Power Failure

by Ben Bova

  Tomlinson leaned back in his desk chair and steepled his fingers in front of his face, thinking. Sitting in front of the desk on either side of Jake were O’Donnell and Patrick Lovett.

  “Zach’s a clever man,” Lovett said, with a satisfied smile.

  “An academic,” countered O’Donnell.

  Senator Tomlinson said softly, “The Treasury Department guarantees the loans so that even if the whole scheme collapses the investors won’t lose their money.”

  “That’s the idea,” said Jake.

  “Is that legal?”

  “It’s been done before.”

  O’Donnell said, “Maybe it has, but that was before the Securities and Exchange Commission was created, I’ll bet. There’s probably five hundred federal regulations that’d prevent it now.”

  “You could look that up easily enough,” said Lovett.

  “Even if it’s not illegal,” O’Donnell insisted, “the opposition would tear the idea to shreds. The US government guaranteeing that Wall Street investors can’t lose their money.” O’Donnell shook his head. “You’d be crucified, Frank.”

  “But if we got a couple of key financial types to say they’d invest in this…” Lovett’s voice faded away, leaving the idea dangling.

  “Sure they’d invest in it! What’ve they got to lose?”

  Jake said, “They’d be tying up their money for fifty years, maybe longer.”

  Tomlinson nodded warily.

  Lovett countered, “It would make a hot campaign issue. It would get Frank noticed by the news media.”

  “Captain Moonbeam,” O’Donnell groused.

  Jake said, “Wait a minute. Suppose we got some of the people who’ve already invested in private space companies to say they’d put in seed money, with or without a federal guarantee.”

  “Like who?” Tomlinson asked.

  “Like Harold Quinton, for example,” Jake replied. “The Silicon Valley billionaire who started up Space Tours, Inc.”

  Lovett nodded. “I know Harry Quinton. He might go for something like this.”

  Jake added, “And Nicholas Piazza. He founded Astra Corporation. They’re the major carrier back and forth from the International Space Station.”

  “You think they’d invest their own money in a lunar base project?” Tomlinson asked.

  “Yes!” said Jake. “And they’d back a plan to encourage other investors to put in their money.”

  Lovett rubbed his square chin. “It could work. At the very least, it could start a dialogue. Give the news media something different to chew on.”

  O’Donnell shook his head. “Captain Moonbeam,” he repeated.

  Tomlinson sat up straighter. “Jake, you get this Kalamandis to check out the Treasury Department and the SEC about this.”

  “Karamondis,” Lovett corrected. “And you don’t ask him to do dog work. He’d laugh in your face.”

  “But I could ask him to recommend a grad student to look up the existing regulations,” Jake said.

  “That could work.”

  Tomlinson put on his million-dollar smile. “I think we’re onto something. I could be the first president of the United States to fly to the Moon!”

  Lovett nodded thoughtfully. O’Donnell said nothing, but the expression on his face could have curdled milk.

  * * *

  When they first got married, Jake and Tami alternated the chore of preparing dinner. Tami was a good and imaginative cook, although Jake teased her that a sushi dinner shouldn’t count as cooking.

  “You try slicing the fish and preparing the garnishes,” she would counter, with faked indignation.

  Jake’s idea of cooking was to heat up a couple of microwave dinners. To make up for his lack of culinary capability, Jake was in charge of the cocktails and the wine cellar—a bin among the kitchen cabinets.

  On special occasions they would eat out, and this night was certainly a special occasion in Jake’s mind.

  He got home before Tami did. Too excited even for a cocktail, Jake stewed around the living room, turned on the evening TV news, turned it off again, checked the clock on the wall, paced back and forth, debated calling Tami’s cell phone—and finally heard her key turning in the front door’s lock.

  As she stepped into their living room Jake rushed to Tami and kissed her mightily.

  She understood immediately. “He’s going ahead with it?”

  Nodding vigorously, Jake said, “Full speed ahead. Next stop, Moon Base One!”

  “Jake, that’s wonderful. But—”

  “We’re going to Mamie’s for dinner. I’ve already made the reservations.”

  “Good!” said Tami.

  Jake felt puzzled. It was his turn to cook, he knew. Usually Tami twitted him when he decided to go to a restaurant on a night he was supposed to do the cooking. Instead, she just stood there, her purse slung over her shoulder, beaming at him.

  “Good?” he asked.

  “I’ve got something to celebrate, too,” Tami said. “Pat Lovett’s PR man has asked me to join his staff!” Her smile could have lit up the whole District of Columbia.

  “You’ll be on the campaign staff?” Jake heard his own voice jump an octave.

  “We’ll be working together!” Tami said.

  “Together again. For the first time.”

  Arm in arm they left their apartment and headed for Mamie’s Restaurant.

  White Sands, New Mexico

  Jake thought it was surprisingly cool in the New Mexico desert. Of course, the sun was barely peeking above the dunes on the horizon and a chill dry wind was blowing across the sands from the distant mountains.

  Slightly more than a mile from the grandstand where Jake waited with the other bystanders, the Space Tours rocket launcher stood tall and straight, sunlight glinting off its silver skin. Six tourists were strapped into the passenger module at the top of the rocket, Jake knew. The ground crew was leaving the launchpad in minivans painted sky blue, each van kicking up a rooster tail of dust as it drove across the desert.

  “FIVE MINUTES AND COUNTING,” came the announcement from the loudspeakers at the rear of the grandstand. “ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO.”

  Jake turned his head from the rocket on its launchpad and looked at Isaiah Knowles. The former astronaut was standing rigidly at attention, his eyes riveted on the rocket launcher. It always surprised Jake that Knowles was several inches shorter than he; the man gave the impression of being bigger, more impressive. But now Jake saw that he was nervously rubbing his thumb against his forefinger. He’s just as tightened up as I am, Jake realized.

  “How many launches have you seen?” Jake asked.

  Knowles stirred, as if coming out of a trance. “This is the worst part,” he said, his voice low. “If anything goes wrong this is where it’d most likely happen.”

  “FOUR MINUTES AND COUNTING. ALL SYSTEMS GO.”

  “Man, I’d rather be in the bird instead of out here watching,” Knowles said fervently. “I’d be working, active, instead of just standing here doing nothing.”

  The grandstand was sparsely filled with onlookers. Families of the half dozen paying customers aboard the rocket, a few Space Tours employees, tourists with little kids, teenagers from the nearby town come to see the launch and pretend they were going into space.

  “TWO MINUTES AND COUNTING,” the loudspeakers blared.

  Behind the grandstand rose a curved modernistic building, all deeply tinted glass and stainless steel gleaming in the rising sun: headquarters of the Space Tours Corporation that was carrying half a dozen sightseers into space for three orbits around the world.

  They’re going to see sights they’ve never seen before, Jake told himself.

  Raising the binoculars that Space Tours had loaned him, Jake could see a thin whiff of white seeping from the upper level of the slim rocket. Liquid oxygen boiling away, he knew.

  Then the umbilical lines carrying the LOX and electrical power dropped away from the launcher.

  “THE LAUN
CH VEHICLE IS NOW ON INTERNAL POWER,” blared the loudspeakers. “ALL SYSTEMS ARE NOMINAL. LAUNCH IN ONE MINUTE AND COUNTING.”

  Jake could hear his pulse thudding in his ears. It was starting to feel warmer, with the sun climbing into the cloudless turquoise-blue sky. Everyone in the grandstand seemed to be holding their breath. Even the children fell silent.

  “FIFTEEN SECONDS … FOURTEEN…”

  Jake mentally counted down the seconds with the announcer. At T minus five seconds a cloud of steam billowed from underneath the rocket. Before Jake could ask Knowles if that was normal, the rocket began to rise slowly, majestically, out of the steam and up, straight, straight up into the crystal sky.

  No noise. No sound at all. But then the crowd in the grandstand seemed to take in a collective breath, to stir, sighing as they watched the rocket rising higher, higher.

  At last the sound reached them. A bellowing howl, like a thousand demons roaring all at once, like an overpowering ocean wave pouring over them, the rocket’s thunder beat down, pulsing, shaking every nerve in Jake’s body, throbbing, pounding with a power that Jake had never felt before.

  Jake trembled, awestruck.

  Someone behind him was chanting, “Go, go, go…”

  The rocket was hurtling across the sky now, its pulsating roar of power dwindling. Some people cheered and waved their hands in the air. Jake saw a woman crying, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Several of the teenagers took up the chant.

  A bright flare from the rocket shocked Jake. An explosion?

  “First stage separation,” Knowles said tightly before Jake could ask. The astronaut was visibly puffing, short of breath.

  The rocket dwindled until at last they could see it no longer. The sky was empty, the launchpad emptier. The crowd began to filter grudgingly out of the grandstand, but Knowles didn’t move.

  With a slightly bewildered shake of his head, the former astronaut told Jake, “No matter how many launches I’ve seen, it always gets to me.”

  “It certainly got to me,” Jake confessed.

  Knowles started to edge toward the stairs. “I think it’s the subsonics in the noise from the rocket. Jangles your nervous system.”

  Jake thought that trying to explain the emotions he had just been put through was like trying to explain the Mona Lisa.

  “Come on,” Knowles said, with a reluctant glance at the now-empty launchpad. “Harry’s waiting to see us.”

  Harold Quinton

  The two of them followed the crowd down from the grandstand and into the big glass-walled building. The glass was heavily tinted, Jake saw, and once they got inside, the air conditioning felt good. It might have been the emotional impact of the launch, but it was starting to feel hot outside.

  Knowles led him away from the spectators streaming toward the exit doors and the parking lot outside, and headed toward a door marked MISSION CONTROL: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. A pert blonde teenager stood in front of the door, wearing a sky-blue Space Tours T-shirt that fit her snugly.

  She raised a hand and began, “I’m afraid this area—”

  “Mr. Quinton’s expecting us,” Knowles said.

  “Oh! You must be Colonel Knowles.”

  Gesturing to Jake, Knowles said, “And this is Dr. Ross, from Senator Tomlinson’s office.”

  The young woman stared at Knowles with wide china-blue eyes. After a blink, though, she dimpled into a smile and opened the door. “Mr. Quinton is right over there”—she pointed—“with the launch director.”

  “Thank you,” Knowles said.

  “Thank you,” said the young woman. Jake saw stars in her eyes. The astronaut effect, Jake thought. A mixture of awe and admiration and romantic fantasies. Astronauts, he said to himself. Knights in shining armor.

  Space Tours’s mission control center was nowhere near as large as the NASA installation at Kennedy Space Center. The modest-sized room held a mere half dozen consoles. Men and women were getting up from their swivel chairs, stretching bodies that had been hunched tensely in front of their display screens only moments before. Two of the crew were still at their consoles, Jake saw. They must be monitoring the bird’s flight, he thought.

  As they approached him, Harold Quinton seemed to be engrossed in conversation with his launch director. It was hard to tell which one was which: both men were short, heavyset, graying. In their fifties, Jake guessed, maybe sixty. Both were gesticulating like a pair of Mediterranean fishmongers.

  “… it’s only two percent below nominal,” Jake heard one of them say, his voice brittle and defensive.

  “I don’t care if it’s two-tenths of a percent,” the other one answered, not as loud but equally tense. “There’s six paying customers on that bird and I want everything up to snuff.”

  Jake realized who was who. The launch director nodded unhappily and walked away.

  Knowles stepped the final few paces to where Quinton stood and stuck out his right hand. “Still giving ’em hell, Harry?”

  Harold Quinton didn’t look like a hard-driving taskmaster to Jake. If anything, he looked like a high school teacher or maybe an insurance broker. He was on the short side, overweight, with a round middle and a boyish, soft, apple-cheeked face. Thinning dark hair. But his dark brown trousers had a knife-edge crease to them, and his tasseled shoes glowed with polish. Four pens were clipped inside his shirt pocket.

  He’s a billionaire, Jake knew, who had made his fortune in Silicon Valley and was now spending a considerable fraction of it on the company he had founded: Space Tours, Inc.

  A crooked smile sneaked across Quinton’s youthful face as he took Knowles’s hand. “Somebody’s got to put the fear of god into them. How the hell are you, Ike?”

  The two men shook hands, then Knowles turned and introduced, “This is Dr. Ross, from—”

  “From Senator Tomlinson’s office, I know,” Quinton said, extending his hand.

  “Jake,” said Jake.

  “Good. And I’m Harry. Now what’s this back-to-the-Moon talk all about?”

  As Jake started to explain his ideas, Quinton led them almost at a trot back to the door and into the building’s spacious main room. Jake had to hustle to keep up with him and Knowles. The launch director came running after them.

  “Bird’s achieved orbit and we tweaked the cabin pressure back to nominal.”

  “Good,” said Quinton. “I knew you could do it, Sid.”

  Sid grinned and turned back toward the launch control center.

  “Can’t let things slide,” Quinton said, still scurrying along. “Start down that road and the next thing you know you’ve got an accident. A disaster.”

  Jake gave up on talking. He was almost breathless trying to keep up with Quinton’s pace. Outside into the bright sunshine they went, the breeze still coolish but the sunlight already feeling like a dragon’s hot breath.

  Quinton yanked open the door of a deep blue Bentley convertible sitting in front of the building’s main entrance in a parking space marked with a sign that read NUMERO UNO—DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE. He held the door open for Jake to clamber into the back seat while Knowles went around and sat on the right.

  “Piazza’s going to meet us in Alamogordo,” Quinton said as he slid in behind the steering wheel. He revved the engine to life, let the roof slide down, then took off in a cloud of dust.

  Jake found it impossible to say much as they sped down the two-lane road with the hot wind blowing in his face.

  “Alamogordo’s not that big a town,” Quinton yelled over the buffeting wind, “but I’ve found a place that makes a decent steak.”

  And off they roared.

  Nicholas Piazza

  When you’re rich you get all the breaks, Jake thought. Quinton tooled his Bentley down Alamogordo’s main street and nosed into an empty parking space right in front of a restaurant marked LUCITA’S KITCHEN.

  “Best place in town,” Quinton said as he hauled himself out of the car.


  Looks like the only place in town, Jake thought, squeezing past the folded-down front seat.

  Quinton pointed to a sleek sea-green Ferrari, spattered with dust, in the next parking slot. “Nick got here ahead of us.” With a shake of his head he added, “Still driving that puke-green bucket.”

  The three of them pushed through the double doors of the restaurant. For a moment Jake felt like a cowboy in an old western sauntering into the town’s saloon.

  But this was a quiet little restaurant. No bar, only a handful of tables set for four and a quartet of booths along one wall. All but two of the tables were empty.

  A chubby woman came rushing up to them, smiling brightly, arms spread wide. She was wearing a frilly black dress and had a flower tucked into her luxuriant dark hair.

  “Señor Quinton!” she exclaimed. “Welcome.”

  Quinton broke into an equally big smile as she wrapped her heavy arms around him in a motherly hug. “Lucita,” he said as they disengaged, “let me introduce my friends. This is Isaiah Knowles. He was an astronaut; he’s been in space many times.”

  “Mucho gusto,” said Lucita, with a dip of her double chin.

  “And this is Dr. Ross, who works for a United States senator.”

  “Mucho gusto,” she repeated—with considerably less ardor, Jake thought.

  Lucita led them through the restaurant and into a small private room across the hallway from the kitchen. Another man was already sitting at the only table there, with a much younger fellow beside him. He got to his feet like a giraffe rising from the ground; the youngster rose more slowly, hesitantly.

  “Guys,” said Quinton, “this is Nick Piazza. Nick, you know Harry, of course. This is Dr. Jacob Ross, science advisor to Senator Tomlinson.”

  “Jake,” said Jake as he extended his hand to Piazza.

  Piazza’s smile seemed confident, cocky. He was well over six feet tall, towering over Jake and the others. He looked quite young, slim, but when he took Jake’s hand his grip was strong, almost painfully so.

  Jake had looked up his biography, of course. Piazza was from Chicago and had made a name for himself as a basketball star with Notre Dame. Instead of turning pro, however, he went into the entertainment business, not as a performer but as a manager of performers. Before he was thirty he owned an Internet music company. By the time he was thirty-five he had started his own production company.