The cool air of evening served to clear Henry Enright’s head as he walked down Larimer Street toward the Denver railroad yards. Everything’s going to be all right, he told himself as he walked. Old Hank Enright’s still the best engineer in the business. Wasn’t he the expert and authority on rocket propulsion? O.K., he admitted to himself, the business is in a slump. But it’ll bounce back. It’s got to, he reasoned. There’s too much invested in it. The space station’s still up there, and they’ve got to have rockets to supply it, don’t they? This is only temporary; it can’t last.
But in the back of his mind he knew he was lying to himself. He knew, as he’d known for the last two years, that the science of rocketry was dead.
He looked down Larimer Street, raising his eyes from the dirt and poverty, in time to see a silvery blob of light catch the evening sunlight as it rose. He followed it until it finally faded from sight into the purple sky at the zenith.
“Hey, Mac, get outa the street!” the shout of a cop brought him back as traffic started to stream past him with a roar of motors and a blast of horns. He scrambled out of the middle of the intersection and made it to the curb miraculously unscathed. Then he looked up into the sky again. Venus was shining brightly up there above the Rockies.
He swore loudly and bitterly, partially at the flowing mob of people that pushed and jostled him, but mostly at the silvery blobs of light still rising from South Denver Port toward the moon and planets.
Once there had been tall, sleek rockets climbing up to the satellite, shaking the ground as they reached for the sky. Now, the space craft of the new order were rising silently and easily to the planets themselves.
All this because of Bill O’Neil, Enright thought bitterly. A rocket technician who went and destroyed the science of rocketry, the very thing he worked with!
It was painful to think about. Bill O’Neil had been a good rocket technician in spite of his lack of formal education. In his time, he had known all the little tricks and idiosyncrasies of rocket motors and the fiery pits in which they were tested. But O’Neil had been other things, too.
Enright thought back, letting his memories of the long years keep him company as he walked his solitary way through the crowd.
He’d first met O’Neil… let’s see, when was it? Back at White Sands in ’63. He could never forget the Form 57, Application for Federal Employment, that had landed on his desk that day. There were fifteen sheets listing Bill O’Neil’s experience tacked onto it. He had chuckled as he noticed that O’Neil had been a tractor mechanic, a crop-dusting pilot, a chicken farmer, communications officer on a Pacific tramp steamer, a detective story writer, a trumpet player with three name bands and the New York Philharmonic, a journeyman welder, a news photographer, a rig foreman in the Peruvian oil fields, a summer camp counselor for Indian lore, a special-effects man in Hollywood, overseas computer repairman for IBM in Europe and Arabia, and a machinist for Reaction Motors. Enright had O.K.’d his application because of the last-named job.