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from the porch lamp. After a moment the door opened. " 'Lo,
Steve," a large elderly woman said.
" 'Lo, June. This is George Long."
"I know George," she said. "You're a long way from NESFA."
Long nodded. "New England's getting cold. I'm moving out
here," he said. "By way of Worldcon."
"I ran into him at Minicon, then on the Amtrak," Steve said.
June opened the door and led them into a kitchen. There were
a dozen fans talking, standing in doorways as fans did. Most didn't
know George Long, but June was taking care of the introductions.
"Is Merlin here yet?" Steve asked.
"Upstairs."
The stairway was ornate, with magnificent wood bannisters.
There was mahogany wainscoting in the hallways, and the ceilings
were carved plaster. Most of the splendor was in decay, but here
and there someone had worked to restore it.
The upstairs room was locked. Steve knocked and waited.
Finally the door was opened by a tall man with stringy gray hair and
bad teeth. He stood in the doorway. "Steve."
"I need to get on-line."
Merlin Null, LASFS Senior Committeeman, frowned at Mews.
"The rules are, you tell me, and I do it if I think it's safe."
"Merlin, this is Stone from Heaven business."
Null thought about it. "Have to check." He came out into the
hall, carefully locking the door behind him, and led the way down
the hall to another room.
C.C. Miller, often called Cissy for reasons no one remembered,
was Chairman of the LASFS. He sat at a table in the old butlers
pantry making a list. Miller was a large, round man, gray haired as
most LASFASians were. His wife, Ginny, looked half his age, but she
always had.
"Steve wants me to log him on," Null said.
Miller nodded knowingly. "It's all right. Steve, when you get
done, we've got a package for you."
"Package?"
"Fan Express," Miller said. "From Curtis. Address `Bottle Shop
Keeper, care of Steve Mews.' I gather he wants you to deliver it."
"That figures. See you in a minute."
Back inside the locked computer room there were three people
at a poker table. Hands had been dealt, and there were poker chips
in front of the players. No one really cared much about illegal
gambling, but it was a cover for the locked door.
Null locked the door again, then opened a cabinet. Inside were
more poker chips and cards. Null reached past them to open the
back of the cabinet, exposing a computer console. Null pulled it out.
"OK, what?"
"FAPANET," Steve said. "I need to get on."
Null typed furiously. There were the odd tones of a modem
dialing, then locking on. Finally Null stepped back. "You got it."
Steve typed gingerly. "They call me Bruce."
:
"I am new in town."
let me talk. Bruce, Pins says they're looking forward to greatest
burgers in the universe for lunch tomorrow. That is tomorrow.
Treasure hunt has gone well. Time to see the bottle shop wizard.>
"Roger Dodger." Steve stepped back from the console.
"That's it?" Null asked.
"That's a lot," Steve said. "Now I need to see C.C. again. I'm
going to need some help. Starting with a car and somebody to
drive."
The drive from Los Angeles through Mojave took nearly three hours
in C.C. Miller's underpowered car. Interstate 5, the main north-
south California artery, was still maintained, but when they turned
off into the Antelope Valley and headed toward Palmdale the decay
in America's infrastructure was obvious.
They crossed the San Andreas Fault line. "Lucky so far," Miller
said. "We've been expecting The Big One for years . . ."
"They said at Minicon that the Ice would definitely trigger it,"
Steve said. "Guess that would close the highway for good."
Palmdale was half-deserted. They passed a stand of dead
trees and grapevines. "Can't say I disagree with the Greens on that
one," Steve said. "Sucking water out of Sacramento to grow
Christmas trees and grapes in the desert never did make sense."
"It would if you had enough electricity to make the fresh
water," C.C. Miller said. "But, hell, that's science fiction."
They drove through Mojave, past the faded signs proudly
announcing Phoenix and Voyager. Now Mojave was a small road
town, as it had once been. They turned east.
A sign told them it was twenty-five miles to the turnoff to the
Thunder Ridge Air Force Museum.
There had once been a fence and guard post at the North Entrance
to Edwards AFB, but the guardhouse was boarded up, and the
fence had been knocked down by tumbleweeds piling against it.
There had been some maintenance, though. The blacktop road up
the ridge from Highway 58 had potholes, but Steve didn't think it
was much worse than 58 itself, and 58 still had traffic, if you could
call a truck every five minutes traffic. The view across the Mojave
Desert to the north was spectacular. So was the Rogers Dry Lake
bed to the west. Where the spaceships used to land. A million
people camped out on the desert to watch the first shuttle landing .
. .
The museum stood at the top of a ridge: several concrete
block buildings, a blockhouse, a large concrete pad, and big
cylindrical storage tanks. The security shack at the main gate to the
facility was empty, but the gate was open. They drove on up to the
largest building, a huge structure. Most of the windows were
boarded up, but not all, and there was a light inside one office.
Gary Hudson was tall and thin, graying a bit. He wore a silver-tan
shirt and a desert hat, and looked a bit like the old films of Indiana
Jones when he wasn't carrying a bullwhip and pistol. He came out of
the office and watched as C.C. and Steve got out of their car.
"Museum's only open Friday and Saturday," he said. "Sorry,
it's a long trip, maybe I can show you a little anyway." He waved
toward a big corrugated aluminum structure. "The bird's in that
hangar."
"We'd love to see it," Steve said. "Thanks."
Hudson led the way over in silence. The wind whistled off the
Mojave Desert and howled around them, rattling the corrugated
metal of the hangar building. They went in through the small,
people door set in the enormous hangar door. It was almost as
loud inside as out, but it was a relief to be out of the wind.
It was gloomy inside. Hudson gave them a moment to let their
eyes adjust. The roof was eighty feet or more above them, held up
by a network of girders that looked needlessly complicated just to
hold up a roof.
Phoenix stood in the center of the enormous room. It looked
like a giant ice cream cone, sixty feet high, standing on its big end.
At the slightly rounded base it was half as big across as it was high.
It stood alone, with no scaffolding around it.
Hudson threw a switch, and banks of spotlights came on.
The nose was rounded. Holes a foot and a half across ringed
the base: not one big rocket motor, but a couple of dozen little [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
