“Denny, there’s no sense our going around this bush any more. I want to back Morgan Scanwell. I want to throw the entire Oklahoma delegation to him at the convention—”
“He won’t make it to the convention. He’ll be wiped out by Super Tuesday. Maybe by the New Hampshire primary.”
“If you knew him you wouldn’t feel that way,” said Senator Thornton.
“He’s just a hick from the sticks, Senator! A rube from nowheres-ville.”
“That’s what they thought in Dallas and Houston,” she replied. “And in Austin. But he won. He beat them all and won the governorship. And he can win the White House, with the proper backing.”
“No way.”
She stopped walking and turned to face O’Brien. His face was dripping sweat. He seemed to be visibly melting, like a snowman in the sun.
“Denny, I’m flying to Tulsa tomorrow night. Come and join me there. Meet the man. Is that asking too much?”
O‘Brien gave her a mistrustful look. While many in Washington thought that Senator Thornton’s physical appearance was her greatest asset, O’Brien and a handful of other insiders knew that the senator’s ability to convince people, her skill at changing the minds of erstwhile opponents, was the true key to her success.
“Overnight?” he asked warily.
“I’ll be gone for the weekend. One day in Tulsa to keep my home fences mended, and then at home at the ranch.”
“I’ll come to the ranch,” O’Brien said. “Okay?”
“Fine,” she said.
“Great. Now let’s get out of this sun!” O’Brien stalked off toward the nearest bar.
Matagorda Island, Texas
As Dan walked along the catwalk from his one-room apartment to his office and the breakfast tray that April would have waiting for him, he saw Passeau coming in from the morning sunlight through the hangar’s big open sliding double doors. The FAA inspector already had his jacket off and folded neatly over one arm. With his free hand he slowly unknotted his bow tie and unbuttoned his collar as he stood there staring at the wreckage of the spaceplane on the hangar floor.
From this distance it was hard to see the expression on Passeau’s face, but from the slump of his shoulders the man seemed to be downcast, depressed.
Dan forgot about going to his office and clattered down the steel steps to reach Passeau’s side.
“It’s so heartbreaking,” Passeau said, once he recognized Dan. “I hate to see the wreckage of a plane. It saddens me.”
“Come with me,” Dan said. “I’ll show you something that’ll cheer you up.”
Passeau followed Dan without argument, back into the burning brightness of the summer morning. Dan felt the warmth of the sun soaking through his short-sleeved shirt. We can make electrical energy out of you, he said silently to the Sun. We can use your energy to light up the world.
“Where are we going?” Passeau asked, walking beside Dan.
Pointing to hangar B, a huge metal box looming a few dozen yards from them, Dan replied, “Right there.”
This hangar’s sliding doors were shut, but there was a man-sized doorway in the nearer of them, with an armed security guard standing just inside it, in the shade.
“Hi, Mr. Randolph,” said the guard, smiling. He was portly, jowly, looked out of condition. But he wore a nine-millimeter pistol on his hip.
“Morning, Frank,” Dan said. “This is Dr. Passeau. He’s with the FAA.”
Passeau fingered the ID card he wore on a cord around his neck and the guard peered at it. “Dr. Pass-oh,” the guard drawled. “Right.”
It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the much lower light level inside the hangar. And then Passeau sucked in his breath.
“So that’s it,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“That’s it,” said Dan.
Sitting in the middle of the hangar floor was a sleek, silvery, stub-winged spaceplane, the twin of the one that had crashed. A single tail fin flared up from its rear end, atop a pair of rocket nozzles. Its nose was pointed like a stiletto, with a raked-back windshield above it showing where the cockpit was. The spaceplane rested on three wheels, two where the stumpy wings joined the fuselage, the third beneath the nose.
Passeau slowly walked around it, admiration clear in his eyes, his expression. He reached out his free hand and touched the smooth metal skin, like a worshipper touching a statue in a cathedral.
“Hey, yo! Hands off!” a deep voice bellowed.
Passeau jerked his hand away as if it had been scalded.
Dan saw a skinny black man in spanking white coveralls advancing from the shadows beneath the catwalk balcony, his dark face scowling. “Don’t touch the hardware, man.”
“Claude, this is my chief technician, Niles Muhamed. Niles, this is Dr. Passeau of the Federal Aviation Administration.”
Muhamed’s demeanor changed by a fraction. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Passeau. But please keep your hands off Oh-Two.”
“I’m sorry,” Passeau apologized. “I should have known better.”
“Niles is the head honcho in this hangar,” Dan explained. “Nobody lifts a finger in here without Niles knowing about it.”
“It’s a beautiful creation,” Passeau said, gesturing toward the spaceplane.
“It’s almost ready to fly,” said Dan.
“’Nuther week,” Muhamed said. “Maybe ten days. We’re checkin’ ever’thing twice. Just like Santa Claus.”
“Good,” Dan said. Passeau said nothing. He simply stared admiringly at the backup spaceplane.
“Come on, Claude,” Dan said at last. “Time to get back to work.”
Muhamed nodded approvingly. He didn’t like having strangers poking around in his hangar. Or the boss, either, for that matter.
He’s not such a bad guy, Randolph thought as he watched Passeau getting involved deeper and deeper with Joe Tenny in a discussion of the crash investigation.
“The telemetry data is pretty clear,” Tenny was saying, pointing to a jagged series of spiky lines weaving across his desktop screen.
“The forward attitude jets fired,” Passeau murmured, nodding.
“But they weren’t programmed to fire at that point,” Tenny said, his finger pecking at the keyboard. “See? This is the program, on the left, and on the right’s the actual.”
Passeau stared at the screen as intently as if it were the Mona Lisa. Or a Playboy centerfold, Dan thought
He had taken the FAA official down to Tenny’s office, where Passeau could compare notes with the beefy engineer on the crash investigation. Tenny had complained that so many people from the FAA, the NTSB, and half a dozen other government agencies were crawling over Astro’s headquarters that he was spending all his time “babysitting the red-tape gang.” Yet it had to be done. You don’t have a crash, especially a fatal one, without government hounds sniffing everywhere. Even NASA had sent in a team of advisors, although the spaceplane was strictly a private endeavor.
Dan had ordered Tenny to cooperate fully with the investigators. Reluctantly, the engineer turned over most of his tasks to his top aide, Lynn Van Buren, and devoted himself full-time to working with Passeau and the other government people.
Tenny’s office was the opposite of Randolph’s: almost exactly the same size, but as neat and ordered as Randolph’s was cluttered: The only thing out of place was a painter’s easel standing in the far corner of the room, a half-finished acrylic of a tropical beach at sunset done in bold, blaring primary colors.
As soon as the two of them began talking technical details, Passeau’s demeanor—his entire personality—had changed. In my office he’s a bureaucrat winding red tape around my dead body, Randolph said to himself. But here with Joe he’s an engineer trying to figure out what the hell went wrong with the flight