BAM!
Lights out!
That was the way he expected to go out. Some psycho loser was going to take him out when he wasn’t looking, or he was gonna fuck up and touch a hot wire and bite his tongue through, shattering his teeth, 150,000 kilowatts torching every hair off his blistering skin. Meanwhile, he positioned himself above the juncture to begin his next bead.
He should have taken a tea break. He should have fired up the stove back in his office and made a cup of organic South African rooibos.
Or, something he’d done more than once, he should’ve poured a cup of cold water and thrown a tea bag of anything in it and come back later to drink it. Even that would have been better than nothing.
As it was, he knelt down to lift a heavy stanchion armature onto his shoulder and drove an eight-inch-long piece of steel wire (that he had somehow miraculously avoided all night) through his leg, through the meat of his left calf and the pants leg of his favorite grease-stained jumpsuit. He gasped, a tremor of agony shaking his entire body, and leaned slightly to his left, tossing the heavy stanchion far enough that it would not rebound onto his own injured limb. He stifled the screech that rose in his throat as he lifted his leg off the wire, the length of it sliding out with a friction audible in Sergio’s hissing exhalation. He growled a long string of banal cusswords and sat on the one bare patch of dusty cement floor he could vaguely make out, his attention drawn to the nastiness flaring up his leg. He wrapped his hands around the wound, which he could feel leaking warmly through the fabric, sighing. “Ow, fuck,” he added.
Then he limped toward the stairs at the far corner of the vast ruin. He’d have to pour hydrogen peroxide into both sides of this wound so he didn’t wind up with tetanus. He’d get the cup of tea that had been in the back of his mind for some time.
On the final night, did he even see the figure that separated itself from the shadows?
Although he always kept a pair of bolt cutters handy in his truck at all times, Swirling was glad he did not have to interrupt his spiel about the dead economy, California’s once-great, eighth-largest (or fifth-largest according to some estimates) world economy and its ever increasing population, 38 million at last count, the dead economy freeing up space both actual and intellectual for airships of new thinking, forward bound, filled with the helium of dreams.
Sergio had, as usual, cut through the chain and hung the lock so that it appeared locked; so Swirling could swing out of the cab, with the Germans safely tucked inside as the dawn streaked brightly across the puddled expanses of empty pavement, pull some keys from his pocket to “unlock” the lock, open the sagging chainlink gate, and drive his quiet, bemused bunch through to the still vaguely impressive facilities.
It was clearly all fallen into disrepair but the Germans had been told all that. They had been told all sorts of things, parts of it certainly true.
Like the edgiest of venture capitalists, these guys checked their cell phones as often as teenagers. With their open-collared polo shirts and paunches and eco-shoes and salt-and-pepper close-cropped bullet heads, they were not really interested in the grimmest and grimiest of dull details. They expected that to be taken care of in advance. Maybe just one or two morsels to titillate like an appetizer. They wanted the secret glory of the supposed outside risk (that was primarily yours to bear), but mainly they expected insured return (of some kind!) on their money.
That was all fine, Swirling reflected, as he drove across the railroad tracks that cut through the plant, through another gate that Sergio had (as instructed) opened in advance, even though it was worrisome that Sergio had stopped answering his calls sometime after 4 a.m.
He hoped that Sergio had not injured himself or been killed.
That would certainly put a damper on the meetings with this group. ELADATL needed this capital to get to the next phase. Sergio had never failed him before, that’s why Swirling was putting him in charge of all the forward teams (once they organized some forward teams).
Meanwhile, Swirling covered his worry about not hearing from Sergio for hours during this most critical period by raising the decibel levels—roaring through the expanse of the former plant with its mounds of clumpy debris and its empty rectangles of razed foundations shining damply in the dawn light, speeding through the grounds at fifty miles an hour like a low-flying twin-engine P-38 “Lightning.”
Swirling tossed out all kinds of facts and random commentary while he drove, drawing his charges’ attention to this or that and away from his own jittery nerves. When he arrived at the runway—which had been in use as a parking lot but was still recognizably a runway—with the B-1 building adjacent, the huge hangar doors were not open. In the mean light of dawn, they looked permanently closed, nonfunctional, battered and corroded.
“Gentlemen! Time to view our newest prototype!” Swirling said.
He leaped out, swaggered to the center of the nearest hangar door and banged loudly, repeatedly.
“What the hell,” he muttered, banged again, his fist hitting the door that reverberated thunderously inside the cavernous building.
“If he’s working, sometimes he can’t hear,” Swirling explained, glancing at the Europeans from the corner of his eyes. They commenced looking about in the morning breeze and grinned at him, unwavering steady pinpoints of gravity in their eyes.
Swirling was banging again, desperately, when the huge sheet-metal door gently lifted, softly rising into the air.
It went up about twenty feet and stopped, revealing the great hall with its sad, strange stacks and piles of sheet metal, piping and debris scattered about the huge frame of an obvious dirigible, five or more (top obscured in dimness) stories high and hundreds of feet long, what you could see of it, as rays of morning light penetrated the dimness of the interior.
As usual, Sergio had ultracapacitors hooked up to oscilloscopes and generators to produce random electrical thrumming and sizzling far down the tail end of the ship, and he’d left his welding apparatus shooting sparks and had to run over and switch it off, all for effect. This ship produced its own sound track.
The German investment group rushed forward, as if hypnotized by their own expectations. One of the investors with a cigarillo in his mouth (one of their slim brown cigarillos) caught Swirling’s glance, removed the cig and pinched it away in his pocket, grinning and shaking his head.
Swirling took to nodding, as if everything was on schedule.
Sergio made it on schedule.
Sergio dropped the nylon line of the manual pulley he’d had to rig to get the huge door to slide on its broken old tracks; he limped over on his damaged leg to shake hands with the investors. Swirling was explaining some ideology about dirigibles, some shit about self-charging titanium frames and solar power to these guys who had to remove their sunglasses to see into the dimness.
Sergio was tired. He stood behind Swirling till Swirling finally noticed him and introduced him to the members of the investment group, “This is Sergio, head of our Forward Teams division.” Swirling gave the bloody rag wrapped around Sergio’s calf a glance and said, “How’re you, boss?”
Sergio frowned, tipping his head toward the hangar door. The two walked out toward the shining expanse of morning. The Germans talked happily.
“You all right?” Swirling asked again.
“Look,