They recover the piece of wood and sneak off in the other direction. By this time Jim is hopelessly disoriented, but part of Sandy’s ESP is a perfect internal compass, and he leads them east, then back down through the applex’s laundry/recreation/administration building, with its wall of five hundred mailboxes, and out to Chapman Avenue again.

The copcar is still parked in front of Fluffy’s. Ah ha, there’s Abe and Tash, up ahead of them. After them and across the street to Jim’s car. “What happened to you guys?” Tash asks.

“I dropped the piece of wood,” Jim says. “Had some trouble finding it.”

“I hope you were successful,” Abe chides him, “or we’re sending you back for it!”

“No, here it is! See?”

His friends laugh loud and long. All’s well that ends well. They jump in the car, click on the motor, slide back onto the track and roll out onto Chapman. Abe says, “Let’s get this precious fragment to the museum and track down to Sandy’s to see how the party’s going.”

“Ah, hahaha. No party tonight, boys.”

“That’s what you think.”

Chapter 2

2

The next morning Dennis McPherson, Jim’s father, takes United’s commuter flight from LAX to National Airport in Washington, D.C. He wakes as the Boeing 7X7 drops back into the atmosphere, shuffles the papers on his lap back into his briefcase. They haven’t helped him. Of course he’s napped for most of the short flight, but even if he had been reading them they wouldn’t have helped. He’s here, first, to meet with Air Force Colonel T. D. Eaton, to confer on the progress of the Ball Lightning program, one of the big contracts currently in development at McPherson’s company, Laguna Space Research. It’s not McPherson’s program, however, and he doesn’t know how to explain the delays that have plagued it. His old friend Dan Houston should be fielding this one, but Houston is down at White Sands, trying to get a successful trial out of Ball Lightning’s acquisition/pointing/tracking satellite. And McPherson has other errands to run in Washington, so he’s been stuck with this one too. Great.

The other purpose for this visit is a conference with Major Tom Feldkirk, from the Air Force’s Electronic Systems Division. Feldkirk requested the conference without giving a reason for it, which is worrying. LSR has several contracts with the Electronic Systems Division, and the problem to be discussed could be in one of a number of areas.

Because the truth of the matter is, LSR is struggling these days. Too many proposals have been lost, and too many of the contracts won have gone into delays and overruns. The Air Force is coming down on such problems harder than ever, and whatever Feldkirk wants to discuss, it isn’t likely to be good.