Van hovered at the brink of sleep, his chest heaving at the thin air. The shining image of his grandfather’s gun occurred to him. The gun pressed against his mind’s eye, heavy with dream-importance. The ray gun had run out of solder as he worked on his doomed KH-13 presentation. That’s when he had opened it up, removing four tiny steel screws, and discovered that the engineers of the Skunk Works had built a fake jet engine inside there. When he’d popped off the butt of the ray gun, he was looking right up the round model rocket rump of an SR-71 Blackbird. To make the gun work, you had to shove solder wire up the jet’s exhaust, round as a gun barrel. That was true geek humor. Very crew cut and bow tie, very 1960s styling. No wonder his grandfather had always treasured the thing.