The Precipice Read online

  They ducked through the open hatch and into the cramped chamber. Stavenger climbed the two steps and looked out, grinning. Dan squeezed in beside him, nearly bumping his head on the curving glassteel.

  “I used to sneak out here when I was a kid to watch the liftoffs and landings,” Stavenger said, grinning. “I still get a kick out of it.”

  Dan made a polite mumble.

  “I mean, we spend almost our whole lives indoors, underground,” Stavenger went on. “It’s good to see the outside now and then.”

  “As long as the glass doesn’t crack.”

  “That’s what the safety hatches are for.”

  Daii said, “But you’ve got to get through them fast, before they shut themselves.”

  Stavenger laughed. “True enough.”

  They watched shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped blister, listening to the flight controllers’ crisp voices clicking off the countdown. Stavenger seemed as excited as a child; Dan envied him. A little tractor rolled noiselessly across the crater floor to the launch pad. Pancho’s spacesuited figure jumped from it in dreamlike lunar slow-motion, stirring up a lazy puff of gray dust. Then she climbed up the ladder and sealed herself into the booster’s one-person crew module.

  “This is just an assembly mission, isn’t it?” Stavenger asked.

  “Right,” said Dan. “She not a pilot on this flight, just baby-sitting the robots.”

  Strangely enough, Dan felt his palms going clammy as the countdown neared its final moments. Relax, he told himself silently. There’s nothing to this.

  Still, his heart began to thump faster.

  “… three… two… one… ignition,” said the automated countdown voice.

  The spacecraft leaped off the launch pad in a cloud of smoke and gritty dust that evaporated almost as soon as it formed. One instant the craft was sitting on the concrete, the next it was gone.

  “We have liftoff,” said one of the human controllers in the time-honored tradition. “All systems in the green.”

  Pancho’s voice came through the speaker. “Copy all systems green. Orbital insertion burn in ten seconds.”

  It was all quite routine. Still, Dan didn’t relax until Pancho announced, “On the money, guys! Fm cruisin’ along with the other modules.* Time to go to work.”

  A controller’s voice replied, “Rendezvous complete. Initiate assembly procedure.”

  Dan huffed. “She sounds more like a robot than a human being.”

  Just then the controller added, “Okay, Pancho. I’ll see you at the Pelican tomorrow night.”

  Stavenger grinned at Dan. “Maybe she drinks lubricating oil.”

  They walked through the corridor to the tunnel that led back to Selene. As they climbed onto one of the automated carts that plied the kilometer-long tunnel, Stavenger asked, “How soon will you be ready for your flight to the Belt?”

  “We’ve programmed a month of uncrewed flight tests and demo flights for IAA certification. Once we get the nod from the bureaucrats we’ll be ready to go.”

  “Could your craft reach Jupiter?”

  Surprised at the question, Dan replied, “In theory. But we won’t be carrying enough propellant or supplies for that Jupiter’s almost twice as far as the Belt.”

  “I know,” Stavenger murmured.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Stavenger hesitated. The cart trundled along the blank-walled tunnel smoothly, almost silently, its electrical motor purring softly. At last Stavenger answered, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to go to Jupiter… or maybe one of the other gas giants.”

  Dan saw where he was heading. “Fusion fuels.”

  “Jupiter’s atmosphere is rich in hydrogen and helium isotopes.”

  “Kris Cardenas mentioned that to me,” Dan remembered.

  “She and I have been talking about it. Fusion fuels could be a major trade commodity for Selene. And very profitable for Starpower, Ltd.”

  “Mining asteroids is a lot easier than scooping gases from Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

  “Yes,” Stavenger admitted, “but your idea of moving large segments of Earth’s industry off the planet is only part of the solution to the greenhouse warming, Dan.”

  “I know, but it’s a big part.”

  “The other half is to wean them off fossil fuel burning. They’ve got to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere if they’re going to have any chance of stopping the global warming.”

  “And fusion is a way to do that,” Dan muttered.

  “It’s the only way,” Stavenger said firmly. “Your solar power satellites can provide only a small fraction of the energy that Earth needs. Fusion can take over the entire load.”

  “If we can bring in enough helium-three.”

  “There are other fusion processes that could be even more efficient than burning deuterium with helium-three. But they all depend on isotopes that are vanishingly rare on Earth.”

  “But plentiful on Jupiter,” Dan said.

  “That’s right.”

  Dan nodded, thinking, He’s right. Fusion could be the answer. If we could replace all the fossil-fueled electricity-generating plants on Earth with fusion plants we could cut down the greenhouse emissions to almost nothing. Fusion power plants could generate the electricity for electric cars. That’d eliminate another big greenhouse source.

  He looked at Stavenger with new respect. Here’s a man who’s exiled from Earth, yet he wants to help them. And he sees farther than I do.

  “Okay,” he said. “After the flight to the Belt, we make a run out to Jupiter. I’ll start the planning process right away.”

  “Good,” said Stavenger. Then he added, “Will this be a Starpower project or will you keep it for Astro Corporation?”

  For a moment Dan was dumbstruck. When he found his voice, it was a shocked whisper. “You want to cut out Humphries?”

  “He’s maneuvering to get a stranglehold on asteroidal resources,” Stavenger said, as cold as steel. “I don’t think it would be wise to let him control fusion fuels as well.”

  By all the gods that ever were, Dan thought, this guy is ready to go to war with Humphries.

  BOARD MEETING

  The filters in his nostrils were giving Dan a headache; they felt as big as shotgun shells. He had come back to Earth reluctantly for this quarterly meeting of his board of directors. Dan always felt he could run Astro Manufacturing just fine if the double-damned board would simply stay out of his way. But they always had to poke their noses into the corporation’s operations, complaining about this, asking about that, insisting that he follow every crack-brained suggestion they came up with.

  It was all so unnecessary. Dan held a controlling interest of the corporation’s outstanding stock; not an absolute majority of the shares, but enough to outvote the other board members if he had to. The board could not throw him out of his seat as corporate president and chief executive officer. All they could do was nibble away, waste his time, drive up his blood pressure.

  To top it off, now Martin Humphries had joined the board, smiling, making friends, chatting up the other members as they milled around the sideboard scarfing up drinks and tea sandwiches before sitting in their places at the long conference table. Humphries was out to get an absolute majority, that was as clear to Dan as a gun aimed at his head.

  Through the sweeping window that ran the length of the board room Dan could see the surging waters of the Caribbean sparkling in the morning sun. The sea looked calm, yet Dan knew it was inching ever higher, encroaching on the land, patiently, inexorably. Humphries kept his back to the window, deep in intense discussion with a trio of elderly directors.

  Dan had flown back to La Guaira specifically for this meeting. He could have stayed in Selene and chaired the meeting electronically, but that three-second lag would have driven him crazy. He appreciated how Kris Cardenas felt, dealing from the Moon every day with Duncan and his team in Scotland.

  Dan stood at one end of the sideboard, benea
th the big framed photograph of Astro’s first solar-power satellite, glinting in the harsh sunlight of space against the deep black background of infinity. He sipped en his usual aperitif glass of Amontillado, speaking as pleasantly as he could manage with the people closest to him. Fourteen men and women, most of the men either gray or bald, most of the women looking youthful, thanks to rejuvenation treatments. Funny, he thought: the women are taking rejuve therapy but the men are holding back from it. I am myself, he realized. The ultimate machismo stupidity. What’s wrong with delaying your physical deterioration? It’s not like a face-lift; you actually reverse the aging of your body’s cells.

  “Dan, could I speak to you for a moment?” asked Harriett O’Banian. She’d been on the board for more than ten years, ever since Dan had bought out her small solar-cell production company.

  “Sure, Hattie,” he said, walking her slowly to the far corner of the big conference room. “What’s on your mind?”

  Hattie O’Banian was a trim-looking redhead who had consummated her buyout by Astro Manufacturing with a month-long affair with Dan. It had been fun for them both, and she’d been adult enough to walk away from it once she realized that no matter who shared his bed, Dan Randolph was in love with former President Jane Scanwell.

  Glancing over her shoulder to make certain no one was within eavesdropping range, O’Banian half-whispered, “I’ve been offered a damned good price for my Astro shares. So have half a dozen other board members.”

  Dan’s eyes flicked to Humphries, at the other end of the room, still chatting with the directors gathered around him.

  “Who made the offer?” he asked.

  “A straw man. Humphries is the real buyer.”

  “I figured.”

  “The trouble is, Dan, that’s it’s a damned good offer. Five points above the market price.”

  “He’s gone up to five, has he?” Dan muttered.

  “With the stock in free-fall the way it is, the offer is awfully tempting.”

  “Yep, I can see that.”

  She looked up at him and Dan realized that her emerald green eyes, which could be so full of delight and mischief, were dead serious now.

  “He can buy up enough stock to outvote you,” O’Banian said.

  “That’s what he’s trying to do, all right.”

  “Dan, unless you’re going to pull some rabbit out of your hat at the meeting today, half your board is going to cash out.”

  Dan tried to grin. It came out more as a grimace. “Thanks for the warning, Hattie. I’ll see what kind of rabbits I’ve got for you.”

  “Good luck, Dan.”

  He went to the head of the conference table, tapped the computer stylus against the stainless steel water tumbler there, and called the meeting to order. The directors took their seats; before he sat down, Humphries complained of the glare from the window and asked that the curtains be closed.

  The agenda was brief. The treasurer’s report was gloomy. Income from the company’s final solar-power satellite construction project was tailing off as the project neared completion.

  “What about the bonus for finishing the job ahead of schedule?” asked a florid-faced graybeard. Dan thought of him as Santa Claus with hypertension.

  “That won’t be paid until the sunsat is beaming power to the ground,” said the treasurer.

  “Still, it’s a sizeable amount of money.”

  “It’ll keep us afloat for several months,” Dan said, waving the treasurer to silence.

  “Then what?”

  “Then we have to live off the income from existing operations. We have no new construction projects.”

  “That’s the last of the power satellites?” asked the board member that Dan had privately nicknamed Bug Eyes. His eyes were even wider than usual, as if this was the first time he’d heard the bad news.

  Dan clasped his hands as he answered carefully, “Although there are several orbital slots still available to accommodate solar power satellites, the GEC refuses to authorize any new construction.”

  “It’s those damned Chinese,” growled one of the older men.

  “China is not alone in this,” said a plump oriental woman sitting halfway down the table. Dan’s name for her was Mama-San. “Many nations prefer to build power stations on their own ground rather than buy electrical power from space.”

  “Even though the price for that electricity is more than twice as high as our price,” Dan pointed out. “And even higher, if you count the costs of sequestering their greenhouse gas emissions.”

  “Their governments subsidize the greenhouse amelioration,” the treasurer pointed out.

  “The people still have to pay for it, one way or another.”

  “What about beaming power from the Moon?”

  “You wouldn’t need the GEC to allocate any orbital slots for that, by god!” Santa Claus thumped the table with his fist.

  “It’s a possibility,” Dan admitted, “and we’ve talked about it with the officials of Selene—”

  “Selene doesn’t own the whole damned Moon! Go off and build solar energy farms in the Ocean of Storms. Cover the whole expanse with solar cells, for god’s sake!”

  “We’ve looked into it,” Dan said.

  “And?”

  “The problem is that no matter where the electricity is generated, it’s got to be beamed to the ground here on Earth.”

  “We know that!”

  Holding on to his temper, Dan went on, “The Pan-Asia bloc doesn’t want to import energy, whether it comes from orbit or the Moon or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They won’t allow us to build receiving stations on their territory. The Europeans have gone along with them and, between the two blocs, they have the GEC all wrapped up.”

  “How can we generate electricity from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud?” asked Bug Eyes. “That’s quite a long distance away, isn’t it?”

  Give me strength, Dan prayed silently.

  He got them through the various departmental reports at last, fielding what seemed like seventeen thousand questions and suggestions—most of them pointless, several absolutely inane—and went on to new business.

  “At least here I have something positive to report,” Dan said, smiling genuinely. “Our prototype fusion drive has been assembled in lunar orbit and test-flown successfully.”

  “You are ready to go to the Asteroid Belt?” asked Mama-San.

  “As soon as we get the required crew-rating from the IAA.”

  From the far end of the table, Humphries spoke up. “We should have IAA approval in two to three weeks, barring any unforeseen setbacks.”

  “Setbacks?”

  “An accident,” Humphries said lightly. “Failure of the equipment, that sort of thing.”

  Or an IAA inspector on the take, Dan added silently. It happened only rarely, but it happened.

  “How much is this mission to the asteroids costing us?” asked the sprightly, dapper Swiss gentleman whom Dan had dubbed The Banker.

  “The mission is being fully funded by Starpower, Limited,” Dan replied.

  “Astro owns one-third of Starpower,” Humphries pointed out.

  “And you own the rest?” The Banker asked.

  “No, Humphries Space Systems owns a third, and the other third is owned by Selene.”

  “How can a city own part of a corporation?”

  “All the details are in the reports before you,” Dan said, tapping his stylus against the computer screen built into the tabletop.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll explain it after the meeting,” Humphries said, full of graciousness.

  The Banker nodded but still looked unsatisfied.

  “The point is,” Dan told them, “that once this flight to the Asteroid Belt is accomplished, Astro’s stock is going to rise. We’ll have taken the first step in opening up a resource base that’s enormous—far bigger than all the mining operations on Earth.”

  “I can see that Starpower’s stock will go up,” Santa Cl
aus challenged.

  “Astro’s will, too,” Dan said. “Because we have the corner on building the fusion engines.”

  “Not Humphries Space Systems?” They all turned to Humphries.

  He smiled gently, knowingly. “No, this is going to be Astro’s product. My corporation is merely supplying the capital, the funding.”

  Dan thought that Humphries looked like a cat eyeing a helpless canary.

  SELENE

  “So there you have it,” Dan said to the IAA inspector. “The system performs as designed.”

  They were sitting in Starpower, Ltd.’s one and only conference room, a tiny cubicle with an oval table that felt crowded even though only five people were sitting around it The display screens on all four smartwalls showed data from the test flights of the fusion drive. The first half-dozen flights had been run remotely from the control center underground in Armstrong spaceport The second string of six flights had been piloted by Pancho and Amanda.

  Pointing to the screens, Dan said, “We’ve demonstrated acceleration, thrust, specific impulse, controllability, shutdown and restart… every facet of the full test envelope.”

  The inspector nodded solemnly. He was a young man with Nordic fair skin and pale eyes, dressed rather somberly in a plain gray pullover shirt and darker slacks. His hair was a thick dirty-blond mop that he wore long, almost down to his shoulders. Despite his conservative outfit, though, he wore several small silver earrings, silver rings on his fingers, a silver bracelet on his right wrist, and a silver chain around his neck. There was a pendant of some sort hanging from the chain but most of it was hidden beneath his shirt.

  Pancho and Amanda sat flanking Dan; Humphries was on the other side of the small oval table, next to the inspector. For some long moments there was silence in the conference room. Dan could hear the background hum of the electrical equipment and the soft breath of the air circulation fans.

  At last, Dan asked, “Well, what do you think, Mr. Green-leaf?”

  “Dr. Greenleaf,” the IAA inspector replied. “I have a doctorate in sociology.”

  Dan felt his brows hike up. Why would the IAA send a sociologist to check out a new spacecraft propulsion system? And why this particular little prig of a sociologist?