“Right now just the Soviets and the Americans are building and financing the project which has cost twenty-two billion dollars to launch. Once in place it can be expanded far more cheaply. In any case any increase in total world energy supplies will benefit everybody.”
Pilkington wiped his lips with the back of his hand and twitched, then took a new tack. “The danger, that's the thing the whole world's worried about. This death ray you'll be shooting out, it could wipe out whole cities, couldn't it?”
“That's not quite true, Mr. Pilkington, I'm afraid you must have been reading your own paper.” A quick thrust instantly half-regretted. “Colonel Kuznekov developed the technique and it has been tested as thoroughly as anyone knows how. Electricity is generated from sunlight in space by simple thermal means, a turbine-driven generator, then broadcast as a beam of high-energy short waves. These are received on Earth and converted back into electricity.”
“But couldn't this death ray get out of control and wipe the countryside right out?”
“The radio waves are the same as the radio waves that are all round us now. They're just stronger; more concentrated. Admittedly if you stood in the right spot they could cook you.” His voice left no doubt as to who it was that needed cooking. “But this is a very remote possibility. The receiving antennae are located in extremely remote surroundings, and there are a great number of automatic controls to stop the broadcasting if any emergency should arise.” Patrick looked across the room, over the reporter's head, and saw Nadya standing against the far wall. “You'll have to excuse me, I'm needed over there. Be sure and tell your readers that Britain's power grid is ideally set up to distribute electricity of this kind. Eventually it will supply all the UK's power needs — incidentally getting rid of all the pollution you get through the burning of irreplaceable coal and oil. Thank you.”
He ducked round the microphone and pushed his way through the crowd, reaching out to take two of the tiny glasses of icy vodka from a tray. She turned as he came up. The remembered face with the transparent, ice-blue eyes with the little tilt at their corners, the hair golden as Ukrainian wheat. She was in uniform, a wide leather belt tight about the long jacket, a row of little medals on ribbons pinned over the swell of her breast.
“Nadya…”
“Welcome to the Soviet Union, Major Winter.” She took one of the glasses and raised it, unsmiling.
“Thank you, Major Kalinina.” He drank it down with a single motion and his eyes never left hers. Her fixed expression did not change. “Nadya, after this thing is over I would like to talk to you---”
“There will be many opportunities for conversation, Major, during our official duties.”
“Damn it, Nadya, you know what I mean. I want to explain…”
“I do know what you mean, Major, and no explanations are needed. If you will excuse me.”
Her voice, like her expression, never altered, but when she turned around her skirt swirled out and dropped back to her polished leather boots, swirling faster perhaps than she had intended. Patrick watched her receding back and smiled. She was still a woman. Maybe she hated him but by God she wasn't indifferent to him.
What had it been, just four months since she had left Houston? After those long, long weeks of training on the Prometheus Flight Deck simulator. At first he had felt like all the other Americans in the program, felt angrier if anything because he would have to fly with her as his copilot. Sure, everyone knew that the Russians had women in their space program, Valentina Tereshkova had been the first and others had come after her. But Prometheus was too big a project for anything but the best — and the Soviets had sent a woman. A political publicity ploy, nothing else. Good old USSR, home of female and racial equality, shining example to capitalistic USA where male fascists cracked the whip over women and the darker races. Maybe that had been the idea behind their choosing Nadya, there was no way to tell, but she had done her job and had done it so well that no one had ever found anything to bitch about. She was too good at what she did. From the very first moment they had met in Houston, she had had Patrick on the defensive….
“Ya orchen rad vctretitsas vamy,” Patrick had said.
“How do you do, Major Winter. You have a very good accent and I am sure when we speak Russian during operations that there will be no problem. But wouldn't it be better if we spoke English now?”
Sure, because your English is perfect and I probably sound like an illiterate coal miner from the Caucasus. But he couldn't be sure of this because she quickly added that she had never been in an English-speaking country before and she hoped he and everyone would permit her to talk with native speakers to perfect her knowledge of the language. Feeling like a very native speaker, he had agreed.
The training had been rough but she had hacked it without getting a hair out of place. Like Patrick, she had first trained to fly fighters, then gone on to be a test pilot. Unlike him she had gone back to school for a degree in orbital navigation. She had flown a number of missions on Soyuz and then on Salyut. At times he felt lucky that he had one more space mission than she had — plus the fact that the last stage of Prometheus was an American design. Or he would have been working as copilot for her. She had even been made a major a month before he had. It was enough to give a normally superior male intense feelings of inferiority.
Not only that but she was goddamn good-looking. The blond hair, blue eyes and tilty-nose bit was okay, though she rarely smiled and wore a baggy jump suit for training. But Sundays were always free, a NASA rule in Houston, and on her second one she had accepted an invite for a hamburger barbecue around the pool at Doc Kennelly's. Doc was a stocky, smiling Irishman with a doting wife and seven noisy kids who was, behind the jokes and the Irish whiskey, the best space medic in the business. Nadya may have tried to dodge the invitation, but she never had a real chance to say no. She showed up at the party in a Russian cotton dress of such massive ugliness that she appeared more feminine and attractive by comparison. May Kennelly had taken one horrified look and whisked her into the house and behind closed doors. Some form of feminine argument, backed up by the stewpot climate of a Houston August, had got Nadya into a wispy blue bikini that brought on a whistling round of masculine applause. She accepted it with a small bow then did a smooth dive into the pool. The afternoon had been all a breeze after that. Once out of uniform Nadya seemed to be a more accessible person, ready to talk about trivial things, ready to smile. When Doc shouted Come and get it, Patrick grabbed two paper plates and loaded them up. Nadya was drying her hair with a thick towel and looking very good indeed in the bikini.
“Hungry?” he asked.
“Ravenous. Like a Siberian wolf.”
“Then you're in luck. Doc's burgers have no relation to those rubber shoe heels we get in the commissary. Ground sirloin, Bermuda onions, Canadian cheddar — along with May's secret formula bean salad, cole slaw, garlic pickles, french fries, that's the way, douse them with ketchup, and all the rest. Dig in.”
She did, with an appetite as good as his, washed down with cans of Jax beer from the ice-filled washtub. “This is very good, “she said.
“You better believe it, real American home cooking for a Sunday afternoon. If you were back in Russia what would you be eating now?”
“That would depend where you were. The Soviet Union is very large you must remember, with many different peoples. At my home in Leningrad there would be herring and brown bread, perhaps cucumber in sour cream, very good in summer, and kvass to drink.”
“Kvass?”
“You do not have it here. It is a drink made from old bread….”
“Doesn't sound so great.”