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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Powersat (The Grand Tour)
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“S
enator Thornton!”
Jane turned at the sound of the voice. She didn’t recognize the young man elbowing his way toward her against the crowd streaming down the crowded marble corridor of the Hart Senate Office Building. Denny O’Brien, walking beside her, looked over his shoulder and whispered, “Gerry Zisk,
Wall Street Journal.”
It was almost four o’clock, the nominal end of the working
day for staffers, and already the corridors were jammed with office workers on their way to the homeward-bound traffic rush. The young man striding briskly against the human torrent looked too scruffy to be a reporter for the redoubtable
Journal.
He was balding but had a silly-looking goatee springing from his chin. He wore slacks and a baggy pullover shirt and, Jane noticed, expensive Birkenstock sandals that looked as if they had seen plenty of miles. But no socks.
“He covers high tech, science, that sort of stuff,”O’Brien explained before she could ask.
Zisk reached them and stuck out his hand. “Thanks for waiting up for me,” he said, grinning happily. “I just want to ask you a few questions about the bill you introduced on the Senate floor this afternoon.”
“Why don’t we go over to my office, where we can be comfortable?” Jane suggested.
Zisk nodded enthusiastically.
As they started walking upstream, with Zisk between Jane and O’Brien, he asked, “Is this bill part of Governor Scanwell’s plan for energy independence? I mean, it’s aimed at helping to raise capital for high-tech companies, isn’t it?”
“Yes, to both halves of your question,” said Jane.
They rounded a corner and went to the SENATORS ONLY elevator. O’Brien pushed the button, muttering about how the elevator stops on every floor when the staff are emptying out of the offices on their way home.
“Do you really think it’s possible for the U.S. to become totally independent of Arab oil?” Zisk asked.
The elevator arrived and a fresh flood of employees streamed out, forcing Jane and the two men to retreat back away from the doors. Jane thought of the old saw about Civil Service employees: How many people work in this office? About a third of the staff.
They got into the elevator and Zisk repeated his question as the doors slid shut.
“Totally independent of oil imports?” Jane mused. “That’s our goal. How close we can get to it, and how quickly we approach that goal, depends on who’s leading the nation.”
Zisk grinned at her. “I’m covering technology, Senator, not politics. Is it possible, technologywise?”
“Of course it is. A lot of the necessary technology already exists, and we can develop what isn’t ready today.”
They reached the top floor and headed down the corridor for Jane’s suite of offices. Instead of going in through the outer rooms, Jane pecked at the electronic lock on the door to her private office.
Zisk seemed unimpressed by the handsome, dark mahogany furniture. He barely glanced at the window and its view of the Supreme Court building.
“You’re really confident we can develop stuff like this solar power satellite?”
“We got to the Moon, didn’t we?” O’Brien snapped, heading for the refrigerator hidden beneath the ceiling-high bookshelves.
“And it cost twenty billion bucks.”
Jane took one of the green-and-white-striped upholstered chairs near the window. Zisk sat in the facing chair.
“You want something to drink?” O’Brien called, hoisting a chilled bottle of spring water.
“Beer?” Zisk asked.
“What kind?”
“Lite anything.”
“I’ll have a tonic with lime,” Jane called to her aide.
“Coming up,” O’Brien replied.
Hunching forward in his chair, Zisk asked again, “Do you really think this power satellite can work?”
Jane hesitated. The reporter didn’t have a notepad in his hand. There was no evidence of a recording device, unless he had one burrowed inside his pullover or jammed into a pants pocket.
“Are you recording this?” she asked.
He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “I’ve got a good memory.”
Jane gave him a wintry smile. “Then perhaps I’d better make a record of what we say.” As O’Brien handed her a tall glass of tonic, she asked, “Denny, would you turn on the machine?”
Looking back at Zisk, “We can provide you with a copy, if you like.”
“Whatever,” he answered, shrugging carelessly. “Now, about your bill: this is a bailout for Astro Corporation, isn’t it?”
O’Brien shot her a warning frown as he headed for her desk. Jane waited until he had clicked on the digital recorder before replying.
“My bill is intended to provide help for struggling companies in areas of new energy technology without costing the taxpayers a penny.”
“Unless a company like Astro defaults on the loans.”
“The government has done this before,” Jane pointed out. “For Chrysler Corporation, for Lockheed. It’s nothing new.”
“But it is intended to bail out Astro, isn’t it?”
“It should help Astro, certainly. And other companies struggling to establish private ventures in renewable energy technology.”
“Name two,” Zisk said, grinning.
“Rockledge Industries has plans to build a hydrogen fuel facility, I hear,” Jane replied immediately. “And several companies are looking into the possibilities of establishing windmill facilities—wind farms, they call them.”
Zisk’s grin widened. “What about Sam Gunn and his zero-g honeymoon hotel?”
“That’s not a form of energy technology,” said Jane coolly.
Zisk changed his tack. “Word we get is that Astro’s going to sell out to Tricontinental Oil. Or maybe Yamagata. Looks to me like they won’t need your help, after all.”
Jane had a technique for hiding her surprise. She took a sip of the drink she’d been holding, then smiled as pleasantly as she could manage for the reporter, all the while thinking furiously of what her reply should be.
At last she said, “If that’s the case, then Astro won’t need the assistance my bill offers. But there are other new, sttuggling high-tech companies that will.”
Zisk nodded, his grin wider than ever.
 
 
T
hat evening, Dan was sitting in a booth at the Astro Motel bar with Claude Passeau. They had shared a mediocre dinner and decided that some strong drink would be better than the desserts the restaurant offered.
“You must come to New Orleans,” Passeau said. “The food is infinitely better than here.”
“At least I got them to put in a halfway decent brandy,” Dan said, swirling his tumbler of El Presidente.
Passeau shook his head. “You should try Armagnac, Dan. Much better.”
“Armagnac?”
“It comes from the region of France next to Cognac, but it’s smoother and better tasting.” Passeau placed a hand on his chest. “That’s my opinion, of course.”
“Armagnac,” Dan muttered. “I’ll have to remember that.”
Passeau looked around the place. A couple of Hispanics were at the bar, quietly drinking beer. The barmaid was on the phone, talking intently, her free hand gesturing as if she were being hysterical in sign language. Country music seeped from the speakers set into the ceiling, some guitar-strumming lament about lost love.
“Whatever made you decide to build your headquarters here?” Passeau asked. “It’s like the end of the Earth.”
Dan sipped at his brandy. “We can launch over the Gulf of Mexico from here. And I had an uncle who was able to sweet-talk the parks department into letting us lease this half of the island from the sovereign state of Texas.”
“Ahh,” said Passeau. “Money talks.”
“Especially when it’s in unmarked bills being passed under the table.”
Passeau laughed. “You’re really something of a scoundrel, aren’t you?”
Feigning surprise, Dan replied, “I didn’t bribe the parks people. My uncle did that.”
“And look where it got you.”
“It’s not exactly a tropical paradise, is it?” Dan admitted.
“I’ve been to Cape Canaveral,” Passeau said. “I thought that was run-down. But this …” He waved his hand vaguely toward the bar.
“This will be a metropolis someday,” Dan said, grinning.
“Not in our lifetimes.”
With a shrug, Dan conceded, “Maybe not.”
“You worked for the Japanese, didn’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Up in space?”
“I wasn’t an astronaut, technically. I was what they call a mission specialist. In my case it meant being a construction worker in zero gravity.”
“Hmm. Did you like it?”
“Loved every minute of it.” Touching his nose lightly, “Even the fights.”
The look on Passeau’s face was somewhere between disbelief and fascination.
Dan let him take a swallow of the scotch he was drinking, then hunched forward slightly on the booth’s table and said in a lowered voice, “Claude, we’re ready to fly the backup spaceplane.”
Passeau backed away slightly. “I can’t authorize another test flight until we definitively prove what made the first plane crash.”
“We know what made it crash. Sabotage.”
“You may believe that, Dan. As a matter of fact, I believe it myself. But we haven’t any proof.”
“That’s because the proof isn’t in the wreckage.”
“Then where is it?”
“In Pete Larsen’s skull.”
Passeau pulled in a breath. “Then it’s permanently beyond your reach.”
“Look,” Dan said, hunching even further over the table. “Pete had access to the command codes for the plane’s control systems. And he knew the ground track. He sold that information to somebody. That somebody operated a radio
transmitter that sent the command to fire the nose thruster. They knew how to activate the plane’s control system and they knew where and when to do it:”
“But the pilot could have overridden the command.”
“Not during reentry!” Dan whispered urgently. “Every microsecond is crucial at that point in the flight. Hannah had just started the pitch-up maneuver that angles the plane so the heat shield on its underside takes most of the reentry heat. Firing the thruster that pushed the nose down knocked the plane out of control. No pilot could’ve recovered. The plane was doomed.”
“Why didn’t she eject?”
“She probably tried,” Dan said.
“This is all conjecture,” Passeau said.
“If we flew the backup and nothing went wrong, that would prove that the crash was caused by sabotage, wouldn’t it?”
“No, it wouldn’t. There could be—”
“I want to fly the backup.” Dan insisted. Then he added, “Unmanned.”
“Without a pilot?”
Dan said, “Completely automatic. But this time we keep the command codes to ourselves and we don’t tell anybody what the ground track’s going to be.”
“You can’t fly like that, even unmanned,” Passeau objected. “There are other planes in the sky, you know. You’ve got to clear a flight path, get the FAA to allow—”
“That’s your end of the game, Claude. I need a big swath of airspace, wide enough so the murdering sons of bitches won’t know exactly where the plane’s going to be on reentry.”
“That’s impossible. You’re asking the FAA to clear half the continent of North America for you.”
“Just for half an hour, during the reentry phase of the flight. While the bird’s in orbit she’ll be all right.”
“It can’t be done, Dan. I’m sorry, but it can’t be done.”
“You mean you won’t—”
Dan’s cell phone began playing “Take Me Out to the Ball
Game.” He grimaced., plucked the phone from his shirt pocket and flicked it open.
Jane’s face was on the tiny screen. She looked decidedly unhappy.
Before Dan could begin to say hello, she said, “Dan, we need to talk.”
With a glance at Passeau, he asked, “Face-to-face?”
“Yes.”
“I could fly up to Washington for the weekend, I guess.”
“No, not here. At the ranch.”
Dan hesitated and looked at Passeau again. He was making a great show of trying to catch the eye of the barmaid, who was still gesticulating with the bar phone pressed to one ear.
Lowering his voice, Dan asked, “Will Scanwell be there?” Jane said, “No. He’s got to run up to New Hampshire.” Breaking into a smile, Dan said, “I’ll be there Saturday in time for lunch.”
Jane said, “Come alone.” And abruptly cut the connection.
T
he Staggerwing was too slow to suit Dan for this trip, and from the way Jane had looked on the phone, he figured that she wanted this meeting between them to be kept as secret as possible. So Dan unlocked his bottom desk drawer and fished out the driver’s license, Social Security card, and credit card for Orville Wilbur, a phony identity he had established years earlier, when credit card companies were hounding him to become their customer. He found it ridiculously easy to establish a false identity. No wonder terrorists can sneak around the country at will, Dan thought. It had started as a lark, but Dan found times when it was convenient to have an alternate persona. Such as now.
That Friday night Dan drove to Corpus Christi. Orville Wilbur registered at a motel near the airport and from the phone in his room purchased an electronic ticket from Southwest Airlines, round trip from Corpus Christi to Oklahoma City on the earliest flight out, with a commuter link to Marietta. When he got there, Orville Wilbur rented an SUV and drove out to the Thornton ranch.
As he drove through the fancy carved wooden gate of the Thornton ranch, well before noon, he saw another van some distance behind him spurting a rooster tail of dust as it followed him along the road that led to the ranch house. Security? Dan wondered. Hope it’s not news media.
Pulling up in front of the low, sprawling house, Dan stepped out into the late morning sunlight. It was hot and dusty, the Sun high in a bright blue sky that had hardly a wisp of a cloud in it. Squinting, Dan saw contrails etching across the blue, people on their way somewhere, six miles above the ground. Then his eye caught the faint, ghostly image of a crescent Moon, just a trace of its lopsided smile visible.
I know, Dan said silently to the Moon. I’m an idiot for coming out here. But what the hell.
His SUV was the only car parked in front of the house. No one seemed to be stirring; the house seemed silent, empty. Dan rapped on the door and waited for someone to answer. Turning, he saw the van that had followed him growling up the gravel driveway. It crunched to a stop in a swirl of gritty dust.
And Jane got out.
She was dressed in jeans with a white blouse tucked into the waist, decorated with a trio of cardinals across its front. Her hair was pinned back, off her neck. Wide leather belt with a silver and turquoise buckle. Well-scuffed cowboy boots.
“You got here before me?” Jane said, surprised.
“I camped overnight,” Dan joked.
She stepped toward him. He wanted to take her in his arms but she walked swiftly past and pulled an electronic key card from her jeans.
“Nobody’s here,” she said as the door clicked open. “I gave the staff the weekend off.” No smile, no warmth, no hint of a suggestion of any kind. Just a statement of fact Jane seemed as cool and businesslike as a stranger. Hell, Dan grumbled to himself, our two vans are parked closer together than her and me.
“Come on in,” she said.
“What’s all the secrecy about?” Dan asked as he stepped into the cool shadows of the entryway.
Heading down the corridor toward the kitchen, Jane said over her shoulder, “I’ve introduced a bill that is clearly intended to help you, Dan. The news people are sniffing around, trying to find a personal link between us.”
“They don’t have to look all that far,” Dan said, following her.
“I’ve made no secret of our past relationship,” she said, flicking on the fluorescent lights set into the kitchen ceiling. “But I can’t afford to be seen with you now.”
“Unless Scanwell’s around,” Dan muttered.
She turned to face him. “That’s right: unless Morgan’s around.”
“Is he your chaperon or your bedmate?”
Jane’s eyes flared angrily, but she quickly regained control of herself. “He’s a candidate for president of the United States, and I’m not going to do anything that might damage his chances.”
Dan grunted. “Spoken like a lawyer.”
“That’s what I am, Dan. A lawyer. You knew that … in the old days.”
There were a million things he wanted to say. Instead, he went to the breakfast bar and perched on one of the stools.
“Are you going to cook lunch for us?”
“I can cook,” she said.
“I can help.”
She seemed to relax a fraction. “All right. Let’s see what’s in the fridge.”
As they pulled eggs and sausages out of the refrigerator, Dan said, “So why’d you ask me up here, Jane?”
“How’s the accident investigation going?” she asked.
“Slow. Too double-damned slow. I’m pushing the FAA honcho to allow us to fly the backup spaceplane—”
“I understand the FBI is involved also.”
“If they are, they’re invisible.”
“They’re good at that,” she said.
Dan waited until the eggs were sizzling in the skillet and two places had been set on the small table in the breakfast nook. Jane was setting down two glasses of orange juice. The aroma of brewing coffee wafted through the kitchen as the coffeemaker gurgled busily.
“So why’d you ask me here?” he asked again.
She took up the spatula and shoveled eggs and sausage onto a serving platter. Dan waited until she set the platter on the table, then he took her by the shoulders and turned her to face him.
Those cool and limpid green eyes.
He always recalled the line from the old song when he looked into her eyes:
A pool in which my heart lies.
“Jane,” he said, holding her, “for god’s sake—”
She brushed his hands away. “I asked you here to talk politics, Dan. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else?”
“Politics. That’s all.”
“All right,” he said, with a theatrical sigh. It was pretty much what he had expected of her. He pulled out a chair for her. “So talk.”
“You’re making a deal with Tricontinental Oil.”
“Against my gut instincts,” he said, sitting down opposite her.
“Don’t do it, Dan.”
“And what should I do? Make a deal with Yamagata?”
“Give me a chance to get this bill through the Senate. We want you to raise the money you need from American sources.”
“Tricontinental is American.”
“Garrison is an American—”
“A Texan,” Dan pointed out, managing to grin.
“—But Tricontinental is a multinational corporation. You
know that. It’s as much Arabian and Venezuelan and even Dutch as it is American.”
“What of it?”
“Garrison isn’t interested in energy independence. He’s going to fight Morgan every inch of the way.”
Dan nodded.
Ignoring the food cooling on the platter, Jane said earnestly, “Dan, the reason for my bill is to get American funding for you. It’s part of Morgan’s energy independence program.”
“I don’t give a hoot in Herzegovina about Scanwell’s energy independence program! I’m trying to save my company!”
“And we’re trying to help you!”
“But I need help
now
,” Dan insisted. “Not after the Senate finishes tinkering with your bill. Not after Morgan Scanwell becomes president, if he ever does. Now!”
“You could put your operation in low key for a year, couldn’t you? Lay off some of your staff? Mothball your equipment.”
“Jane, I’ve got a two-mile-wide satellite hanging up there in orbit, doing nothing but soaking up money and getting dinged by orbital debris. I can’t just let it hang there for a year.”
“Why not? It’ll still be there a year from now, won’t it?”
“Yeah, and Yamagata will own it. Or Tricontinental.”
“Not if you don’t make a deal with them.”
“And what am I supposed to do for a year? Sit around with my thumbs up my butt? Besides, the election’s more than a year off.”
“Fourteen months.”
“I can’t lay off my staff and expect them to come back fourteen months later. They’ll find other jobs.”
“Please, Dan. Be reasonable.”
“Reasonable? You want me to put my whole operation in suspended animation for more than a year in the hope that your dark-horse candidate will get himself elected?”
“Yes. That’s what’s best for all of us:”
Dan took a deep breath. Then he counted to ten. At last he
said quietly, “It might be best for Scanwell. And you. But not for me or the people who’re working for me.”
“Dan, the country needs Morgan Scanwell in the White House. You don’t know him, he’s a great man, a wonderful man.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, I like him, too. He’s a very likeable guy. What of it?”
“If you only knew the pressures he’s under, the battles he’s fighting. The oil interests are dead-set against him. Even in his own state he’s fighting an uphill battle.”
“And you’re sleeping with him, aren’t you?”
Her chin went up. “That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“The hell it doesn’t.”
“Please, Dan. Wait. Let us get Morgan into the White House and then you’ll be able to do everything you want to do. He’s a great man, he really is.”
“I don’t care about him! You’re the only one I’m interested in.”
She didn’t seem surprised. Or angered. Or even distressed. “No, Dan,” she said, very softly. “That was finished a long time ago.”
“I’ll drop the whole double-damned project. I’ll sell it off to the highest bidder. I don’t care about it anymore.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“Dan, that project is your life, your work.”
“And what’s it got me?” he answered bleakly. “Three people killed and the project’s going down the toilet. What good is any of it? I don’t want to bury any more of my friends. I want out. I want you. Nothing else matters. You forget Scanwell and—”
“Don’t!” Jane snapped. “We’re talking about the future of America, Dan. The future of the world! Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see? The future of the whole world is at stake!”
“Your world, Jane. Not mine. I don’t give a damn about any of it if you’re not part of the deal.”
She looked at him, her cool green eyes steady, clear, dry. “I’m working to save America from being bound hand and foot to the oil interests. I thought you were, too. It seems I was mistaken”
“No,” he said, low, defeated. “I’m working for that, too. It’s just … I love you, Jane. Nothing else makes any sense to me if we can’t be together.”
For long moments Jane said nothing. Then, with a slow shake of her head, she replied, “We can’t be together, Dan. That’s over and done with:”
Dan realized that she was very, very sad. And so was he.

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