Arkwright (14 page)

Marty held up a finger. “One … about three weeks ago, Wessen introduced a bill on the Senate floor, a routine measure requesting an exemption from a bill Congress passed a couple of sessions ago—namely, he put forth an amendment to the Domestic Space Access Act, requesting an exemption on behalf of something called the Arkwright Foundation.”

“What's—”

“Two.” Marty held up another finger. “When our people checked Wessen's public statement of campaign contributions, they discovered that, in the five months since he officially declared his candidacy, he's received nearly $400,000 from … want to guess where?”

“The Arkwright Foundation?”

“Bull's-eye. Give the lady a prize.” His fingers became a pistol that he aimed and fired at her—a pet expression and gesture that he used just often enough to be obnoxious. “So our people wanted to know the same thing you do—what is the Arkwright Foundation? They did a little checking and found out that it's a nonprofit organization based in the Boston area that—and I quote—‘advocates the research and development of near-term interstellar travel.'”

“Sounds like they want to build a starship.”

“Uh-huh and that's just about all anyone knows about them. So far as we can tell, they don't do much public outreach. No membership drives, no magazines or newsletters, a website that tells as little as they can get away with.” Marty picked up a rubber band, began playing with it. “For an advocacy group, they're awfully quiet. And for a nonprofit, they must have a lot of money to throw around if they're able to give that much to the campaign of a candidate no one seriously believes has much chance of winning the nomination.”

“Yeah, it's a mystery.” She frowned. “Let me guess—you want me to check them out, right?”

“Uh-huh. Fly up there and see what you can find out about them. Who are they? Why are they bankrolling Wessen? Why did he introduce a bill on their behalf?”

“All right, but”—Jill hesitated—“why me? This is a political story, Marty. I'm a science writer. Why don't you want one of your political reporters to handle this instead?”

“Because every one of them is working double time covering the New Hampshire primary, and this has enough of a science angle to it that you should be able to tackle it.” A condescending smile. “Besides, it's not like you've got a lot to do around here, is it?”

“Since you mention it—”

“Whatever else you've got on your plate, you can add this to it.” His smile vanished. “If you can't handle two stories at once, I'm sure there are a lot of unemployed writers who can.”

Jill didn't answer that. Much like the pistol gesture, this was something that Marty said often enough that she no longer found it threatening. Since she'd been working at the
Truth,
seldom had a week gone by that he didn't make the pretense of being about to fire her. If he'd sexually harassed her, it wouldn't have been as annoying as having him wave the job termination stick every time they had a disagreement.

On the other hand, they both knew that the science beat at
The Dirty Truth
was something of a fifth wheel. She'd come here straight out of journalism school at the University of Missouri, and in the last year or so, stress and overwork had been the least of her concerns. Privately, she'd lately begun to wonder if she should begin looking for another job. Unfortunately, she knew that there were few to be found. She'd been keeping up with her classmates, and more than half of them had failed to find work in the journalism field. Like it or not, she had been very lucky to land a position at a Washington-based investigative news site … even if it meant working for a toad like Alphonse Martino.

“Since you put it so nicely…” Jill pushed back her chair to stand up. “How much do you want, and when do you want it?”

“Six thousand words yesterday, but I'll settle for the same this time next week.” Marty turned toward his desk comp. “Go see Angie about a train ticket.”

*   *   *

South Station in Boston was a mess. Construction work on the terminal from the new transcontinental maglev had resulted in a chaos of sawhorses, plastic sheets, jackhammers, and concrete dust, and getting from the Amtrak platform to the sidewalk was like running a gauntlet. And it didn't get any better once she reached the cab stand. It had been just three weeks since the temporary seawall outside Boston Harbor had burst, and the city was still cleaning up from the flood. The downtown streets smelled of seaweed and dead fish, and Jill had step over a gutter filled with standing water to reach the cab at the front of the line.

So Framingham was something of a relief. Her appointment turned out to be on the second floor of a wooded, ivy-grown industrial park that looked like it had been there for decades; she spotted the names of a couple of well-established high-tech firms on the sign out front. Inside was a reception area that could have belonged to a venerable old charity: wood-panel walls, an impressive painted mural of the Milky Way, faux-leather furniture that looked comfortable enough to sleep on.

Which she nearly did. The receptionist, an older lady named Barbara, took her name, tapped her ear jack and repeated it to someone at the other end, and then asked her to take a seat and offered a cup of coffee. Believing that the person she was supposed to see would soon come out to meet her, Jill politely declined the coffee and sat down on the couch. Barbara smiled and turned to her desk screen. After a few minutes, Jill pulled out her slate and checked her questions. A few minutes after that, she turned to her notes. Once that was done, she decided that it couldn't hurt to look at her email. It was late afternoon and her train trip from Washington had been long, and before she knew it, her eyelids were beginning to feel heavy and her neck boneless and weak, and her head lolled forward and …

“Hello? Am I disturbing you?”

The light pressure of a hand on her knee and a quiet voice snapped her back to awareness. Startled, Jill sat up at once. “Oh, my god! I'm so sorry, I—”

The rest caught in her throat. Standing before her, bent over to shake her awake, was a young man about her own age, fair skinned with rust-colored hair and a closely trimmed beard, and lively blue eyes that played mischievously behind a pair of rimless glasses. There was an amused but not unkind smile as he studied her.

“Not at all,” he said, and his smile became apologetic as his hand fell from her leg. “I'm the one who should be sorry. I was on a conference call that took longer than I'd thought, and, well, at least you found a comfortable place to wait.”

Jill's face burned. Dozing off just before an interview is not good form. At least there was no one else in the room to witness her embarrassment except Barbara, who'd diplomatically turned away. At a loss for what else to do, she stood up and stuck out her hand. “Well, then, hello,” she said. “I'm Jill Muller, staff writer for
The Dirty Truth
.”

“Benjamin Skinner, media representative for the Arkwright Foundation.” Rising from his crouch, Skinner took her hand. He was tall and well dressed, and Jill decided that he was just about the most attractive male she'd met in quite a while.

“Pleased to meet you,” Jill said, “but…” She hesitated. “I'm sorry, but I thought my interview was going to be with someone else named Skinner—Kate Skinner, the foundation president.”

“My mother, yes.” He nodded. “She extends her apologies for not being here herself. Something came up at the last minute that required her attention.”

Ordinarily, Jill might have been irritated to find herself being brushed off by the person she was scheduled to interview, but if it gave her a chance to spend a little time with this handsome specimen …

Knock it off
.
You're here on business
. “That's quite all right, Mr. Skinner. Thanks for taking the time to see me.”

“Not at all. My pleasure.” He extended a hand toward the hallway leading to the back. “If you'll follow me.” He started to turn away, and then he stopped to turn and add, “Oh, and by the way, it's Dr. Skinner, but I'd be happy if you'd call me Ben.”

“Okay, Ben,” she said, “and you can call me Jill.”

Ben led her to a small, windowless office down the hall that didn't look like it was used all that often. She suspected that it didn't actually belong to him or anyone else but mainly functioned as a place for meetings such as this. He closed the door behind her and then sat down behind an immaculately clean desk, stretched out his legs and folded his hands together, and calmly let the interview begin.

Most of the answers he gave were just as routine as the questions themselves but nonetheless interesting. The Arkwright Foundation, he explained, was a private, nonprofit organization devoted to the research and development of the first interstellar vessel. It had been founded thirty years earlier by Ben's great-grandfather, the science fiction author Nathan Arkwright—Jill wasn't familiar with his name until Ben mentioned that he was the creator of the Galaxy Patrol—who'd left his literary estate as a bequest to provide seed money for the foundation. Since then, the Arkwright Foundation had grown exponentially, using that money to provide capital investments for companies perfecting the enabling technology needed for interstellar exploration and then using the profits from those investments for the foundation's primary goals.

“To build a starship?” Jill asked, and Ben nodded. “In the near future … say, this century?” He nodded again. “Are you serious about this?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, not at all insulted. “We're quite serious. In fact, we already have a design in mind for such a vessel, an unmanned ship called
Galactique
.”

Ben slid a hand across his desktop and tapped its inlaid keypad. The wall behind him dissolved into a starscape panorama. On display was, at first glance, what appeared to be an open, horizontal parachute; whiskery cables towed a tiny cylindrical object behind it. Ben tapped the keypad again, and the image became animated. The parachute began to slowly move forward, and as it did, the background stars faded to a light shade of blue and stretched out into long, thin rays.

“It's going to be a beamship,” Ben said, turning in his chair to point to the image behind him. “That is, a spacecraft that doesn't carry its own engines but instead is propelled by—”

“Lasers.”

He gave her a surprised look. “Microwaves, actually. A phased-array satellite positioned at Lagrange Point Four will transmit a 120 terawatt beam—”

“That powerful? Really?” Jill raised an eyebrow. “And where are you going to get that much power?”

“Solar powersat in the same Lagrange-point orbit. It'll beam electrical energy to the beamer, which in turn will convert it to a steady-state microwave beam.” She started to ask the obvious next question, but he beat her to it. “When the powersat comes into eclipse, storage batteries aboard the beamer will continue supplying power. The beam will continue uninterrupted throughout the ship's boost phase, however long that will be.”

“Okay.” Jill paused to write a few notes in her slate. Ben politely waited until she was ready; she could feel his eyes on her, but oddly enough it didn't bother her as it might have if it had been anyone else. “So, um…”

“Yes?” Not impatiently, but in expectation, as a good listener would be.

She briefly considered continuing in a technical vein—she'd love to know why they were opting for an unmanned craft instead of one with a crew—but decided to close in on the real point of the interview. “This is going to cost a lot, isn't it?” she asked, and he nodded. “Where does the foundation think it's going to get the money for all this?”

“As I said, it'll be from investments in the technology developed by the companies who'll be doing the work for us. Powersats, of course, we already have, although we believe the market could stand an improved design. But the big one will be the beamer. Once it's sent
Galactique
on its way—we're still in the process of selecting a destination from a list of candidate stars—it can then be utilized for interplanetary missions within our own solar system. With something like this, we'll be able to send spacecraft to the outer system—for instance, the asteroid belt or the Jovian moons, where the best commercial opportunity lies—in just weeks or even days. So the economic payback will be sufficient to maintain the foundation's operations for decades to come.”

“But in the meantime, you still need to raise money, yes?”

Ben crossed his arms. “We're doing well,” he replied.

Was it her imagination, or had he just become a little more guarded? She looked down and pretended to look at her notes, but she really wanted to make him sweat just a little. “So what's your connection with Clark Wessen?”

He shifted a little in his seat. “How do you mean?”

“Well, a few nights ago during a debate in New Hampshire, the senator came out in support of a project very much like what you're suggesting. As it turns out, the Arkwright Foundation has made considerable cash contributions to his campaign—”

“It wasn't cash.”

“Excuse me?”

“It wasn't a cash contribution. It was a check.” He grinned like a kid. “I watched my mother fill it out myself. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“That's a rather large amount, don't you think?”

A casual shrug. “Not as much as others make.”

“Why did she—the foundation, I mean—make it?”

“We approve of the senator's stance on various issues, and we think he'd make a great president.”

“Uh-huh. And the fact that he's asked for an exemption to the Domestic Space Access Act on behalf of the Arkwright Foundation…?”

“What a remarkable coincidence. All the more reason for us to support his campaign.”