Powersat (The Grand Tour) Read Free Page B

have ’em all trooping out to New Mexico for the funeral.”
    The chief legal counsel of NASA had regretfully turned down Dan’s request to have Hannah Aarons honored with other fallen astronauts. “She wasn’t a NASA employee,” he explained reluctantly. In the telephone screen Dan could see the pained expression on the man’s face and decided not to press the issue. Aarons’s alma mater, the Naval Academy, suggested she could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. But her family wanted her with them, so Dan flew to Hannah’s hometown of Taos, above Santa Fe, for her funeral.
    The ceremony was brief and dignified. The Aarons’s rabbi spoke of Hannah’s unquenchable spirit. A high school choir sang the sailor’s hymn, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” adding the verse written for fliers:

    Lord, guard and guide all those who fly
Through the great spaces of the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!

    Standing in the crisp morning breeze beneath a warming Sun, Dan noticed that Hannah would be buried not far from the grave of Kit Carson. Not bad, kid, he said to her silently. You’ll be with another frontier scout. Good company.
    The sky was bright and clear. The sunshine felt good, comforting, on his shoulders. Dan thought of all the energy that the Sun beamed out continually for billions of years. If we could convert even a tenth of 1 percent of that sunlight into electricity, the world would never have a power shortage. Ever. And we could turn off all the fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants on Earth.
    Adair spoke haltingly of his admiration for Hannah and promised he would finish the work that she had started. Then
it was Dan’s turn to say a few words, and he wondered if he could do it without breaking up. He walked up to the grave, murmured his regrets and condolences to Hannah’s husband, her ten-year-old daughter, and her wheelchair-bound mother. Crumpling the speech his public relations man had written for him, Dan said simply:
    “Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter, home from the hill.”
    He couldn’t say more. Not without bawling like a baby.
    When it was all finished and Hannah lay beneath the freshly turned earth, Dan, Tenny, and Adair started toward the cemetery’s gate, following the Aarons family. A cluster of news reporters and camera crews were hovering outside the cemetery like a humming swarm of bees. Only a few close friends and coworkers and Hannah’s immediate family had been allowed past the steady-eyed Native American men who guarded the cemetery gates with loaded shotguns.
    Dan knew he would have to face the reporters. There was no way around it.
    “You want me to run interference for you?” Tenny asked gruffly as they trudged toward the iron gates.
    Dan almost grinned. Tenny was built like a football guard, not all that big but just as burly. Dan pictured the engineer knocking down reporters like a bowling ball going through tenpins.
    “No,” he answered, looking at the little crowd waiting on the other side of the gates. “Time for me to try to put some positive spin on this.”
    Tenny grunted. “Lotsa luck.”
    As soon as the guards swung the gates open the reporters swarmed around him. Dan knew what their questions would be, they were always the same after an accident:
    Do you know what caused the crash?
    Does this mean your project is finished?
    What are you going to do next?
    He spread his arms to quiet them, then said in his clearest, most authoritative voice, “We have the best investigators in
the world working to determine what went wrong with the spaceplane. At this point in time, all I can tell you is that there might have been a fault in the control system.”
    “Will Astro Corporation be able to continue the solar power satellite project?”
    “We intend to.”
    “But our information is that you’re broke.”
    “Not quite.”