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scruffy, beige-carpeted hall. “We keep him in my son’s old room. He wanders a little. He wanders a lot, don’t you know.”
    “I heard about that.”
    “Sometimes he is also very stubborn, your grandfather.”
    Van nodded. “Yeah.”
    “Please don’t let him smoke.” Mrs. Srinivasan pulled a house key from a chain in her hefty bodice. She unlocked the door.
    His grandfather’s cell smelled like a plastics refinery. He’d been using hot glue on his airplane models, something pungent. Worse yet, he’d somehow managed to set fire to his mattress. The narrow wooden bed frame had a long scorched scar under the wrinkled sheets.
    Van hugged his grandfather. The old man was stooped and bony, with the empty flabbiness of old age.
    “Little Derek,” he said.
    “I brought my son here, Grandpa Chuck. Your great-grandson, Ted. Ted’s out there in a truck.”
    “Oh, wow.” The old man stared at him peaceably.
    “Grandpa, I think I need your advice.”
    “My advice, huh? Okey-doke!” The old man sat on his metal stool, and with a careful, visible effort, he crossed his legs. “Shoot!”
    “So, did you see what just went down in New York? And the Pentagon?”
    “I saw the President’s speech on the TV,” said the old man, growing livelier. “That kid is all right! He’s not like his dad. Old George Bush, he used to come out to Area 51 when we were launching Blackbirds. Back when George was Company. ‘Fifty thousand dollars an hour,’ George Bush would say. No vision thing! He was a bean-counter! Anywhere on earth, any Sunday, a Blackbird could bring back pictures!
    High detail, too, shots the size of bedsheets!”
    “Great.”
    “We never lost a pilot.”
    “Right.”
    “First ten pilots inside the Blackbird, nine of them became Air Force generals!”
    “Right, Grandpa.”
    “Surveillance shots straight from Eastman Kodak, the size of dang tabletops! With a handful of planes. Every one of ’em handmade in Burbank!”
    Van had no reply to offer. An ugly thrill of weariness shot through him. He sat on the old man’s reeking bed. It scrunched and shot a cloud of dust into a beam of morning sunlight.
    “Made out of titanium !” The old man brandished his glue gun. It was big, hollow, and shiny, with fins like a Flash Gordon ray gun.
    Van sat up. “Titanium, huh?”
    Van’s grandfather quickly hid the titanium gun inside his desk. He forgot to unplug it, though, so the bright red cord simply trailed from the desk to the wall, an obvious trip hazard. “Robbie, if I say anything I’m not supposed to say, you just forget that. All right? You can just forget about all of it.” He waved a hand at the crumbling boxes on his walls. “Don’t look at all this.”
    Van looked. “What?”
    “They ordered us to destroy all the documents. They ordered us to break all our tools. ” The pain was still fresh in the old man’s eyes. “That was the worst part, Robbie: when the politicians make you break your dang tools.” He looked at the slumping wall of boxes. “The D-21, that’s what this is. A cruise missile we built in 1963. Well, ol’ Kelly Johnson had all these boxes stored in his garage in Alameda. He was supposed to burn ’em all. Burn every blueprint! But in Alameda? There woulda been an air quality report !” The old man chuckled wheezily. “Couldn’t break those federal rules and regulations now, could he? The EPA wouldn’t like the smoke ! They’da sent ol’ Kelly straight to Leavenworth! Ha ha ha!”
    “Why did they break your tools?” Van coaxed.
    “So we couldn’t pull the D-21 back out of mothballs when the White House changed hands. Breaking the tools, son, that’s the only way to kill a secret federal program and keep it dead. We built ’em a cruise missile twenty-five years before its time. Fifty Lockheed engineers and about a hundred union guys in our machine shop. We made that bird with our own hands. We fired it over Red China four times. At Mach 3. The Chinese never knew