Read onlineGravity's Angel
Author's note: This story concerns a future in which Congress continued funding for the SSC, which of course did not happen in our timeline, where instead of gravity's angel we have a large, mostly empty tunnel beneath the Texas plains. I would also remind the reader that all stories take place in alternate realities, perhaps, as David Deutsch maintains, among an infinite number of them.
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License.About fifty meters away, Diehl stood talking to a man wearing blue overalls with the yellow flashes of a crew chief. The man looked taut, white-faced. "So pull every goddamned dipole with that batch number and replace the smart bolts," Diehl said. They walked toward me, and the crew chief stopped at a com station and plugged in his headset, no doubt beginning the evil task Diehl had set him.
"What can I do for you, Sax?" he asked.
"I've got a visitor," I said. "From Los Alamos. And she's got some interesting simulations of our full-power shots. I think you ought to see them." He looked startled; he hadn't expected me to ask for his time-money, resources, priority, yes, but not his time. "Or ma be not," I said. "Maybe you should let me have Dickie Boy put her Monte Carlos on The Thing. She's got some strange stuff there, and if it works out, we need to be prepared."
"Sax, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm tired, you know? We're in the home stretch here, on budget, on time ... now t
