, it cut off. Then she could hear the yells, the whistles, and leaped into the air herself with a cowboy whoop.

"It worked, it worked!" she shouted, ears still ringing with that impossible noise.

"And why should it not?" the deep, sonorous voice of Dr. Satya Gupta inquired calmly. "The concept was proven decades ago. It was merely a new design that needed to be tested."

"Dr. Gupta, you can't stand there and tell me you didn't feel anything—any nervousness, any anticipation—while we were counting down to the first firing!"

The dark eyes twinkled. "Well . . . Anticipation, certainly. The success of such a project, this is the reward of an engineer."

Jackie loved that considered, deliberate delivery, with the exotic combination of Indian and English accents flavoring Dr. Gupta's precise and well-crafted speech.

There was nothing unusual about Gupta's appearance—dark skin, black hair, symmetrical and well-molded face with a hooked nose over a brilliant smile, and he always dressed as though attending a formal dinner. Nothing unique at all, unless you counted the sharpness of those black eyes. It was Satya Gupta's voice that caught one's attention.

Everyone remarked on it, sooner or later. When A.J. Baker had met Gupta, he'd said: "So that's what Saruman is supposed to sound like."

Being A.J., he'd said it right in front of Gupta, too. Fortunately, the Indian engineer had a good sense of humor and hadn't been offended.

"So you never worried about something going wrong?"

Gupta gave an elaborate shrug. "It is always possible for there to be a failure, of course. Why else do we engineers always try to allow for all possibilities—and then add more reinforcements, just in case? On the other hand, a machine that is designed correctly should work. It will work. On this premise, Ms. Secord, our entire civilization depends."

Jackie almost laughed. Coming from anyone else, Gupta's little speeches and saws would just sound pompous; coming from him, they were simply right.

"Still—a nuclear rocket, Dr. Gupta! We just fired the first nuclear rocket since NERVA shut down!"

"Speaking for myself," Dr. Philip Moynihan said from his chair near the observation port, "I knew perfectly well it would work, and I still feel the same way Jackie does." The very elderly researcher was the only living man in the room who had participated in the original NERVA tests in the 1960s. "It's wonderful to see the new rocket fired for the first time."

Steven Schiffer, as was his way, added a cautionary note. "If the scrubbers don't make the outside air as clean as it was before the firing, it may be the last firing, too. The licensing hassles to permit this were something hellish. If one of the counters outside the range so much as hiccups, they'll probably come in and seal the whole complex." Gloomily: "With us in it, under a million tons of cement."

"And if they do that," Dr. Rankine said from his position at one of the analysis stations, "We'll just fire Zeus up again and blow a hole in the cement. Peak thrust of four and a half million newtons—call it just over a million pounds."

"Sweet! That'll give us something to fly from here to Mars on!"

"I still prefer 'Old Bang-Bang,'" grumbled Dr. Hiroshi Kanzaki.

Jackie rolled her eyes. The Japanese engineer's attachment to the old Orion design had always struck her as just barely short of obsessive.

"Oh, sure," she jibed. "That would be a lot easier to get authorized. 'Hi, we're going to take this huge honkin' plate of steel, put our ship on top, and then light off a chain of nuclear bombs under our asses to get us moving. In your back yard.'"

Kanzaki was never one to take a jibe without a rejoinder. "Well, you can't argue that us going for the nuclear rocket hasn't taken the heat off your boyfriend."

"A.J. is not my boyfriend!" Jackie replied automatically, for what was probably the three thousandth time.

The rest of what Kanzaki had said was true enough. The Ares Project also needed nuclear reactors to pull off some of the projected stunts, like generating new fuel on Mars for the return trip. If the government hadn't already been planning to make extensive use of nuclear technology in space for its own projects, A.J. and his fellow Nuts would have had hell's own time trying to convince anyone to let them fire off something loaded with fissionable materials into the sky.

"No doubt. I'm sure they're all grateful for that minor favor. Still, it means we get the real drive system while they're playing with bottle rockets."

That was greeted with another euphoric roar of agreement. Ever since they began, the space programs of the world had been stuck using chemical fuels to catapult loads into space. While that was perfectly acceptable for simple small orbital work, the fact remained that to explore the rest of the solar system demanded some other method of propelling a spaceship.

Many alternatives had been proposed, but they all had one of two disadvantages. Either, like solar sails or electric drive systems— sometimes called "ion" drives—they provided miniscule amounts of thrust. Or, they required a power source of such magnitude that only something like a nuclear reactor could provide the oomph needed.

In the case of Orion—"Old Bang-Bang," in their parlance— the design cut out the middleman entirely and detonated nuclear explosives like firecrackers under a tin can to kick a truly impressive payload upwards. However, with the paranoia against all things nuclear—even controlled reactions like NERVA—no such design had ever really been given a chance to get off the ground, so to speak.

But with the impetus to get to Mars suddenly in overdrive, it was clear that some superior drive system would be needed for the projected spaceship that NASA intended to send to Phobos and, thence, to Mars. With that demand, the NERVA program—Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications—had been reborn. Even in its prototype stages two-thirds of a century before, NERVA had demonstrated the immense thrust of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The specific impulse, which meant the amount of time that one pound of propellant could be used to produce a thrust of one pound of force, had been over eight hundred seconds—far greater than that which could be obtained from chemical sources.

While other theoretical systems, such as VASIMR, offered superior overall performance, they remained theoretical. All of them required major technological breakthroughs, such as controlled commercial fusion—still eternally twenty years away—or specialized materials design. NERVA was in fact the simplest overall concept available. It used nuclear power to heat reaction mass to tremendous temperatures and pressures, and then let it squirt out. Simple, but with proper design reasonably efficient and vastly powerful.

"What was our specific impulse?" she asked.

"Eight hundred ninety-two seconds," Rankine answered smugly. "Pushing the calculated limits already. I'll bet with tuning we can crack the nine hundred second barrier!"

Jackie's phone pinged. "Yes?"

A.J.'s image appeared in front of her, courtesy of her VRD. "Congratulations, Jackie! Looks like you hit a million pounds of thrust there!"

"How the hell do you know that? You didn't play Tinkerbell with me, did you?"

A.J. gave an exaggerated look of wounded pride. "How could you even consider such a thing, Jackie?"

"Because it's just the kind of thing you'd do!"

He waved a finger in the manner of a prissy teacher. "Certainly not. Planting unapproved sensors inside that complex would be illegal, and the last thing I want is to get hauled up before the law."

He paused a moment, obviously fighting a grin. "Now, monitoring it from outside and performing my own unique analyses on the data, that's a different matter."

A.J. made a theatrical frowning glance to the side, as though consulting some very complex and important display out of her range of vision. "And it looks like you can tell your friends not to worry about having your tests cancelled. According to my data, the air you're venting is actually coming out below ambient rad levels."

"Showoff."

"Well, true. Let me make it up to you—meet Joe and me in Alamogordo and we'll buy you dinner. We both have something to celebrate!"

"You too?"

"Yep. Ted's Steak and Lobster, how's that? Meet you there at eight? Great. See you!"

"Hey, wait! What—" But A.J. had cut off. "Oooh, he is so . . ."

"Your boyfriend annoying you again?"

"He is not my boyfriend!"

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Framed