The Precipice

CUENCA

Dan 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 vee-shaped 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 hut 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 Gridley 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.

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

“Fuel cells on line.”

“Capacitor bank ready.”

Duncan stood beside Dan, sweeping all the consoles with his eyes.

“Approaching ignition point,” said Vertientes.

Leaning slightly toward Dan, Duncan said, “It’s set to ignite automatically, although we have the manual backup ready.”

Dan got to his feet and stared out the window at the stainless steel sphere out in the scaffold. There was a crackling air of tension in the lab now; he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising.

“Ignition!” Vertientes called.

Dan saw nothing. The metal sphere outside didn’t move. There was no roar or cloud of smoke, not even a vibration. He looked at Duncan, then over to the six others, all of them standing rigidly intent at their consoles. Numbers flickered across screens, curves crawled along graphs, but as far as Dan could see or feel nothing was actually happening.

“Shutdown,” Vertientes said.

Everyone relaxed, sagged back a bit, let out their breaths.

“Thirty seconds, on the tick,” someone said.

“Power output?” Duncan asked.

“Design maximum. It reached fifty megawatts after four seconds and held it there right to cutoff.”

Vertientes was beaming. He turned and clutched Duncan by both shoulders.

“Perfecto! She is a well-behaved little lady!”

“You mean that’s it?” Dan asked, incredulous.

Duncan was grinning too. They all were.

“But nothing happened,” Dan insisted.

“Oh no?” said Duncan, grasping Dan’s elbow and turning him toward the row of consoles. “Look at that power output graph.”

Frowning, Dan remembered a scientist once telling him that all of physics boiled down to reading a bloody gauge.

“But it didn’t go anywhere,” Dan said weakly.

They all laughed.

“It isn’t a rocket,” Duncan said. “Not yet. We’re only testing the fusion reactor.”

“Only!” said the Japanese woman.

“Thirty seconds isn’t much of a test,” Dan pointed out.

“Nay, thirty seconds is plenty of time,” Duncan rebutted.

“The plasma equilibrates in five seconds or less,” said Vertientes. “But to be useful as a rocket,” Dan insisted, “the reactor’s going to have to run for hours… even weeks or months.”

“Si, yes, we know,” Vertientes said, tapping a finger into the palm of his other hand. “But in thirty seconds we get enough data to calculate the heat transfer and plasma flow parameters. We can extrapolate to hours and weeks and months.”

“I don’t trust extrapolations,” Dan muttered.

The blonde stepped between them. “Well, of course we’re going to build a fullscale model and run it for months. For sure. But what Doc Vee is saying is we’ve done enough testing to be confident that it’ll work.”

Dan looked her over. California, he decided. Maybe Swedish ancestry, but definitely California.

“We intend to mate the reactor with an MHD generator,” Vertientes said, earnestly trying to convince Dan. “That way the plasma exhaust from the reactor can provide electrical power as well as thrust.”

“Magneto…” Dan stumbled over the word.

“Magnetohydrodynamic,” Vertientes finished for him. The blonde added, “The interaction of electrically-conducting ionized gases with magnetic fields.”

Dan grinned at her. “Thank you.” She’s showing off, he thought. She wants me to know that she’s a smart blonde, despite her surfer chick looks. Then he caught Duncan watching him with that sly look in his glittering coalblack eyes, and remembered the student from Birmingham who had convinced Humphries to pay attention to their work. He shook his head ever so slightly, to tell Duncan that he wouldn’t need to be convinced that way. Once he would have scooped up a young available woman and enjoyed every minute of their brief fling together. But not now. He grimaced inwardly at the weird curves fate throws. When Jane was alive I chased every woman I saw, trying to forget her. Now that she’s dead I don’t want anyone else. Not now. Maybe not ever again.