“Are you listening?” Jack asked the hand as he worked. “This is all going to be on the quiz Tuesday. Yes, ceramic-aluminum. Now shut up while I do the hard part. See, I’ve got enough material here to make a mosquito net for a used-car lot. Now, inch-per-inch, Charmin weighs more than this, stuff, so one good breeze could mess me up really good. You sneeze, Lefty, and I swear I’ll kill ya.”
Jack was sweating as he attached the material using tiny clips, then, when it was in place, misted it with a chlorine mixture that turned the material liquid just long enough to adhere it. Once he got rolling, he could adhere a ten-foot strip of material every two minutes. When one side was done he began rolling the ten-foot rolls across the frame and adhered them to the opposite side. It took two hours for the entire frame to be covered in material.
By then, the corpse of Jesus Merienez was down to 90.3 degrees Fahrenheit. The fingers, which had been clenched in a animal-like claw, were drooping like fading blossoms.
“You look tired,” Jack said to the hand. “Me, too.”
He jumped up on the earth drill, and his top half disappeared inside. He came out with a pair of Coronas. He grinned at the hand, then frowned.
“Don’t give me that stuff. Dad says if I’m old enough to steal secret military hardware I’m old enough to have a brewski.” Jack sucked down the first beer, tossed the bottle into the backpack and started on the second one as he inspected his handiwork.
“Oh, no! Look.” He pointed into the middle of his construction. “I’ve got a run in my airship!”
There, amid the vast frame of dark gray fabric, a tiny cactus spine was protruding through the fabric, almost invisible in the starlight. The tear spread for two feet.
“Oh, well, bound to happen. Watch how I fix it. I learned this from my girlfriend’s mom. She uses nail polish when she gets a run in her nylons. I use this stuff.” Jack scrounged out a small spray bottle of thick liquid. “Works even better than Revlon.” He crawled on all fours under the fabric and squirted the stuff over the run, creating a flexible mend.
“Now, we are ready to go.” Jack told the hand, retrieving his beer and sucking it empty. He fished a remote control from his pocket. It had come with a ninety-nine-dollar Nishitsu DVD player that died years ago. It was easy enough to put a booster in the remote and use it to get the thing started. He pressed Power.
The tiny proton cell whizzed up the turbine. It was virtually silent, but a tiny amber LED told Jack it was working. The teenager stood silently, almost thoughtfully as the proton cell did its work.
“See, I didn’t feel a thing, did you?” he asked the hand of Jesus. “There’s something about that proton field, though. It sends those kung fu dudes into conniptions. At least I think it’s the proton charge. Well, whatever.” Jack heard the generator begin working, powered by the proton cell. He was using bursts of electricity to create electricity, but what the heck? It worked, didn’t it? And man, did it give him a lot of power to work with.
“Hey, you ready? I swear you never saw anything like this before.” Jack pressed the channel-up button. The huge framed triangle shuddered, crackled with electricity, then rose in a billow of desert dust. Jack hastily dragged on the plastic filtration mask he had clipped on his belt, and watched the airship rise. It blotted out the stars; it was acres big.
“Is that cool or is that cool?” Jack demanded. His eyes, as blue as the tropical ocean in a travel brochure, glinted with wild excitement. “Fetch, boy.”
He pressed Play, and the airship drifted away in virtual silence.
When he turned back to the drill, Jack found the hand of Jesus was buried in dust up to the cuticles.
“Oh, man, you missed it? Sorry about that.” He pushed off the sand until the hand was exposed again almost to the elbow, then Jack set up his laptop to monitor the progress of the Jack Fast’s Amazing Invisible Airship. Not that he had to do anything. The airship was already programmed to do the work all by itself. Like everything Jack Fast engineered, it worked perfectly.
After an hour, Jack got out the cooler to make some baloney sandwiches.
The Object of Plausible Denial—OPD—lay under a rock.
It had fallen out of the sky when it shouldn’t have and hadn’t exploded when it should have. It bounced and skidded across the desert floor for 87.62 yards before becoming wedged under the big rock. The skid marks were erased by a brisk wind before they could be sighted from the air by the U.S. Air Force search planes. The Air Force devoted almost ten thousand man-hours to the search effort, but the device was never found.
There were two schools of thought on how to handle the loss of a device that dangerous.
