by Allen Steele
“Since you put it so nicely…” Jill pushed back her chair to stand up. “How much do you want, and when do you want it?”
“Six thousand words yesterday, but I’ll settle for the same this time next week.” Marty turned toward his desk comp. “Go see Angie about a train ticket.”
* * *
South Station in Boston was a mess. Construction work on the terminal from the new transcontinental maglev had resulted in a chaos of sawhorses, plastic sheets, jackhammers, and concrete dust, and getting from the Amtrak platform to the sidewalk was like running a gauntlet. And it didn’t get any better once she reached the cab stand. It had been just three weeks since the temporary seawall outside Boston Harbor had burst, and the city was still cleaning up from the flood. The downtown streets smelled of seaweed and dead fish, and Jill had step over a gutter filled with standing water to reach the cab at the front of the line.
So Framingham was something of a relief. Her appointment turned out to be on the second floor of a wooded, ivy-grown industrial park that looked like it had been there for decades; she spotted the names of a couple of well-established high-tech firms on the sign out front. Inside was a reception area that could have belonged to a venerable old charity: wood-panel walls, an impressive painted mural of the Milky Way, faux-leather furniture that looked comfortable enough to sleep on.
Which she nearly did. The receptionist, an older lady named Barbara, took her name, tapped her ear jack and repeated it to someone at the other end, and then asked her to take a seat and offered a cup of coffee. Believing that the person she was supposed to see would soon come out to meet her, Jill politely declined the coffee and sat down on the couch. Barbara smiled and turned to her desk screen. After a few minutes, Jill pulled out her slate and checked her questions. A few minutes after that, she turned to her notes. Once that was done, she decided that it couldn’t hurt to look at her email. It was late afternoon and her train trip from Washington had been long, and before she knew it, her eyelids were beginning to feel heavy and her neck boneless and weak, and her head lolled forward and …
“Hello? Am I disturbing you?”
The light pressure of a hand on her knee and a quiet voice snapped her back to awareness. Startled, Jill sat up at once. “Oh, my god! I’m so sorry, I—”
The rest caught in her throat. Standing before her, bent over to shake her awake, was a young man about her own age, fair skinned with rust-colored hair and a closely trimmed beard, and lively blue eyes that played mischievously behind a pair of rimless glasses. There was an amused but not unkind smile as he studied her.
“Not at all,” he said, and his smile became apologetic as his hand fell from her leg. “I’m the one who should be sorry. I was on a conference call that took longer than I’d thought, and, well, at least you found a comfortable place to wait.”
Jill’s face burned. Dozing off just before an interview is not good form. At least there was no one else in the room to witness her embarrassment except Barbara, who’d diplomatically turned away. At a loss for what else to do, she stood up and stuck out her hand. “Well, then, hello,” she said. “I’m Jill Muller, staff writer for The Dirty Truth.”
“Benjamin Skinner, media representative for the Arkwright Foundation.” Rising from his crouch, Skinner took her hand. He was tall and well dressed, and Jill decided that he was just about the most attractive male she’d met in quite a while.
“Pleased to meet you,” Jill said, “but…” She hesitated. “I’m sorry, but I thought my interview was going to be with someone else named Skinner—Kate Skinner, the foundation president.”
“My mother, yes.” He nodded. “She extends her apologies for not being here herself. Something came up at the last minute that required her attention.”
Ordinarily, Jill might have been irritated to find herself being brushed off by the person she was scheduled to interview, but if it gave her a chance to spend a little time with this handsome specimen …
Knock it off. You’re here on business. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Skinner. Thanks for taking the time to see me.”
“Not at all. My pleasure.” He extended a hand toward the hallway leading to the back. “If you’ll follow me.” He started to turn away, and then he stopped to turn and add, “Oh, and by the way, it’s Dr. Skinner, but I’d be happy if you’d call me Ben.”
“Okay, Ben,” she said, “and you can call me Jill.”
Ben led her to a small, windowless office down the hall that didn’t look like it was used all that often. She suspected that it didn’t actually belong to him or anyone else but mainly functioned as a place for meetings such as this. He closed the door behind her and then sat down behind an immaculately clean desk, stretched out his legs and folded his hands together, and calmly let the interview begin.
Most of the answers he gave were just as routine as the questions themselves but nonetheless interesting. The Arkwright Foundation, he explained, was a private, nonprofit organization devoted to the research and development of the first interstellar vessel. It had been founded thirty years earlier by Ben’s great-grandfather, the science fiction author Nathan Arkwright—Jill wasn’t familiar with his name until Ben mentioned that he was the creator of the Galaxy Patrol—who’d left his literary estate as a bequest to provide seed money for the foundation. Since then, the Arkwright Foundation had grown exponentially, using that money to provide capital investments for companies perfecting the enabling technology needed for interstellar exploration and then using the profits from those investments for the foundation’s primary goals.
“To build a starship?” Jill asked, and Ben nodded. “In the near future … say, this century?” He nodded again. “Are you serious about this?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, not at all insulted. “We’re quite serious. In fact, we already have a design in mind for such a vessel, an unmanned ship called Galactique.”
Ben slid a hand across his desktop and tapped its inlaid keypad. The wall behind him dissolved into a starscape panorama. On display was, at first glance, what appeared to be an open, horizontal parachute; whiskery cables towed a tiny cylindrical object behind it. Ben tapped the keypad again, and the image became animated. The parachute began to slowly move forward, and as it did, the background stars faded to a light shade of blue and stretched out into long, thin rays.
“It’s going to be a beamship,” Ben said, turning in his chair to point to the image behind him. “That is, a spacecraft that doesn’t carry its own engines but instead is propelled by—”
“Lasers.”
He gave her a surprised look. “Microwaves, actually. A phased-array satellite positioned at Lagrange Point Four will transmit a 120 terawatt beam—”
“That powerful? Really?” Jill raised an eyebrow. “And where are you going to get that much power?”
“Solar powersat in the same Lagrange-point orbit. It’ll beam electrical energy to the beamer, which in turn will convert it to a steady-state microwave beam.” She started to ask the obvious next question, but he beat her to it. “When the powersat comes into eclipse, storage batteries aboard the beamer will continue supplying power. The beam will continue uninterrupted throughout the ship’s boost phase, however long that will be.”
“Okay.” Jill paused to write a few notes in her slate. Ben politely waited until she was ready; she could feel his eyes on her, but oddly enough it didn’t bother her as it might have if it had been anyone else. “So, um…”
“Yes?” Not impatiently, but in expectation, as a good listener would be.
She briefly considered continuing in a technical vein—she’d love to know why they were opting for an unmanned craft instead of one with a crew—but decided to close in on the real point of the interview. “This is going to cost a lot, isn’t it?” she asked, and he nodded. “Where does the foundation think it’s going to get the money for all this?”
“As I said, it’ll be from investments in the technology developed by the companies who’ll be doin
g the work for us. Powersats, of course, we already have, although we believe the market could stand an improved design. But the big one will be the beamer. Once it’s sent Galactique on its way—we’re still in the process of selecting a destination from a list of candidate stars—it can then be utilized for interplanetary missions within our own solar system. With something like this, we’ll be able to send spacecraft to the outer system—for instance, the asteroid belt or the Jovian moons, where the best commercial opportunity lies—in just weeks or even days. So the economic payback will be sufficient to maintain the foundation’s operations for decades to come.”
“But in the meantime, you still need to raise money, yes?”
Ben crossed his arms. “We’re doing well,” he replied.
Was it her imagination, or had he just become a little more guarded? She looked down and pretended to look at her notes, but she really wanted to make him sweat just a little. “So what’s your connection with Clark Wessen?”
He shifted a little in his seat. “How do you mean?”
“Well, a few nights ago during a debate in New Hampshire, the senator came out in support of a project very much like what you’re suggesting. As it turns out, the Arkwright Foundation has made considerable cash contributions to his campaign—”
“It wasn’t cash.”
“Excuse me?”
“It wasn’t a cash contribution. It was a check.” He grinned like a kid. “I watched my mother fill it out myself. Four hundred thousand dollars.”
“That’s a rather large amount, don’t you think?”
A casual shrug. “Not as much as others make.”
“Why did she—the foundation, I mean—make it?”
“We approve of the senator’s stance on various issues, and we think he’d make a great president.”
“Uh-huh. And the fact that he’s asked for an exemption to the Domestic Space Access Act on behalf of the Arkwright Foundation…?”
“What a remarkable coincidence. All the more reason for us to support his campaign.”
The smile was still there. She might have been annoyed if he wasn’t so charming. “So why would the foundation want an exemption? Why would you ask the senator to—”
“May I ask a question? A personal one?”
“Well, yes, I suppose. What do you—”
“What are you doing for dinner tonight?”
Jill was so startled the stylus fell from his fingers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Ben said, instantly apologetic. “I didn’t mean to … I mean, I didn’t—”
“No, no, that’s quite all right.” She nervously scooped up the pen and was glad that the movement let the hair fall down around her face to obscure the blush she felt coming on. “I just … I didn’t—”
“That was a bad question. Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.” He let out his breath, looked away.
Jill studied him. Without a doubt, there was something about Ben Skinner she found irresistible, a strange collision between intelligence and innocence. Had his mother anticipated a hard line of questioning from a Dirty Truth reporter and sent her attractive, awkward son to deflect her? No, no one was that clever. He was what he was, and that was more intriguing—and to be honest, sexier—than just about any other man she knew.
What the hell. Go for it, kid.
“I haven’t made any plans,” she replied. “Why? Do you have something in mind?”
* * *
They went out to dinner together. Later that evening, she accepted his request to come home with him. That wasn’t surprising, really; by the time dessert arrived, Jill Muller had decided that Benjamin Skinner was someone with whom she could easily become infatuated, and apparently the feeling was mutual. So of course she took him up on his proposition.
It was the second proposition he made later that surprised her.
Jill had expected the dinner conversation to be a continuation of the interview, but they spoke very little about the foundation or its goals. Instead, by candlelight in the Revolution-era tavern in Sturbridge where he’d taken her, they talked about themselves. She learned that Ben’s work at the Arkwright Foundation was only part-time and that he was actually a systems engineer at NASA. He didn’t expect to be there very much longer, though, seeing how the space agency was being downsized into nonexistence, an unexpected consequence of the Domestic Space Access Act. Once the Galactique Project was under way, he planned to tender his resignation and work for the foundation full-time. And no, he wasn’t married and didn’t even have a girlfriend, although he was hoping that might change any day now.
For her part, Jill told him about her frustrations at being a science writer at a muckraking news site that had little interest in science; she’d been hired only because the publisher thought they needed a science desk, but most of the time, all she did was cover press conferences. She admitted, perhaps a bit rashly, that she’d been put on this story because of its political angle, not because the Truth had any real interest in space exploration. Perhaps her candor had come from the nice bottle of merlot Ben ordered, but probably not. She liked him a lot and didn’t want to deceive him by pretending any longer that this story was about anything else than what it was. In any case, she was so busy wondering if he’d ask her to come home with him that she let slip the fact that she’d gladly find another job if only one was available.
However, she didn’t entirely forget why she’d come to Boston in the first place. And so, quite some time later, when both of them were naked and sweaty but not exhausted enough to fall asleep, Jill rolled over on his living room rug, pulled up the sheet he’d thrown over them, and propped her chin upon his chest.
“So let me ask you one thing,” she said.
“Yes, of course I can,” Ben said as he slid his hand across her buttocks.
She snickered. “Right answer, but the wrong question.”
“Ohhh, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“No, really”—she hesitated—“why did the Arkwright Foundation give all that money to Senator Wessen?”
Ben didn’t reply at once. Instead, he rolled over on his side and gazed past her at the warm embers of the fake fire not really burning in the hearth a few feet away. “Let me ask you something first,” he asked after a moment. “If I tell you, am I going to read it on your site?”
That was a good question. “Maybe … oh, god, I don’t know.” Jill sighed, let her head fall to the floor. “This isn’t ethically proper, is it? Sleep with a guy and then try to get him to say something that could get him in trouble?”
“I don’t know. Was that your intention?”
“No!” She quickly sat up, looked him straight in the eye. “That’s never what I wanted to do! But if I don’t come back with something—”
“Okay, sure. I understand.” Ben rolled over on his back. “How about this? I’ll tell you what you want to know on the condition that, when I’m done, you’ll let me ask you a question. After that, you can decide how you want to handle what I’ve told you. Okay?”
Jill gazed down at him. “You’d trust me that much?”
“Uh-huh.” He gently stroked her thigh. “I think you’ll do the right thing.”
“All right. Sure.”
Ben sat up, pulling his end of the sheet across his lap. “Yes, the four hundred Gs the foundation contributed to Wessen’s campaign was a payoff,” he said as he reached for the bottle of wine he’d taken from the kitchen. “It’s pretty obvious that we wanted him to submit a bill exempting the foundation from the law requiring all American-based space companies, including nonprofits like the Arkwright Foundation, to launch their spacecraft from U.S. launch sites. And you can probably figure out the reason we’d want that.”
“Uh-huh.” Jill watched as he poured dark-red petit noir into their glasses. “The Domestic Space Access Act had the best intentions, but it backfired. The coastal launch sites in Florida, Texas, and Maryland are going underwater, and that’s caused the commercial sites in New Mexico a
nd California to become overbooked.”
“And that means they can charge as much as they want for their services.” Ben passed a glass to her. “It’s going to take at least four launches for the foundation to get all the starship’s components into orbit—that’s not counting the powersat we’ll have to build at L-4—and we won’t have money to spare on rate hikes and surcharges. But we’ve already got a nice site picked out in the Caribbean, so if we can get the exemption—”
“Then you can launch from down there.” Jill placed the glass on the floor beside her without tasting it. “And that took bribing a senator, of course.”
“It’s not a bribe. Not technically, anyway.” Ben sipped his wine. “We’re just fortunate to find a presidential candidate who also happens to be a ranking member of the Senate science committee. He’s got sufficient clout to move the bill out of committee and to the Senate floor, and once it’s there, I have little doubt that it’ll move to the House. It’s a routine measure, really—unless, of course, the Truth calls attention to it.”
“Uh-huh.” Jill watched the holographic flames for a moment, thinking over what he’d just said. “Okay, I can see why you’d pick Wessen. A contribution to his presidential campaign wouldn’t look like an obvious bribe. But he called attention to it himself when he made that comment during the debate. If he hadn’t, no one would’ve known what you guys were doing. So was he just being dumb or—?”
“No.” Ben put down his glass and then arched his back to stretch. “He wasn’t being dumb. In fact, I’d say he was downright clever.”
“Really?” Jill squinted at him. “From what I’ve heard, he just about killed his chances of winning New Hampshire with that comment.”
“And if he does badly enough in New Hampshire, he’ll probably have to get out of the race.” Ben smiled. “Tell me something … do you think every politician who runs for president actually intends to win the election? Or even get nominated?”