Powersat

Matagorda Island, Texas

Dan Randolph stood at the broad window of his office, staring grimly at the hangar floor below. A pair of technicians was bringing in a twisted bit of wreckage from the truck parked outside in the hot summer sunshine, carrying it as tenderly as if it were the body of a fallen comrade. Part of the wing, it looked like, although it was so blackened and deformed that it was tough to be sure.

The sleek outline of the spaceplane’s original shape was laid out across the hangar floor in heavy white tape. As the chunks of wreckage came in from the field, the technicians and crash investigators from the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board laid them out in their proper places.

“Once they get all the pieces in place,” Dan muttered, “they’ll start the autopsy.”

Saito Yamagata stood beside Randolph, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed in sympathy.

“Might as well do an autopsy on me, too,” said Dan. “I’m as good as dead.”

“Daniel, you are much too young to be so bitter,” said Yamagata.

Dan Randolph gave his former boss a sour look. “I’ve earned the right,” he said.

Yamagata forced a smile. No matter what, he almost always smiled. Founder and head of a young but vigorously growing Japanese aerospace corporation, Yamagata had much to smile about. He wore a Savile Row three-piece suit of sky blue, with a tiny pin in the jacket’s lapel: a flying crane, the family emblem. His dark hair, combed straight back from his broad forehead, was just beginning to show a touch of gray at the temples. He was the tallest member of his family within living memory, at five-eleven, more than an inch taller than Randolph. Once Yamagata had been as slim as a samurai’s blade, but the recent years of living well had begun to round out his belly and soften the lines of his face. His eyes, though, were still probing, penetrating, shrewd.

Dan was in his shirtsleeves, and they were rolled up above his elbows. A solidly built middleweight, he had a pugnacious look to him, in part because his nose had been broken a few years earlier in a brawl with a trio of Japanese workmen. When he smiled, though, women found his rough-hewn face handsome, and he could be charming when he had to be. He felt far from charming now. His gray eyes, which had often sparkled as if he were secretly amused at the world’s follies, were sad now, bleak, almost defeated.

The spaceplane had been his dream; he had bet everything he had on it, everything he could beg or borrow. His company, Astro Manufacturing Corporation, was going to show the world how private enterprise could make money in space. Now that dream lay twisted and broken on the hangar floor below.

Dan saw a small, slight figure off in the far corner of the hangar: Gerry Adair, the company’s backup pilot, slim and spare; from this distance he looked like a sandy-haired, freckle-faced kid. Adair was staring silently at the wreckage being deposited on the floor. He had often clowned around with Hannah Aarons; she had been the serious one, he the exuberant, playful joker. He wasn’t clowning now. He simply stood there like a forlorn teenager as the technicians brought in the blackened, twisted pieces of what had been a machine he might have piloted.

Dan turned away from the window. “Today is Astro Corporation’s fifth anniversary, Sai. Probably its last, too.”

The office was cluttered with papers and reports that were piled high on Randolph’s massively grotesque old Victorian black walnut desk. Even through the thick, double-paned window they could feel the deep, heavy vibration of the overhead crane as it lugged the blackened remains of the spaceplane’s cockpit section across the hangar to the team of technicians waiting to set it into its proper place in the outline on the floor.

As he stood beside Randolph, Yamagata laid a hand gently on the younger man’s shoulder and said, “Dan, if you allow me to buy you out, you can continue to run the company.”

Randolph grimaced. “Into the ground.”

“You need capital. I’m offering—”

“Sai, we both know that if I let you buy me out, within a year I’ll be out on the street, no matter how reluctant you’d be to can me. A company like Astro can’t have two masters. You know that, and I know you know it.”

Yamagata’s smile turned slightly down. “You are probably right,” he admitted. “But you must do something, Dan. Wasn’t it one of your own presidents who said that when the going gets tough, the tough get going?”

“Yeah, to where the going’s easier,” Randolph muttered.

Yamagata shook his head. “You have great assets, Daniel. The power satellite is nearly finished, isn’t it? That could be worth several billions by itself.”

“If it works.”

“You know it will work. The Yamagata demonstration model works, doesn’t it?”

Randolph nodded reluctantly. He had helped to build the Japanese power satellite, working as an employee of Yamagata. Then he had used the demonstration satellite’s success to win backers for his own start-up company, Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Yamagata had been angered, but as soon as he heard about the accident he had flown in from Tokyo. To offer his help, he told Randolph. To scoop up the competition at a distressed price, Dan thought.

“Your company wouldn’t be the first to encounter difficulties because its founder was too optimistic, too much in love with his own dreams.”

“Dreams? I don’t have any dreams. I’m a hard-headed businessman,” Randolph growled. “Not a good businessman, maybe, but I’m no starry-eyed dreamer.”

Yamagata looked at this American whom he had known for almost ten years. “Aren’t you?” he asked.

“No,” Dan snapped. “The spaceplane is an important part of the picture. If we don’t have cheap and reliable access to orbit, the power satellite isn’t much more than a big, fat, white elephant in the sky.”

“White elephant?” Yamagata looked puzzled for a moment, but before Randolph could explain, he said, “Ah, yes, a useless extravagance”

“You’ve got it, Sai.”

“So you intend to continue with the spaceplane?”

“If I can.”

Yamagata hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “I can provide you with enough capital to last for another three years, even at your current level of losses.”

“No thanks, Sai. I’ll be double-dipped in sheep shit before I let you or anybody else get their hands on my company.”

With a theatrical sigh, Yamagata said, “You are a stubborn man, Daniel.”

Randolph touched his crooked nose. “You noticed that?”

The office door swung open and Randolph’s executive assistant stuck her head in.

She started to say, “Joe Tenny’s here. Mrs. Aarons’s funeral is set for—”

Tenny barreled past her, a short, stocky, scowling man in an open-neck shirt and a tight-fitting, silver-gray blazer over a pair of new blue jeans. “Time to get to Hannah’s funeral, boss,” he said, in his abrupt, no-nonsense manner. “I’ll drive.”