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“Just a few qualitative forms.” He tapped his fingers on a stack of paperwork on the console desk. “Thirty minutes
     or so.”
    Hennings nodded. The room was silent except for the ambient sounds of electronics.
    Randolf Hennings let his eyes wander absently over the equipment in the tight room. The functions of this equipment were not
     entirely a mystery to him. He recognized some of it and guessed at what looked vaguely familiar, as a man might do who had
     been asleep for a hundred years and had awakened in the twenty-first century.
    When he was a younger man he had asked many questions of his shipboard technicians and officers. But as the years passed,
     the meaning of those young men’s answers eluded him more each time. He was, he reminded himself, a product of another civilization.
     He had been born during the Great Depression. His older brother had died of a simple foot infection. He remembered, firsthand,
     a great deal about World War II, the Nazis and the Japs, listening to the bulletins as they came across the radio in their
     living room. He recalled vividly the day that FDR died, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the day the Japanese surrendered, the day, as
     a teenager, that he saw a television screen for the first time. He remembered the family car, a big, old, round-bodied Buick,
     and how his mother had never learned to drive it. They’d come an incredibly long way in a short span of time. Many people
     had chosen not to go along on that fast ride. Others had become the helmsmen and navigators. Then there were people like himself
     who found they were in positions of command without understanding what those helmsmen and navigators were doing, where they
     were going.
    He walked over to the single porthole in the room and pushed back the blackout shade. The tranquil sea calmed his troubled
     conscience. He remembered when he had finally made the decision that he would have to evaluate his men on their personal traits
     and then trust their technical advice accordingly. Men, he understood. Human beings did not really change from generation
     to generation. If his sixty-seven years were good for anything, it was that he had arrived at an understanding of the most
     complex piece of machinery of all. He could read the hearts and souls of his fellow men; he had peered into the psyche of
     Commander James Sloan, and he did not like what he saw.
    Petty Officer Loomis turned around. “Commander Sloan.” He pointed to a video display screen.
    Sloan walked over to the screen. He looked at the message. “Good news, Admiral.”
    Hennings closed the blackout shade and turned around.
    Sloan spoke as he read the data. “Our elements are in position. The F-18 is on station, and the C-130 is also in position.
     We need only the release verification.” He glanced at the digital countdown clock. Five minutes.
    Hennings nodded. “Fine.”
    Sloan gave a final thought to the one command check he was not able to complete. If the test had not been a secret, and if
     delay had not meant possible cancellation, and if cancellation had not meant potential disadvantage in a future war, and his
     career weren’t in the balance, and if Hennings weren’t evaluating him with those steely gray eyes, and if it wasn’t time for
     the Navy to gets its balls back, and if that damn digital clock weren’t running down . . . then, maybe, maybe he would have
     waited. Four minutes.
    The video screen’s display updated again, and Sloan looked at the short message. He read it first to himself, smiled, and
     then read it aloud. “The C-130 has launched its target and it was last tracked as steady and on course. The target drone has
     accelerated to Mach 2, and is now level at sixty-two thousand feet.” He glanced at the digital countdown. “In two minutes
     and thirty seconds I can instruct Lieutenant Matos to begin tracking the target and engage it at will.”

    “Would you like another drink?”
    “No, I think I’ll wait.” John Berry