Termination Shock

The positions of the eighteen shells were plotted and updated on a real-time map displayed on a big monitor. They were spread out like beads on a string along a trajectory that rose straight up from the Flying S Ranch and then spiraled down through Mexican airspace. They all seemed to be following the same basic flight plan, like cars in an aerial train. Each had two video cameras, one aimed forward and the other aimed back. The twin feeds from one shell were up on the video screens. They couldn’t have been more different. The view forward was of a black sky above a curved horizon limned in blue. The view back was an endless series of flashes, which became so visually annoying that the pane had to be minimized. But it confirmed that the sulfur-burning pulse jet had ignited and was farting away.

At one end of the car T.R. was doing an interview with a tame journalist. With a couple of beers in him, he had become amusingly and colorfully exasperated by this person’s stubborn misunderstanding of the muzzle flash. “It is just a by-product. We would eliminate it if we could. If we used helium, it wouldn’t happen at all—and it wouldn’t matter because the purpose of that gas is just to be like the air in a peashooter. Unavoidably, some of it leaks out of the muzzle after the shell has departed. We control that as much as we can with check valves and such. But it’s safer to burn it off than to just have it drifting around god knows where.” He caught the eye of an aide who seemed to specialize in media communications. “We need more animations or something to better illustrate that—it is just gonna be a chronic misunderstanding.”

Another invited journalist asked a question that Saskia couldn’t quite hear. T.R. nodded. “The gun just lobs the shell up to the altitude we want—the stratosphere. About eighty thousand feet. Where sulfur does no harm—and much good. Now, at that point it’s just gonna fall straight back down unless we do something. We could just detonate it with an explosive charge and it would disperse the sulfur. Hopefully some of it would burn. That was actually plan A. But our aerospace engineers didn’t think that was fancy enough and so they ginned up the idea for a sulfur-burning engine that can keep the shell airborne for a little while. It’s got the worst performance characteristics you can imagine but we don’t care—it gives us a few minutes for the shell to remain at altitude and disperse the SO₂ more widely where the jet stream can catch it and begin spreading it around. Then the shell runs out of fuel and glides to the ground and we try to catch it.”

T.R. drew the journalists’ attention to a feed from another camera, this one near the ground, aimed at a stretch of ranch property covered by nets stretched between poles. “This here is all there is to it,” T.R. said. “Same as you see at the circus. It’s a few miles from here, down toward the Rio Grande.”

There followed a few minutes’ futzing around with video feeds and camera angles that only gave a helter-skelter picture of what was going on. “The point,” T.R. eventually said, after his frustration had reached a crescendo and then collapsed in a farrago of basically humorous cursing and hat-throwing, “is that we are recycling the goddamn shells. We catch them in the net and toss them in the back of a truck and drive them back to the reloading facility. Providing jobs, good safe jobs, on the ground. Come out here if you want to see what I mean.”