Powersat

Seattle, Washington

It was drizzling again, after a cheerfully bright sunny morning. Rick Chatham looked out the rain-spattered windows and wished he were back in Arizona, where rain was as rare as sunshine here in Seattle. The house he was staying in looked out over the working harbor, where freighters from China and Japan unloaded their cargoes of toys, appliances, automobiles, and god knew what else. Globalization. Chatham hated the idea. Americans are supporting sweatshops and slave labor camps just so they can pay a few dollars less for their luxuries.

He had been christened Ulrich, which in German means “wolf rule.” The name pleased him, although he never told anyone about it. There was a lot about himself that he never told anyone. Rick Chatham was a man of secrets.

He hardly looked the part. He was a bland-seeming man in his late thirties, so average in stature that he could fade into a crowd without anyone noticing him. He wore his long, sandy hair in a ponytail and kept a neat little beard ringing his unexceptional face. He had a tiny diamond stud in his left earlobe but no other jewelry. Chatham’s great talent was his mind, his intelligence; he prided himself on seeing farther than others, and on understanding how to rally people to his point of view.

When the Astro Corporation spaceplane had crashed, Chatham had barely paid attention to the news coverage. Until he discovered the enormous ecological havoc that a solar power satellite could wreak. He discovered it quite by accident: one of the TV news broadcasts covering the spaceplane accident and its aftermath gave a brief, animated explanation of how a powersat would work. That was enough to set Chatham firmly against the very idea of allowing a solar power satellite to go into operation.

“It beams out microwaves,” he was telling the small group of people who had assembled to listen to him. “Microwaves, for chrissakes! Like you use to cook! They could cook you!”

There were eight other people in the living room, sitting on the overstuffed sofa, the New England rocker, or on pillows strewn across the polished oak floor. This was the nextto-last stop on Chatham’s itinerary. One more little gathering like this in L.A., and then back home to Tucson.

“Microwaves?” asked one of the women.

“Microwaves, just like you use in your kitchen,” Chatham replied.

“The government wouldn’t let them do that,” she said. The others around her snickered.

Chatham explained patiently. “They tell you that a power satellite is clean and environmentally friendly. Doesn’t burn any fuel. Uses solar power. Yeah, right But how do they get the energy from the satellite up there in space down to us on the ground? They beam it down with microwaves. Five or ten billion watts’ worth of microwaves!”

“They can’t do that!”

“They will unless we stop them.”

“Now wait a minute,” said the lean graying man who was Chatham’s host. He and his wife wore matching bulky gray cable-knit turtleneck sweaters. “They’re going to send the beam down to an isolated area, aren’t they? White Sands, from what I remember.”

“Yeah, that’s what they claim they’re going to do,” Chatham admitted.

“And the beam will be spread out over a dozen square miles or something like it, so it won’t be strong enough to hurt anything.”

“If you believe what they say,” Chatham replied. “They claim that birds will be able to fly through the beam without being hurt.”

“So what’s the problem?” His host smiled to let Chatham know that he was merely playing devil’s advocate.

Chatham smiled back tightly. “The problem, sir, is that we have no idea of what the long-term effects will be. Remember, ecology is the science of understanding consequences—”

“Frank Herbert wrote that,” one of the others murmured, loud enough for everyone to hear. Admiration shone on her face.

“And he was right,” Chatham snapped. “Suppose a bird circles around in the beam. How many circles can it make before it’s cooked? Or blinded?”

“Blinded?”

Warming to his subject, Chatham said, “Back in the nineteen fifties the U.S. Defense Department put up a string of big-ass radars, up above the Arctic Circle, in Canada and Alaska. They were supposed to provide early warning of an attack from the Soviet Union.”

“What’s that got to do with power satellites?”

“Let me tell you,” said Chatham. “Eskimos found that the area around those huge radar antennas was warmer than the rest of the region, so they started setting up their camps near the radars. And pretty soon they started going blind.”

“Blind?” asked a woman.

“Blind. Those radars were pumping out microwaves. That’s why it was warm near them. The microwaves cooked the Eskimos’ eyeballs. Hard-boiled them.”

“Oh my god!”

Almost triumphantly, Chatham added, “And the microwaves those radars put out are puny compared to what the powersat will be beaming to the ground.”

One of the younger men, wearing a scruffy-looking UCLA sweatshirt, objected: “But I’ve seen pictures of cows grazing in a field where the power satellite’s receiving antennas are set up.”

“Drawings, yeah,” Chatham said. “If they try that in reality they’ll be cooking their steaks on the hoof.”

That brought a few distressed laughs.

Chatham went on, “What’s more, nobody’s done any studies of what the long-term effects on the atmosphere will be if we start beaming gigawatts of microwaves all over the place. Nobody.”

“You mean it might affect the weather?”

“Does a bear sleep in the woods?” Chatham replied, grinning.

“The point is, I think,” said the group’s host, “that we’ve got to do whatever we can to stop this threat to our environment.”

“No,” Chatham snapped. “We’ve got to do whatever it takes to stop the power satellite.”