Powersat (The Grand Tour) Read online

“Why not? I’m worth it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really and truly, Mr. Randolph.”

  Jabbing a thumb toward the plane, Dan said, “Okay. You want to fly back to Matagorda with us? We can talk without interruption for a couple of hours.”

  She broke into a wide smile. “My bags are in the car. I’ve got to drop it off at the rental office.”

  Dan started walking beside her toward the burgundy Corolla. “I’ll get somebody to drop off the car for you.”

  “Can you?”

  “Sure. No problem. Always happy to cooperate with the news media.” He laughed, wondering how cooperative she would be with him.

  COUNTDOWN TO LAUNCH

  Very, it turned out.

  Once they landed at the company airstrip on Matagorda Island, instead of taking Vicki to his own one-room apartment halfway down the hangar catwalk from his office, Dan drove her to the Astro Motel, a few miles away from the airstrip.

  “A Jaguar convertible,” Vicki said, impressed, as he tossed her luggage and his own battered travel bag into the trunk.

  “Ten years old,” he gruffed as he slid in behind the steering wheel. “I spend more time under the chassis trying to keep it running than I do driving her.”

  Vicki nodded as if she thought he was merely making an excuse for an extravagance.

  The motel was legally owned by Astro Corporation, but operated quite independently by a local Calhoun County family who had gladly added the hospitality industry to their generations-long business of renting fishing boats and guiding tourist hunters through carefully stocked “safaris” across Matagorda Island. Despite being less than five years old the motel already had a slightly seedy, run-down look to it. The family who ran it was hardly ever there; they far preferred to take their profits to Las Vegas and hand them over to card dealers and slot machines.

  Vicki didn’t seem to notice the motel’s slightly tacky décor. She didn’t demur when Dan registered her as a corporate guest and toted his own travel bag along with hers into the room. Two queen-sized beds, same as every room in the place. They ate dinner together in the motel’s restaurant; she hardly paid attention to the food as she pumped Dan for the story of his life. He thought that her indifference to the cooking was a good thing, considering its quality, while he spun out a carefully edited version of his days working in space for Yamagata and his goal of making the first working solar power satellite here in the United States of America.

  She seemed to take it for granted that they would sleep together. Dan had no objections; in fact, he worried that if he didn’t have sex with her she’d get sore. Hell hath no fury, he reminded himself. Besides, it had been a long time since he’d had a sexual romp. Months. Seemed like years.

  When Dan awoke the next morning, Vicki was still sleeping soundly beside him. He slipped out of bed and padded to the bathroom, wondering if this little tumble in the hay would help silence the rumor about him and Hannah or make things worse. Every time you think with your gonads, he berated himself, you screw nobody but yourself.

  As he looked back at Vicki’s fleshy naked body entangled in the sweaty sheets, he laughed inwardly. And damned well, too, he added.

  Lifting his toiletries kit from the travel bag he’d left on the unoccupied bed, Dan closed the bathroom door softly and went through his morning shower, brushed his teeth, and started to shave. As he stared into the mirror at his lathered face, though, he thought of Jane.

  Haven’t seen her in—what is it now, five years? No, damned near six. And you’re still thinking of her. Last night in bed with Vicki he had fantasized about Jane Thornton, the woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago, the woman who had moved out of his life and gone back to her native Oklahoma to be a United States senator.

  He nicked himself. Damn! Love hurts, he thought.

  When Dan came out of the bathroom Vicki was sitting up in bed, the sheet modestly tucked across her bosom, chattering into her cell phone. She smiled at him without missing a syllable.

  Dan motioned for her to put the phone down. She did, covering the tiny mouthpiece with her free hand.

  “I’ve got to get back to my office in Houston,” she said, “or else—”

  “Don’t you want to see the rocket launch?”

  “Rocket launch?”

  Nodding, Dan said, “If the weather holds we’ll be launching an OTV around ten this morning.”

  “What’s an OTV?”

  “Orbital transfer vehicle. A little shuttle bus that can take crews from low Earth orbit up to geosynch, where the power satellite is.”

  “Geosynchronous orbit,” Vicki said, as if answering a test question. “That’s the twenty-four-hour orbit. Twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.”

  It’s twenty-two thousand and three hundred, Dan corrected silently. But what the hell, she’s got the basic idea.

  “They want me back at the office as soon as I can get there,” she said.

  “You want to get connected with Aviation Week? Cover this launch for them as a freelancer. Make an impression.”

  He could see the wheels churning in her head. It took her all of three seconds to put the phone back to her ear and say, “I’m going to stay for Astro’s launch of a rocket … . Yes, a rocket launch. They’re putting up an OTV. Orbital transfer vehicle. It’ll make great footage.”

  By eight-forty-five they were back in the forest green Jaguar, speeding along the empty road the few miles to the Astro complex. Dan had the top down. It was cloudy and cool, with the wind whipping past. Hope there’s no problem with the weather, he said to himself.

  Once in his office, Dan’s executive assistant brought them a breakfast of coffee and English muffins, an obvious frown on her face. Jealousy? Dan wondered. No, he decided. April was young and popular and so good-looking that even the rednecks forgot she was an African American. Could she be suspicious of this news reporter? April’s damned sharp, Dan said to himself. She’s got sensitive antennae.

  When he led Vicki up to the roof of the hangar, the clouds were breaking up and the Sun was beginning to heat the morning. To his surprise, Dan saw a thin haze of fog over by the beach.

  “Are all these buildings yours?” Vicki asked, turning a full circle.

  “All my domain,” Dan replied. “As far as the eye can see, almost.”

  “Wow.”

  He pointed to the wall of live oaks and pines off to the right. “Those trees mark the end of Astro Corporation’s property and the edge of the state park.”

  Turning, he identified for her the office building that rose four stories on one side of the hangar, the Hangar B on the other side, and the machine shops and assembly buildings beyond it.

  “And there,” Dan stretched his arm, “is the bird we’re going to launch this morning.”

  Two miles distant, the rocket booster stood tall and slim against the brightening morning sky. It was painted stark white with a big ASTRO corporate logo stenciled in Kelly green along its upper length.

  “That’s not the spaceplane,” Vicki said.

  “No, this is an unmanned launch. We’re putting up an OTV, like I told you.”

  “There are people up there?”

  Shaking his head, “Nope, the satellite’s unattended now, waiting for a crew to go up and finish the final assembly tasks before we turn her on and start generating energy.”

  “When you send a crew up, they’ll go in the spaceplane?”

  “Right. As soon as we find out what went wrong in the test flight and get the fault fixed.”

  “But the spaceplane only goes to low orbit,” Vicki said, obviously trying to get her facts straight, “while the power satellite’s up in geosynch orbit.”

  “Which is why we need the OTV,” said Dan. “To transfer work crews from the low orbit to geosynch.”

  She nodded her understanding and then turned to look out at the booster. Dan expected the usual comment about a phallic symbol. Instead, Vicki said, “I don’t see any vapor comi
ng from it. No frost where the liquid oxygen tanks are.”

  His estimation of her climbed several notches. “It’s not a liquid-fueled rocket. Solid fuel, like the old Minuteman missiles. Just a big, dumb, cheap booster. Fire it off like a skyrocket.”

  “Oh.”

  Pointing again, he explained, “The upper stage has all the sophistication: guidance, rendezvous and docking systems, all that. The first stage just belts her the hell off the planet and then plops down into the Atlantic.”

  “You mean the Gulf?”

  “No, the Atlantic, nearly a thousand miles from here. We send a command to break up the booster shell once she’s exhausted her fuel and disengaged from the upper stage. Pieces burn up in the atmosphere, mostly. Some small debris falls into international waters.”

  “Then why do you need the spaceplane?” she asked.

  “To carry people safely and economically. The big dumb booster’s fine for carrying freight. We need something better to get people up there. And back down again.”

  “Oh. Back down.”

  “That’s the trick. We’ve been leasing Russian spacecraft and launching them from an oceangoing platform that a private company operates. Damned expensive. If we’re going to generate electricity at a competitive price, we’ve got to bring down the costs of sending people to the powersat. That’s what the spaceplane is for.”

  “I see,” said Vicki. She took her miniature camera from her handbag, then slipped the bag over her shoulder. “How long until the launch?”

  Dan fished his cell phone from his shirt pocket and called the launch center. Everything was going on schedule. Solid-fuel boosters were simpler to operate than the more complex liquid-propelled rockets. The launch countdown was going smoothly.

  Vicki began panning across the skyline of square, blocky buildings. She took close-ups of Dan and zoom shots of the booster standing on its launchpad. The clock ticked down.

  April came up at T minus ten minutes with two of the FAA investigators with her. Dan saw little knots of people clustering on the roofs of Hangar B and the office building.

  “Five … four …”

  Dan felt his innards tightening. No matter how many launches he had seen, how many he had participated in, there was always this heart-thumping anticipation.

  “ … one … zero.”

  A blossom of flame flared at the bottom of the rocket’s tall cylindrical shape. Dan felt the building beneath his feet rumble. The rocket stirred, lifted slowly, majestically. The roar of a million demons carried across the miles between them, growling louder as the rocket rose higher, higher, gaining speed, a brilliant stream of fire rushing from its tail. Wave after wave of throbbing, pulsing sound washed over them, a physical thundering that shook the bones and tingled every nerve in the body. The rocket was hurtling through the sky, up, up, up, growing smaller, the throaty roar of its engines diminishing now, deepening into a rolling distant thunder.

  And then it was gone. The tiny blazing star of the rocket exhaust winked out; the sound dissipated. The sky seemed suddenly empty, the launchpad deserted.

  It took Dan a few moments to get his breathing back to normal. When he looked at Vicki Lee, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

  “I’ve never seen anything …” she said in a near whisper, her voice faltering. “It’s an experience …”

  Dan nodded and suddenly realized that Jane had never seen a rocket launch. Not one.

  MATAGORDA ISLAND, TEXAS

  Within a few minutes, though, Vicki recovered from the emotional rush. Suddenly she was in a mad hurry to get back to her office in Houston. Chattering frantically into her cell phone as she scampered back down to Dan’s office, Vicki grabbed a gulp of warm orange juice that had been left on his desk and then headed for the door. Dan hustled after her, asking April to set up a corporate plane to take Vicki to Houston, then drove her to the airstrip in his convertible.

  “Thanks, Dan, that was wonderful,” she said as he walked her to the waiting twin-jet Citation. She gave him a peck on the cheek. No sentimental good-byes, no “When will I see you again?” Just as well, Dan said to himself as he followed her down to the parking lot. Just as well.

  Dan watched the plane take off, then drove back to his office the long way, around the airstrip and along the shore road, with the Gulf of Mexico lapping placidly against the white sand of the beach. Much of Matagorda Island had once been a ranch, its scrubby vegetation used as grazing for cattle. Decades earlier, a real pioneer in the space industry had launched a rocket from the island, one of the very first launches by a private industrial firm rather than a government agency. Dan had bought the old ranch when he first started Astro Manufacturing Corporation. He had bulldozed a three-mile-long landing strip and thrown up the hangars, test stands, and cinderblock office buildings that comprised Astro’s headquarters complex. The region’s environmentalists howled, but the local building inspector hesitantly okayed the buildings as tenable under the county’s hurricane safety code. The inspector departed from the Astro complex with a large bulge of cash in his pocket.

  A hurricane—that’s all we need, Dan thought as he parked his forest green convertible in his personal space. He tried to keep the ten-year-old XJS in mint condition; before the spaceplane crash he had often tinkered with the auto himself. Not now, though. He walked briskly past the DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE sign that marked his slot, eager to get out of the hot, humid air. Hurricane season coming up, he reminded himself.

  Inside the air-conditioned hangar Dan clanged up the steel stairway to his office on the catwalk that ran across three sides of the big open barnlike structure. The spaceplane’s wreckage was spread across the floor, one lonely technician squatting on his heels in the middle of it, looking puzzled. Dan thought about how much it cost to air-condition the whole hangar. The building wasn’t insulated, either, he knew: just bare metal walls frying in the sun. Be cheaper to keep just the offices under air. But as he looked down at that one technician Dan realized that cutting the air-conditioning bill wasn’t going to save Astro from bankruptcy.

  He smiled at April as he passed her desk. She looked happier now that Vicki was gone. Dan closed his office door behind him and slid into the ultramodern leather swivel chair behind the heavy, ornately Victorian desk. His grandfather had given Dan the desk when he’d first started Astro Corporation. It had been the desk of his father, Dan’s great-grandfather, when he’d been a genteely impoverished young minister in rural Virginia. Dan had promised to use it as his very own. So now it dominated the cluttered office like a dark brooding castle looming over an untidy little hamlet.

  Dan booted up his desktop computer and punched up his schedule for the remainder of the day. And frowned at the screen. One P.M.: Claude Passeau, Federal Aviation Administration. That’ll take the flavor out of lunch, he thought.

  He’s coming here to close me down, Dan thought. What he didn’t know was how he might talk the man out of it.

  It was precisely twelve minutes after one when Dan’s phone buzzed.

  “Mr. Passeau to see you,” April announced. Dan thought again of how fortunate he was to have April as his executive assistant. The woman was smart, hard-working, and good-looking, to boot: tall and leggy, with skin the color of creamy milk chocolate and glossy shoulder-length dark hair. She ran his office, his social calendar; she could even program his computer with cool efficiency.

  The memory of Vicki Lee’s accusation about an affair with Hannah flicked into his memory, annoying him all over again. If I was going to take an employee to bed it would be somebody like April, Dan said to himself. Not my top test pilot.

  His office door opened and Claude Passeau stepped in. He was a small man, almost dainty, wearing a lightweight beige suit and a neat bow tie of blue and yellow stripes. Clip-on, Dan guessed. Passeau looked to be about forty, forty-five. Too young to be worried about his retirement benefits yet. He had a trim little moustache; his hairline was starting to recede, but his hair was still dark
brown, although thinning.

  Dan got to his feet and came around the desk, his hand extended. “Mr. Passeau.”

  “Doctor Passeau, actually,” he said in a smooth voice that almost purred. He smiled pleasantly as he spoke.

  Gesturing the man to the little round conference table in the corner of his office, Dan asked, “Doctor of engineering?”

  Passeau brushed his moustache with a fingertip. “Psychology, I’m afraid. It was the only curriculum I could get in the school’s distance-learning program.”

  “Oh. I see.” Dan started to ask which school he’d gone to, then thought better of it, realizing that Passeau had bought his doctorate from a diploma mill.

  “The doctorate looks good on my resumé,” Passeau said as he sat at the chair Dan proffered. “The government doesn’t really care where it comes from or what subject it’s in. Just being able to claim a doctorate from a reasonably reputable school is enough to boost your salary category.”

  Dan grinned as he sat next to him. Either this guy is charmingly honest or he’s a damned slippery customer, he thought.

  April stepped into the office. “Can I get you gentlemen something? Coffee, maybe?”

  “Thank you, I’ve had my lunch,” said Passeau.

  “I’ll have coffee,” Dan said.

  “In that case, so will I,” Passeau reconsidered.

  As April shut the door behind her, Dan leaned slightly toward Passeau and said, “My people seem to be working well with your investigators. I think they’ll find the reason for the accident in a week or so.”

  “More like a month or two, I’d say,” Passeau replied.

  Dan said nothing, but grumbled to himself. More like six months, if I don’t light a fire under this bureaucrat.

  Passeau asked, “Do you intend to build another spaceplane?”

  “We’ve already got one nearly finished. It’s over in the next hangar, if you want to see it.”

  “You realize, of course, that you will not be permitted to fly it until our investigation into the crash is concluded.”

  Dan leaned back in his chair. “It could take a year to finish all the paperwork.”