The zenith angle (20 page)

GUNS GUNS.

“Whoa,” said Van, hitting the brake.

Van arrived late at his destination, pitched out at the end of a two-lane road. The drunken Hickok wheeled his Humvee and roared back down the mountainside. He’d said something about a girl waiting in Fort Collins, but Van was not convinced of it. With that briefcase finally off his wrist, Hickok had the look of a man aiming for a major-league bender.

Van was left standing alone in a cold Colorado night, under two pools of amber light that fell from curving, snake-shaped poles. Observatories hated light pollution. So these Martian-looking light poles carried weird LED panels that shed a very thin gleam. Reading by their light was like wading underwater in a hookah.

Van set down his brand-new survivalist backpack and stared up at a beautifully painted sign.ALFRED

A. GRIFFITH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL FACILITY, it announced. This big sign—it was a dignified metal billboard, really—carried eye-squinting little logos for a whole swarm of federal sponsors and private contractors.NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION. AURA. NOAO. NASA. NORTHRUP GRUMMAN OPTICAL SYSTEMS DIVISION. CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY /

AGENCE SPATIALLE CANADIENNE. MAX PLANCK INSTITUT FUR

EXTRATERRESTRISCHE PHYSIK. Warning: This Is a U.S. Interior Department Endangered Species Refugium.

To Van’s right, to his left, stretched a galvanized twelve-foot steel elk fence. It was topped with nasty whorls of razor wire.

Too bad nobody had included a doorbell here.

There was no way for Van to enter Dottie’s facility. It was very clear that nobody ever showed up here who wasn’t fully expected. The fences were too tall and sharp to climb. The gates looked built to resist a headlong charge by angry buffalo. There was no intercom and no guard on duty. Van had no cell phone.

The winter night was getting colder.

Van opened his pack and pulled out his laptop. Another tough break: there was no wireless signal for his laptop’s Wi-Fi card, either.

As Van was accustoming himself to complete defeat, the overhead light poles winked out. How very bright a million stars were in the mountains, suddenly.

Van opened his laptop. The federal dot-pdf on his screen was horribly titled “Draft Reporting Instructions for the Government Information Security Reform Act and Updated Guidance on Security Plans of Action and Milestones.” Van did not have to read any more of this awful document, though. Instead, his computer was going to give him enough light and heat to survive the night. Van dug in his pack and wrapped himself in a four-dollar NASA surplus astronaut blanket. He chewed a brick of indestructible NASA-surplus spaghetti. He warmed his hands on the hot battery of his laptop. He’d been in a paranoid mood, back at the survival store.

Hooded in his windproof blanket like a silver garbage bag, Van sat on his bulletproof backpack and confronted the glow on his screen. What did it matter if he was alone, cold, lonely, and humiliated on the end of the road? Van had a lot of important office work on his lap. Many unread reports, many policy statements, and important federal white papers. Requests for commentary. Invitations to important seminars. He could achieve a lot while freezing in a wilderness.

The air was thin up here, and it got colder yet. Van rearranged and color-coded his many, many files and folders. As he typed, his fingers turned blue.

After an hour and forty-two minutes, the black gates spontaneously opened. Van was forced to scramble out of the way or be crushed. A slab-sided white panel truck barreled through. Before the gates could swing shut, Van grabbed up his pack and hustled inside. Van trudged uphill in cold and darkness, under starlight, with his eyes gone big as an owl’s. It was a very steep climb. For all his hard work in the gym, the hike had Van huffing, wheezing, and rubbing his thighs. When he plodded his way over a crest, Van could see, lit up like toy ballerinas, a distant nest of gently whirring rotors. Wind power, renewable energy. Out here, those pretty dancing windmills wouldn’t smudge their perfect skies with smoke.

A deer stared at Van fearlessly and went back to raiding the bushes. The road lifted suddenly. Van found himself walking on an echoing metal bridge. More amber lights loomed ahead. Here was a parking lot, all of it up on pillars. It was filled with silent electric vans and logo-covered golf carts. Van had found Dottie’s research complex. The pictures she had sent him didn’t do the place justice. It was a whole lot odder than it looked in the brochures. The place was like a Silicon Valley health spa built for mountain hobbits.

The complex rose right up a mountain slope, all twinklingly underlit with tiny amber lights. The offices were made of cedar, granite, glass, and aluminum. Lots of perforated grating, pillared balconies, and shiny steel handrails. All these buildings were poised on the mountainside on daintily curved metal feet. Endangered species could frolic right under their floors. Roof gutters caught all the snow and rain and fed it into big cisterns.

It looked amazingly pretty, like something out of a kid’s encyclopedia. For some touchy enviro-fanatical reason, nobody had been allowed to dig anywhere, to break the tender mountain soil. So all the Facility’s water, sewer, and electrical were neatly suspended on pylons, like an Alaska pipeline for toilets. The place was overrun with fat, silver-wrapped pipes. It looked like it had been designed by Super Mario. Van huffed to catch his breath, then clomped straight up a set of toothy aluminum stairs. He opened a double-paned glass door. He walked down a hall floor lined with dark cork. He knocked at Room A37.

The door was opened by an old woman wearing rimless bifocals, a colored head scarf, and a lumpy, hand-knitted sweater.

“Sorry,” Van muttered, “wrong room.”

“You must be the husband,” said the gypsy woman.

“Uhm, yeah.”

“You’re late. Dottie had to go. Why didn’t you call?”

Van made a beeline for Dottie’s bedside phone. “I’ll call her right now.”

“Don’t do that. She’s on television.”

“At night?” Van said.

“Of course at night! It’s a telescope!”

The talking woke Ted. Ted was sleeping in a plastic crib at the foot of Dottie’s bed. Ted hustled sideways on his Disney-cartoon sheets and peered through his bars. He saw Van and shrieked. Van advanced on his son and picked him up.

Ted had become huge. Ted’s noggin was thick with brand-new blond hair. Ted seemed to have added a full fifty percent to his body mass. When Ted struggled, he really meant it now. In Van’s long absence, Ted’s marshmallow baby body had turned into muscle. The boy looked ready to jump into his own clothes, grab up his cup and rattle, and get himself a day job.

“It’s me, your dada,” Van bargained.

“NOOOOOO!” Ted thrashed his thick legs as if jumping hurdles. He was wearing a long-sleeved red flannel onesie suitable for chilly nights. Ted looked like an infant lumberjack. “NOOoooooOOOOO, no, Mama!” His diapers stank.

“I’ll tell Dottie you are finally here,” said the unknown baby-sitter. She vanished out the door. Van set Ted down on the chilly floor as he hunted down a pack of diapers. Van hadn’t changed a diaper in ages, but it wasn’t a skill one forgot. Ted resented this brutal procedure. He gave Van a look of bitter, jaded suspicion.

“It’s all right, Ted,” Van lied. He buttoned Ted back up and set him on his pudgy feet. With a determined scowl, Ted gripped the edge of his mother’s bed and sidled away from Van. For the first time in his life, Van had some insight into what had gone wrong with his own father. It was guilt. That was why the guy had finally crumbled. Because of burning guilt, dirty guilt, painful, humiliating, fully deserved guilt. There were bad acts in a man’s life that could never, ever be repaired. Van sat on Dottie’s bed, which was narrow and hard. Dottie’s high-tech eco-room was creeping him out. This was like the home of some alternate Dottie from a bad
Star Trek
episode. Dottie’s tight, virginal sheets had tiny blue flowers. Dottie had a small, oval-shaped, Energy Star fridge. She had a hot plate and a pretty teapot on top of her bamboo clothes drawer.

Dottie’s computer desk was ergonomic and very disturbing. It had many adjustable plastic cranks and was made of swoopy red plastic lozenges. The desk had one special kidney-shaped shelf way up on a tall metal arm. The shelf was poised at a weird, unlikely, Dr. Seuss angle. The tall shelf held one empty, dusty little flower vase.

This was a room that was silently screaming for a man’s disturbing touch. This room really needed its hair mussed. It was all Van could do not to start hitting things with a bat.

“Ted, son, how do you live here?”

Ted replied with bitter whimpering.

Van persisted. “Hey, Edward.”

Ted turned his small face toward Van, but he was openly skeptical.

Van zipped open his backpack. “You wanna see something really cool? I’m gonna show you my ray gun!”

Feet skidded down the hall. Dottie had a new haircut and had put on five or ten pounds. Van stood up. Dottie zipped across the room and gave him a kiss. It was a nice, solid “I am your wife, here are my lips”

kind of kiss.

“A long trip, honey bear?”

The feel of her soft arms around his neck was saving Van’s life. Loneliness drained out of him like poison. “This place is the middle of nowhere!”

Dottie nodded, blue eyes bright. “It is! It is. But no one ever leaves us.” She shrugged out of her padded jacket.

“Why not?”

“Because the catering is too good! There’s Indian food, Chinese food, they had a barbecue chef in today . . . We ate wild elk!”

The sight of Dottie meant so much to him that he felt faint. “You look great, honey.”

“This is my TV outfit.” Dottie went to the cubbyhole bathroom and flicked on its fluorescent, eco-correct lightbulb. “There was a crew in tonight from Australian television. I seem to be the big PR

person around here now . . . It turned out that I’m pretty good at that. This is not the biggest adaptive telescope in the world, but you know, it really looks great on TV.”

“No kidding.”

“This is the only telescope facility ever designed by a major modern architect. Did you see all that fiber-optic out there? We got really big pipes here!”

Van sighed. It was hard for him to rally any enthusiasm for another Internet money hole. After the stock crash, Mondiale was doing a scary reassessment of the company’s physical assets. Internet routers were in such oversupply that they were worth only twenty-five cents on the dollar. No wonder Tony had stuck some surplus Net hardware up here in the high backwoods. All out of sight, out of mind. Dottie found a heavy quilt. “It gets so cold up here,” she said. “They don’t like us running the electric heaters . . .” She lifted Ted and put him back into his crib. Ted looked relieved and interested. Ted hadn’t seen his parents together in several baby eons, but his mom was happy, and the routine was jogging his memory.

For the first time, Ted offered Van a smile. Van put a hand on his son’s face and looked deep into his eyes. It was like gazing through a powerful mirror straight into the youth of the universe.

“Derek, look, this thermostat has a power meter built right into it, isn’t this great? They’re in all the rooms.”

“Why won’t they let you heat the place? We’re way up in the hills!”

“Astronomers get used to that.” Dottie tucked Ted into a spotless blanket. “It’s a very nice place up here, honey. We get health care. We get paid vacations . . . There’s horseback riding. We got workout rooms and massage . . . We get big-screen movies. We get
Bollywood
movies.”

“And you watch that stuff on purpose?”

“Bollywood movies are great.
Fiza,
that’s such a wonderful film. It’s all about a Moslem girl from Bombay whose brother is a mujahideen terrorist.” Dottie’s voice fell. “I cried and cried.”

Dottie had been crying and crying, thought Van with a pang. She was being so bright and sweet to him. Two minutes together, and it was as if they had never parted at all. But he knew she had suffered. He had suffered. He had suffered so much he had no idea what to do with his feelings. He hauled Ted back out of his crib and set him on his knee. He couldn’t keep his hands off the kid. Ted was such a lively presence that holding him was like licking a fresh battery. “So, who was that babysitter who was here?”

“That’s Dr. Ludewig. She used to run a radio telescope in Denmark. We get a lot of visiting scholars from overseas here. This place, it’s a lot like Cerre Tololo in Chile. For colleagues in Europe and Asia, we’re such a big deal.” Dottie turned to him. “I’m gonna get some great publications out of all this.”

“I thought you were still two years away from your ‘first light.’ ”

“Sure, we are, but running the telescope is just part of our action.” Dottie was always completely serious whenever she discussed her career. “It’s all about leveraging digital instruments with the Net. We’re building the world’s biggest star archives here. Lots bigger than MAST or HEASARC. They’re already using us for their backups and mirror-sites, because our bandwidth is so hot. We’re the only physical backbone that NSFnet has crossing the Continental Divide. We’ve got tremendous pipes, stacks of equipment, machines we haven’t even unwrapped yet. Racks and racks of numerical simulators. It was

‘pre-owned’ by the feds, but we’re astronomers, so that doesn’t matter to us. We’re like kids in a candy store.”

This was a billionaire federal contractor at work, thought Van, with a potent mix of private and public money. It had to get like this, when fewer and fewer ultra-rich people controlled bigger and bigger chunks of America’s economy. Peel a few labels off, and the government’s suppliers and buyers turn out to be the very same guy.

Van understood that well now, because he watched the federal government’s “Industrial Base Management” happening every day. Van himself was both Mondiale R&D and CCIAB Tech Support. He was knee-deep in the system, too.

Jeb called it “the Smoking Room.” Step one: get those heavy operators into the smoke-filled room. Step two: close all the doors and windows. Step three: pick only the contractors who are willing to play the game. When you leave government, then they’ll hire you. You’ll be them, and they’ll be you. The Smoking Room had a built-in revolving door.