Ill Wind (3 page)

But Erin would never grow up to join these demonstrators at the Oilstar gate, and he felt unexplainably annoyed at the protesters for that.

He drove past the crowd without incident,
then
worked his way across the refinery grounds, driving past a wasteland of pipes and tanks, fractionating towers and steam, with huge oil-storage tanks riding the surrounding hills. The place looked like an Escher industrial nightmare, amplified by hissing noises and foul smells.

Eventually, he found himself by his office on the second floor of Oilstar’s research annex. Fumbling with his keys, he opened the door and went inside, ignoring the yellow telephone messages taped to his door. His office looked too clean, too neat. He had never taken the time to be tidy when he was swallowed up in work; now he did little else but rearrange his papers into neat piles.

A picture of Alex’s family sat on the desk, all four of them smiling, a frozen moment from the past. His own image faced him, wire-rimmed glasses and graying hair above a neat peppery beard; beside him sat Marcia, strong and slender. Jay, 21 years old, reddish hair cropped short since entering the Army, his sparse mustache all but invisible against his skin
;
petite Erin with strawberry-blond hair, striking dark eyebrows and flawless skin, a beauty that was lost on the high-school boys. Erin would have shattered hearts had she lived to enter college.

“About time, Alex!” Mitch Stone leaned on the
door frame
. “I’ve already set up a meeting for us tomorrow morning with Emma Branson and the other mucky mucks. We’ve got to move on this right away.”

At 28 and rising fast, Mitch concerned himself with dressing impeccably. He got his hair razor cut every other week, wore stylish clothes, even sported a tie in the
lab.
In public, Mitch toed the Oilstar party line and talked fast. He didn’t try to annoy Alex, but his skewed priorities, office bullpen politics, and his constant “emergencies” had drained away all of Alex’s respect for him. Alex remembered when he had been filled with so much ambition.

Mitch ticked off points on his fingers. “The engineering folks are getting lightering operations underway to pump the rest of the oil out of the cargo holds. The tides are playing hell with the wreck. Boat teams are rigging booms around the spill, but there are pleasure boats and protesters up the wazoo, maritime rubber-neckers in everyone’s way. Best estimates are that a quarter of a million barrels have already dumped into the Bay and it’s still gushing out.
Zoroaster
—”

Alex held up a hand to stop the other man. He noticed his fingers trembling. “Mitch, I don’t know what on Earth you’re talking about. Tell me what a
Zoroaster
is before you go on.”

Mitch goggled at him. “You mean you don’t know? Oh, come on!” Tugging on Alex’s sleeve, Mitch marched him down the carpeted halls into the lunchroom.

A sour, burnt smell drifted up from a puddle of coffee in the bottom of the pot. Washed coffee cups—no two alike—sat upended in wet spots on brown paper towels between the sink and microwave oven. The television was turned on and loud. Four people straddled uncomfortable plastic chairs at the wood-grain tables, watching CNN. Alex had not seen such rapt expressions on viewers’ faces since the coverage of the first Gulf War.

“Could be the biggest spill ever,” Mitch said. “Far bigger than the
Exxon Valdez
. Only this time it’s not up in Alaska, it’s right here in San Francisco Bay!”

From a helicopter, the TV camera looked down at the wreck of the
Oilstar Zoroaster
, its side ripped open by the southern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. A montage of shots, beginning with pictures at dawn, traced the growth of the spill during the day. Boats hovered on the edges of the slick.

Alex’s knees went weak, appalled at himself for belittling Mitch’s reaction, the protesters’ outrage. The sharp thorns of pain in his bones felt suddenly overwhelming.

The broadcast showed seagulls blanketed with tarry residue, floating corpses of sea otters. Crowds stood anxiously on Fisherman’s Wharf, staring out at the approaching oil. Alex’s breath quickened; his head ached, starting with a pressure in his temples that wouldn’t go away. The program played a long sequence of archival footage from the 1989
Exxon Valdez
disaster.

Mitch clapped a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “The bozos over at Admin Gardens are in a state of panic. They’re willing to try anything for some positive publicity. We can cash in on it if we get approval to release Prometheus to help the cleanup efforts!”

Mitch didn’t seem affected by the images on the television. He lowered his voice. “We’ll be heroes even if it doesn’t work!”

Alex shook off Mitch’s hand and stared at the oil spilling across the water, the thick liquid lapping against the shore. He remembered the times he and his son Jay had spent days hiking on the rocky headlands. Especially the time when Jay had told him he wanted to drop out of college and join the
army.
. . .

“What’s the matter, Alex?” Mitch frowned. “Don’t you see what an opportunity this is?” He pressed closer.

“An opportunity?” Alex said in a voice that came out as a low growl. Time and again, since the death of his family, he had shielded his emotions behind a wall of weariness and apathy; at rare times, though, the wall cracked to expose a furnace blazing inside. He had never been a violent man, but he had been walking on the thin ice of intensely charged emotions for months.

Alex flexed his right hand; the pain inside made his breath like ice knives, and Mitch stood just
too damned close
. Suddenly lashing out, he shoved Mitch backwards—not hard, but enough to knock the other man over a chair, sprawling to the floor.

“You’re right, Mitch,” Alex said, “but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it.”

Chapter 3

Spencer Lockwood shielded his eyes from the glaring sun. The wasteland around White Sands, New Mexico, looked more like the surface of the Moon than a restricted national preserve. Bleak gypsum sand stretched to the horizon, broken only by scrub brush, yucca plants, and lava rock. The rugged peaks of the Organ Mountains shimmered like a mirage. The heat made the dusty air smell like gunpowder.

Numerous rocket and
guided-missile
systems had been tested at the White Sands missile range in its half century of existence. Mountains in the east stood over Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated in 1945. To the north, the five-mile-long ramp of a prototype railgun launcher ran up Oscura Peak, where a month earlier it had accelerated its first test satellite to low Earth orbit.
History, plenty of history.

Spencer was determined to add not just a footnote to the story of White Sands; he was after an entire chapter.

For now he devoted his attention to the small metal antennas that dotted the compound. Thousands of whiplike microwave receivers blanketed a circular patch of desert two kilometers in diameter, making it look like a huge pincushion. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the “antenna farm.”

Spencer knelt by one of the frail-looking antennas and fingered the flexible wire.
Work for me today, baby
! He had cobbled the whole project together on a shoestring budget, and he dreaded that his experiment might fail because of a stupid glitch.
A preventable glitch.
Then the bureaucrats would shut down the whole circus.

“Hey, Spence!”

He jerked his head up. Surrounded by the small wire constructions, he seemed to be standing in the center of a field of metallic cornstalks. Shading his eyes, he saw a gangly woman wearing an Australian hat walk toward him. Rita Fellenstein was a technical whiz herself, but she had taken it upon herself to be a combination den mother and butt-kicker for the solar satellite group—including Spencer himself.

“It’s
gonna
work,” Rita said. “Stop hovering over it.”

“Just checking the connections one last time.” Spencer wiped his hands against his pants.

Rita stepped around the wires. “Well, don’t get all anal retentive about it. You’re starting to act like Nedermyer.”

“He could get you fired for a remark like that,” Spencer said.

“Fire a national lab employee? Get real. Come
on,
let’s get back to the command trailers. The reporters want to talk to you.”

Spencer felt a tug at his gut. “Uh, I’ve got to check this stuff.” It seemed that every time they got the array hooked up they lost contact with one of the antennas, usually due to a kangaroo rat gnawing through the cables.

“No you don’t need to check it. You’ve already done it. I’ve already done it. And the technicians have already done it. Now go talk to the newsies before first light comes down.”

“I just hate it when they ask stupid questions.” He realized he was not much sounding like a history-making visionary.

Rita put her hands on her narrow hips. “Well, Nedermyer doesn’t mind talking to the press. He’ll come across as an important Department of Energy watchdog over us brash young scientists. And if you don’t get back there, they’ll be quoting
him
instead of you. Do you want them to get a Washington beancounter’s view of the project?”

Spencer detected a smile beneath the shadow of her hat. “Okay, okay. I give up. He always tries to rain on my parade.”

Of all the bureaucrats who had visited the solar antenna farm, Lance Nedermyer was the most difficult for Spencer to understand. Nedermyer had built a fast-burning reputation during his younger days, with a promising future ahead of him in research. But a White House Fellowship lured him to the Washington political scene, and the spark of his scientific curiosity had fizzled. “Potomac fever” they called it. Nedermyer had thrown away his chance at doing real research in favor of gaining political influence.

Spencer started toward the battered U.S. Government truck at the periphery of the antenna farm. He stepped over the spaghetti web of wires on the ground, connecting hundreds of whiplike antennas. The setup didn’t have to look pretty to work—nor did it have to cost an arm and a leg. That was the beauty of it.

Spencer had to trot to keep up with Rita’s long-legged pace. “I lost track of time,” he said. “When’s the next flyover?”

Rita answered without checking her watch, still striding along. “Alpha One is due in forty minutes. It’s got a dwell time of five minutes, with Alpha Two and the rest of them right on its heels. It’ll be another twenty-four hours before the Seven Dwarfs are in place again.”

The “Seven Dwarfs,” a cluster of small solar-collection satellites, circled Earth more than 300 miles up, equally spaced over a segment of orbit like cars on a freight train. Spencer marveled at the simple concept. He couldn’t claim total credit for coming up with the idea, but he had been instrumental in getting the project off the ground.

The satellites converted raw solar energy into microwaves. Once the first satellite popped over the horizon, it would beam focused energy down onto the field of antennas, not unlike the millions of telephone conversations comsats already beamed to Earth. The key was to use a lot of little, low-orbiting satellites instead of a single big one.

Spencer had spent years fighting for his project, trying to convince uninterested politicians or military types the best way to tap the power of the sun. Low-efficiency passive solar arrays on Earth could generate only minimal power, enough to run a few local farms. Only by deploying enormous solar panels in space, then beaming the power through the atmosphere, would solar energy pay off in a way big enough to make a difference.

But other technical experts hawked their own ideas to the same committees; since the decision makers knew little or nothing about the subject, they were swayed by razzle-dazzle presentations and good public speakers rather than solid technical content.

Spencer’s test had finally come down to the wire, and today was the day he would blow the other guys out of the water. He hoped his smallsat program would be as simple in practice as he made it sound in his sales pitches.

Rita slammed the door of the old gray pickup,
then
roared across the rutted temporary roads. The infrequent New Mexican rain fell two inches at a time,
then
dried the ground hard as cement. Spencer tried to keep his head from hitting the roof of the truck as they bounced toward the cluster of buildings. He tried to talk, but his teeth clicked together as the truck jounced. He kept quiet until they reached the command center.

He brushed aside his usual revulsion at the substandard quarters the government had allotted his project. Maybe the TV reporters wouldn’t shoot too much footage of the facility itself. The “blockhouse” was a bank of three revamped 1960s-vintage trailers that had been used for various experiments at White Sands. A mesh of chickenwire completely surrounded the trailers, making the blockhouse into a giant Faraday cage, safe from stray microwave beams if the satellites missed their mark.

The rattling hum of portable air conditioners buzzed outside the white aluminum-siding walls. A fist of twisted fiber-optic wires ran from the distant microwave farm to a switchboard inside.

“Get your badge on, Spence,” Rita said. “Look nice for the newsies.”

He pulled his laminated badge out of his pocket and clipped it to his collar.
Awful I.D. photograph, on par with his driver’s license.
Brown hair that wouldn’t stay combed, blue eyes open a little too wide, prominent sunburn, and a thin face wearing an expression like he had just swallowed a grape whole. Spencer wondered if it was a requirement that photo identification had to be embarrassing.