The Precipice (7 page)

The redhead looked Pancho over from head to toe, grinned, and flounced off.

Visibly trying to contain his fury, Humphries said, “I'm sorry for the interruption.”

Pancho shrugged. So I'm not invited for dinner, she realized. Should've known.

“Is that your wife?” she asked coolly.

“No.”

“You are married, aren't you?”

“Twice.”

“Are you married
now
?”

“Legally, yes. Our lawyers are working out a divorce settlement.”

Pancho looked straight into his icy gray eyes. The anger was still there, but he was controlling it now. He seemed deadly
calm.

“Okay,” she said, “let's finish up this business meeting so y'all can get down to dinner.”

Humphries picked up his glass again, drained it, and placed it carefully back on the bar. Looking up at Pancho, he said, “All
right. I want to hire you.”

“I already have a job,” she said.

“As a pilot for Astro Manufacturing, I know. You've been working for them for more than six years.”

“So?”

“You won't have to quit Astro. In fact, I want you to stay with them. The task I have in mind for you requires that you keep
your position with Astro.”

Pancho understood immediately. “You want me to spy on them.”

“That's putting it rather crudely,” Humphries said, his eyes shifting away from her and then back again. “But, yes, I need
a certain amount of industrial espionage done, and you are ideally placed to do it.”

Pancho didn't think twice. “How much money are we talkin' about here?”

D
an Randloph felt a wave of giddiness wash over him as he stood at his hotel window and looked down into the rugged gorge of
the Jucar River.

This is stupid, he told himself. You've been in high-rises a lot taller than this. You've been on top of rocket launch towers.
You've been to the Grand Canyon, you've done EVA work in orbit, for god's sake, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth
without even an umbilical cord to hold onto.

Yet he felt shaky, slightly light-headed, as he stood by the window. It's not the height, he told himself. For a scary moment
he thought it was one of the woozy symptoms of radiation sickness again. But then he realized that it was only because this
hotel was hanging over the lip of the gorge, six stories down from the edge.

The old city of Cuenca had been built in medieval times along the rim of the deep, vertiginous chasm. From the street, the
hotel seemed to be a one-story building, as did all
the buildings along the narrow way. Inside, though, it went down and down, narrow stairways and long windows that looked out
into the canyon cut by the river so far below.

Turning from the window, Dan went to the bed and unzipped his travel bag. He was here in the heart of Spain to find the answer
to the world's overwhelming problem, the key to unlock the wealth of the solar system. Like a knight on a quest, he told himself,
with a sardonic shake of his head. Seeking the holy grail.

Like a tired old man who's pushing himself because he doesn't have anything else left in his life, sneered a bitter voice
in his head.

The flight in from Madrid had turned his thoughts to old tales of knighthood and chivalrous quests. The Clippership rocket
flight from La Guaira had taken only twenty-five minutes to cross the Atlantic, but there was nothing to see, no portholes
in the craft's stout body and the video views flashing across the screen at his seat might as well have been from an astronomy
lecture. The flight from Madrid to Cuenca, though, had been in an old-fashioned tiltrotor, chugging and rattling and clattering
across a landscape that was old when Hannibal had led armies through it.

Don Quixote rode across those brown hills, Dan had told himself. El Cid battled the Moors here.

He snorted disdainfully as he pulled his shaving kit from the travel bag. Now I'm going to see if we can win the fight against
a giant bigger than any windmill that old Don Quixote tackled.

The phone buzzed. Dan snapped his fingers, then realized that the hotel phone wasn't programmed for sound recognition. He
leaned across the bed and stabbed at the ON button.

“Mr. Randolph?”

The face Dan saw in the palm-sized phone screen looked almost Mephistopholean: thick black hair that came to a point almost
touching his thick black brows; a narrow veeshaped
face with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin; coal-black eyes that glittered slyly, as if the man knew things that no one
else knew. A small black goatee.

“Yes,” Dan answered. “And you are… ?”

“Lyall Duncan. I've come to take you to the test site,” said the caller, in a decidedly Highland accent.

Dan puffed out a breath. They certainly aren't wasting any time. I'm not even unpacked yet.

“Are you ready, sir?” Duncan asked.

Dan tossed his shaving kit back onto the bed. “Ready,” he said.

Duncan was short, rail-thin, and terribly earnest about his work. He talked incessantly as they drove in a dusty old Volkswagen
van out into the sun-drenched countryside, past scraggly checkerboards of farms and terraced hillsides, climbing constantly
toward the distant bare peaks of the Sierras. The land looked parched, poor, yet it had been under cultivation for thousands
of years. At least, Dan thought, it's far enough from the sea to be safe from flooding. But it looks as if it's turning into
a brown, dusty desert.

“… tried for many a year to get someone to look at our work,
anyone''
Duncan was saying. “The universities were too busy with their big reactor projects, all of them sucking on one government
teat or another. The private companies wouldn't even talk to us, not without some fancy university behind us.”

Dan nodded and tried to stay awake. The man's soft Scottish burr was hypnotic as they drove along the winding highway into
the hills. There were hardly any other cars on the road, and the hum of the tires on the blacktop was lulling Dan to sleep.
Electric motors don't make much noise, he told himself, trying to fight off the jet lag. He remembered that auto makers such
as GM and Toyota had tried to install sound systems that would simulate the
vroom
of a powerful gasoline engine, to attract the testosterone crowd. The GEC had nixed that; silent, efficient, clean electrical
cars had to
be presented as desirable, not as a weak second choice to muscle cars.

“… none of them wanted to see that a compact, lightweight,
disposable
fusion generator could work as well as the behemoths they were building,” Duncan droned on. “No one paid us any attention
until we caught the ear of Mr. Martin Humphries.”

Dan perked up at the mention of Humphries's name. “How did you reach him? He's pretty high up in the corporate food chain.”

Duncan smiled craftily. “Through a woman, how else? He came to Glasgow to give a speech. The anniversary of his father's endowment
of the new biology building, or something of that sort. He took a fancy to a certain young lady in our student body. She was
a biology major and had quite a body of her own.”

With a laugh, Dan said, “So she did the Delilah job for you.”

“One of the lads in our project knew her—in the biblical sense. He asked her if she'd help the cause of science.”

“And she agreed.”

“Willingly. ‘Tisn't every day a lass from Birmingham gets to sleep with a billionaire.”

“Oh, she was English?”

“Aye. We couldn't ask a Scottish lass to do such a thing.”

Both men were still laughing as the car pulled into the test site's parking lot.

It wasn't much of a site, Dan thought as he got out of the car. Just a flat, open area of bare dirt with a couple of tin sheds
to one side and a rickety-looking scaffolding beyond them. Rugged hills rose all around, and in the distance the Sierras shimmered
ghostlike in the heat haze. The sun felt hot and good on his shoulders. The sky was a perfect blue, virtually cloudless. Dan
inhaled a deep breath of clean mountain air; it was cool and sharp with a tang of pines that even got past his nose plugs.
Dan thought about taking them
out; it would be a relief to do without them. But he didn't remove them.

There were six people in the “office” shed, two of them women, all but one of them young, wearing shabby sweaters and slacks
or jeans that hadn't known a crease for years. Dan felt overdressed in his tan slacks and suede sports jacket One of the women
was tall, with long, lank blond hair that fell past her broad shoulders. She looked like a California surfer type to Dan.
Or maybe a Swede. The other was clearly Japanese or perhaps Korean: short and chunky, but when she smiled it lit up her whole
face.

They all looked eager, excited to have Dan Randolph himself here to see their work, yet Dan caught a whiff of fear among them.
Suppose it doesn't work today? Suppose something goes wrong? Suppose Randolph doesn't understand its value, its importance?
Dan had felt that undercurrent in research labs all around the world; even on the Moon.

The one older man looked professorial. He wore baggy tweed trousers and a matching vest, unbuttoned. His long face was framed
by a trim salt-and-pepper beard. Duncan introduced him as “Dr. Vertientes.”

“I am delighted to meet you, sir,” Dan said, automatically lapsing into Spanish as he took the man's hand.

Vertientes's brows rose with surprise. “You speak Spanish very well, sir.”

“My headquarters is in Venezuela.” Dan almost added that he'd once been married to a Venezuelan, but that had been too brief
and too painful to bring into the conversation.

“We are a multinational group here,” Vertientes said, switching to British English, overlaid with a Castilian accent. “We
speak English among ourselves.”

“Except when we curse,” said the Japanese woman.

Everyone laughed.

Much to Dan's surprise, Duncan was the leader of the little group. The tall, distinguished Vertientes turned out to be
the group's plasma physicist. Duncan was the propulsion engineer and the driving force among them.

“You know the principle of nuclear fusion,” the Scotsman said as he led the entire group out of the office shack and toward
the slightly larger shed that served as their laboratory.

Nodding, Dan said, “Four hydrogen atoms come together to form a helium atom and release energy.”

“Nuclei,” Duncan corrected. “Not atoms, their nuclei. The plasma is completely ionized.”

“Yep. Right.”

“Seven-tenths of one percent of the mass of the four original protons is converted into energy. The Sun and all the stars
have been running for billions of years on that seven-tenths of one percent.”

“As long as they're fusing hydrogen into helium,” Dan said. To show that he wasn't entirely unlettered, he added, “Later on
they start fusing helium into heavier elements.”

Duncan gave him a sidelong glance from beneath his deep black brows, then said, “Aye, but it's only hydrogen fusion that we're
interested in.”

“Aye,” Dan murmured.

The laboratory shed wasn't large, but the equipment in it seemed up-to-date. It looked more like a monitoring station to Dan's
practiced eye than a research laboratory. Beyond it was a bigger building that couldn't be seen from the parking lot. The
group trooped through the lab with only a perfunctory glance at its equipment, then went on to the other building.

“This is where the dirty work gets done,” Duncan said, with his devilish grin.

Dan nodded as he looked around. It was a construction shack, all right. Machine tools and an overhead crane running on heavy
steel tracks. The sharp tang of machine oil in the air, bits of wire and metal shavings littering the floor. Yes, they worked
in here.

“And out there,” Duncan said, pointing to a dust-caked window, “is the result.”

It didn't look terribly impressive. Even when they stepped outside and walked up to the scaffolding, all Dan could see was
a two-meter-wide metal sphere with a spaghetti factory of hoses and wires leading into it. The metal looked clean and shiny,
though.

Dan rapped on it with his knuckles. “Stainless steel?”

Nodding, Duncan said, “For the outside pressure vessel. The containment sphere is a beryllium alloy.”

“Beryllium?”

“The alloy is proprietary. We've applied for an international patent, but you know how long that takes.”

Dan agreed glumly, then asked, “Is this all there is to it?”

With a fierce grin, Duncan said, “The best things come in the smallest packages.”

They went back to the lab and, without a word, the six men and women took their stations along the bank of consoles that lined
two walls of the shed. There was an assortment of chairs and stools, no two of them alike, but no one sat down. Dan saw that
they were nervous, intense. All except Duncan, who looked calmly confident. He cocked a brow at Dan, like a gambler about
to shuffle cards from the bottom of the deck.

“Are you ready to see wee beastie in action?” Duncan asked.

Tired from traveling, Dan pulled a little wheeled typist's chair to the middle of the floor and sat on it. Folding his arms
across his chest, he nodded and said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

The others looked slightly puzzled, wondering who Grid-ley might be and what his significance was. Duncan, though, bobbed
his head and grinned as though he understood everything.

He turned to Vertientes and said softly, “Start it up, then.”

Dan heard a pump begin to chug and saw the readout
numbers on Vertientes's console start to climb. The other consoles came to life, display screens flickering on to show multi-colored
graphs or digital readouts.

“Pressure approaching optimum,” sang out the blonde. “Density on the curve.”