Powersat (The Grand Tour)

by Bova, Ben

  It was much the same in college. Yes, there was some racial trouble now and then, especially when she dated white men. But she handled it without letting it blow up into a major confrontation. She found that she was actually interested in learning about history and English literature and even the dreary courses in economics. Her only difficulty came when she was pledged for a sorority chapter and some of the sisters were unhappy with a tall, good-looking, almond-eyed charmer who made them look shabby by comparison. But she won them over and by the time she was a senior she was elected president of the chapter.

  Men were a problem, though. She could manipulate them easily enough: her high school boyfriends were so driven by testosterone that she could have made them bay at the Moon for her, or rob a bank. In college she began to date older men, including professors from the faculty. She wanted to learn from them, learn about the big world beyond the campus, learn about what life had in store for her. Instead, they patted her on the head (or elsewhere) and made it clear that all they expected from her was to be pretty. And compliant. When she tried to talk politics, or art, or anything deeper than the latest Hollywood flick, their eyes went wide with apprehension. And they seldom asked her out again. She got a reputation for being a snob.

  She graduated with a degree in English literature and an ambition to do something interesting. The first job she took was as an editor on the magazine published by the state’s tourism bureau. That lasted less than six months. She was asked to leave after showing the editor-in-chief how he was missing some major stories and allowing the magazine to fall into a boring rut. Unemployed, she spotted a news story about a private company in Texas that was building a solar power satellite. Interesting, thought April Simmonds. She e-mailed her resumé (with photo) to Astro Manufacturing Corporation and applied for a secretarial job, the only position she felt qualified for. Within twenty-four hours she received a return e-mail inviting her to fly down to Matagorda Island for an interview.

  The personnel chief was a tough-looking older woman with hard, probing eyes and a no-nonsense attitude. But after talking with April for ten minutes, she smiled and said that the CEO and founder of the company needed an executive assistant. April accepted the offer, determined to do her job well but never to let her boss see how smart she truly was.

  Then she made her first mistake. She fell in love with her new boss, Dan Randolph. He was one of those rare men who was not intimidated by an attractive woman with brains. In fact, she thought he seemed uninterested in her looks. April got the feeling that he was in love with someone else, someone unobtainable. That made her love him even more.

  Now she was determined to help Dan find the people who had killed Hannah Aarons, Joe Tenny, and most likely Pete Larsen, as well. She knew this would be difficult. What she never stopped to consider was that it would also be very dangerous.

  AUSTIN, TEXAS

  The cocktail reception was held not at the governor’s mansion, nor in the capitol, nor even in one of Austin’s major hotels. For this quiet little get-together with his major backers, Morgan Scanwell used the home of the University of Texas’s chancellor.

  As he drove his rented Lexus sedan up the driveway Dan saw that it was a lovely house, nestled in the deep shade of a garden steeped in vivid beds of azaleas, begonias, and jacarandas. The air was heavy with the sweet scent of jasmine. A pair of kids in T-shirts and jeans were serving as parking valets. Students, Dan guessed. Smart of Scanwell to have the party here; no snoops from the news media, and he gives the university brass the impression that he owes them one.

  Plenty of security, Dan saw. Blank-faced men in sports jackets and business suits were scattered around the garden and standing at the front door. Dan thought that they probably had enough firepower under those jackets to take out half the student body.

  There were only a dozen people in the spcious living room, the men in ordinary suits, as Dan was, the women in dresses or slacks. Scanwell was nowhere in sight. Neither was Jane.

  A young woman in a maid’s dark outfit proffered a tray of champagne flutes. Caterer, Dan thought, although she might be a student working for the caterer. He thought briefly about asking for a glass of amontillado but immediately figured it would be an exercise in frustration and accepted the champagne. Then he saw that several of the men had shot glasses in their hands. Stronger stuff was available.

  “Daniel Randolph?”

  Dan turned at the sound of the man’s voice and saw a shortish, solidly built man with a round face fringed by a neatly trimmed dark beard. His skin was about the same shade Dan’s would be after a summer in the sun. The man wore a light gray suit with a pastel green tie carefully knotted at the collar of a figured white-on-white shirt. Expensive. Dan thought of Polonius’s advice about apparel: rich, not gaudy.

  “I’m Dan Randolph,” he said, smiling politely.

  “I am Asim al-Bashir,” the man said, extending his hand. He had to shift his cut crystal old-fashioned glass to his left hand; his fingers felt cold to the touch.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Dan, thinking, He looks Arab, his name sounds Arab, but he’s drinking alcohol. Not much of a Moslem, then.

  “I’m on the board of Tricontinental Oil,” al-Bashir said. “Mr. Garrison wants me to go over the details of our agreement with you.”

  Dan replied, “I spent the morning talking to Yamagata’s people. They want to buy into Astro, too.”

  Unruffled, al-Bashir replied, “I’m sure they do.”

  With a rueful chuckle, Dan said, “As long as I’ve got that powersat up there, I’ll never be lonely.”

  “Until you go bankrupt,” al-Bashir countered pleasantly.

  “There is that,” Dan admitted.

  Scanwell entered the room with Jane at his side. Dan felt his face settle into a frown. With an effort, he forced a smile. She’s always with him, he thought. Like they’re living together. No, he tried to tell himself. It’s just that you only see her when she’s meeting with him. Yeah, he retorted silently. And she’s meeting with him all the time.

  Everyone turned to greet the governor. He wore a lightweight tan suede jacket over darker brown slacks, a bolo string tie hanging from his open shirt collar. Jane was in a midthigh cocktail dress, tropical flowers on a pale blue background. She looks gorgeous, Dan thought. Smiling and happy and gorgeous. She caught his eye momentarily but quickly looked away and began chatting with the couple nearest to her and Scanwell.

  The governor started working the room, smiling and shaking hands, going from one guest to the next, Jane constantly at his side.

  When he came up to Dan and took his hand in his strong grip, he said softly, “I’m glad you came, Dan. I hope you can stay after this shindig winds up. Jane and I need to talk with you.”

  Dan nodded. “Fine. Can do.” But he was thinking, Jane and him. Jane and him.

  “Good.” Scanwell turned his smile to al-Bashir.

  After expertly working his way through the guests, Scanwell placed himself in front of the empty, dark fireplace and held up both his hands to silence the buzz of conversations. Once everyone had turned their full attention to him, he smiled broadly.

  “You probably already know,” he began, “that I’ve got a news conference set for Monday afternoon. It’s no secret that I’m going to announce my candidacy for president of the United States.”

  Everyone broke into applause. Scanwell looked properly humble, stared at his boots for a moment, then looked up again.

  “This won’t be an easy fight. I’ll be facing powerful opposition within the state, within the party, and once I’ve won the nomination—well, you know what a national campaign is like.”

  “You can do it, Morg!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  He laughed modestly and made a silencing motion with his hands. Big hands, Dan saw. An athlete’s hands. Cowboy hands.

  Then he looked at Jane and wondered if she’d let him put those hands on her. He didn’t want to know the answer.

 
“Well now, you know that a candidate needs a first-rate campaign manager. I wanted to let you know before the rest of the world is told that I’m going to have the best campaign manager in the country.” And he turned to Jane. “Senator Jane Thornton, of Oklahoma!”

  Everyone clapped as hard as they could. Everyone except Dan. He heard one of the women shouting over the noise of the applause into the ear of the woman beside her, “Don’t they make a lovely couple?”

  Dan gritted his teeth.

  “As some of you already know,” Scanwell was going on, “I intend to make energy independence a major issue in the coming campaign. The United States has been held hostage by Middle Eastern oil for too long. It’s time for us to cut that umbilical cord and become energy independent.”

  All the lights went out.

  “Damn!” somebody grumbled.

  “Not another blackout!”

  “Looks like it.”

  “They must have heard me.” Scanwell’s voice, with a slight chuckle.

  “I don’t see any lights on outside.”

  One of the caterer’s men came with a candle that guttered uncertainly in his cupped hands. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. It seems to be a major blackout.”

  “Again?”

  “That’s the third one this year, and we’re not even halfway through the summer.”

  Scanwell took the candle and placed it on the mantle. While the servants brought in more, he said forcefully, “See what I mean? This country needs an energy policy that works—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and fifty-two weeks a year!”

  Everyone cheered in the flickering shadows.

  “We need to end our dependence on imported oil and start developing energy sources that are reliable, renewable, and under our own control!”

  They cheered harder.

  “Now, to accomplish that, I’m going to need all the help I can get,” Scanwell resumed. “Most of you have supported me very generously in the past. I’m going to need you to open your checkbooks again.”

  “Oh, damn, Morgan, I forgot to bring my checkbook!” joked one of the elderly men.

  “It’s too dark in here to write a check anyway,” someone else called out.

  Scanwell grinned at them. “That’s okay. We know where you live. And where you bank.”

  The crowd broke into laughter. Dan thought, I didn’t bring my checkbook, either. Even if I did, I’d have to write with red ink.

  The reception went on by candlelight, but within an hour people began leaving. The streets outside were still dark and Dan heard the hollow wail of sirens now and then. It’s going to be an interesting drive back to my hotel, he thought. Keeping one eye on Jane, who never left Scanwell’s side, Dan spent most of the time talking with al-Bashir: strictly getting-to-know-you banter, no business.

  “What is it like, working in outer space?” al-Bashir asked, his face half-hidden in the flickering shadows. “There’s no gravity, I’m told.”

  “Zero-g,” Dan said, nodding. “The scientists call it microgravity, but to us working stiffs it’s zero-g.”

  “You float like a balloon?”

  “You’re weightless, yep. It’s not that there isn’t any gravity, but the motion of your orbit cancels the effect of Earth’s gravity. You’re falling, really, but your forward speed keeps you from hitting the Earth.”

  Al-Bashir shook his head, puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  How could you? Dan thought. You have to be there. You have to experience it for yourself. And once you do you’ll never be completely happy pinned down to this Earth again.

  The first time Dan went into orbit, as a Yamagata employee, he got sick. He was keyed up for the rocket launch, excited and a little scared about riding a rocket into space. Yamagata had bought out a bankrupt American firm that launched rockets from a huge seagoing barge, so Dan had to fly out to the mid-Pacific along with five Japanese coworkers who eyed him with suspicious silence.

  Big as it was, the launching barge heaved and swayed in the long rolling swells of the Pacific. Next to it was the command ship, a converted supertanker that had towed the barge to this precise position on the equator. Dan couldn’t help grinning when he saw that his fellow workers were getting queasy from the barge’s motion. He had never been seasick, not even on his first boyhood ventures in a borrowed Sunfish out on Chesapeake Bay.

  It all went exactly the way it had in training. Wriggle into the cumbersome spacesuit, pull on the helmet and lock the visor down, plod in the heavy boots to the elevator that lifted the six workers to the top of the rocket, crawl into the capsule and shoehorn yourself into the padded couch.

  The capsule was like a metal tomb. No windows, no panels of instruments or controls. Six couches jammed into the cramped confines like a half-dozen biers for mummified bodies.

  Lying there with nothing to see but the underside of the couch six inches above his visor, Dan waited, his pulse beating faster with each tick of the countdown clock, while he listened to the bang of valves and the gurgle of propellants surging through pumps. The rocket was coming alive, stirring like a slowly awakening beast At T minus three seconds Dan felt the low, growling vibration of the engines’ startup.

  Then an explosion and a giant fist smashing into his spine and they were hurtling up, pressed into the couches by the enormous force of acceleration. Dan’s vision blurred, and he grit his teeth to keep from biting his tongue in half. The world outside his helmet was a rattling, shaking, roaring haze of pain.

  And then it stopped. Just as suddenly as a light switch flicking off, it all stopped. Silence. No sense of motion at all. Dan sucked in a deep double lungful of canned air, realizing that he had been holding his breath for god knew how many seconds. He saw his arms floating up off the couch’s armrests, lifting slowly like ghosts rising from their graves. He turned his head inside the helmet to look at the Japanese worker beside him, and his insides suddenly lurched. Dan felt bile burning up his throat. He broke into a sweat and fought to keep from upchucking.

  No use. He vomited inside the helmet, as wretchedly sick as any landlubber in his first storm at sea. His coworkers immediately reacted. They all laughed uproariously.

  Smiling at the memory, Dan said to al-Bashir, “You have to be there to really appreciate it. Once you get accustomed to zero-g it can be really exhilarating.”

  Al-Bashir smiled back, slightly. “I understand that sex under weightless conditions is fantastic.”

  Dan thought, No sense disillusioning him. “You’ve got to be pretty damned ingenious; you’re both floating around like a couple of feathers. But, yeah, once you get the hang of it, it’s incredible.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to try it some time.”

  “Sure. Everybody should.”

  Looking around in the guttering light of the candles that had been placed through the room, Dan saw that most of the other guests had already left. Scanwell was in the entryway, bidding good evening to a white-haired couple. With Jane still at his side.

  Al-Bashir peered at his wristwatch, which glinted in the shadows. Solid gold, Dan thought. He must get his daily exercise for that arm just by lifting it to see what time it is.

  “I have a dinner engagement,” he said to Dan.

  Walking with him toward the entry hall, Dan said, “I can have one of my people fly you down to Matagorda on Monday, if you’d like to see our operation.”

  “I fly my own plane,” said al-Bashir. “But Monday will be fine. Say, eleven o’clock?”

  “Eleven it is,” Dan replied, thinking, This guy’s not an early riser. Almost as an afterthought, he asked, “What are you flying?”

  “Oh, I’ve rented a T-38 for my stay here in Texas. It’s old but serviceable.”

  The kind of jet that NASA astronauts used, Dan realized.

  “How’s it fly?” he asked.

  “Like a willing virgin,” said al-Bashir.

  Turning, he stepped up to Scanwell to say his good-bye. Dan watched the
short, brown-skinned al-Bashir shake hands with the lanky, craggy-faced governor while Jane looked on, smiling her politician’s fixed smile, full of phony sincerity and artificial warmth. He knew what her real smile was like.

  As the front door closed behind al-Bashir, Scanwell turned to Jane. “That’s the last of them, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, relieved.

  “Good. Let’s get somebody to make us some sandwiches. I’m starving.” He laid a meaty hand on Dan’s shoulder and started back into the candlelit living room. “Dan, we’re going to make your power satellite a part of our energy independence program. What do you think of that?”

  Dan looked from Scanwell to Jane and back again. “I think it’s great. I just hope I’m still in business by the time you get into the White House.”

  “We can help you, Dan,” Jane said.

  “How?”

  One of the caterer’s waitresses came into the living room. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Governor?”

  Scanwell grinned wolfishly, then said, “If the food in the fridge hasn’t spoiled yet, maybe you could rustle up some sandwiches for us, honey. And beer, if it’s still cold.” He turned to Dan. “Beer okay for you?”

  Tempted to say he preferred wine, Dan instead nodded. “Beer’s fine.”

  “I wonder how long this blackout will last?” Jane murmured as she went toward the sofa.

  “Last one was two whole days,” said Scanwell.

  Dan felt glad that his complex on Matagorda had its own backup generators. And several days’ worth of fuel for them.

  The waitress went back into the kitchen. Scanwell pulled off his jacket and tossed it onto a chair, then loosened his bolo as he plopped himself onto the sofa beneath a Remington painting of cowboys herding cattle out on the range beneath scudding clouds lit by a glowing full Moon.