Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  “At the very least,” said Passeau.

  “I was thinking that once you found the fault, we could fly the new bird without waiting for the paperwork to be finished.”

  Passeau began to reply, but April came in with a lacquered tray bearing an insulated stainless steel jug of coffee and two delicate-looking china cups.

  “I’ll pour,” Dan said, shooing her out of the office with the expression on his face.

  Passeau said, “I know you’re anxious to get a successful flight, but the Federal Aviation Administration has rules, you realize, and those rules must be obeyed.”

  And rain makes applesauce, Dan said to himself. Aloud, he asked, “Can’t we bend those rules a little?”

  “And kill another pilot? What would that gain you?”

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “It’s a mistake, Senator.”

  Jane Thornton said nothing; she merely continued walking along the side of the reflecting pool, her back to the giant phallic Washington Monument, her eyes on the classic beauty of the Lincoln Memorial. The smell of freshly cut grass filled the air. It was a warm afternoon; tourists and office workers were strolling along the lawn or sprawling on the grass, soaking up the sun. Jane wondered inwardly, How many of them are federal workers who should be at their desks? She smiled slightly at the thought that “federal worker” could be regarded as the biggest oxymoron of them all.

  The man beside her was grossly overweight, sweating heavily in his summerweight suit, tie pulled loose from his wilted collar. He misunderstood her smile.

  “You think it’s funny?” asked Denny O’Brien. “It isn’t, you know. We’re talking about your political future.”

  “I understand that,” Senator Thornton said, without taking her eyes off the distant Lincoln Memorial. Squinting, she thought she could make out the form of the heroic statue inside the graceful Greek columns. Hidden by a grassy knoll off to the right was the Vietnam Wall. To the left, the Korean Veterans’ Memorial.

  “I mean, you back a dark horse and win, you’re a genius,” O’Brien went on, wheezing slightly. “But you back a dark horse and lose, like Scanwell would lose, and you’re an idiot.”

  Very few people could speak that way to Senator Thornton. O’Brien was one of them. He had engineered her campaign for reelection to the Senate. Now he was worried that she was going to throw it all away.

  “Scanwell hasn’t got a chance, Senator.”

  Senator Thornton at last turned her eyes to the globulous O’Brien. In high heels she was inches taller than he, and even though she was wearing comfortable flats at the moment, she still looked down at him. Her long auburn hair was done up off her graceful neck in a stylish swirl. Her skirted suit of pale green was modest, yet heads still turned as she strolled along the pool. She was not merely beautiful: Jane Thornton was regal, tall and stately, possessed of the porcelain-skinned, greeneyed beauty of a Norse goddess. Yet she had a reputation for being cold, aloof, a hard-headed, no-nonsense Ice Queen.

  O’Brien was becoming frustrated by her frosty silence. “Come on, Senator, face it: Scanwell’s a nobody!”

  “He’s governor of Texas,” she said calmly.

  Squinting in the sunshine, O’Brien countered, “Not every governor of Texas becomes president of the United States.”

  “Morgan Scanwell will.”

  O’Brien looked as if he wanted to hop up and down in frustrated fury. He’d give himself a heart attack if he did, Senator Thornton thought.

  “You can’t declare for him! It’d be political suicide!”

  “Not if he wins, Denny.”

  “Which he won’t,” O’Brien retorted sullenly.

  “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 an
d 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

  “May I see the high magnification video again?” Passeau asked.

  “It’s pretty grainy,” Tenny said as he grabbed the computer’s mouse in a meaty hand.

  “Yes, I know, but I want to see that pitch-down maneuver. Perhaps the video can be enhanced enough to show the puff from the attitude jet.”

  Tenny nodded, impressed. “Yeah, come to think of it …”

  Randolph got up from the chair Tenny had given him, thinking, Better to leave these two alone. The longer Passeau’s with Joe, the less he’ll bother me.

  “Gentlemen,” Dan said, “if you’ll excuse me, I have a business to run.”

  They barely acknowledged his exit, their heads together as they watched the video of the spaceplane’s breakup. Dan couldn’t stand to watch it again.

  Glad to be out of there, Dan pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket and checked his schedule. Meeting with his public relations director at ten. It was a few minutes past the hour, he saw. Hurrying down the hallway, mumbling greetings to the employees he passed, he saw the P.R. director ambling up from the opposite direction, toward him.

  Len Kinsky was a tall, gangling native of New York, where he had worked as an editor and writer for technical magazines for several years. He had left the city in the middle of a nasty divorce proceeding and accepted a job “in the boondocks,” as he put it, because he needed more money than a journalist made to pay for his divorce lawyer and his ex-wife’s constant demands.

  But although he had taken himself out of New York, he could not take the New York out of himself. He prided himself on being a native of the Big Apple. At least once a day he declared to anyone who would listen that the entire state of Texas wasn’t worth a single block of Manhattan’s worst slum. He had absolutely no faith in rockets, no interest in space exploration or power satellites or anything more complex than a beanbag chair. Which made him a damned good public relations man for Astro Corporation, as far as Dan was concerned. The worst trap a P.R. guy can fall into is believing his own propaganda. Kinsky wasn’t even sure he believed in airplanes.

  His face was long and horsy, with startling ice-blue eyes that peered out suspiciously from under heavy reddish brows. His ginger-red hair was a thick tangle, like a jungle underbrush, almost. Kinsky was known to call attention to himself at parties by whipping out an ancient Ronson cigarette lighter and setting his hair on fire. Randolph had seen him do it. As everyone gasped and staggered, Kinsky would put out the little blaze with a couple of pats of his hand, grinning and saying, “Wasn’t that sensational?”

  He wasn’t smiling now as he approached Randolph, and his Ronson was in his pocket.

  “How’s it going, Len?”

  Kinsky reversed his course like a soldier doing an aboutface and fell into step with Randolph. The two men strode swiftly down the corridor toward Dan’s office.

  “Not good, boss. The New York fucking Times ran their usual editorial about keeping people out of space. Practically blamed you for murder.”

  Randolph snorted disdainfully. “So what else is new?”

  “The Wall Street Journal says pretty much the same, but in a more businesslike way.”

  “How so?”

  “They say the powersat could be operated entirely by remotely operated machinery; no need for humans in space.”

  “Yeah,” Dan groused. “And rain makes applesauce.”

  “They quoted three different university professors.”

  Dan banged through the door to his outer office, startling April at her desk. “The day any one of those double-dome geniuses starts to operate his own laboratory on campus entirely with remotely operated machinery, without using grad students or any other humans, then I’ll believe we won’t need human crews at the powersat.”

  He pushed through the door to his private office and threw himself into the sculpted chair behind the big ornate desk.

  “You know that, boss,” said Kinsky, dropping into the upholstered chair in front of the desk, “and maybe even I know it. But the media doesn’t and neither do the public.”

  “Fatheads and fools,” Randolph muttered.

  “But if you want the government to be on your side—”

  “The double-damned government!” Randolph snapped. “I’ve got a guy from the FAA sitting in Tenny’s office. He’s all set to shut us down. For good.”

  “You need friends in high places, boss.”

  “Maybe I should build a church?”

  Kinsky’s long face took on a crafty look. “Or see the governor of
the state.”

  “The governor?”

  “Governor Scanwell. There’s talk that he’s considering running for president next year.”

  “What good’s that going to do me?” Randolph demanded.

  “Well,” Kinsky said, “Scanwell’s a dark horse, an outsider to Washington politics. He’s going to need some issues that the Beltway bandits haven’t taken for themselves yet.”

  Randolph made a sour face. “No major politician has made an issue of space since Kennedy.”

  Shaking his head vigorously, Kinsky said, “No, no, no, boss. It’s not space. It’s energy.”

  “Energy.”

  Hunching forward in his chair eagerly, the P.R. director said, “Look. The U.S. is more dependent on oil from the Middle East every year, right? Europe, too.”

  “Right,” said Randolph.

  “Every President since Nixon has made noises about energy independence, right? But every year we buy more oil from the Arabs. That oil money funds dictatorships, slavery, attacks on Israel, you name it.”

  “And terrorism,” Randolph muttered.

  “Right!” Kinsky agreed. “And terrorism. Okay, so here’s you, with Astro Corporation. What are you trying to do?”

  “Stay afloat.”

  “No! You’re trying to open up a new source of energy for the U.S. of A. Solar power! Enough energy from one solar power satellite to replace all the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants in all of Texas!”

  “Or California.”

  “Or New York!”

  Dan sank back in his softly yielding chair. “Okay, so we’re offering a way off the oil teat. There’s nothing new in that.”

  “But the governor of Texas could use it as a campaign issue. It would bring him instant national attention. International attention!”

  “You think he’d buck the oil lobby?” Dan scoffed. “In your dreams.”

  Kinsky retorted, “He’s already bucking them with the environmental legislation he’s pushed through. He won the governorship without oil money!”

  “By a hair.”

  “But he won. He beat them.”