“Fifty trillion watts for a billionth of a second,” Jon said breathlessly. “That’s fifty thousand watts per second. We need at least seven hundred and fifty thousand.” His eyes darted aimlessly as he started to fill in details in his mind. “But that’s using only one ion generator ...”

“And a solid-state ion generator is much smaller than your diode laser pumps,” Kelsey said. “How many can we fit in the Dragon?”

“Hundreds,” Jon said. “No ... thousands. One generator of neodymium disks could have over a thousand in it alone. We could fit... we could fit over a dozen generators in a B-52. Over ten thousand ion generators, pumped by a plasma field... my God, Kelsey, we’re talking about a ten-million-watt laser!”

“That’s two million watts per second,” Kelsey said proudly. “Almost double the size of the Air Force’s chemical laser.”

“My God,” Jon muttered. “A plasma-pumped solid-state laser—on board an aircraft. Incredible! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“You did, remember?” Kelsey giggled.

“The plasma-yield warhead ... can we confine the fusion reaction to the laser chamber?” Jon started mumbling to himself, the others forgotten. “How much power will we need for that?” It was several moments later before he realized that Kelsey was holding a school notebook up to him— with preliminary figures already calculated. “Kelsey!”

“I don’t know all the details on your plasma-yield warhead, Jon,” she said, “and I need to look at the schematics of the oscillator and laser generators. But a plasma field of this approximate size and of this density will need only this much laser power for the inertial confinement process in the fusion chamber, and then will require approximately this much power in the magnetic field to channel the plasma to the laser generator. I think we can do it.”

“You think you can do it? Kelsey, you've just done it! This is it!” Jon exclaimed breathlessly, looking at the formulas with ever-widening eyes. “This is the answer! I can take this to the engineering department and have them start building the fusion chambers right away! We’ve got so much work to do—reconfiguring test article number two, getting the engineering going . ..” To Jon’s great surprise, Kelsey started heading for the door. “Kelsey? Anything wrong? Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I can help with the engineering after I get done.”

“Well,” Helen remarked with a smile, “that’s certainly something you don’t hear every day from a world-class engineer.”

At that moment, Jon’s secure cell phone beeped. He looked at the caller’s ID number, smiled broadly, then punched in a descrambling code. “Patrick!” he said happily. “Is that you?”

“Hi, Jon,” Patrick McLanahan said. Kelsey and Cheryl Duffield looked on with great interest as they heard the name of the man they most wanted to meet at Sky Masters.

“How are you? Any news about Wendy?”