harbouring their own thoughts, they obeyed.
It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, further than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.
Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.
But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangar-like buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?
Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.
Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap – not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife – but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.
In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.
But she did wonder – if Cornelius turned out to be right – if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant …
Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant – supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful – seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or DC. He looked like what he was, she thought – or rather what he had always wanted to be – a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.
But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.
They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the centre of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.
And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a Space Shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapour was venting from somewhere in the stack and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.
Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.
Malenfant pulled up the jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.
‘What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a Space Shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The Shuttle engines we use are obsolete: they’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old Shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.’ He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. ‘At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury …’
They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, ‘We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full Shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred per cent thrust.’ He smiled at Maura Della. ‘This is the only place in the world anybody is firing Shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-storey-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up the turbo-pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second –’
‘All very impressive, Malenfant,’ said Della, ‘but I’m hardly likely to be overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?’
‘Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.’ He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. ‘We reach two to three thousand Centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.
‘We think we can process most poisonous industrial by-products, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.’
‘Getting rich by cleaning the planet,’ Della said.
Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. ‘Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste … But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.’
Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the attention of Malenfant and Della.
‘Captain Future. I forgot you were here,’ Malenfant said sourly.
‘Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.’
Maura Della said, ‘Cover-up? What are you talking about?’
‘Key Largo,’ said Cornelius. ‘That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?’
Malenfant glowered at him, calculating.
Here we go, Emma thought bleakly. Not for the first time in her life with Malenfant she had absolutely no idea what was going to come next, as if she was poised over a roller-coaster drop.
Cornelius said, ‘I watched your Delaware speech the other night.’
Malenfant looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Expanding across the Galaxy, all of that? I’ve given that talk a dozen times.’
‘I know,’ said Cornelius. ‘And it’s admirable. As far as it goes.’
‘What
