The Rock Rats

CHAPTER 20

Amanda would have preferred to stay in Selene for just a few days more, but Fuchs insisted that they start back for Ceres as soon as possible. He learned from Pancho that an Astro ship was due to depart for Ceres the next day, carrying a load of equipment that Helvetia had ordered before the warehouse fire. “We’ll go back on that ship,” Fuchs told his wife. “But it’s a freighter. It won’t have passenger accommodations,” Amanda protested.

“We’ll go back on that ship,” he repeated. Wondering why her husband was so insistent on returning as quickly as possible, Amanda reluctantly packed her travel bag while Fuchs called Pancho to beg a ride.

The next morning they rode the automated little tractor through the tunnel that led out to Armstrong Spaceport and climbed aboard the spindly-legged shuttlecraft that would lift them to the Harper. The ship was in lunar orbit, but rotating at a one-sixth g spin. Fuchs felt grateful that he would not have to endure weightlessness for more than the few minutes of the shuttlecraft’s flight.

“Newest ship in the solar system,” said her captain as he welcomed them aboard. He was young, trim, good-looking, and stared openly at Amanda’s ample figure. Fuchs, standing beside her, grasped his wife’s arm possessively.

“I’m afraid, though, that she’s not built for passenger service,” the captain said as he led them down the habitat module’s central passageway. “All I can offer you is this cabin.”

He slid an accordion-pleated door back. The cabin was barely large enough for two people to stand in.

“It’s kind of small,” the captain said, apologetically. But he was smiling at Amanda.

“It will do,” said Fuchs. “The trip is only six days.”

He stepped into the compartment, leading Amanda.

The captain, still out in the passageway, said, “We break orbit in thirty minutes.”

“Good,” said Fuchs. And he slid the door shut.

Amanda giggled at him. “Lars, you were positively rude to him!”

With a sardonic grin back at her, he said, “I thought his eyes would fall out of his head, he was staring at you so hard.”

“Oh, Lars, he wasn’t. Was he?”

“He most certainly was.”

Amanda’s expression became sly. “What do you think he had on his mind?”

His grin turned wolfish. “I’ll show you.”

Even though they took place in the tropical beauty of La Guaira, on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, the quarterly meetings of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s board of directors had turned into little less than armed confrontations. Martin Humphries had built a clique around himself and was working hard to take control of the board. Opposing him was Pancho Lane, who had learned in her five years on the board how to bring together a voting bloc of her own.

As chairman of the board, Harriett O’Banian tried her best to steer clear of both groups. Her job, as she saw it, was to make Astro as profitable as possible. Much of what Humphries wanted to do was indeed profitable, even though Pancho opposed virtually anything Humphries or one of his people proposed.

But now Pancho was proposing something that might become an entirely new product line for Astro, and Humphries seemed dead set against it.

“Scoop gases from the atmosphere of Jupiter?” Humphries was scoffing. “Can you think of anything—any idea at all—that carries more risk?”

“Yeah,” Pancho snapped. “Lettin’ somebody else get a corner on the fusion fuels market.”

Red-haired Hattie O’Banian was no stranger to outbursts of temper. But not while she chaired the board. She rapped on the long conference table with her knuckles. “We will have order here,” she said firmly. “Mr. Humphries has the floor.”

Pancho slumped back in her chair and nodded unhappily. She was seated almost exactly across the table from Humphries. O’Banian had to exert some self-control to keep from smiling at her. Pancho had come a long way since her first awkward days on the board. Underneath her west Texas drawl and aw-shucks demeanor, she had a sharp intelligence, quick wit, and the ability to focus on an issue with the intensity of a laser beam. With Hattie’s help, Pancho had learned how to dress the part of a board member: today she wore a trousered business suit of dusky rose, touched off with accents of jewelry. Still, Hattie thought, her lanky, long-legged tomboy image came through. She looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and sock Humphries between the eyes.

For his part, Humphries seemed perfectly at ease in a casual cardigan suit of deep blue and a pale lemon turtleneck shirt. He wears clothes well, Hattie thought, and hides his thoughts even better.

“Martin,” said O’Banian. “Do you have anything else to add?”

“I certainly do,” Humphries said, with a crafty little smile. He turned his gaze to Pancho for a moment, then looked back at O’Banian. “I am opposed to fly-by-night schemes that promise a jackpot at the end of the rainbow but are in reality fraught with technical risks. And human dangers. Sending a ship to Jupiter in a crazy attempt to scoop hydrogen and helium isotopes from that planet’s atmosphere is utter madness, pure and simple.”

Half a dozen board members nodded agreement. O’Banian noticed that a couple of them were not usually on Humphries’ side in these quarrels.

“Ms. Lane? Do you have anything more to say in support of your proposal?”

Pancho sat up ramrod straight and looked squarely at Humphries. “I sure do. I’ve presented the facts, the engineering analysis, the cost estimates and the profit probabilities. The numbers show that scooping fusion fuels is within the capabilities of existing technology. Nothing new needs to be invented.”

“A ship that dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere to collect its gases?” blurted one of the older men down the table. He was paunchy, bald, red-faced.

Pancho forced a smile at him. “A ship that’s being teleoperated from Jupiter orbit. It’s well within existing capabilities.”

“There’s no base in the Jupiter system for a remote operating team; we’d have to set it up it ourselves.”

“That’s true,” Pancho said evenly. “I didn’t say it was existing state-of-the-art hardware. But it is within existing capabilities. We just have to build it and test it.”

“At what cost?” asked the gray-haired woman sitting two chairs down from Pancho.

“You have all the cost figures in my presentation,” Pancho said. Then, turning to O’Banian, she asked, “Can I finish my say without bein’ interrupted, please?”

O’Banian nodded. Raising her voice slightly, she said, “Let’s give Pancho the same courtesy we gave Martin, everyone.”

Pancho said, “Thanks, y’all. Earth needs energy sources that won’t put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Fusion is the answer, and fusion based on helium-three is the most efficient fusion system that’s been built so far. There’s trillions of dollars per year waitin’ for the company that can supply fusion fuels for Earth. And don’t forget that Selene, the Mars bases, Ceres, and lots of other facilities off Earth will buy fusion fuels, too. Not to mention the market for spacecraft propulsion.”

“Selene sells us deuterium-three,” said the red-faced bald man. “They scoop it up out of the ground.”

Pancho countered, “There’s not enough deuterium on the Moon to satisfy the potential market demand.”

“But going all the way out to Jupiter… that will make the price too damned high, won’t it?”

“Not once we get the facilities runnin’. It’ll be a long-haul cargo run, a pipeline operation. We won’t hafta undercut Selene’s price; we’ll just offer a million times more fusion fuels than Selene can dig up.”

The man mumbled to himself, unconvinced.

Pancho looked back to O’Banian, but before the chairwoman could say anything, she went on, “One more thing. If we don’t do this, Humphries Space Systems will.”

Humphries shot up from his chair and pointed an accusing finger at Pancho. “That’s a deliberate insult!”

“That’s the truth and you know it!” Pancho fired back.

The board room erupted with angry voices.

O’Banian banged on the table, hard. “Quiet! All of you.”

“Do I still have the floor?” Pancho asked, once the commotion calmed down. Humphries was glaring at her from across the table.

O’Banian threw an irritated look at Pancho. “As long as you refrain from personal attacks on other board members,” she answered stiffly.

“Okay,” said Pancho. “But it seems to me like we got a problem here. Mr. Humphries here is in a position to block new ideas and then take ’em back to his own corporation and run with ’em.”

“You’re accusing me of unethical behavior!” Humphries barked.

“Damn right,” said Pancho.

“Wait! Quiet!” O’Banian demanded. “I will not have this meeting break down into a personal quarrel.”

The oldest member of the board, a frail-looking gentleman who hardly ever said a word, spoke up. “It seems to me,” he said in a whispery voice, “that we do indeed have a conflict of interest here.”

“That’s nonsense,” Humphries snapped.

“I’m afraid that the point has to be considered,” O’Banian said. She tried to make it as mild and noncommittal as possible, but she was not going to let this point pass without a full discussion. She deliberately kept her eyes away from Pancho, afraid that her gratitude would show.

The discussion wrangled on for nearly two hours. Each board member demanded to have his or her say, whether or not the same sentiment had already been expressed by someone else. O’Banian sat patiently through it all, watching their egos on parade, trying to figure out how she could bring this to a vote. Throw Humphries off the board? Gladly. But there weren’t enough votes for that. The best she could hope for was to pull his fangs.

Humphries was no fool. He too listened to the board members’ repetitious ramblings, clearly impatient, obviously calculating his odds. By the time it was his turn to speak in his own defense, he had come to a decision.

Rising to his feet, he said slowly, calmly, “I’m not going to dignify the accusation that Ms. Lane made by trying to defend myself against it. I think the facts speak for themselves—”

“They sure do,” Pancho muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Humphries kept his temper, barely. “Therefore,” he continued, “I will withdraw my opposition to this Jupiter concept.”

O’Banian realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out with a gush, surprised at how displeased she felt. She had hoped that Humphries would do the gentlemanly thing and resign from the board.

“But let me tell you this,” Humphries added, with an upraised finger. “When the costs mount up and the whole idea collapses around our heads, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

O’Banian took another breath, then said, “Thank you, Martin, on behalf of the entire board.”

But Humphries’s clique on the board still opposed the Jupiter project. The best they would agree to was to allow Pancho to seek a partner that would share at least one quarter of the project’s costs. Failing that, the board would not allow the program to be started.

“A partner?” Pancho groused. O’Banian threw her a sharp warning look. If Pancho complained openly that no one would join Astro in such a partnership, it merely proved Humphries’s point that the idea was impractically far-fetched.

“I think you might open up a dialogue with some of the major utilities corporations,” O’Banian suggested. “After all, they have the most to gain from an assured supply of fusion fuels.”

“Yeah,” Pancho mumbled. “Right.”

As the meeting broke up and the board members made their way out of the conference room, muttering and chattering to one another, Humphries came up to O’Banian.

“Are you satisfied?” he asked, in a low, confidential voice.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this, Martin,” she replied.

“Yes, I can see how sorry you are.” He glanced across the room, to where Pancho was talking to the old red-faced man as they filed out of the room. “Clever work, using Pancho as your stalking horse.”

O’Banian was genuinely shocked. “Me? Using…?”

“It’s all right,” Humphries said, smiling thinly. “I expect sneak attacks now and then. It’s all part of the game.”

“But, Martin, I had no idea—”

“No, of course you didn’t. Well, go ahead with this Jupiter nonsense, if you can find some idiot foolish enough to go along with you. Once it flops I’ll be able to use it to get you off the board. And that damned grease monkey, too.”