by Bova, Ben
“She was a very wonderful woman,” Eamons went on. “More wonderful than you know.”
Dan’s head sank halfway down to his chest. “Jesus,” he mumbled. “Sweet Jesus Christ Almighty.”
“We’re getting a good deal of information out of this Williamson guy,” Chavez said, trying to sound brighter. “He’s being very cooperative.”
So what? Dan wanted to say. Instead, he heard himself ask, “And the French? How do they feel about us bombing one of their villas?”
Chavez put on an innocent expression. “Who bombed one of their villas? The terrorists blew each other up.”
“The French are going along with that?”
“We’ve allowed them to participate in Williamson’s interrogation. I’m sure we’ll make other concessions to them, as well.”
Dan shook his head wearily. “I suppose I could offer them electricity at a cut rate.”
“The powersat is back in operation?”
“Since yesterday. Delivering ten gigawatts to White Sands, day and night. I’m getting bids for the electricity from six different power utilities in the States, and another one in Canada.”
They chatted for a few minutes more, never mentioning April again. Then Chavez got to his feet and Eamons followed suit.
“We’ve got to get back to Houston,” Chavez said.
“I can fly you.”
The FBI agent shook his head. “We’ll drive. Officially, we haven’t been here. This is all on our own time.”
“I’m really sorry about April,” Eamons said, her voice trembling.
“Yeah,” said Dan, his own voice faltering. “Me, too.”
And then there was nothing left to say. Dan shook hands with the two agents and went out to the catwalk with them. He watched them walk slowly down the metal stairs, their footsteps echoing in the empty hangar, and walk out to where Chavez’s car sat parked in the nearly empty lot.
Chavez drove away, and the hangar grew very quiet. Won’t be for long, Dan said to himself. We’ll start building two new spaceplanes in a few weeks. And laying out plans for the next power satellite.
He walked back into his office and booted up his computer to look at his appointments for the coming week.
“Testimony to Senate science subcommittee,” he read from the screen. I wonder if Jane will be there? he asked himself.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“So you’re telling this subcommittee that your power satellite is not dangerous?” Senator Quill asked sharply.
Seated at the green baize-covered witness table, Dan said crisply, “That’s right, Senator. A power satellite is no more dangerous than any other electrical power station, if it’s operated properly.”
“But terrorists turned it into a death ray!” snapped an angry-faced white-haired senator several seats down from Quill. “Nearly a thousand people were killed!”
Dan had expected that. “Senator,” he replied patiently, “how do you prevent terrorists from blowing up a nuclear power station?”
The senator’s white brows knit. “Why, you have guards and such.”
“Right,” said Dan. “You protect the facility. And that’s what we’re going to have to do with power satellites. Protect them. Guard them. They are very valuable assets, and just because they’re in space instead of on the ground doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be protected—or can’t be.”
“Protected how?” Quill asked, anxious to retake control of the hearing.
Dan started his prepared little lecture on building failsafes into the satellite controls and having crews standing by with spaceplanes ready to fly out to a powersat in case of any emergency. As he spoke, though, he wondered where Jane was and why she hadn’t attended this hearing.
By day’s end Dan felt bone tired and ready to fly back to Texas. The Senate subcommittee hearing had gone favorably, he thought. Quill had even broached the idea of proposing to the Department of Defense that the air force take on the task of protecting American assets in orbit.
Dan ate dinner with his new Washington-based public relations staff, who congratulated him on his testimony before the subcommittee. Then he rode out to Reagan National Airport in a hired limousine. The Astro corporate jet was parked outside the general aviation terminal. As he ducked out of the limo Dan saw that a dank, chilly fog was rolling in from the Potomac. He heard the thundering roar of a commercial jetliner taking off. The fog won’t keep us grounded, he thought, with relief. I’ll be home by midnight.
And then his heart flipped as he saw Jane walking toward him from the terminal building. She was wearing a fitted suit—modest, yet it showed her figure to good advantage. Light color; it was hard to make out the shade in the dim, foggy evening light.
“You’re leaving without saying good-bye?” she asked, trying to smile.
“I was hoping we could get together while I was in Washington,” he said, “but then I figured it wasn’t going to work.”
“You’re going back to Texas.”
“And you’re going to the White House.”
She hesitated a heartbeat, then stepped closer to him, so close he could feel the warmth of her, smell the delicate scent of her perfume.
“Dan,” she breathed, “maybe I should go to Texas with you.”
His jaw dropped open.
“I could give it up, the whole thing, all of it,” Jane said.
“Leave Scanwell? Leave Washington?”
She didn’t reply. He saw tears welling in her eyes.
“You can’t do that, Jane,” he heard himself say. “You’d hate yourself in the morning.”
“Be serious—”
“I am. You’d hate me, sooner or later. If Scanwell doesn’t win the election, you’d be miserable.”
“But what about us?”
Now he fell silent for a long, agonizing moment. At last, “It just won’t work, Jane. There’s too much between us.”
“Your satellite.”
“Your career. Scanwell. The White House.”
“My God, Dan … I wish it wasn’t like this.”
“But it is.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder and he slipped his arms around her waist. Dan’s mind was racing, trying to find a way, thinking of what would happen if …
He lifted her chin and looked into her misty green eyes. “I love you, Jane. I always will.”
“And I love you, Dan.”
She kissed him lightly on the lips. He let his arms slide away from their embrace. They stood face to face, almost touching, silent and miserable.
“Well,” he said, “good luck. After you get elected, invite me to the White House.”
“The Lincoln Bedroom,” she said, trying to smile.
Dan realized there were no more words in him. He walked past her to the plane that was waiting for him. It was the most difficult thing he had ever done.
MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS
Several weeks later, Dan sat alone at his desk in the evening shadows and watched Morgan Scanwell make his acceptance speech at the convention.
“ … and more than mere energy independence, the United States will become the supplier of energy to the world, energy to raise the living standards of the poor: clean, renewable energy to build new industries, new cities …”
His phone called out, “Mr. Yamagata on line one, boss.”
Dan frowned at the synthesized voice’s interruption, but he realized that it must be lunchtime in Tokyo. Despite himself, he grinned at the thought of Saito delaying a meal just to talk to him. So he muted the TV and shrank the scene from the convention to a small box at the bottom corner of the screen.
Saito Yamagata’s round face beamed a big smile at him. “Congratulations, Daniel, my friend. You have a president that will be very helpful to you.”
“He’s not elected yet,” Dan said.
“He will be. My experts assure me that Scanwell will beat the incumbent by a comfortable margin.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“We should discuss a strategic partnership between my corporation and yours,” Yamagata said.
Dan felt his brows hike. “Scanwell’s preaching energy independence, Sai. He wants us to stand by ourselves.”
Yamagata’s smile didn’t falter one millimeter. “What he says now to get elected and what he finds as realities once he’s in the White House are two very different things.”
“Meaning?”
“The Japanese ambassador and his technical aides are already discussing cooperation between Japan and the United States in building power satellites. Surely the global energy market is big enough for us both.”
Dan nodded, thinking, Sai’s no fool. “I get it,” he said to Yamagata. “If Scanwell partners the U.S. with Japan it’ll cut the legs out from under OPEC and the guys who fund terrorists.”
Yamagata made a polite shrug. “It might help Scanwell to overcome the pressures from Garrison and the oil industry, as well.”
“You know that double-damned Garrison cut off Tricontinental’s loans to me as soon as we got the powersat working again.”
“I’m not surprised. Garrison has no interest in helping any form of energy that competes with oil.”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t you worry about him, Daniel. I predict a very bright future for us.”
“Us?”
“Astro and Yamagata. An alliance beneficial to both corporations and to both nations.”
Dan saw in the corner of the screen that Scanwell had finished his acceptance speech. Jane came up beside him and he put an arm around her. Husband and wife.
That’s it, he thought. The whole world knows about them now. It’s over. You’ll never have her. You had your chance and you threw it away. Beau Geste, that’s who the hell I am. A double-damned idiot.
Yamagata was saying, “You’re going to become a very wealthy man, Daniel. An extremely wealthy man.”
“Yeah,” said Dan sourly. “I guess so.”
And he thought about Hannah, Joe Tenny, Pete Larsen, April. Is it worth the cost? Nearly a thousand killed by the terrorists. Is anything worth all those lives?
His eyes strayed from the images on the screen to the models on his desk: the powersat and the spaceplane. We’re going to change the world, Dan told himself. We’ve paid the price, and now we’re going to start bringing the world energy from space.
I’ll get filthy rich, just like Garrison. And Jane’s going to be president of the United States one day. Big fucking deal.
He said good-bye to the still-smiling Yamagata and shut down his screen. Sliding out from behind his heavy dark desk, Dan went out to the catwalk, still half-expecting to see April as he passed her desk. He climbed the metal stairs and stepped out onto the hangar’s roof. The sun had set more than an hour ago, but the sky was still aflame with deep reds and violets. A fresh breeze was blowing in from the gulf, carrying the rich scent of pines and the salty tang of the sea.
Turning toward the southwestern horizon, Dan saw a single bright star gleaming against the growing darkness. The power satellite. The future. With a sardonic smile twisting his lips he stared at it and promised himself he’d build a whole constellation of them.
He heard Yamagata’s voice in his head: You’re going to become a very wealthy man, Daniel. An extremely wealthy man.
Maybe so, he thought. But the real job is to make the world wealthier. That’s what’s important.
His bitterness ebbed a little. Not a bad goal for a man to have, he told himself. Saving the world.
TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA
As on a Darkling Plain
The Astral Mirror
Battle Station
The Best of the Nebulas (editor)
Challenges
Colony
Cyberbooks
Empire Builders
Escape Plus
Gremlins Go Home (with Gordon R. Dickson)
Jupiter
The Kinsman Saga
The Multiple Man
Mercury
Orion
Orion Among the Stars
Orion and the Conqueror
Orion in the Dying Time
Out of the Sun
Peacekeepers
The Precipice
Privateers
Prometheans
The Rock Rats
Saturn
The Silent War
Star Peace: Assured Survival
The Starcrossed
Tales of the Grand Tour
Test of Fire
To Fear the Light (with A. J. Austin)
To Save the Sun (with A. J. Austin)
The Trikon Deception (with Bill Pogue)
Triumph
Vengeance of Orion
Venus
Voyagers
Voyagers II: The Alien Within
Voyagers III: Star Brothers
The Winds of Altair
OUR FUTURE, ON A RAZOR’S EDGE
Two hundred thousand feet up, things go horribly wrong. The experimental low-orbit spaceplane Astro falls to Earth over a trail hundreds of miles long. In the wake of this disaster is the beginning of the most important mission in the history of space.
Entrepreneur Dan Randolph is determined to provide energy to a desperate world. He dreams of an array of geosynchronous powersats, satellites which gather solar energy and beam it to generators on Earth, breaking the power of the oil cartels forever. But the wreck of his experimental spaceplane has left his company on the edge of bankruptcy.
Worse, Dan discovers that the plane worked perfectly right up until the moment that saboteurs knocked it out of the sky. And whoever brought it down is willing and able to kill again to keep Astro grounded … .
“Tom Clancy–like danger and intrigue!”—Amazing
“A classic guy’s tale … Bova is a spare writer who nevertheless crafts the perfect voice for each of his characters.”
—San Antonio Express-News
From Ben Bova
The Green Trap
(0-765-30924-6)
Available Now in Hardcover!
Read on For a Preview
TUCSON: THE MIRROR LAB
Paul Cochrane dreaded leaving the Mirror Lab. Set beneath the massive slanting concrete of the University of Arizona’s football stadium, the lab was only a three-minute walk from Cochrane’s office, but it was three minutes in the blazing wrath of Tucson’s afternoon sun. It was only the first week of May, yet Cochrane—who had come from Massachusetts less than a year ago—had learned to fear the merciless heat outside.
As he limped down the steel stairway toward the lab’s lobby, he mentally plotted his course back to his office at the Steward Observatory building, planning a route that kept him in the shade as much as possible.
He was a slim, quiet man in his mid-thirties, wearing rimless glasses that made him look bookish. Dressed in the requisite denim jeans and short-sleeved shirt of Arizona academia, he still wore his Massachusetts running shoes rather than cowboy boots. And still walked with a slight limp from the auto crash that had utterly devastated his life. His hair was sandy brown, cut short, his face lean and almost always gravely serious, his body trim from weekly workouts with the local fencing group. Although his PhD was in thermodynamics, he had accepted a junior position with the Arizona astronomy department, as far from Massachusetts and his earlier life as he could get.
He reached the lobby, nodded to the undergrads working the reception desk, and took a breath before plunging into the desert heat outside the glass double doors. He saw that even though the window blinds behind the students had been pulled shut, the hot sunlight outside glowed like molten metal.
His cell phone started playing the opening bars of Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro.
Grateful for an excuse to stay inside the air-conditioned lobby for a moment longer, Cochrane pulled the phone from his shirt pocket and flipped it open.
His brother’s round, freckled, red-haired face filled the phone’s tiny screen.
Surprised that his brother was calling, Cochrane plopped onto the faux leather couch next to the lobby doors. “Hello, Mike,” he said softly as he put the phone to his ear. “It’s been a helluva long time.”
“Hi, there, little brother. How’s your suntan?”
Michael Cochrane was a microbiologist working for a private biotech company in the Bay Area of California.
“I don’t tan, you know that.”
Mike laughed. “Yeah. I remember when we’d go out to Lynn Beach. You’d get red as a lobster, and the next day you were white as Wonder Bread again.”
Cochrane grimaced, remembering how painful sunburn was. And other hurts. His marriage. The auto wreck. Jennifer’s funeral. Jen’s mother screaming at him for letting her drive after drinking. He hadn’t even been out of the wheelchair yet. Everybody in the church had stared at him. Just the sound of Mike’s voice, still twanging with the old Massachusetts inflection, brought it all back in a sickening rush.
“I try to stay out of the sun,” he said tightly.
“So you switched to Arizona,” said Michael. “Smart move.”
Keeping his voice steady, Cochrane asked, “How long has it been, Mike? Six months?” He knew it had been longer than that. Mike hadn’t called since Cochrane had asked his brother to repay the thirty thousand dollars he’d loaned him.
“Don’t be an asshole, Paulie.”
“Come on, Mike. What’s going on? The only time you call is when you want—”
“Stuff it,” Michael snapped. “I’ve got news for you. Big news. I’m gonna pay you back every penny I owe. With interest.”
“Sure you will.” Cochrane couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“I damned well will, wise ass. In another few days. Your big brother’s going to be a rich man, Paulie. I’ve come up with something that’s gonna make me a multimillionaire.”
Cochrane raised his eyes heavenward. Ever since they’d been teenagers Mike had touted one get-rich-quick scheme after another. His bright, flip-talking big brother. Quick with ideas but slow to do the work that might make the ideas work. The latest one had cost Cochrane a chunk of his insurance settlement from the accident.