Power Failure Page 4

  Money is the root of all evil, Jake repeated to himself as he stared blearily at the numbers on his computer screen. And the federal government is the root of all money, just about. Private funding just doesn’t come up with this kind of money.

  It’ll have to be tax dollars.

  His phone jangled.

  Kevin O’Donnell’s narrow-eyed face took form on the phone’s screen. “Meeting in the senator’s office at three o’clock.” Before Jake could ask, the staff chief added, “To meet the campaign manager.”

  The screen went blank. Jake glanced at the digital clock on his desk: 1:48. At least I’ll have time to wash up and look presentable, he thought. Maybe even grab a sandwich for lunch.

  At 2:57 Jake started across the suite to the senator’s office. The place buzzed with expectant excitement. Even the lowliest staffers seemed to realize that something important was about to unfold.

  Senator Tomlinson’s new executive assistant, Francine, was sitting up straighter than normal at her desk, like a groupie expecting a celebrity to appear. She was slim and pretty enough to be a photographer’s model, with curly red hair and a bouncy disposition. Smartly dressed in a tailored white blouse and light pink sweater, she smiled brightly at Jake as she said, “Go right in, Dr. Ross. They’re expecting you.”

  The senator’s inner office was already crowded with staff people sitting around the big circular conference table in the far corner, by the windows that looked out at the Capitol’s dome. Jake recognized them all, of course, except for the man sitting at Tomlinson’s right: fiftyish, good shoulders, wearing a dark gray suit, silvery hair long enough to tickle his collar, a smile that radiated self-assurance and calm competence.

  Seeing only one chair still empty, Jake realized that he was the last one to arrive for the meeting.

  Tomlinson arched a brow as Jake sat down. With a wry smile he said, “Now that everyone’s here, we can begin.” Turning to the stranger, he announced, “People, this is Patrick Lovett, who has agreed to manage my campaign for the presidency.”

  Then Tomlinson introduced the people around the table, starting with Earl Reynolds and ending with Kevin O’Donnell.

  Lovett nodded at O’Donnell. “I’ve known Kevin for quite some years. Good to work with you at last, Kev.”

  O’Donnell grinned almost boyishly, and Jake realized that he must be the one who had recommended Lovett to the senator.

  Looking around the table, Lovett said, “We have a lot of work ahead of us. I’ll try to stay out of your way so you can do your jobs without interference, but once we’ve set up a campaign headquarters and hired some staff, I’m afraid we’re going to have to pester you from time to time.”

  O’Donnell said, “That’s okay, Pat. No problem.”

  “Good.”

  The meeting was brief and to the point. Lovett’s job was to get the senator elected to the White House. “That’s going to take lots of money, lots of elbow grease, and—”

  Reynolds interrupted with a sonorous, “Blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”

  Lovett smiled patiently. “Not so much blood or tears, I hope. But plenty of toil and sweat.”

  Reynolds said, “Oh, sure. I was just—”

  “I’ll have to put together a media relations staff, Earl. Can I count on your help on that?”

  With a glance at the senator, Reynolds said, “Sure. Of course.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  Jake decided he liked Patrick Lovett.

  As the meeting broke up and people filed toward the door, Tomlinson called, “Jake, can you stay for just a few minutes more?”

  Surprised, Jake replied, “Of course.”

  Once everyone except the senator, Lovett, O’Donnell, and Jake had left the office, Tomlinson headed back for his desk and gestured at the comfortable deep bottle-green leather chairs arrayed in front of it.

  “Jake here is working on the space issue,” said the senator, as he pulled off his jacket and draped it on the back of his desk chair.

  Lovett’s brows rose a bare centimeter. “Space is an issue?”

  “It should be,” Tomlinson said.

  Raising his eyebrows even a bit higher, Lovett said, “The way I see it, this campaign is going to hinge on three major issues: the economy, terrorism, and foreign relations.”

  O’Donnell said, “The president’s getting a big break with Putin on his last legs.”

  “There’s already talk of a summit meeting,” said Tomlinson.

  “She’s always been lucky,” Lovett agreed. “Good thing she’s finishing her second term. You won’t have to run against her.”

  “Against her legacy, though,” O’Donnell said.

  With a shake of his head, Tomlinson objected, “Her legacy includes a shameful neglect of the space program.”

  Smiling patiently, Lovett said, “Please tell me why that’s important.”

  Tomlinson pointed a finger at Jake, like a pistol.

  Trying to put his thoughts in order, Jake said, “We should be making space useful to the voter, produce jobs, new industries, make an impact on the economy.”

  Lovett’s squarish face took on an expression of curiosity. “Tell me more.”

  Jake saw that Senator Tomlinson wasn’t smiling. He looked interested, engaged, serious. O’Donnell seemed unreceptive, uninterested, almost bored.

  Jake realized this was a test. Lovett could squash his ideas with a single frown.

  Okay, Jake said to himself. Here goes. “We go back to the Moon, build a permanent base there, and begin to use the Moon as a resource center.”

  “Resource center?” Lovett asked. “For what? Scientific research?”

  Jake replied, “Scientific research, yes. But more than that. Industrial operations. Mine the Moon’s natural resources and use them to reduce the cost of space operations.”

  His calm gray eyes totally focused on Jake, Lovett asked, “How are you going to accomplish that?”

  “For one thing, about half the Moon’s surface layer—its regolith—is composed of oxygen. Most of what we launch into space, pound for pound, is oxygen. We can produce oxygen from the Moon and ship it down to Earth orbit twenty times cheaper than lifting the same tonnage of oxygen from Earth.”

  “Once you’ve got a facility in place.”

  “Yes, of course,” Jake said.

  “And what else?” Lovett probed.

  “Aluminum, silicon, magnesium, titanium. If we ever get practical nuclear fusion generators, they can be fueled with helium-three from the Moon.”

  “That’s pretty far in the future, isn’t it?”

  “Solar power satellites aren’t,” Jake said. “We could build them now, and build them twenty times cheaper by using lunar raw materials.”

  “Why do we need solar power satellites? People put solar panels on their roofs, don’t they? My condominium building went solar a couple of years ago.”

  Jake answered, “Solar power satellites can deliver gigawatts of power to the ground. Base load electrical power, the kind you need to run factories and whole cities. Cleanly, with no pollution. And cheaply, once the satellites go into operation. Rooftop solar can’t do that.”

  Lovett nodded slowly. “So I’ve heard. But first you have to build a considerable mining base on the Moon.”

  “And an electric catapult for shooting payloads back to Earth orbit,” Jake added.

  “That would be expensive.”

  He says it gently, Jake thought, but he still says it.

  “Yes, it would be expensive. It would be an investment that would pay off a hundredfold, though. Or more.”

  Lovett glanced at Tomlinson. “What do you think of all this, Senator?”

  “I think it’s exciting. I think we could get the voters excited about it.”

  “Until they realize how much it would cost.”

  There it is, Jake thought. The shot through the heart.

  Lovett reached into his jacket’s inside pocket and pulled out a calling card. “Jak
e, I’m writing down the name and number of a man you should talk to.”

  “A psychiatrist?” Jake asked, weakly.

  No one laughed.

  “No,” Lovett said, handing Jake the card. “He’s an economist. At Princeton. If anybody can figure out a way of funding the program you’re talking about, it’s him.”

  Jake looked down at the name Lovett had scrawled on the back of the card: Zacharias Karamondis.

  Zacharias Karamondis

  Once he started looking up Zacharias Karamondis in the various Internet sources, Jake learned two things about the economist right away. He wasn’t at Princeton University itself but at the Institute for Advanced Study, which was located a couple of miles from the school’s campus. Jake goggled at the fact. Einstein took up residence there when he fled the Nazis and came to America. John von Neumann. Wolfgang Pauli. Robert Oppenheimer. The Institute at Princeton was one of the world’s most prestigious intellectual centers.

  The second thing Jake found was that Karamondis did not travel, not even to meet a United States senator.

  “Dr. Karamondis hasn’t left this neighborhood since I’ve been here,” said the smooth-voiced executive assistant who answered Jake’s phone call. “If you want to speak with him, you’ll have to come here.”

  Jake had no objections to that. He had always wanted to see the Institute for Advanced Study. In his mind it was the ultimate temple of learning, a refuge where the best minds in the world could pursue knowledge without being bothered by the pressures of the outside world.

  “It’s like going on a holy pilgrimage,” he said to Tami that evening, excitedly.

  She grinned back at him. “Say hello to Zeus and the rest of the gang for me.”

  The reality was somewhat different. The Institute’s buildings were practical, not monumental. The place looked more like a suburban office complex than a set of temples.

  And Zacharias Karamondis didn’t resemble Zeus at all.

  “Call me Zach,” he said affably as Jake stepped into his office. The smooth-voiced executive assistant Jake had talked with on the phone quietly closed the door behind him.

  Zacharias Karamondis was nearing seventy-five years of age, Jake knew from checking his biographic sketch. His hair was still dark, though, a thinning and unruly patch that looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb in at least a week. The man was fat, short, and rotund, wearing a wrinkled, rumpled pair of hideous golf slacks and an equally baggy pinkish short-sleeved shirt.

  He was standing at his desk, which was cluttered with papers. A computer rested on the table behind the desk, equally strewn with journals, papers, and dog-eared books. One wall of the office was entirely bookshelves, crammed to overflowing.

  Karamondis himself was fleshy-faced, his eyes barely slits set into puffy cheeks. Jake thought he looked like a good candidate for a heart attack.

  Yet he was smiling warmly as he gestured to the only empty chair in front of the desk. It was a straight-backed wooden chair, though, not comfortable at all. There were two more to one side, both piled with papers.

  As Jake sat down, the executive assistant reentered the office, carrying a tray bearing a teapot and a pair of cups.

  “Would you prefer coffee?” she asked. Jake realized that she was quite attractive: old enough so that her hair was turning gray, but still trim of figure and bright of eye.

  “A cold drink, if you have it,” he replied.

  “Coke? Club soda?”

  “Club soda, please.”

  She deftly cleared a space on the desk with one hand, then gently deposited the tray there and left the office.

  Karamondis sat heavily in his squeaking desk chair and reached for a half-eaten sandwich resting on a crumb-littered plate among the piles of papers on the desk. Jake noticed that the front of his hideous shirt was generously sprinkled with more crumbs.

  His appearance didn’t seem to bother Karamondis at all. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, almost jovially. “The fat guy’s eating gyros between meals.”

  Jake couldn’t think of a reply, so he stayed silent. Karamondis’s accent was decidedly not Greek. If anything, Jake thought he heard the Bronx in the man’s overly loud tones.

  “I’ve got a heart problem,” he explained. “My doctor told me to eat several little meals during the day, instead of a few big ones.” He bit off a chunk of the sandwich, then went on as he munched away, “So I eat six or seven times a day instead of three.”

  “I see,” Jake said weakly.

  Karamondis gulped down his mouthful, then placed the plate atop a teetering mountain of papers. He started to reach for the tea just as his executive assistant returned to hand Jake an insulated mug of club soda that bore a blue and white New York Yankees logo.

  Karamondis lost interest in the tea. He leaned back in his groaning swivel chair and, clasping his hands over his ample belly, fixed Jake with a stern stare. “So … Patsy Lovett says you need my advice. What about?”

  Somewhat haltingly, Jake started to explain his work on the space program. Karamondis nodded in all the right places.

  “It makes sense. After all, we spent a hundred billion in twenty-first century dollars to get to the Moon. Why let it go to waste, if there are good economic reasons to develop an industrial base there?”

  Feeling heartened, Jake said, “The problem is that the cost—”

  “The problem with everything is the cost.”

  “The program could cost as much as a hundred billion over ten years.”

  “Pah! The petroleum industry spends that much on drilling dry holes every ten years. More!”

  “But the voters, the taxpayers—”

  “Why should they foot the bill?” Karamondis asked, almost belligerently.

  “Who else?”

  “Private capital! Why is it those dunces in Washington can’t see farther than the ends of their noses? Every time they want to start a new program, they think that only tax money can finance it. Phooey!”

  Jake blinked at him.

  Karamondis leaned both his heavy forearms on his desk, scattering papers in every direction and threatening to topple the teapot.

  “Let me ask you a question.” Without waiting for a response from Jake, the economist asked, “How were the big power dams in the American West financed?”

  “Power dams?”

  “You know, Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee, Bonneville, the other dams that generate electricity.”

  Jake stared at him. What’s this got to do with solar power satellites? he asked himself.

  Karamondis eased back in his chair. “Since you obviously don’t know, I will tell you.

  “Back in the early years of the twentieth century, many people in the West—in California, Arizona, Washington State, places like that—they wanted to build dams that would control their major rivers, irrigate their dry farmlands, and generate electricity. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. But they had problems. Building such dams was damned expensive.” Karamondis chuckled delightedly at his pun. Then, serious again, “Besides, most of the projects involved more than one state. There were questions about who had the rights to the water. And profits from the dams would be a long time coming. No single state could afford to finance such a project and private investors saw all outgo and a long time before any income.”

  “So they went to the federal government,” Jake guessed.

  “Wrong. In those days the federal budget was small and tight. It would be decades before FDR came in with his tax-and-spend policies and opened up the federal treasury for everything in sight.”

  “Where’d the money come from, then?”

  Karamondis grinned knowingly. “From a simple yet ingenious financing scheme. Simply ingenious, you might say.” Again he laughed. This time Jake smiled back at him.

  His grin widening, Karamondis explained, “A few pretty smart financial types figured that if the federal government offered to back long-term, low-interest loans fo
r these projects, private investors would pony up the money for the dams.”

  “But I thought private investors steered clear of the projects.”

  “At first they did. But with Washington backing the loans, guaranteeing that the investors wouldn’t lose their money no matter what, all the millions that were needed came out of the pockets of private financiers. Not a nickel of money came from the US Treasury.”

  It took a few moments for Jake to absorb what Karamondis was telling him. “No tax money was spent.”

  “Not a penny of tax money. The dams were built on private capital. All that Washington provided was the assurance that the investors would not lose the money they put up.”

  “And that’s how the dams got built.”

  Karamondis nodded hard enough to make his cheeks waddle. “The loans paid out in fifty years, if I remember correctly. By then the dams had helped to power the Southwest and Northwest. Helped to build Phoenix and Las Vegas. Tamed the Columbia River. Delivered the electricity for the Manhattan Project.”

  “The atomic bomb project,” Jake said, feeling awed.

  “So you see,” Karamondis said, spreading his flabby arms, “you can build your base on the Moon and everything else you want without spending a penny of the taxpayers’ money.”

  “No federal financing.”

  “Merely a federal guarantee to back long-term, low-interest loans. That will open up the spigots on Wall Street.”

  “Would it really work?” Jake wondered.

  “It already has!” Karamondis boomed.

  Senator Tomlinson’s Office

  “But could it work?” Senator Tomlinson asked.

  “It already has,” Jake said, echoing Karamondis’s words.

  The senator’s private office had changed in the nearly six years since he’d arrived in Washington. Back then the room had been decorated in soft, neutral tones of beige and soft blue, with light walnut paneling and pearl gray drapes. Over the years the décor had become bolder: the drapes were now more silvery, the carpeting royal blue, the senator’s desk wider, handsomely curved, more regally imposing.