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CHAPTER ONE
The Amazing Atomic Rocket
Mark Styles stepped from his beat up model-T and whistled slowly as he took in the front entrance of the Starr Estate. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright back in the thirties, it looked like a house of the future, even now. The front gates were elegant art deco affairs that hadn't cared for the changing of the seasons and the shifting of style. Heroic figures held aloft the sides of the doors, statues with stark features and bold proportions. Along the top of the gate read the Latin inscription of the Starr family.
"Ad Astra? The heck does that mean?" Jimmy Katz asked, leaning his head from the side of the car. Mark chuckled.
"Kid, I pay you to take pictures, take pictures," he said and Jimmy hurried from the car to set up his camera. He snapped a shot quickly, then another -- and the front gate slowly opened as Mark himself took in the rest of the mansion beyond. Two wings, three stories, statuary in a tasteful style that spoke of great wealth and greater restraint...but there were odder things too. The greenhouse dome on the left side. The large garage. What looked to be a target shooting range, with rifles of various kinds propped up under an awning, where they could be snatched up at a moment's notice.
But what he noticed most was the overgrown nature of the garden.
"This Starr bird doesn't have many guests, does she?" he muttered, his unlit cigarette dancing at the corner of his mouth.
"Sure doesn't, Mr. Styles!"
"I was talking to myself, kid," Mark said, looking at Jimmy. Jimmy flushed, then held up his camera. Then his jaw hit the floor -- and the camera flashed at the same time. Mark turned away to see what it was he had snapped and...
"Fhew," Mark whistled to himself as the gate started to slide open and he caught his first sign of anyone alive on the Starr estate. The fact she was the prettiest looking girl he'd ever seen since '45 in a little townhouse two miles east of the Seine just made the little black and white uniform she was all dolled up in kick even harder. French maid outfits were really their own reward. She had opened the gate with some kind of electric device in her hands, and she smiled brightly at him and Mark.
"
Mademoiselle
," Mark said, immediately slipping back into the passable French he picked up over there. "
Enchantée!
"
"Oh, hah, tarnation, I don't speak German," she said, with a thick Tennessee accent. She did curtsy. "My name's Claudette! Why don't ya'll come in. The Missus is waiting fer ya in the observatory! Oh, none of ya'll are interested in drinkin', right?"
"Uh, I don't mind a snort or two, why?" Mark asked as Claudette fished a small box from one of the many folds of her frilly uniform. She beamed and bent forward to hold out the box -- which gave a remarkable view of her...ah...photogenic side. Jimmy, who had been a short-pint back when Mark had been killing Nazis, looked as if he was about to faint, his eyes going completely crossed as he tried to look right down Claudette's dress. Mark, from his lofty and mature age of twenty six, was considerably better at hiding his glance and elbowed him.
"Well, uh, the Missus says y'all wanna skip any kind of whiskey or spirits after taking these," she said.
"What are they?" Mark asked, taking one of the pills from the case curiously. They were tiny white oval shaped pills, looking a bit like Tylenol or aspirin. He looked from the pill to Claudette who smiled at him.
"Potassium Eye Oh Die!" she said, bringing out the elemental name with a flair only someone from the south could. "Missus says it'll keep yer guts safe as houses. Just in case."
Mark's eyebrows shot right up. "Your missus is a doctor now?"
"Doctor, yeah!" Claudette said, turning -- her skirts swishing. "She got her first doctorate when she was ten years old, mister! She became a medical doctor during the war, and won the gold medal-"
"Twice, yeah," Mark said, nodding as they walked together through the front door. The lobby of the Starr estate had a huge portrait of a forbearing looking older man that Mark was fairly sure was Jasmine Starr's eccentric grandfather, who had raised her ever since her parents had died on the Lusitania. Jacob Starr had been an oil baron, then a telephone innovator, then a reclusive coot after his claims of receiving messages from space aliens had been debunked by the scientific community. He had died in obscurity and left his vast fortune to Jasmine. According to the research Mark had done, she had doubled it with clever investments...then lost almost all of it in a string of economic decisions that could only be considered 'utterly baffling.'
"In fencing," Claudette said, taking the stairs ahead of her with a cheerful humming. Mark dry swallowed his pill. Jimmy, trying to ape him, started to choke. But that might have been because the stairs leading from the lobby to the second story of the estate were remarkably steep and the view was...
"The observatory is right this way, gentlemen," Claudette said, cheerfully as she stepped off the stairs and turned to the right, her hips and her high heels working together to get Jimmy to trip over his own feet. Mark stepped up hurriedly and followed after Claudette, leaning in to speak quietly to her.
"Fencer, doctor, tinkerer, entrepreneur," he said, ticking the things off on his fingers. "Private investigator."
"Private investigator?" Claudette chuckled, shaking her head. "Shucks no, the Missus doesn't do...how you say it, gumshoe work?"
"She led to the arrest of Fatts Ricci," Mark said, dryly.
"Oh, that was just a side thing," Claudette said, brushing off the event that had rocked New York City to its roots for a solid three weeks and implicated several senators in the criminal underground -- and had made Jasmine Starr a household name...again.
The maid opened the door leading to the observatory and Mark stepped inside and realized that the breadth of his interview may have gone further than he expected. The observatory was not, as he had guessed, a telescope or something. It wasn't a place to gaze at stars. It was, in fact, a gantry bay that looked down upon the insides of a workshop that looked like it should have been turning out tanks or B-52s, not sitting in the hands of some weird bachelorette in upper New York State. The machine tools were sophisticated, sturdy, and well used and the fruits of their work sat in the center of the garage, easily viewed from the observatory.
"Is that a..." Mark bit back the stronger word. "Is that a rocket?"
"You are quite correct, Mr. Styles! That is none other than my very own rocket -- I call her...
Atomo
!"
The arrival of Jasmine Starr was almost as arresting as the arrival of her maid. She was less conventionally attractive -- skinnier, taller, more mannish in her dress and mannerisms -- but that didn't stop her from being one of the prettiest girls that Mark had ever seen. Her hair was short and frizzy, clinging tight to her head like she was a kind of pixie, and her face was all sleek angles and hard edges, with bright blue eyes that seemed to take in everything at once. She was dressed in simple coveralls that were stained with grease, and had a clipboard in her hand, covered with neat, even handwriting. She beamed at him as she held out her hand -- work roughened and strong in his grip -- and shook.
"Please, call me Mark," Mark said.
"Then you can call me Jaz. My favorite kind of music, you know," she said, nodding. "Pioneered by remarkable people and appreciated round the world, Jazz..." She looked down at the rocket, then looked back at Mark, beaming at him. "I see you're impressed."
Jimmy snapped a picture.
"Impressed? Hell, I..." Mark whistled. "It looks like someone took one of those big V2 things and blew it up three times as big!"
"Ah, the work of
Herr
Von Braun, yes," Jaz said, shaking her head with a little thin frown. "I have differences with the man -- but that's not what you're here about. You want to know what the Mad Spinster of New York is all about."
"Well-"
"Come!" Jaz turned and then headed to the side of the observatory, where a metal pole was set against the ceiling, running down to the next level -- like a firehouse. She casually swung onto it and gripped to it, sliding down with a squeak. Jimmy gulped and Mark, remembering the kid was scared of everything, put his hand on his shoulder.
"Stay here, Kid. Snap shots of the rocket, get lots of pictures. This is going to be a big story," he said, nodding, then turned to the pole.
He stepped away from it a moment later, his heart racing despite himself -- and then he heard a squeak and a thump behind him. Turning, he saw Claudette untangling herself from the pole as if she slid down it every day. Mark changed his mental evaluation of the curvaceous maid a bit, anyone who could take a pole like that in a dress like hers was someone not to underestimate.
Jas gestured him forward, pointing. "Do you know how rockets operate?"
"Not really, Jas, no," Mark said.
"Ah, yes, well!" Jas's finger stabbed out. "A rocket requires power and reaction mass. In Von Braun's clumsy devices, the power and reaction mass are one in the same! Rocket fuel can use, for instance, hydrogen and oxygen mixed together and ignited, much as we use gasoline in our automobiles. However, this is rather wasteful and hard to control. There is a far more effective and small source of power that can be utilized for rockets -- separate from the reaction mass, so that one may 'refuel' the rocket with nothing more complex than water!"
