He meets Colonel Eaton at the Air Force’s SD Battle Management Division office, and Eaton takes him into one of the center courtyard commissaries. They talk over a lunch of croissants and salad. McPherson outlines some of the problems that Houston’s team is having with the boost-phase interceptor.

Ball Lightning: the job is to detect and track as many as ten thousand Soviet ICBMs, launched simultaneously; then aim ground-based free-electron laser beams, bounce them off mirrors in space, and destroy the ICBMs while they’re still in boost phase. It’s a tough job, and McPherson is glad it isn’t exactly his. But now he has to take Colonel Eaton’s grilling about it, which is informed and relentless. The test results in your proposal, Eaton says, indicated that you could solve the problems you’re telling me about. That’s why you have the contract. Get it together, and soon. Or it’s a Big Hacksaw for you.

McPherson cringes at the reference to the Hacksaw disaster, a gun program axed by the DOD for incompetence; it was the beginning of the end for Danforth Aerospace, which is now just a name in the corporate history books. That kind of thing could still happen; a big program could go bad so disastrously that it got the axe and brought its whole company down.…

So. Great lunch. McPherson tries to remember what he ate as he makes notes of the conversation, in the LSR offices on the top floor they rent in the Aerojet Tower. Apparently it didn’t agree with him. Salad? No matter. He spends the rest of the afternoon on the phone to OC, and then to White Sands, to tell Dan Houston that the heat is on. Dan knows that already, and in an anxious, almost frightened voice, he asks for help. McPherson agrees to do what he can. “But it’s not my program, Dan. Lemon may not give me the time to do anything. Besides, I’m not sure what I can do.”

That evening Major Tom Feldkirk comes by and picks him up, and they track over the river into Georgetown.

Feldkirk is around forty-five, ex-flyer, wears his black hair longer than they’d like it back on base, in a swoop over his forehead and well down his back. He’s dressed casually, sport shirt, slacks, loafers. McPherson has dealt with him twice before, likes him all right. They park in an underground lot, walk up onto a brick sidewalk and into the usual Georgetown crowd. They could be two lawyers, two congressmen, two of any part of Washington’s success structure. They discuss Georgetown, the fashionable bars, the crowds. McPherson is familiar with the area by this time, and can mention favorite restaurants and the like.

“Have you been to Buddha In The Refrigerator?” Feldkirk asks.

McPherson laughs. “No.”

“Let’s try it, then. It’s not nearly so bad as it sounds.”