Now he shuffles back to Jim and they quickly set up a missile launcher, with the missile already in it. They nail the base of it into the ground. It’s got a covert laser targeter, and all in all it’s the latest in microarmament: it looks like a Fourth of July skyrocket, or a kid’s toy. When they fire it, it will shoot through the new hole in the fence and behave like a little cruise missile, following its laser clothesline into the door of Parnell’s physical plant; impact will penetrate the door and release a gas containing degrading enzymes and chemical solvents, mostly a potent mix called Styx-90, another Dow product; and all the plastic, filaboy, reinforced carbon, graphite, epoxy resin, and kevlar reached by the gas will be reduced to dust, or screwed up in some less dramatic way. And Parnell, primary contractor for the third layer of the ballistic missile defense architecture, currently trying to make satellite mirror stations covert or semicovert, will have the bulk of its ground stock handed to it on a plate. Turned into dust and odd lumps on the floor.

Aiming the device is simple though a bit risky, as it makes them semicovert for that instant that the laser targeting is happening. Arthur does it, and they crawl down the fence fifty yards and repeat the whole operation, aiming at another building’s door.

Now comes the hard part. The missiles have secondary manual starters, in case radio signals happen to be jammed or responded to with some kind of return fire. Arthur has judged either possibility to be all too likely, so they are using the manual starters, which are buttons at the end of cords connected to the minimissiles. The cords are about a hundred yards long. So Jim crawls backwards through the sage and the trash as far away as the cord lets him, and Arthur does the same from the first missile. They angle toward each other, but Jim can’t see Arthur when he comes to the end of his cord. In the suits they’re completely invisible to each other.

Arthur has anticipated this difficulty, however. He’s given Jim one end of an ordinary length of string, and now Jim feels three tugs on it. They’re ready to go. When he gets three more hard tugs he pushes the button on the firing cord, drops both cord and string, and starts running.

It really is a very simple business.

Hitting the button is like turning on all the alarm systems in the world at once; there’s a wail of sirens and glare of supplementary floodlights back on the Parnell lot. There’s no way of knowing exactly what the missiles did—not a chance of hearing any small crunches that they might have made on impact—but judging by the response, something sure happened.