All the lights went out.
“Damn!” somebody grumbled.
“Not another blackout!”
“Looks like it.”
“They must have heard me.” Scanwell’s voice, with a slight chuckle.
“I don’t see any lights on outside.”
One of the caterer’s men came with a candle that guttered uncertainly in his cupped hands. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. It seems to be a major blackout.”
“Again?”
“That’s the third one this year, and we’re not even halfway through the summer.”
Scanwell took the candle and placed it on the mantle. While the servants brought in more, he said forcefully, “See what I mean? This country needs an energy policy that works—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and fifty-two weeks a year!”
Everyone cheered in the flickering shadows.
“We need to end our dependence on imported oil and start developing energy sources that are reliable, renewable, and under our own control!”
They cheered harder.
“Now, to accomplish that, I’m going to need all the help I can get,” Scanwell resumed. “Most of you have supported me very generously in the past. I’m going to need you to open your checkbooks again.”
“Oh, damn, Morgan, I forgot to bring my checkbook!” joked one of the elderly men.
“It’s too dark in here to write a check anyway,” someone else called out.
Scanwell grinned at them. “That’s okay. We know where you live. And where you bank.”
The crowd broke into laughter. Dan thought, I didn’t bring my checkbook, either. Even if I did, I’d have to write with red ink.
The reception went on by candlelight, but within an hour people began leaving. The streets outside were still dark and Dan heard the hollow wail of sirens now and then. It’s going to be an interesting drive back to my hotel, he thought. Keeping one eye on Jane, who never left Scanwell’s side, Dan spent most of the time talking with al-Bashir: strictly getting-to-know-you banter, no business.
“What is it like, working in outer space?” al-Bashir asked, his face half-hidden in the flickering shadows. “There’s no gravity, I’m told.”
“Zero-g,” Dan said, nodding. “The scientists call it microgravity, but to us working stiffs it’s zero-g.”
“You float like a balloon?”
“You’re weightless, yep. It’s not that there isn’t any gravity, but the motion of your orbit cancels the effect of Earth’s gravity. You’re falling, really, but your forward speed keeps you from hitting the Earth.”
Al-Bashir shook his head, puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
How could you? Dan thought. You have to be there. You have to experience it for yourself. And once you do you’ll never be completely happy pinned down to this Earth again.
The first time Dan went into orbit, as a Yamagata employee, he got sick. He was keyed up for the rocket launch, excited and a little scared about riding a rocket into space. Yamagata had bought out a bankrupt American firm that launched rockets from a huge seagoing barge, so Dan had to fly out to the mid-Pacific along with five Japanese coworkers who eyed him with suspicious silence.
Big as it was, the launching barge heaved and swayed in the long rolling swells of the Pacific. Next to it was the command ship, a converted supertanker that had towed the barge to this precise position on the equator. Dan couldn’t help grinning when he saw that his fellow workers were getting queasy from the barge’s motion. He had never been seasick, not even on his first boyhood ventures in a borrowed Sunfish out on Chesapeake Bay.
It all went exactly the way it had in training. Wriggle into the cumbersome spacesuit, pull on the helmet and lock the visor down, plod in the heavy boots to the elevator that lifted the six workers to the top of the rocket, crawl into the capsule and shoehorn yourself into the padded couch.
The capsule was like a metal tomb. No windows, no panels of instruments or controls. Six couches jammed into the cramped confines like a half-dozen biers for mummified bodies.
Lying there with nothing to see but the underside of the couch six inches above his visor, Dan waited, his pulse beating faster with each tick of the countdown clock, while he listened to the bang of valves and the gurgle of propellants surging through pumps. The rocket was coming alive, stirring like a slowly awakening beast At T minus three seconds Dan felt the low, growling vibration of the engines’ startup.
Then an explosion and a giant fist smashing into his spine and they were hurtling up, pressed into the couches by the enormous force of acceleration. Dan’s vision blurred, and he grit his teeth to keep from biting his tongue in half. The world outside his helmet was a rattling, shaking, roaring haze of pain.
And then it stopped. Just as suddenly as a light switch flicking off, it all stopped. Silence. No sense of motion at all. Dan sucked in a deep double lungful of canned air, realizing that he had been holding his breath for god knew how many seconds. He saw his arms floating up off the couch’s armrests, lifting slowly like ghosts rising from their graves. He turned his head inside the helmet to look at the Japanese worker beside him, and his insides suddenly lurched. Dan felt bile burning up his throat. He broke into a sweat and fought to keep from upchucking.
No use. He vomited inside the helmet, as wretchedly sick as any landlubber in his first storm at sea. His coworkers immediately reacted. They all laughed uproariously.
Smiling at the memory, Dan said to al-Bashir, “You have to be there to really appreciate it. Once you get accustomed to zero-g it can be really exhilarating.”
Al-Bashir smiled back, slightly. “I understand that sex under weightless conditions is fantastic.”
Dan thought, No sense disillusioning him. “You’ve got to be pretty damned ingenious; you’re both floating around like a couple of feathers. But, yeah, once you get the hang of it, it’s incredible.”
“I suppose I’ll have to try it some time.”
“Sure. Everybody should.”
Looking around in the guttering light of the candles that had been placed through the room, Dan saw that most of the other guests had already left. Scanwell was in the entryway, bidding good evening to a white-haired couple. With Jane still at his side.
Al-Bashir peered at his wristwatch, which glinted in the shadows. Solid gold, Dan thought. He must get his daily exercise for that arm just by lifting it to see what time it is.
“I have a dinner engagement,” he said to Dan.
Walking with him toward the entry hall, Dan said, “I can have one of my people fly you down to Matagorda on Monday, if you’d like to see our operation.”
“I fly my own plane,” said al-Bashir. “But Monday will be fine. Say, eleven o’clock?”
“Eleven it is,” Dan replied, thinking, This guy’s not an early riser. Almost as an afterthought, he asked, “What are you flying?”
“Oh, I’ve rented a T-38 for my stay here in Texas. It’s old but serviceable.”
The kind of jet that NASA astronauts used, Dan realized.
“How’s it fly?” he asked.
“Like a willing virgin,” said al-Bashir.
Turning, he stepped up to Scanwell to say his good-bye. Dan watched the short, brown-skinned al-Bashir shake hands with the lanky, craggy-faced governor while Jane looked on, smiling her politician’s fixed smile, full of phony sincerity and artificial warmth. He knew what her real smile was like.
As the front door closed behind al-Bashir, Scanwell turned to Jane. “That’s the last of them, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said, relieved.
“Good. Let’s get somebody to make us some sandwiches. I’m starving.” He laid a meaty hand on Dan’s shoulder and started back into the candlelit living room. “Dan, we’re going to make your power satellite a part of our energy independence program. What do you think of that?”