Rocket Science Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Floyd, it’s none of my business what people do or don’t bring in here from Kansas City or Chicago or Baltimore. Heck, London or Hong Kong don’t make me no never mind. But I saw you drive a Nazi war machine off that flat car Floyd Bellamy, me and half the town. That ain’t business, that’s plum weird . What the hell are you up to?”
    I was pretty interested in Floyd’s answer to the question.
    “Business, Odus, is about getting ahead of the other guy. Santa Fe Railroad’s going diesel, right? Tell me, why is that?”
    Odus shrugged. “Don’t know the details, ain’t my job, but it’s about cost I reckon. Steam locomotive’s expensive to operate and maintain. I hear one man can run two, three diesels together. Try that trick with steam, you’re like to wind up in the ditch with thirty tons of scrap metal parked on your forehead, right quick.”
    “Cost.” Floyd ticked his points off on his fingers. “Efficiency. Quality. Same reasons we won the war. We could do it better, faster and cheaper than anyone else.”
    He glanced around the room, made a show of checking for eavesdroppers. The conversation paused while Midge brought our suds. Floyd got another wink. She never even looked at me. “I’d never be one to give aid and comfort to an enemy, but Odus, you’ve got to know the Jerries had some great technology. German optics, chemicals, color dyes, fertilizers, machine tools — best in the world before the war. Heck, they’d still be the best at that kind of stuff today if those bombers Vern built hadn’t flattened them.”
    My B-29s only flew in the Pacific theater, which Floyd knew perfectly well, but this was his spiel.
    “Maybe you have that right,” Odus answered grudgingly, “but it feels darned weird to be talking up the enemy.”
    “They’re not the enemy any more,” Floyd whispered fiercely. “Those are our boys now. If General Patton had had his way, we’d be fighting side by side with the Jerries against the Red Menace already.” He sat back in his seat and took a long pull off his mug. “No reason in the world some hard-working American boys can’t make money off some of Jerry’s good ideas.”
    “I ain’t giving you no money,” said Odus automatically.
    Floyd waved his hands, as if pushing Odus away. “No, no, Odus, you misunderstand me. I don’t want your money. I just want to keep a lid on things for a while — maybe four, six months.”
    “Lid?” Odus sipped his drink. I toyed with mine, then shucked a couple of peanuts from the little ceramic bowl.
    Floyd gave Odus a narrow-eyed stare. “You see that halftrack I pulled off the train?”
    Odus chuckled. “Of course.”
    “It wasn’t no halftrack.”
    Odus’ chuckle turned into a laugh. “Floyd Bellamy, if you’re going to flim-flam me, you’re going to have to do a lot better than that.”
    “No, Odus, it had wheels and treads. That’s not what I mean. But that funny little housing on the back? It was a mobile fertilizer plant. High-yield fertilizer straight from bunker-grade crude. Nazis had to develop that stuff to survive near the end of the war when we had ’em cut off from overseas shipments and on the run.”
    Odus gave a low whistle. I was pretty impressed myself — Floyd must have worked on that routine for a while.
    “Anyway,” Floyd continued, “Vernon here’s an engineer. Me and him are going to break down that equipment, reproduce the process, and make Augusta, Kansas the fertilizer capital of the world. And we only need one thing to do it.”
    “What?” After that last bout of resistance, Odus was completely under Floyd’s spell. I figured Floyd could get money from him now if he had a mind to.
    Floyd reached across the table to touch Odus’ lips. “Your silence,” he said.
    Odus sipped from his beer and thought that over. He glanced around the bar at the oil-stained roughnecks. I could almost see him thinking about all the wells in eastern Kansas, the business it would bring to