Chang and Wu played chess under the awning.

After a time, Farley took a nap, too.

Chapter Seven

Heineman murmured to himself testily. Walking slowly along the Velcro pad surrounding the assembly area, he scrolled through the cargo manifest on the slate. The cargo—removed from its cocoon and assembled—fit all the specifications the engineering team had made up six months before. That had been a crazy time—trying to design a device which had ridiculous properties to do a job that none of the engineering team understood. But back then, green badges had been very rare items.

There was no way now for anyone to deny him a green badge. He was the only one who could test the device and teach others how to use it.

It was a beautiful piece of work: a hollow cylinder twenty meters long and six wide, resembling a giant jet engine with all its guts removed. He peered down the middle of the assembly at the sickle-shaped metal pieces that would clamp down on the mysterious something the cylinder would surround. The clamps now rested on plastic inserts, which would be removed when the device was in place.

It was called a tuberider. Sitting next to it—brought up in three cocoons by a subsequent OTV—was a highly modified Boeing–Bell prop-driven vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft, V/STOL for short, model number NHV-24B.

It was the most peculiar aircraft he had ever seen. Developed initially for the U.S. Air Force, designed for search and rescue missions, it could rotate its two wingtip-mounted engines through 120 degrees. The five broad blades of each prop could be folded back into the engine nacelles. And in the tail, aimed slightly above the centerline, was a kerosene-oxygen rocket engine, no doubt to provide extra thrust—but under what conditions?

Its wings were rakishly forward-swept and were mounted three-quarters back on the fuselage, almost touching the V-tail. It could carry eighteen people and a crew of two, fully loaded, or fewer passengers and a lot of equipment. It was at once airplane and helicopter and rocket.

He loved it just from reading the specs. He had always had a weakness for Rube Goldberg gadgets.

The V/STOL could be fitted to the tuberider in three positions: like an arrow sticking from the side of a log, nose and refueling nozzle inserted mid-cylinder; in the configuration of its first mission, inserted "up the cylinder's ass" as Heineman thought of it, as its rocket propelled the tuberider down the middle of the plasma tubes and bore holes to the seventh chamber; or clamped to the cylinder along its belly.

He didn't have the slightest idea what it would do once it was in place. From an aeronautical or astronautical perspective it was pure craziness. How would the cylinder be stabilized on its track—whatever that was—while the V/STOL docked? The cylinder had no maneuvering engines. The whole contraption would be just barely stable enough to ride down the axis with the rocket pushing—

'Tis not mine to reason why, he thought, marking the final check on the slate. Despite his initial enthusiasm, no aircraft, Heineman felt, was truly beautiful until he had flown it—and survived.