She grinned. “What, no limo?”

The young man half-turned in his seat and said quite seriously, “Mr. Randolph doesn’t believe in unnecessary frills. This is comfortable enough, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” said Amanda.

By the time they got to the test site Amanda had set up a dinner date for herself with their handsome young escort.

The test site was on the shoulder of a green hillside that sloped down into the warm Caribbean. Late afternoon sunshine slanted down from between massive cumulus clouds that were visibly growing, boiling up into towering thunderheads, getting darker and more menacing by the minute. Pancho smelled the salt tang in the air, heard the surf rolling in gently below, felt the warm steady breeze on her face. A tropical paradise, she thought.

Or it would be, if it weren’t for all that danged hardware squatting in the middle of the field.

Following their Latino escort, they walked from the car to the small knot of people standing around what looked like a set of man-tall dewar flasks crusted with frost, a small crane, lots of plumbing and tubing, a medium-sized truck carrying what looked like a pair of major-league fuel cells on its bed, a smaller truck loaded with a bank of capacitors, and a corrugated-metal shed off to one side. Several automobiles and semivans were parked on the other side of the shed. As they got closer, Pancho saw that the people were gathered around a small swept-winged aircraft that was resting on a pair of skids. It was an ancient cruise missile; she saw, an unmanned jet airplane. She knew they’d been outlawed by the disarmament treaties. Only the Peacekeepers had such weapons, and this one looked too old to be a Peacekeeper missile. The markings on it were faded, the serial number stenciled on its tail barely legible.

Before she could ask a question, a trim-looking man with silver hair and a rugged fighter’s face stepped out of the crowd around the missile. He wore a light tan wind breaker zippered to the throat despite the warm sunshine, a baseball cap perched jauntily on his head, well-faded jeans, and cowboy boots. Their escort stiffened almost like a soldier coming to attention.

“Senor Randolph,” he said, “may I introduce—”

“You must be Amanda Cunningham,” said Dan Randolph, with a crooked smile.

He put his hand out and Amanda took it briefly. “I’m Dan Randolph.”

Then he turned to Pancho. “And you’ve got to be Priscilla Lane.”

“Pancho,” she corrected, taking his extended hand. His grip was firm, friendly.

“Priscilla’s too fussy, and anybody calls me Pru or Prissy, I’ll belt him.”

“Pancho,” Randolph said, his smile widening. “I’ll remember that.”

“What’s this all about?” Pancho asked. “Why’ve you brought us here?” Randolph’s eyes showed momentary surprise at her bluntness, but then he shrugged and said, “You’re going to see some history being made… if this doubledamned jury-rigged kludge works right.”

He introduced Amanda and Pancho to Lyall Duncan and the others gathered around the missile. Almost all of them were male, engineers or technicians. One of the women was a tall blonde; competition for Amanda, Pancho thought. Duncan looked like a fierce little gnome, or maybe a troll, even when he smiled. Puzzled, intrigued, Pancho allowed Randolph to usher her and Amanda to the shed. It was packed with instruments and consoles and one rickety-looking desk with a lopsided chair in front of it.

“You just stay here and watch,” he said, with a curious grin. “If it works, you’ll be witnesses. If it blows up, this ought to be far enough away to keep you from getting hurt.”

The dark-haired troll called Duncan chuckled. “Experimental physics, you know.

Always the chance of an explosion.”

The crane was on its own caterpillar tractor. A pair of technicians used it to hoist the missile off the ground and trundle it out almost half a kilometer. They put the missile gently onto the grassy ground, pointing into the wind blowing steadily in from the sea.

Consoles were coming to life in the shed. Engineers were speaking to each other in their clipped jargon. Pancho watched Randolph. The man seemed outwardly relaxed as he stood with both hands jammed into his windbreaker pockets, watching the missile while the crane waddled back toward them. Duncan buzzed around the shed like a bee in a flower bed. The tension built up;

Pancho could feel it radiating from the backs of the crew standing by the consoles.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Amanda whispered.

Pancho looked up at the looming thunderheads. “Sooner or later.”

At last Duncan said to Randolph, “We’re ready to launch.”

“Okay,” said Randolph. “Do it before it starts pouring.”

Duncan said crisply, “Launch!”

Pancho turned her attention to the missile sitting out on the grass. For a moment nothing happened, but then its tail-end spurted flame and it lurched forward. Just as she heard the whining scream of the jet engine, another sound cut in: a deeper, more powerful roar. The missile leaped off the ground, angling sharply toward the cloud-filled sky, trailing a billow of smoke.

Something fell away from the climbing missile. A rocket pack, Pancho realized.

They used it to get the bird off the ground.

The plane levelled off a scant hundred meters in the air and circled the field once.

“Nominal flight,” one of the engineers called out.

“Fusion drive ready?” Duncan asked.

“Primed and ready.”

“Light it.”

The missile seemed to falter for a moment, as if it had stalled in midair. Pancho saw the slightly smoky exhaust wink out, heard the jet engine’s screech die away. The missile glided for several moments, losing altitude. Then it seemed to bite into the air, raising its nose and climbing steeply upward as it howled a thin, screeching ethereal wail.

“Programmed flight trajectory,” Pancho heard someone call out. “On the money.” The bird flew out to sea until it was a barely visible speck, then turned back and rushed toward them, climbing almost to the base of the thunderheads, its ghostly wail barely audible, streaking past, heading inland. Then it turned again and headed seaward once more. Racetrack course, Pancho realized. Lightning was flickering in the clouds now.

“Coming up on the two-minute mark,” said one of the engineers. “Mark! Two minutes.”

“Bring her in,” Duncan commanded.

“Automatic trajectory,” came the answer.

Pancho watched as the missile turned back toward them once again, dropped its flaps, slowed, and gracefully descended for a landing out in the area where it had taken off. The grass was scorched out there from the takeoff rocket’s hot exhaust. Turning slightly, she saw that Randolph was standing just outside the door, eyes riveted to the approaching missile, mouth slightly open, fists clenched. The missile was still moving fast when it touched the ground, bounced into the air again, wobbled back to the ground, and then plowed nose-first into the dirt, throwing a spray of grass clods and pebbles as it flipped over onto its back and banged down so hard one of the wings tore off. It sounded like a junkyard falling out of the sky.

But the engineers and technicians were all cheering, jumping up and down, pounding each other on the back, yelling and waving like a team that had just scored a gold medal in the Olympics. Randolph yanked off his cap and pegged it out toward the sea.

“Och, what a divot!” Duncan shouted. He raced through the open door to Randolph and launched himself into the older man’s arms, wrapping his legs around Randolph’s middle. Randolph staggered backward and they fell to the ground together, laughing like maniacs.

Pancho looked at Amanda. She seemed just as puzzled as Pancho felt. With a shrug, Pancho said, “I guess any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.”

Amanda shook her head. “I shouldn’t think you’d walk away from that one if you’d been aboard it.”