Solstice

'A joke, Michael.'

'Right. It was a friend of mine. Let's leave it at that. I played my part. Those big wings I told you about? They were mine and mine alone. I was very much into engineering at the time, as much as solar astronomy, the two went hand in hand. Those things that put the juice there in the first place, they had my signature on them. Neat stuff too, even if I say so myself.'

She took her hand away and looked into his face. Somewhere underneath the surface there lurked a bright, animated side to Lieberman's character, and she couldn't work out why he kept it hidden sometimes.

'The way you talk about it, I guess it never happened. That must have hurt.'

His eyes flashed, and there was a spark of anger there she hadn't seen before.

'Hurt? You don't know the half of it. This friend of mine, she could sweet-talk the birds out of the trees. She went away, talked to all these grey people in Washington, in NASA. We were at Berkeley then, so they were reluctant to begin with. More money for the hippies, that kind of thing. But then, all of a sudden, we got bankrolled. Right out of the blue, a long-term R&D budget to design and build the thing. All the way through to a launch on the Shuttle, which was still in the planning stage itself back then, of course.'

'Whatever came afterwards, that was an achievement, Michael. You should feel proud.'

He turned to stare at her, and it wasn't a pleasant look.

'Really?'

She stuttered, 'I — if you don't want to talk about it — '

'Hey' — he touched her arm lightly — 'I'm sorry. You touched a raw nerve. I apologize.'

'So what happened?' she asked, and wondered whether she wanted to hear the answer.

'We began to build it. This friend and me, and a team of some of the brightest people you ever met. And it was like heaven. This was an idea that combined everything you could dream about. Space, exploration, advanced engineering, and guess what? We got to save the world at the other end too. I can't tell you what that felt like. I used to walk through the city, looking at the smog and the fumes coming out of the cars, thinking one day, one day soon, we just pop the satellite in the sky, work out some way of defraying the launch costs, the ground infrastructure, and bang. There we are. Limitless, constantly renewable energy, at negligible cost. Forever and ever. Amen.'

'They pulled the budget?'

He just looked at the ocean and said nothing.

'They'll come back to it one day, Michael. If it makes sense like you say.'

'Oh, they'll come back to it. You just have to look at the numbers to understand that. It may be fifty years. It may be a hundred. But at some stage we have to realize that this is the only luxury-grade oxygenated planet available to us right now, and we can't keep choking it the way we have this past century. Nothing else makes the grade, not with the kind of energy demands we take for granted nowadays. Maybe someone will come up with some other way of meeting the bill. Right now this is the only one I know.'

'I'm sorry.'

He looked at her, puzzled. 'About what?'

'That it won't be you. In all probability.'

He laughed out loud. 'You think that bothers me? Jesus, Mo. Who gives a damn about that? I'm a scientist. I write this stuff so that someone else, a year, a decade, a century down the line, gets to pillage it, make it better, fix the places where I went wrong. Am I pissed we're not doing this now? You bet. But it's not because I don't get to work on the thing. It's because…'

'Yes…'

'It's because we fritter away our time here, Mo. We're just so blind to what goes on, we veer from gloom and doom on the one hand — the sky is falling, the sky is falling — to thinking what the hell, it's all someone else's job. When really the answer lies somewhere in between.'

She looked at her watch. 'Aren't we supposed to be getting a briefing or something real soon?'

'Yeah.' He didn't look ready to move yet.

'And after they killed the project, that's when you moved into what you do now?'

'I became the sunspot guy. Overnight. A wondrous transformation. No big budgets, no engineering. No teamwork. Never again.'

'And your friend?' she asked hesitantly.

He said nothing. His eyes were fixed on the blue horizon.

'Well…' Mo glanced at her watch again.

'They didn't kill the budget. Just showed us its true direction. I didn't like where it was heading, but my friend stuck with it. It all fell apart a few years ago anyway.'

She watched him in silence; this was an interior conversation, not one in which she was involved.

'We were naive,' he said. 'We were just this bunch of bright kids trying to save the world, trying to tag on this giant pair of wings to a satellite, work on some way of converting all that nice sunshine into a big continuous burst of microwave energy that could take the place of a good number of power stations. We didn't watch the news much. Didn't even take any account of that great speech that Reagan made. March twenty-third, 1983. I stuck that date right into my memory later, when it all became so clear.'

She shook her head. 'I don't understand.'

'We thought we were working on a nice little government project to solve the world's energy crisis. It was all bullshit. We were just little cogs in some huge wheel, and I should have guessed it, should have known from all these guys in black suits who kept hanging around, watching the budgets, making sure everything was kept nice and tight and secure.'

The sun was getting low in the sky. There was a hint of coolness in the evening air; it made the skin prickle on her bare forearms.

'I shouldn't be telling you this, Mo. I signed pieces of paper. They made me.'

'Then don't.'

'To hell with them. It was all a fraud. There was never a plan to put an SPS in the sky. We were just the power plant for Ronnie's bee in the bonnet at the time. Remember the Strategic Defense Initiative? Star Wars, the press called it. A neat little circlet of bite-your-ass satellites spanning the globe. Strictly on a deterrent basis, you understand. Ho, ho. The Soviets throw up a missile, my little SPS unit, now transformed into some kind of orbiting Power Ranger or something, takes it out with microwave, laser, some kind of particle beam, you name it. They had all manner of shit getting tacked on its backside. That's when I found out. I walked in one day and finally got a glimpse of the total design blueprint, not just my part of it. These were war satellites, you'd better believe it. God knows what crap they wanted to build in there, and every bit of it got to live because of what I was making for them. I walked out. Like I said, my friend stayed, and I never did understand that. In the end, SDI itself went down, and all my work with it, I guess. Now no one wants to know about SPS. We just peer ten years ahead and say, "Looks good to me…" It's all such a waste.'

And it was, she understood that, just by looking at the pain, the anger in his face.

'I don't know what to say, Michael.'

'You don't need to say anything. I'm sorry I dropped that on you.'

'No need to be. And after that?'

She knew how to hold on to you when she wanted an answer, he thought.

'After that I got less serious. I got married. Then I got unmarried. I floated around the bright world of solar academia doing my sunspot act. It pays the bills. It gets me by.'

'But you think it's a waste…'

'Yeah.' He thought of Bill Rollinson again, and all those stories about Air Force One. 'I think it's all such a waste. And I wish I wasn't so damn stupid, I wish I wasn't here being some kind of weatherman for these guys when there's so much bigger stuff going on around us.'

Bill Rollinson and a couple of big silver aeroplanes falling from the sky, leaving a smear of radiation-hot metal across the earth.