A third barrel fired seven and a half minutes later, and this time she was able to track it for a few seconds before it became too small for the naked eye to see. Each launch was followed by another sonic boom equal to the first.
“Holy shit,” said the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor.
“I know,” said Daia Chand, next to him. “Even after all this, I didn’t actually believe he was going to pull the trigger.”
“It’s happening,” Alastair said. “After all this—it’s actually happening. I sort of can’t believe it. We are fixing the climate.”
“Changing it, anyway,” Eshma returned.
“This’ll bring the temperature down?” Rufus asked.
“If he can keep firing that gun,” Saskia said.
“Sounds like fixing to me,” Rufus concluded.
Not far away, the three Venetians were engaging in a round robin of embracing and kissing. Sylvester was standing with his arms folded, looking dumbfounded. After the third sonic boom, he walked up to T.R. and shook his hand, grinning broadly under the brim of his borrowed cowboy hat.
The Biggest Gun in the World fired each of its barrels three times, launching a total of eighteen shells, before it fell silent. The test lasted for a couple of hours, not counting shell recovery time. Well before the end of it, Saskia had begun to feel dizzy from the heat. She and many others retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of the train cars to watch the proceedings on video screens.
“So this is what it looks like with an N of eighteen,” Alastair mused over a bottle of Corona. Saskia had spent enough time with him to recognize this as statistician-speak. Launching a single
shell—an N of 1—would have taught T.R. a lot. Launching two would have taught him a little more. An N of eighteen was big enough to do some statistical analysis and get a picture of the range of outcomes.
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.”