by Ben Bova
“And where does your plan stand right now? Will it be implemented by the government?”
Managing to keep on smiling while looking properly serious at the same time, Tomlinson replied, “The plan is being studied by the Senate energy committee. Under chairman Mario Santino, the committee will hold hearings in which the top energy experts from across the nation will be able to contribute their expertise to the plan.”
“So the plan isn’t set in concrete.”
“Far from it,” answered Tomlinson. “We have a long way to go, Dan. But it’s a beginning, a place to start the process of producing a rational, comprehensive energy plan for the nation.”
Manley nodded, then pursed his lips and said, “One part of the plan involves something called magnetohydrodynamics. Did I pronounce it correctly?”
Laughing, Tomlinson said, “You did. But call it MHD, it’s easier.”
“This is an energy system that’s being tested in your home state, isn’t it?”
“That right, Dan.” The screen cut to a view of the MHD rig in Lignite, with Tim Younger and a handful of technicians huddled at one end of it. Jake watched as Tomlinson pointed out the coal hopper, the rocketlike burner chamber, the channel that the hot gases flowed through, and the powerful superconducting magnet wrapped around it.
In a voice-over, Tomlinson explained that an MHD generator was more than twice as efficient as ordinary electric power generators.
“MHD could cut your electric bill in half,” the senator declared happily. Then he quickly added, “Eventually.”
The camera returned to Manley’s slightly dubious face as the interviewer said, “I understand that MHD generators could burn the kind of high-sulfur coal that’s plentiful in Montana, without allowing the sulfur to get out and pollute the atmosphere.”
“Entirely correct,” Tomlinson replied. “That’s one of the reasons why MHD is so important.”
“Because it can revive your home state’s coal industry.”
“Because it can allow us to use our country’s own natural resources, and use them efficiently, without damaging the environment.”
Manley cocked a disbelieving brow at the senator, but he went on to ask, “So what other technological innovations are in your energy plan?”
Tomlinson smiled easily and said, “There’s a way to turn the greenhouse gases that electric power plants and factories produce into a clean, efficient fuel for transportation vehicles.”
Playing straight man, Manley said, “Oh?”
Leaning forward slightly, his expression serious, the senator said, “It should be possible to take the carbon dioxide that we ordinarily let flow into the atmosphere and, instead of burying it underground, use it to produce methanol, a fuel that burns cleaner than gasoline.”
“Methanol,” Manley echoed. “Isn’t that the fuel that race cars use?”
Jake was impressed. Manley’s done his homework, he said to himself.
Nodding, Tomlinson said, “You’re right again, Dan. Methanol puts out about half the carbon dioxide that ordinary gasoline does.”
“But it’s corrosive, isn’t it? Burns out the engine?”
With a shake of his head, the senator replied, “The engines can be treated with a protective anticorrosion coating. Tests have shown it works fine.”
“So you’d have the oil companies switch to producing methanol instead of gasoline.”
Jake could see from Tomlinson’s face that the senator realized he’d stepped into a trap.
He was silent for a moment, then put on his standard smile and answered, “Gradually, Dan. Gradually. The oil industry could shift part of its infrastructure to producing methanol and mixing it with gasoline. Just the way they now offer gasoline mixed with ethanol. In time, I imagine methanol will become a bigger and bigger part of the mix. But it’s not going to happen overnight. No, this will be a process that takes years.”
Jake puffed out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Good going, Frank, he cheered silently. You got out of that one okay. I think.
With the camera focusing tightly on him, Manley said, “A few days ago we asked Senator Mario Santino, chairman of the Senate energy committee, what his committee is doing with Senator Tomlinson’s comprehensive plan.”
“Uh oh,” Jake said aloud.
The screen showed Santino, in his office, smiling genially at Manley.
“It’s an interesting plan,” said the Little Saint in his soft voice. “It’s the kind of plan that the nation has needed for a long time.”
“Then your committee is going to bring it to the floor of the Senate?”
“In time,” Santino answered. “In time. Right now we’re examining the various segments of the plan. We’ll be studying the part that deals with the coal industry first.”
“No!” Jake yelled. “It’s an integrated plan. You can’t take it apart, piece by piece. That’ll ruin it.”
But there was Santino, patiently explaining how each segment of the plan was going to be carefully studied before his committee would make a recommendation about the full plan to the Senate.
Jake shook his head sorrowfully. “He’s killing the plan,” he whispered to nobody. “Killing it an inch at a time.”
Monday, Bloody Monday
The morning after Tomlinson’s Sixty Minutes appearance, Jake was surprised to receive a phone call from the senator.
Jake was in his cubbyhole of an office at WETA, reviewing a new film on space exploration that NASA was urging the station to air. His office was barely big enough to fit a desk and a single visitor’s chair, but at least it wasn’t a cubicle—it had four real walls, a window that looked out onto the parking lot, and a door Jake could close, even though it gave him a shiver of claustrophobia when he shut himself in.
His desktop screen was showing computer-generated animation of astronauts landing on the frozen crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, with the brightly striped giant planet looming over them, filling half the dark sky.
His cell phone buzzed annoyingly. Jake dug in his trouser pocket for it, thinking that the phone could make a reasonably good sex toy. He saw with some surprise that his caller was Senator B. Franklin Tomlinson.
“Frank?”
“Jake, can you come over for dinner tonight?” Tomlinson’s voice sounded tense, worried.
Jake couldn’t help answering, “Are you sure you can take the chance of being seen with me?”
“This is serious, Jake. I need your help.”
“Dinner. At your house?”
“Yes. Seven thirty.”
“Seven thirty. Okay. I’ll be there.”
He could sense the senator nodding. Then, “Don’t park on the street. Come up the driveway.”
Jake almost laughed. He remembered that most of the driveway was hidden from the street by elaborate flowering bushes.
He must be in real trouble, Jake thought.
* * *
It was early twilight by seven thirty. The tree-lined street on which Tomlinson’s house stood was quiet: no traffic, no cars parked along the curbs, no one walking on the sidewalks. The neighborhood looks like a scene from The Stepford Wives, Jake thought.
He drove up the bricked driveway and parked his old Mustang behind a lush azalea bush. As he got out of the car he thought, Maybe I should have taken a taxi; nobody would’ve spotted my car then.
Almost chuckling at the paranoia, he rang the doorbell and was swiftly ushered into the house by the young, dark-suited butler.
As he followed the butler down the house’s central hallway, Jake noted that the pictures on the walls were now Tomlinson family photographs, together with a few original oils, mostly abstracts. Amy’s choices, he knew.
Tomlinson and his wife were in the library. The senator was in his shirtsleeves, tieless, gripping a tumbler of what looked like scotch. Amy, wearing a simple knee-length dress patterned in black and white, held a stemmed wineglass in her hand.
Feeling almost shabby in his jeans and rumpled sports
coat, Jake said, “Hi.”
Tomlinson came to him, hand extended. “Jake, it’s good of you to come.”
“What would you like to drink, Jake?” Amy asked.
“Same as you,” he replied.
As she went to the makeshift bar on the cart by the curtained window, Tomlinson led Jake to the sofa and sat down beside him.
“I think I put my foot in it,” he said. His face looked somber.
“You mean on Sixty Minutes?” Jake asked. “I thought you came across very well. The papers and blogs were all favorable this morning.”
“Senator Perlmutter doesn’t think so.”
“Perlmutter? Who’s he?”
Amy said as she handed Jake his wine, “Chairman of the Senate agriculture committee.”
“Agriculture?”
Tomlinson nodded. “He’s pissed as hell.”
“About your Sixty Minutes interview? What’s got him so upset?”
“Ethanol.”
“Ethanol? What’s ethanol got to do with anything?”
Tomlinson took a long swig of his scotch before answering, “The ethanol mandate.”
Jake felt his face contracting into a frown. “The ethanol mandate,” he echoed.
Tomlinson explained, “For years now, Congress has mandated that gasoline manufacturers have to mix in a certain percentage of ethanol into their gasoline.”
“Oh, that,” Jake said.
“That,” said the senator. “A big percentage of farms are producing crops for making ethanol. Corn and soybeans, mostly. The ethanol goes to the oil companies, who mix it into their gasoline.”
The lightbulb clicked on in Jake’s mind. “What you said about methanol.”
“Right.”
Amy interjected, “Frank didn’t say anything about replacing ethanol.”
“But Perlmutter—or somebody in his office—was bright enough to figure out that if we move to methanol, his farmers will lose their ethanol money.”
“And he’s pissed about that.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Santino was on the phone with me for more than an hour this afternoon. Perlmutter apparently reamed him out over lunch.”
“And Santino blames you.”
“Who else?”
“So now you’ve got the farm lobby set against the energy plan,” Jake said.
“What the hell are we going to do?” Tomlinson’s tone was almost pleading.
Jake took a gulp of the wine, desperately trying to think of something.
“O’Donnell thinks we should just shelve the plan,” Tomlinson said. “Scrap it. Too many vested interests are lined up against it.”
Looking into the senator’s unsmiling face, Jake asked, “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, Jake. I came to Washington to create a sensible energy plan for the nation. But everywhere I turn, the big guys are against me.”
Jake mused, “You can get the MHD part of the plan through, can’t you?”
With a slight nod, Tomlinson said, “I think so. I’m not really sure, though. Not after this.”
Amy said, “We need your help, Jake.”
“Me? I’m the pariah here, don’t you remember?”
“You’re my idea man, Jake,” the senator said, with some fervor. “You’re the brightest person I know, and I need you to come up with a way to salvage the energy plan—or at least, the appearance of salvaging it. I’d be satisfied to let Santino bury it for the time being. But I don’t want it dropped altogether. Not because some shit-kicking farmers are worried their profits might drop.”
Amy corrected, “It’s not shit-kicking farmers, Frank. It’s the big agribusiness corporations that own the farms.”
Jake sank back on the sofa, thinking, Frank’s got O’Donnell and a whole staff of Washington professionals working for him, and he’s asking me to pull his bacon out of the fire. After he’s fired me. After he’s admitted that he’s willing to let my plan be buried by Santino.
I should just get up and walk away, he told himself. This isn’t my fight. Not anymore. I helped Frank get elected to the Senate, and he kicks me off his staff to make Santino happy. What does he expect me to do, thank him for that? Help him, now that he’s in real trouble?
Then he looked at Amy, who was staring back at him. And you, too, Mrs. B. Franklin Tomlinson. You jerked me around just as much as he has.
Slowly, Jake rose from the sofa. Turning slightly to put the wineglass on the end table, he straightened up and said softly, “Let me think about this, Frank. Maybe there’s something you can do, something we haven’t thought of as yet.”
He winced inwardly at his use of the word we.
Space Politics
Jake dreaded going to work the next morning. He was supposed to sit in on a meeting that would decide whether the station would air the space exploration film that NASA was pushing. Isaiah Knowles would be at the meeting, Jake knew, and he wasn’t looking forward to the NASA man’s smoldering resentment.
He had spent the night, and the following morning, trying to think of some way to assuage the wrath of Senator Perlmutter and the farm lobby. A brief computer search showed him that Perlmutter chaired the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. The man’s biography was standard DC hagiography: another saint of a senator. Born and raised in Nebraska. Son of a small-town banker. After two terms in the House of Representatives he won a seat in the Senate, and he had been there ever since. Jake found nothing useful there.
He wished Tami were in town, so he could talk about the problem with her. It was always helpful to bounce ideas off her; Tami was bright, intelligent, and knew more about inside Washington politics than Jake did. Well, he thought as he parked his Mustang in the WETA parking lot, she’ll be coming back this evening. I’ll go to the airport and surprise her.
Jake got into the office a little early; hardly anyone was there yet. He powered up the coffee machine and poured himself a mug when it dinged, then went to his desk and scanned through the day’s agenda on his computer screen. There it was: ten a.m., NASA film.
Like a little boy trudging reluctantly to school, just before ten a.m. Jake went down the corridor to the conference room. Nobody else was there yet, except Knowles, sitting halfway down the table, looking as unhappy as Jake felt.
“Hello, Ike,” said Jake.
“Dr. Ross,” replied the former astronaut.
Sitting across the table from him, Jake said, “For what it’s worth, the energy plan is as good as dead. So your SSP wouldn’t have gone anywhere even if we’d kept it in the plan.”
Knowles closed his eyes, like a man who’d seen too much pain and suffering in this world. At last he said, “Sorry your plan got dumped.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
One by one, the conference table filled up. Five men, including the station manager. Five women. PBS believed in women’s equality. With wry amusement, Jake realized that there were five black people at the table, counting Knowles. PBS believed in affirmative action, too. How many Hispanics? he asked himself. No one of Asian descent, clearly.
The station manager—male, white, graying—asked if everyone had viewed the film. Nods and raised hands.
“Well?” he demanded.
The woman sitting next to Jake said, “It’s sort of the same old, same old. We’ve aired at least four films over the past couple of years about space exploration.”
Jake saw Knowles’s jaw clench, but the former astronaut said nothing.
Around the table the opinions were pretty much the same: the film wasn’t all that exciting.
Finally Knowles burst, “Exploring the moons of Jupiter? Finding alien life under the ice? That’s not exciting?”
“It’s not real,” said the young man sitting next to him. “It’s all animation, instead of the real stuff.”
Before Knowles could reply, the station manager asked him, “Does NASA have a program to send people to Jupiter’s moons—a program that exists right now?”
> Knowles said, “We’ve done studies.”
“But there’s no actual program to send humans to Jupiter.”
“Not yet. That’s why this film is important. It can help build up popular support for having scientists explore the Jupiter system.”
“So you want us to shill for you,” said a middle-aged man sitting at the end of the table, smiling as he spoke the words.
Knowles did not smile back. “I want you to help us. We’ve got to get public support for our programs. You people have a direct line to the public.”
In a slightly rueful tone, the station manager said, “Only a small part of the public, I’m afraid. Joe Six-Pack doesn’t watch PBS.”
“But kids do,” Jake spoke up. “In the afternoons, after school. Our demographics show a strong audience there.”
“You’re suggesting we show this film to the kids?” asked the station manager.
Jake nodded vigorously. “Kids are interested in space. If the show does well, we can run it again in prime time for their parents.”
“And grandparents,” said one of the older women.
The discussion went on for another half hour, but at last the station manager said, “Okay, we schedule the film for the after-school audience in the late afternoon.”
One of the programmers objected, “We have a full schedule of kids’ shows every afternoon.”
“We can shoehorn the film into our regular schedule. Make it a special. Give it plenty of publicity the week before we air it.”
Most of the people around the table were reluctant, but they went along with the station manager’s decision with no real opposition. As the meeting broke up and everyone started to leave the conference room, the station manager patted Jake’s shoulder. “Good idea, man,” he said as he headed for the door.
Jake stood at the table, Knowles stood opposite him.
“Thanks,” said Knowles, unsmiling.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” Jake said.
“It’s better than nothing.”
As they both walked the length of the conference table, toward the door, Jake asked, “Why don’t you do a film about space solar power?”
Knowles grimaced. “Tried to. Got shot down. The administrator’s not interested in SSP.”
