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  She shrugged. This was an argument she’d rehearsed with Malenfant many times. “It’s such a gigantic, mechanistic, depressing vision. Maybe we should all just learn to get along with each other. Then we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy. What do you think?”

  He laughed. “Your marriage must have been full of fire.” And he continued to ask her questions, trying to draw her out.

  Enough. She wasn’t prepared to be pumped by this faintly sinister man about her boss, let alone her ex-husband. She buried herself in e-mails, shutting him out.

  Cornelius sat in silence, as still as a basking lizard.

  After an hour they reached the California border.

  There was a border post here. An unsmiling guard scanned Emma’s wrist barcode, her eyes hidden by insectile camera-laden sunglasses. Since Emma and Cornelius proved to be neither black nor Latino nor Asian, and did not intend to take up permanent occupancy in the Golden State nor seek employment there, they were allowed through.

  California, Emma thought sourly, is not what it used to be.

  Highway 58, heading toward Mojave, took them through the desert. The sun climbed higher, and hard light fell from a hot, ozone-leached sky. The ground was baked, bleached, flat and hard as a paving slab, with only gnarled and blackened Joshua trees to challenge the endless horizontals. Somewhere to her right was Death Valley, which had, in 2004, logged the world’s all-time highest temperature at 139 degrees.

  They reached Edwards Air Space Force Base — or rather they began to drive alongside its chain-link fence, forty miles of it running along-side the highway. Edwards, with its endless expanse of dry salt lakes — natural runways — was the legendary home of the test pilot. But from the highway she could see nothing at all — no planes or hangars or patrolling men-in-black guards. Nothing but miles of link fence. The accountant in her began, involuntarily, to compute the cost of all that wire.

  Still, the closeness of Edwards, with its connotation of 1960s astronaut glamour, was, she was sure, the reason Malenfant had chosen this area for his newest project. Malenfant’s methods with people were coarse, but he knew the power of symbols.

  And it was, indeed, only a little way beyond Edwards that she came to the site of Malenfant’s project.

  The main gate was little more than a hole in the fence barred by a crash barrier that carried a small, almost unobtrusive, Boot-strap corporate logo. The guard was a hefty woman with a small, dazzling-bright pistol at her hip. Emma’s company credentials, appended to the UV barcode ID she wore on her left wrist, were enough to get her and Cornelius through the gate.

  Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.

  Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert’s dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin, even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.

  She took in the cabin’s contents with a glance. Malenfant’s joky company mission statement was repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy — Until Something Better Comes Along. There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by her, about the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap’s cleanup activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke plants and Alaska, and so forth.

  Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright. But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience — sub-age twenty-five, generally subliterate consumers of the planet’s trendiest soft drink — were showing themselves amenable to subtle Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.

  No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.

  Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half smile on his lips. She was finding his quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.

  She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she stepped out the door.

  The car was a late-model Jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tires, with a giant solar-cell carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger was a woman unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit. Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.

  And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.

  Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jumpsuit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, “What kept you?”

  She hissed, “You’ve a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?”

  “Later,” he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, “Do you know Maura Della?” ;

  “Representative Della? By reputation.”

  Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. “Ms. Stoney. He’s told me all about you.”

  “I bet he has.” Emma shook her hand; Della’s grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius Taine’s, in fact.

  Malenfant said, “I’m trying to win the representative’s support for the project here… But I suspect I’ve a little way to go yet.”

  “Damn right,” Della said. “Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-friendly project around rocket engines.”

  Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. “You can tell we’re in the middle of an argument here.”

  “We sure are,” Della said.

  Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on talking. “Look,” she said, “the space shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride, and nitrogen oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer—”

  “If it got into the stratosphere,” Malenfant said amiably, “which it doesn’t, because it rains out first.”

  “Sixty-five percent of it does. The rest escapes. Anyhow there are other effects. Ozone depletion because of the deposition of frozen water and aluminum oxide. Global warming contributions from carbon dioxide and particulates. Acid rain from the hydrogen chloride and the NOX products—”

  “Limited to a half mile around the launch site.”

  “But there. Anyhow there are also the toxins associated with rocket launches, which only need to be present in small amounts. Nitrogen let can cause acute pulmonary edemas, hy-drazine is carcinogenic, and there are old studies linking aluminum with Alzheimer’s.”

  Malenfant barked laughter. “The aluminum in rocket motors is one hundredth of one percent of the total U.S. annual production. We’d have to be launching like Buck Rogers to do any real damage.”

  “Tell that to the mothers of the Florida yellow babies,” Della said grimly.

  It had been a massive scandal. Medical studies had shown a series of birth abnormalities showing up in Daytona, Orlando, and other communities close to Cape Canaveral, in Florida. Abnormal livers, faulty hearts, some external defects; a plague of jaundice, sometimes associated with serious neurological diseases. Yellow babies.

  Naturally Malenfant was prepared for this. “First of all,” he said evenly, “the medicos are split over whether the cluster exists at all. And even if it does, who the hell knows what the cause is?”

  Della shook her head. “Heptyl has been detected in soil and plants. Along the east coast of Florida it reaches as much as point three milligrams p
er kilogram—”

  Emma asked, “Heptyl?”

  “Dimethyl hydrazine. Unburned rocket fuel. Highly toxic; hydrazine compounds are notorious liver and central nervous system poisons. Furthermore we know it can linger for years in bodies of water, rivers, and marshes.” Della smiled thinly. “I’m sorry. I guess we got a little worked up, driving around out here. As you probably know, Malenfant has been kibitzing Congress for some time. Me specifically. I thought I should come see if this rocket shop of his is just another hobby-club tax write-off, or something serious.”

  Emma nodded. Right now she didn’t see why she should make life easy for Malenfant. “He calls you Bill Proxmire in a skirt.” Proxmire had been a notorious NASA-opposing senator of the late twentieth century.

  Maura Della smiled. “Well, I don’t wear skirts much. But I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  “Damn right,” Malenfant said easily, utterly unfazed. “Prox-mire was an unthinking opponent of progress—”

  “While I,” Della said dryly to Emma, “am a thinking opponent of progress. And therefore, Malenfant is calculating, amenable to persuasion.”

  “I told you it was a compliment,” Malenfant said.

  As the two of them fenced, Cornelius Taine had been all but invisible, standing in the shadow of the Portakabin’s doorway. Now he stepped forward, as if materializing, and smiled at Malenfant. Cornelius didn’t blink in the harsh sunlight, Emma noticed. Maybe he was wearing image-processing corneal implants.

  Malenfant frowned at him, startled. “And who the hell are you?”

  Cornelius introduced himself and his company.

  Malenfant growled. “Eschatology. I thought I told the guards to keep you kooks out of the compound.”

  Emma tugged his sleeve. “I brought him in.” She murmured about the shareholding Cornelius represented. “Take him seriously, Malenfant.”

  “I’m here to support you, Colonel Malenfant,” Cornelius said. “Really. I don’t represent any threat to you.”

  “Malenfant. Just call me Malenfant.” He turned to Della. “I apologize for this. I get these bullshit artists all the time.”

  “I suspect you only have yourself to blame for that,” Della murmured.

  Cornelius Taine was holding up manicured hands. “You have me wrong, Malenfant. We’re not psychics. We are scientists, engineers, economists, statisticians. Thinkers, not dreamers. I myself was formerly a mathematician, for instance.

  “Eschatology has built on the pioneering work of thinkers like Freeman Dyson who, in the 1970s, began to consider the future scientifically. Since then we, and others, have worked hard to compile, umm, a road map of the future. In fact, Colonel Malenfant, we already have proof that our studies of the future are generally successful.”

  “What proof?”

  “We’ve become rich out of them. Rich enough to invest in you” He smiled.

  “Why have you come here today?”

  “To emphasize we support you. That is, we support your true objectives. We know about Key Largo,” Cornelius said.

  Della looked confused. “Key Largo? In Florida?”

  The name meant nothing to Emma. But she saw it had caught Malenfant off balance.

  “This is too complicated for me,” Malenfant said at last. “Get in the Jeep. Please. We’ve got some hardware to see. Now that I do understand.”

  Meekly, harboring their own thoughts, they obeyed.

  It was a three-mile drive to the test stand, farther than Emma had expected. Bootstrap owned a big piece of desert, it seemed.

  Malenfant’s base here was like a miniaturized version of Edwards: miles of chain-link fence cutting out a hole in the desert, a hole within which exotic technology lurked, the scent of other worlds.

  But there was a lot of plant here: fuel tanks and hangarlike buildings and skeletal test stands. Malenfant just drove past it all without comment or explanation. Was there a secret purpose here, more equipment than could be explained away by the waste-disposal cover story?

  Malenfant and Maura Della continued to argue about space and rockets. Cornelius Taine was oddly detached. He sat apparently relaxed, hands neatly folded before him, gaze sweeping over the desert, as the babble of chemical names and statistics went on. There was something repellent about his surface of self-containment.

  Emma was financial controller of Bootstrap — not to mention Malenfant’s ex-wife — but that meant little to Malenfant in terms of openness and sharing of information with her. She knew he did rely on her to keep the company within the fiscal regulations, though. And that meant that, in a bizarre way, he trusted her to break through his elaborate webs of deceit and concealment in time to comply with the reporting rules. It was a kind of dance between them, a game of mutual dependence played to unspoken conventions.

  In a way, she admitted to herself, she enjoyed it.

  But she did wonder — if Cornelius turned out to be right — if Malenfant had gone too far this time. Secret rocket ships in the desert? So 1950s, Malenfant…

  Still, here in this desert, just a few score miles from Edwards itself, Reid Malenfant — supple, tanned, vigorous, cheerful — seemed at home. Much more than in a boardroom in Vegas or Manhattan or D.C. He looked like what he was, she thought — or rather what he had always wanted to be — a Right Stuff pilot of the old school, maybe somebody who could have gotten all the way into space himself.

  But, of course, it hadn’t worked out that way.

  They reached the engine test facility. It was a big open box of scaffolding and girders, with zigzag walkways scribbled across the structure, and a giant crane peering over the top of everything. Lights sparkled over the rig, bright despite the intensity of the afternoon sun. It looked like a piece of a chemical factory, unaccountably shipped out here to the dull California desert. But on a boxy structure at the center of the ugly conglomerate Emma could see, crudely painted over, a NASA roundel.

  And there, as if trapped at the heart of the clumsy industrial metalwork, she saw the slim, snub-nosed form of a space shuttle external tank: a shape familiar from images of more than a hundred successful Cape Canaveral launches, and one memory-searing failure. White vapor was venting from somewhere in the stack, and it wreathed around the girders and tubing, softening the sun’s glare.

  Oddly, she felt cooler; perhaps the heat capacity of this giant mass of liquid fuel was sufficient to chill the desert air, her own body.

  Malenfant pulled up the Jeep, and they stepped out. Malenfant waved at hard-hatted engineers, who waved or shouted back, and he guided his party around the facility.

  “What we have in there is a kind of mock-up of a space shuttle. We have the external fuel tank, of course, and a complete aft section, with three main engines in place. Where the rest of the orbiter would go we have a boilerplate truss section. The shuttle engines we use are obsolete: They’ve all flown in space several times, and have been decommissioned. We got the test hardware from NASA’s old shuttle main engine test facility in Mississippi, the Stennis Space Center.” He pointed to a fleet of tankers parked alongside the facility. They were giant eighteen-wheelers, but against the rig they looked like beetles at the foot of an elephant. “At Stennis they bring in the fuel, lox, and liquid hydrogen, by barge. We don’t have that luxury.”

  They reached a flame pit, a mighty concrete conduit dug into the desert alongside the test rig. Malenfant said, “We’ve already achieved 520-second burns here, equivalent to a full shuttle flight demonstration test, at one hundred percent thrust.” He smiled at Maura Della. “This is the only place in the world anybody is firing shuttle main engines right now, still the most advanced rocket engines in the world. We have a nineteen-story-high fuel tank in there, eight hundred tons of liquid fuel chilled through three hundred degrees or below. When the engines fire up, the turbo pumps work at forty thousand revs per minute, a thousand gallons of fuel are consumed every second—”

  “All very impressive, Malenfant,” Della said, “but I’m hardly likely to b
e overwhelmed by engineering gosh-wow numbers. This isn’t the 1960s. You really think you need to assemble all this space hardware just to lose a little waste?”

  “Surely. What we plan is to use rocket combustion chambers as high-temperature, high-volume incinerators.” He led them to a show board, a giant flow diagram showing mass streams, little rockets with animated yellow flames glowing in their hearts. “We reach two to three thousand centigrade in there, twice as high as in most commercial incinerators, which are based on rotary kiln or electric plasma technology. We feed the waste material through at high speed, first to break it down and then to oxidize it. Any toxic products are removed by a multistage cleansing process that includes scrubbers to get acidic gases out of the exhaust.

  “We think we can process most poisonous industrial byproducts, and also nerve gas and biological weapons, at a much greater speed and a fraction of the cost of conventional incinerators. We think we’ll be able to process tons of waste every second. We could probably tackle massive ecological problems, like cleaning out poisoned lakes.”

  “Getting rich by cleaning the planet,” Della said.

  Malenfant grinned, and Emma knew he had worked his way onto home ground. “Representative, that’s the philosophy of my corporation. We live in a closed economy. We’ve girdled the Earth, and we have to be aware that we’re going to have to live with whatever we produce, useful goods or waste. But, if you can spot the flows of goods and materials and economic value, it’s still possible to get rich.”

  Cornelius Taine had walked away from the others. Now he was clapping, slowly and softly. Gradually he caught the atten-

  tion of Malenfant and Della.

  “Captain Future. I forgot you were here,” Malenfant said

  sourly.

  “Oh, I’m still here. And I have to admire the way you’re handling this. The plausibility. I believe you’re even sincere, on the level of this cover-up.”

  Maura Della said, “Cover-up? What are you talking about?”

  “Key Largo,” Cornelius said. “That’s what this is really all about. Isn’t it, Malenfant?”