Powersat (The Grand Tour) (13 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Powersat (The Grand Tour)
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T
he setting sun was low enough to send a shaft of light lanc-Ting through Dan’s office window. He saw that it was in Lynn Van Buren’s eyes, making the woman squint painfully, so he got up and lowered the blinds.
“Whew, thanks,” said the engineer.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
She grinned at him. “Didn’t have to, chief. You caught my body language.”
Lynn Van Buren was an unlikely engineer. Her education at Caltech had been in biophysics, with a minor in mathematics. She’d been an experimentalist, a lab rat who enjoyed getting her hands dirty and tinkering with balky equipment that frustrated less-patient researchers. She got into the engineering end of the business when she started working on biophysics experiments that were going to be performed in space, completely automated after riding into orbit aboard a rocket booster.
In time, she found herself more fascinated by the rockets than by what they carried. She was one of the earliest hires when Dan started Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Within the first year of the company’s operation she became Joe Tenny’s top assistant.
Lynn Van Buren sat before Dan’s desk now, a feisty grin on her face. She was in her early forties, short and chunky, dimpled chin, her mouse-brown hair cut short, her hazel eyes bright with good-humored intelligence. She was wearing a dark blue pantsuit with an incongruous string of pearls around her neck.
“So what’s the latest from Hangar B?” Dan asked.
“That’s why I wanted to see you, chief. Number two’s ready to fly.”
Despite everything, Dan broke into a smile. “She’s ready?”
“We did the final checkout this afternoon. I just had to rush over and tell you in person.”
Dan’s elation quickly faded. “The FAA won’t be finished with their investigation until hell freezes over.”
“They won’t let you fly her until they’re done?”
“Yep. Can’t say I blame them … .”
Van Buren’s expression turned crafty. “Even if the flight’s crewless?”
“Unmanned?” Dan asked.
“Crewless,” Van Buren replied firmly. “We can fly the bird remotely. We did it for the first one, remember?”
“Before Hannah took it up, right.”
“So the FAA won’t stop you from flying it crewless, will they?”
Dan mulled it over for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Passeau about it.”
 
 
N
ear midnight, the hangar was quiet and deserted except for Dan Randolph, sitting in his darkened office, the only light coming from his desktop computer’s screen. He stared at the invitation that had just arrived via e-mail:
The Honorable Morgan Scanwell, Governor of Texas, requests the pleasure of your company at a cocktail reception and dinner Saturday, August 28 …
The invitation was accompanied by a video mail message from Jane: “Dan, please come and join us. Morgan’s going to announce his candidacy the following Monday morning, and we want to bring together a group of supporters for a personal evening with him.”
And rain makes applesauce, Dan said to himself. Why should I go to Austin? To help Scanwell? He hasn’t done a thing to help me.
In all honesty, he thought, what can the governor of Texas do for me? Maybe if he ever gets to be president of the United States he can help, but until then it’s all talk, all smoke and mirrors. And Astro will be in receivership by the time the next president takes the oath of office.
But he stared at Jane’s face, frozen on his screen. And he knew he would go to Austin, or the South Pole, or Mars, to see her again. No matter what the pain.
Clicking on the REPLY icon, Dan put on a smile and said jovially, “Thanks for the invitation, Jane. I’ll be there, in dinner jacket and black tie and dancing shoes.”
Then he blanked the invitation. The screen showed what he had been poring over before Jane’s message arrived: a list of the names compiled from the personnel files that Tenny had checked into the day before he was killed.
The anger burned up inside him again. Killed. Joe didn’t die in an accident. He designed that double-damned hydrogen facility. He knew every weld and flange. It wasn’t an accident. Somebody blew it up. Somebody murdered Joe. And Hannah. Maybe I’m next.
Strangely, that thought calmed him. You want to come after me? he silently asked the unknown murderer. Okay, you try it. In the meantime, I’m coming after you. I’ll find you, you gutless sonofabitch. Me. Myself. I’m going to nail your balls to the wall.
He thought of Passeau and the swarm of government investigators working on the spaceplane crash. They’re still working under the assumption that there was something wrong with the plane. Passeau knows better, but he hasn’t convinced the rest of his crew that it was sabotage. Maybe he’s not trying to. Maybe he’s in on it.
No, Dan told himself, shaking his head. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the crash. He was in his office in New Orleans. At least, that’s what he said. Maybe I should check that out.
The list on his screen showed the names of the staff people whom Tenny had called over the weeks since the spaceplane’s crash. I have to retrace his steps, Dan thought
wearily. I’ll have to go through every double-damned one of those names. Without consciously thinking about it he commanded the computer to rearrange the list in chronological order. Last one first, he thought. I’ll talk to the people Joe called the day he was killed and work backwards from—
He stopped, staring at the screen. The last people Joe had checked on! he realized. Three names were listed for that date. Joe talked to these three people, and that night he was killed. One of them is it! Has to be!
Elyana Mechnikov.
Peter Larsen.
Oren Fitch.
One of them is it, Dan repeated to himself. Maybe more than one of them. Maybe all three!
 
 
D
espite his queasiness at being on the water, Roberto took the last ferry to Matagorda Island and drove the battered pickup truck he had borrowed to the motel a few miles up the road from the Astro Corporation’s fenced-in compound. No one paid much notice to a Hispanic man in work-stained coveralls checking in there, despite his size. The greatest difficulty Roberto had encountered the last time he’d come on the island was getting through the Astro main gate, but even with the spaceplane crash less than a month behind them, the guards at the gate hardly glanced at his phony ID. They saw the security guard uniform he wore and assumed that he was what he claimed to be, a new hire reporting for the night shift
For this job he didn’t even have to get inside the Astro facility. The prey would come to the hunter.
Roberto parked the pickup in front of the dimly lit front door of his motel room, went inside, and dropped his overnight bag on the sagging bed. Then he walked back to the bar that adjoined the motel’s reception desk. He was a big man, with a weight lifter’s shoulders and thickly muscled
arms. He kept his face clean-shaven and the sleeves of his gray coveralls buttoned at the cuffs so that the tattoos he had acquired during his street-gang youth in Los Angeles would not show.
Downhearted country music twanged out of the speakers set into the ceiling above the bar. The barmaid was a tired-looking bleached blonde, trying to look sexy in a push-up bra. “Yew want dinner, the kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she said over the nasal whine of a cowboy singer.
“No thanks,” said Roberto. “Jus’ a beer. Dos Equis dark.”
“We got Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Mick Light, and Corona.”
Roberto sighed. “Mick.”
“Light?”
“No, heavy.”
She poured the beer and placed the mug on the bar in front of him on a round paper coaster. “Kitchen closes in ten minutes,” she reminded him.
“You tole me that.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What time do you get off?”
She gave him a wordless sneer and walked down the bar to start talking with a trio of Anglos. Roberto stared down into his beer, hiding his rage. Sure, spit on the greaser, he seethed inwardly. What would she think if I went over there and kicked the cojones off those three assholes?
He took a long pull of the beer. Stay cool, man. You don’t want nobody to notice you. You get paid to be invisible. Wait. You got a job to do.
The job walked into the bar, looking uncertain, worried.
Peter Larsen was a short, slight, middle-aged man with thinning hair, bulging thyroid eyes, and the beginnings of a potbelly. Despite the jeans and biker-style denim jacket he wore, he looked every inch the techie geek, down to the square MIT ring on his left hand like a wedding band. Roberto saw him in the mirror behind the bar and thought that Larsen looked more like a frightened little bird than anything
else. I could snap him like a wishbone, he told himself.
Larsen didn’t come up to the bar. He just looked around until he recognized Roberto sitting alone, separated by several stools from the guys the barmaid was talking to. Then he walked out, quickly.
Roberto finished his beer, left a five on the bar, and walked out into the night. It was still hot and muggy, the sky overcast. Crickets were chirping and Roberto saw swarms of insects flitting around the lamps that stood on high poles at the corners of the parking lot.
One of the cars flicked its lights. A boxy gray Volvo. Roberto went to it and slid into the passenger’s seat. He felt cramped, confined.
“We’ve gotta talk,” Larsen said, his voice whining, high-pitched.
“Tha’s why I came, man. I know you’re worried.”
“I didn’t expect you to kill Tenny!”
Feigning surprise in the darkness of the car, Roberto said, “Me? Wrong, man. It was an accident, pure and simple.”
“Pretty lucky accident, for you.”
Roberto shrugged.
“I mean, Joe starts asking me questions, so I call you. That night Joe gets killed in an accident.”
“Shit happens, man.”
“I want out of this,” Larsen said, urgency in his voice. “I want to get as far away from all this as I can.”
“Can’t say I blame you.”
“I’ll need money. Cash.”
Roberto pulled in a deep breath, then let it out in a long sigh.
“Well, what about it? If you don’t—”
“Hey, man, simmer down. You’ll get cash. You wan’ it, I got it for you. Le’s drive over to your place. More private than a fuckin’ parkin’ lot.”
Larsen. had an apartment in the company-built low-rent housing six miles down the road from the motel, on the other side of the Astro complex. The next morning his landlady found him dead, hanging from the broken ceiling fan in his living room. The police suspected suicide, especially after
playing his phone messages and hearing a threatening voice demanding that Larsen pay his gambling debts or else. The voice, of course, belonged to Roberto, who slept late in his room that morning, quite tired after walking the six miles from Larsen’s apartment complex back to the Astro Motel.
I
t was drizzling again, after a cheerfully bright sunny morning. Rick Chatham looked out the rain-spattered windows and wished he were back in Arizona, where rain was as rare as sunshine here in Seattle. The house he was staying in looked out over the working harbor, where freighters from China and Japan unloaded their cargoes of toys, appliances, automobiles, and god knew what else. Globalization. Chatham hated the idea. Americans are supporting sweatshops and slave labor camps just so they can pay a few dollars less for their luxuries.
He had been christened Ulrich, which in German means “wolf rule.” The name pleased him, although he never told anyone about it. There was a lot about himself that he never told anyone. Rick Chatham was a man of secrets.
He hardly looked the part. He was a bland-seeming man in his late thirties, so average in stature that he could fade into a crowd without anyone noticing him. He wore his long, sandy hair in a ponytail and kept a neat little beard ringing his unexceptional face. He had a tiny diamond stud in his left earlobe but no other jewelry. Chatham’s great talent was his mind, his intelligence; he prided himself on seeing farther than others, and on understanding how to rally people to his point of view.
When the Astro Corporation spaceplane had crashed, Chatham had barely paid attention to the news coverage.
Until he discovered the enormous ecological havoc that a solar power satellite could wreak. He discovered it quite by accident: one of the TV news broadcasts covering the spaceplane accident and its aftermath gave a brief, animated explanation of how a powersat would work. That was enough to set Chatham firmly against the very idea of allowing a solar power satellite to go into operation.
“It beams out microwaves,” he was telling the small group of people who had assembled to listen to him. “Microwaves, for chrissakes! Like you use to cook! They could cook
you!”
There were eight other people in the living room, sitting on the overstuffed sofa, the New England rocker, or on pillows strewn across the polished oak floor. This was the nextto-last stop on Chatham’s itinerary. One more little gathering like this in L.A., and then back home to Tucson.
“Microwaves?” asked one of the women.
“Microwaves, just like you use in your kitchen,” Chatham replied.
“The government wouldn’t let them do that,” she said. The others around her snickered.
Chatham explained patiently. “They tell you that a power satellite is clean and environmentally friendly. Doesn’t burn any fuel. Uses solar power. Yeah, right But how do they get the energy from the satellite up there in space down to us on the ground? They beam it down with
microwaves.
Five or ten billion watts’ worth of microwaves!”
“They can’t do that!”
“They will unless we stop them.”
“Now wait a minute,” said the lean graying man who was Chatham’s host. He and his wife wore matching bulky gray cable-knit turtleneck sweaters. “They’re going to send the beam down to an isolated area, aren’t they? White Sands, from what I remember.”
“Yeah, that’s what they claim they’re going to do,” Chatham admitted.
“And the beam will be spread out over a dozen square
miles or something like it, so it won’t be strong enough to hurt anything.”
“If you believe what they say,” Chatham replied. “They claim that birds will be able to fly through the beam without being hurt.”
“So what’s the problem?” His host smiled to let Chatham know that he was merely playing devil’s advocate.
Chatham smiled back tightly. “The problem, sir, is that we have no idea of what the long-term effects will be. Remember, ecology is the science of understanding consequences—”
“Frank Herbert wrote that,” one of the others murmured, loud enough for everyone to hear. Admiration shone on her face.
“And he was right,” Chatham snapped. “Suppose a bird circles around in the beam. How many circles can it make before it’s cooked? Or blinded?”
“Blinded?”
Warming to his subject, Chatham said, “Back in the nineteen fifties the U.S. Defense Department put up a string of big-ass radars, up above the Arctic Circle, in Canada and Alaska. They were supposed to provide early warning of an attack from the Soviet Union.”
“What’s that got to do with power satellites?”
“Let me tell you,” said Chatham. “Eskimos found that the area around those huge radar antennas was warmer than the rest of the region, so they started setting up their camps near the radars. And pretty soon they started going blind.”
“Blind?” asked a woman.
“Blind. Those radars were pumping out microwaves. That’s why it was warm near them. The microwaves cooked the Eskimos’ eyeballs. Hard-boiled them.”
“Oh my god!”
Almost triumphantly, Chatham added, “And the microwaves those radars put out are puny compared to what the powersat will be beaming to the ground.”
One of the younger men, wearing a scruffy-looking UCLA sweatshirt, objected: “But I’ve seen pictures of cows
grazing in a field where the power satellite’s receiving antennas are set up.”
“Drawings, yeah,” Chatham said. “If they try that in reality they’ll be cooking their steaks on the hoof.”
That brought a few distressed laughs.
Chatham went on, “What’s more, nobody’s done any studies of what the long-term effects on the atmosphere will be if we start beaming gigawatts of microwaves all over the place. Nobody.”
“You mean it might affect the weather?”
“Does a bear sleep in the woods?” Chatham replied, grinning.
“The point is, I think,” said the group’s host, “that we’ve got to do whatever we can to stop this threat to our environment.”
“No,” Chatham snapped. “We’ve got to do
whatever
it
takes
to stop the power satellite.”

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