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roof. “I don’t care about fission energy, Jack. They can shut down every nuclear reactor in the world and I wouldn’t give a flying fig. But fusion is not fission.”
    Jack took a deep breath. “You told them about me, didn’t you?”
    Perlman slowly lowered his hand. “I had to. The January Group wasn’t going to give me seventy million dollars to hire someone they didn’t know.”
    Jack looked at Perlman. “What did they say? I’m sure they dug up everything they could find on me.”
    â€œNothing.” When he saw Jack’s doubtful expression, he added: “I swear, Jack. They cut the check within two weeks after I told them your plan.”
    Sally had rolled a computer up to
Prometheus,
plugged it into an interface panel. A graphic display, a thick red horizontal line on a blue background, formed on the monitor. “Ascent stage sim, plus ten,” she announced, keying in the parameters of the final stage of the mission.
    â€œReentry activation, nominal readout,” Virgil Judd said, watching the numbers come up on the computer. Judd had been a Cape Ape, laid off by the decimation of the workforce there over the last two years. He was a big, gentle man with a lovely wife and a very sick daughter suffering from the advanced stages of cystic fibrosis. Jack had done everything he could to help Virgil, including arranging for tests at the Mayo Clinic.
We happy few.
    â€œVector all balls, deceleration nominal,” Virgil said. Then, “Bingo deceleration. Switching to reentry mode.”
    A few minutes later another layer of numbers slid across the computer screen. “Simulating reentry, checking azimuth, bingo envelope,” Sally said. “Readouts on volume.” The music, provided by a CD player outside and piped in through speakers in the four corners of the bay, switched to Orff’s
Carmine Burana,
placing a triumphant caste on the already exciting moment. “Nominal targeting.
Prometheus
has landed,” she concluded, peering at the screen. She looked over at Medaris, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “On the money, Jack.
Prometheus
is ready to rocket and roll!”
    Jack joined in the spontaneous applause of the engineers, muffled by their latex gloves. He approached the moon miner, looked over the numbers still running down the computer screen. “Let’s pack him up, children. Our boy is ready to go to India.” His people crowded in, clapping him and each other on the back. Virgil picked a protesting Perlman up bodily and waltzed him around the room. The CD switched to “Jailhouse Rock.” The dozen engineers in the room joined them in an impromptu shag.
Prometheus
seemed to be thoughtfully watching.
    It was several hours later, well past midnight, when Jack finally got to his office to catch up on some paperwork. Virgil was the only other person still in the plant, detailed to finish the inventory of
Prometheus
components, and to initial out the procedures manuals. Since there were only thirty full-time employees at MEC, everyone pulled double, even triple, duty. Jack scanned his desk, determined to make a dent in the piled-up documents, mostly purchase orders for the myriad of hardware required to build such an exacting machine as
Prometheus.
He walked over to the interior window in his office that looked down into the clean room and admired the robotic spacecraft, resting in a cone of light from an overhead lamp. He especially admired the arm with the claw. That had been his addition to the spec. Perlman had asked him about it and Jack had explained that
Prometheus
might need to move a few rocks to get at the fire beads at Shorty Crater. It was an explanation that could be defended but it wasn’t its real purpose. That purpose he kept to himself.
    Virgil spotted Jack and walked to the squawk box. “Hey, boss, I’m nearly finished down here. How about you?”
    Jack looked over his