“You’re not rusty since the crash?”
“I’ve been in the simulator every day, Dan. I’m as ready as I can be.”
“Good,” Dan said, nodding. “Stay sharp.”
“When d’you think we can launch?”
Dan scratched his chin. “Couple weeks. Maybe sooner. The legal eagles are working on clearances from six hundred different double-damned government agencies.”
“Will we land in Venezuela again?”
Dan hesitated. “I don’t know yet. Maybe, maybe not.”
Adair started to reply, but Muhamed strode up to them and jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the spaceplane sitting now on its three landing wheels. The flatbed truck ground its gears and started out of the hangar with a roar and a stench of diesel fumes.
“Okay, flyboy, you said you wanted to check out the cockpit,” Muhamed said.
Adair nodded once and sprinted toward the spaceplane like a kid heading for his Christmas presents. Dan saw that the crew had rolled up a set of metal stairs.
“Don’t know why he’s gotta go sit in the cockpit,” Muhamed groused. “The bird ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Dan grinned at him. “He’s a pilot, Niles. He’d sleep in there if you let him. He’d take his meals in there.”
Muhamed shook his head. “Nobody’s gonna mess up my cockpit with crumbs and stuff.”
Dan laughed, thinking, Maybe I ought to put Niles in charge of security.
April was startled when she returned to her apartment. As she opened the front door she heard country and western music twanging from her radio. She knew she hadn’t left the radio on when she’d left in the morning, and even if she had she’d never leave it tuned to that wailing of losers.
Cautiously she edged the door halfway open, ready to run back to her car if Roberto or some stranger were in her apartment.
Kelly Eamons was sitting in the armchair, her head bent over the computer in her lap, her fingers pecking away.
Gusting out a sigh of relief, April stepped into the living room and shut the door.
Eamons looked up and smiled. “Hi! I’m back on your case. But don’t let anybody know about it.”
Boulder, Colorado
Len Kinsky sat tensely in the rickety little grillwork chair on the sidewalk outside the Walnut Brewery restaurant. A cool breeze was blowing down off the mountains; the trees lining the street had already started to turn golden. Looking in through the restaurant’s big front window, Kinsky could see the big gleaming stainless steel vats of the microbrewery. People were ordering samplers, a row of shot glasses filled with different types of beer. He longed for the old Luchow’s in New York, and an honest mug of strong German beer.
Across the table from him sat Rick Chatham, a bland smile on his round, bearded face. Kinsky didn’t trust men who wore ponytails, but he was desperate enough to agree to this meeting with the environmental activist.
“Try the wheat beer,” Chatham suggested. “You’ll like it.”
Kinsky did not appreciate being told what he would or wouldn’t like. But what the hell, he thought, the guy’s just trying to be friendly. Besides, I need him more than he needs me.
Although the pedestrian mall was a block away, Walnut Street was crowded with scruffy-looking students in tattered jeans and T-shirts that were supposed to look impoverished but actually cost a fortune. There were tourists meandering by as well, toting backpacks, bottled water, and babies that either slept or squalled as they meandered along the sidewalk. Up the street Kinsky could see some mountains and clear blue sky, but he preferred to look at the brick and clapboard buildings lining the street. They’re trying to make this one-horse burg look like a real city, he thought. But it’s just a university town, nothing more.
“So you’ve quit Astro.” Chatham made it a statement, not a question.
“Yeah,” Kinsky said with some bitterness. “I’m going to leave the country and see the world.”
A waitress asked what they wanted. Kinsky asked for the wheat beer; Chatham went through a long menu of bottled water and finally selected the local offering.
“What made you decide to quit?” Chatham asked. He tried to pose it as a friendly question, but Kinsky knew he was really sizing him up.
Always tell the sucker what he wants to hear, Kinsky knew. That was the secret of successful fortune-tellers, and business consultants, and public relations experts.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said slowly, as if pulling it from some inner reservoir of conscience. “I mean, they’re going to be beaming gigawatts worth of microwaves through the atmosphere and they expected me to tell the world it’s all right. Better than all right—they want to pretend it’s an environmentally clean source of energy.”
Chatham’s light brown eyes sparkled.
“Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute,” he said, hunching forward in his chair and clasping his hands together on the little round grillwork table.
“Okay,” said Kinsky. “Go ahead.”
“The microwaves will be beamed to a remote location in New Mexico—”
“White Sands. The middle of nowhere.”
“Astro Corporation is building an antenna farm there to receive the energy being beamed down from space.”
“The rectenna farm, yeah. It’s already finished. Just waiting for the satellite to start working.”
“That’s federal land, isn’t it?”
“White Sands Proving Grounds, right. Dan’s leased the land for the rectenna farm. Looks like a big set of steel clothes poles stuck in the sand. Thousands of ’em.”
“‘Dan’?”
“Dan Randolph. The head of the corporation. Founder and CEO. And chairman of the board, too.”
Chatham pursed his lips. “He’s got all the power in his own hands, doesn’t he.”
“He sure does.”
“So,” Chatham went on, “if these microwaves are being beamed to such a remote location, where nobody’s living, not even cattle or grass, who’s going to get hurt?”
Kinsky smiled crookedly at him. “Devil’s advocate, huh? Okay, yeah, maybe nothing’ll get fried except some lizards and snakes.”
“So what’s the harm?”
Kinsky hesitated a moment. He wants me to do his thinking for him, he realized. He wants me to come up with the ideas he can use.
Raising an index finger, Kinsky said, “First, if they do kill some wildlife out there in the desert, who’s going to know about it? They sure as hell won’t tell anybody.”
“Ahh. Good point.”
“Second,” Kinsky raised another finger, “if they make everybody believe that the satellite works and they’re getting gigawatts of energy from it, they’re going to start building more powersats—with more rectenna farms on the ground.”
Chatham nodded hard enough to make his ponytail bob up and down. “And where will they put those rectenna farms? As close to big cities as they can, because those cities will be the market for the energy!”
“Right,” Kinsky said.
Growing more excited, Chatham asked, “And what about the long-term effects on the climate of beaming so much energy through the atmosphere? Has anybody looked into that?”
“Dan got a couple of meteorologists from some university to come up with a paper that said the effect would be negligible.”
“Negligible! That’s the term they use when they want you to look the other way.”
“There’s more, too.”
“What?”