It’s been a tough couple of months, getting this test prepared. Every weekday he’s gone into the office at six A.M., made a list of the day’s activities that is sometimes forty items long, and gone at it until early evening, or even later than that. At first he had to deal with all of the tasks concerned with designing the Stormbee system: talking with the engineers and programmers, making suggestions, giving commands, coordinating their efforts, making decisions … It’s good work at that point, responding to the technical challenge and dealing with the problems presented by them. And his design crew is a good group, resourceful, hardworking, quirky; he has to ride herd on the efforts of this disparate bunch, and it’s interesting.

Then they got into the production and components testing phase, and the debugging of the programming. That was frustrating as always; it’s beyond his technical competence to contribute much in the way of specifics at that point, and all he could do was orchestrate the tests and keep everyone working at them. It’s a bit too much like Lemon’s role at that point, not that he’d ever go about it in the same style.

Then it was time for the big components’ tests. And now, time for the first test of the entire system.

The train arrives inside the hour, and from the tube station at El Paso the LSR helicopter lofts him over to White Sands Missile Range, the testing grounds that a consortium of defense companies leases from the government.

As he gets out of the helicopter McPherson reaches in his coat pocket for the sunglasses he brought with him. It really is uncanny how white the sand in this area is: a strange geological feature, for sure. Not that anyone actually visits the little national park on the edge of the testing grounds.

McPherson is carted to the LSR building on the range, and several of the engineers there greet him. “It’s ready to go,” says Will Hamilton, LSR’s on-site testing chief. “We’ve got Runway Able for noon and one, and the RPV is fueled and prepped.”

“Great,” says McPherson, checking his watch. “That’s half an hour?”

“Right.”

They have coffee and some croissants in the cafe, then take the elevator up six floors to the observation deck on the roof. Cameras and computers will be monitoring all aspects of the test, but everyone still wants to see the thing actually happen. Now they stand on a broad concrete deck, looking out over the waves of pure white dunes, extending to the horizons like an ocean that has been frozen and then had everything but pure salt bleached away. Such a weird landscape! McPherson enjoys the sight of it immensely.