“Then we better hurry, shouldn’t we?” Kelsey asked. “We have a plasma generator we know will work on Dragon Two right now. Let’s load it up, put the screws back in, and leave before that angry Mr. Willison comes back.” She smiled and touched Jon’s hand. “Jon, we’ll have time to write up the documentation and the engineering later—right now, we have to get Dragon flying, before they come and take her away. You’re worried that you won’t know how it works if it does, and so you won’t be able to start preparing marketing plans and prospectuses for the project. Don’t worry about all that stuff, Jon—let’s see if it flies first, then worry about selling it later.”

Jon Masters looked at Kelsey with a grin. Her enthusiasm was indeed infectious. “Kelsey, you know there’s no way this should work,” Jon said. “It’s too dangerous. We still haven’t gotten the right yield out of the singlegenerator system to be an effective weapon with the proper safety tolerances. We won’t know if it’s ready to let go until just before it blows up. And all these unknowns will be going on with two human beings riding on top of it.”

Kelsey took Jon’s face in her hands, pulled his head down, and kissed his forehead. “You’re silly, you know that?” she said. “I know we don’t know all these things, Jon—doesn’t that want to make you go and try it out?” When he hesitated in replying, Kelsey added, “Jon, wasn’t there once a time when you would have given anything— even your own life—for one chance to try?”

In fact, there was such a time: Jon Masters put himself in the fuselage of an airliner loaded with several hundred pounds of TNT to prove his electronic armor called BERP, or Ballistic Electro-Reactive Process, would protect the aircraft in case of a terrorist bomb going off in the cargo hold. The demonstration had horrified the airline and government representatives to the point that they refused to fund the program, but that didn’t matter—it worked, and Jon risked his own life to prove it. That BERP material eventually became the Tin Man battle armor system, which would one day revolutionize American infantry fighting.

Kelsey paused, still holding Jon’s hand, like a brother and sister taking a stroll. They found themselves standing in front of Dragon One’s open hangar door. There was a flurry of action around it, with dozens of technicians and crew members rushing to get it ready to fly. Right next door was Dragon Two—virtually ignored except for the four security guards stationed around it.