Author's note: While this is a work of fiction, the concept of the Busemann biplane is real.
Let's see now. How did it all begin?
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon—no, that's not right; actually it started in the cafeteria of the Anson Aerospace plant in Phoenix.
Okay, then, how about:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold—well, yeah, but it was only a little after noon when Bob Wisdom plopped his loaded lunch tray on our table and sat down like a man disgusted with the universe. And anyway, engineers don't moil for gold; they're on salary.
I didn't like the way they all looked down on me, but I certainly didn't let it show. It wasn't just that I was the newbie among them: I wasn't even an engineer, just a recently-graduated MBA assigned to work with the Advanced Planning Team, aptly acronymed APT. As far as they were concerned I was either a useless appendage forced on them, or a snoop from management sent to provide info on which of them should get laid off.
Actually, my assignment was to get these geniuses to come up with a project that we could sell to somebody, anybody. Otherwise, we'd all be hit by the iron ball when the next wave of layoffs started, just before Christmas.
Six shopping weeks left, I knew.
"What's with you Bob?" Ray Kurtz asked. "You look like you spent the morning sniffing around a manure pile."
Wisdom was tall and lanky, with a round face that was normally cheerful, even in the face of Anson Aerospace's coming wave of cutbacks and layoffs. Today he looked dark and pouchy-eyed.
"Last night I watched a TV documentary about the old SST."
"The Concorde?" asked Kurtz. He wore a full bushy beard that made him look more like a dog-sled driver than a metallurgical engineer.
"Yeah. They just towed the last one out to the Smithsonian on a barge. A beautiful hunk of flying machine like that riding to its final resting place on a converted garbage scow."
That's engineers for you. Our careers were hanging by a hair and he's upset over a piece of machinery.
"Beautiful, maybe," said Tommy Rohr. "But it was never a practical commercial airliner. It could never fly efficiently enough to be economically viable."
For an engineer, Rohr was unnervingly accurate in his economic analyses. He'd gotten out of the dot-com boom before it burst. Of the five of us at the lunch table, Tommy was the only one who wasn't worried about losing his job—he had a much more immediate worry: his new trophy wife and her credit cards.
"It's just a damned shame," Wisdom grumbled. "The end of an era."
Kurtz, our bushy-bearded metallurgist, shook his graying head. "The eco-nuts wouldn't let it fly supersonic over populated areas. That ruined its chances of being practical."
"The trouble is," Wisdom muttered as he unwrapped a soggy sandwich, "you can build a supersonic aircraft that doesn't produce a sonic boom."
"No sonic boom?" I asked. Like I said, I was the newcomer to the APT group.
Bob Wisdom smiled like a sphinx.
"What's the catch?" asked Richard Grand in his slightly Anglified accent. He'd been born in the Bronx, but he'd won a Rhodes scholarship and came back trying to talk like Sir Stafford Cripps.
The cafeteria was only half filled, but there was still a fair amount of clattering and yammering going on all around us. Outside the picture window I could see it was raining cats and elephants, a real monsoon downpour. Something to do with global warming, I'd been told.
"Catch?" Bob echoed, trying to look hurt. "Why should there be a catch?"
"Because if someone could build a supersonic aircraft that didn't shatter one's eardrums with its sonic boom, old boy, obviously someone could have done it long before this."
"We could do it," Bob said pleasantly. Then he bit it into his sandwich.
"Why aren't we, then?" Kurtz asked, his brows knitting.
Bob shrugged elaborately as he chewed on his ham and five-grain bread.
Rohr waggled a finger at him. "What do you know that we don't? Or is this a gag?"
Bob swallowed and replied, "It's just simple aerodynamics."
"What's the go of it?" Grand asked. He got that phrase from reading a biography of James Clerk Maxwell.
"Well," Bob said, putting down the limp remains of the sandwich, "there's a type of wing that a German aerodynamicist named Adolph Busemann invented back in the nineteen-twenties. It's a sort of biplane configuration, actually. The shock waves that cause a sonic boom are cancelled out between the two wings."
"No sonic boom?"
"No sonic boom. Instead of flat wings, like normal, you need to wrap the wings around the fuselage, make a ringwing."
"What's a ringwing?" innocent li'l me asked.
Bob pulled a felt-tip pen from his shirt pocket and began sketching on his paper placemat.
"Here's the fuselage of the plane." He drew a narrow cigar shape. "Now we wrap the wing around it, like a sleeve. See?" He drew what looked to me like a tube wrapped around the cigar. "Actually it's two wings, one inside the other, and all the shock waves that cause the sonic boom get cancelled out. No sonic boom."
The rest of us looked at Bob, then down at the sketch, then up at Bob again. Rohr looked wary, like he was waiting for the punch line. Kurtz looked like a puzzled Karl Marx.
"I don't know that much about aerodynamics," Rohr said slowly, "but this is a Busemann biplane you're talking about, isn't it?"
"That's right."
"Uh-huh. And isn't it true that a Busemann biplane's wings produce no lift?"
"That's right," Bob admitted, breaking into a grin.
"No lift?" Kurtz snapped.
"Zero lift."
"Then how the hell do you get it off the ground?"
"It won't fly, Orville," Bob Wisdom said, his grin widening. "That's why nobody's built one."
The rest of us groaned while Bob laughed at us. An engineer's joke, in the face of impending doom. We'd been had.
Until, that is, I blurted out, "So why don't you fill it with helium?"
The guys spent the next few days laughing at me and the idea of a supersonic zeppelin. I have to admit, at that stage of the game I thought it was kind of silly, too. But yet . . .
Richard Grand could be pompous, but he wasn't stupid. Before the week was out he just happened to pass by my phonebooth-sized cubicle and dropped in for a little chat, like the lord of the manor being gracious to a stable hand.
"That was rather clever of you, that supersonic zeppelin quip," he said as he ensconced himself in a teeny wheeled chair he had to roll in from an empty cubicle.
"Thanks," I noncommittalled, wondering why a senior engineer would give a compliment to a junior MBA.
"It might even be feasible," Grand mused. "Technically, that is."
I could see in his eyes the specter of Christmas-yet-to-come and the layoffs that were coming with it. If a senior guy like Grand was worried, I thought, I ought to be scared purple. Could I use the SSZ idea to move up Anson Aerospace's hierarchical ladder? The guys at the bottom were the first ones scheduled for layoffs, I knew. I badly needed some altitude, and even though it sounded kind of wild, the supersonic zeppelin was the only foothold I had to get up off the floor.
"Still," Grand went on, "it isn't likely that management would go for the concept. Pity, isn't it?"
I nodded agreement while my mind raced. If I could get management to take the SSZ seriously, I might save my job. Maybe even get a promotion. But I needed an engineer to propose the concept to management. Those suits upstairs wouldn't listen to a newly-minted MBA; most of them were former engineers themselves who'd climbed a notch or two up the organization.
Grand sat there in that squeaky little chair and philosophized about the plight of the aerospace industry in general and the bleak prospects for Anson Aerospace in particular.
"Not the best of times to approach management with a bold, innovative concept," he concluded.
Omigod, I thought. He's talked himself out of it! He was starting to get up and leave my cubicle.
"You know," I said, literally grabbing his sleeve, "Winston Churchill backed a lot of bold, innovative ideas, didn't he? Like, he pushed the development of tanks in World War I, even though he was in the navy, not the army."
Grand gave me a strange look.
"And radar, in World War II," I added.
"And the atomic bomb," Grand replied. "Very few people realize it was Sir Winston who started the atomic bomb work, long before the Yanks got into it."
The Yanks? I thought. This from a Jewish engineer from the Bronx High School for Science.
I sighed longingly. "If Churchill were here today, I bet he'd push the SSZ for all it's worth. He had the courage of his convictions, Churchill did."
Grand nodded, but said nothing and left me at my desk. The next morning, though, he came to my cubicle and told me to follow him.
Glad to get away from my claustrophobic work station, I headed after him, asking, "Where are we going?"
"Upstairs."
Management territory!
"What for?"
"To broach the concept of the supersonic zeppelin," said Grand, sticking out his lower lip in imitation of Churchillian pugnaciousness.
"The SSZ? For real?"
"Listen, my boy, and learn. The way this industry works is this: you grab onto an idea and ride it for all it's worth. I've decided to hitch my wagon to the supersonic zeppelin, and you should too."
I should too? Hell, I thought of it first!
John Driver had a whole office to himself and a luscious, sweet-tempered executive assistant of Greek-Italian ancestry, with almond-shaped dark eyes and lustrous hair even darker. Her name was Lisa, and half the male employees of Anson Aerospace fantasized about her, including me.
Driver's desk was big enough to land a helicopter on, and he kept it immaculately clean, mainly because he seldom did anything except sit behind it and try to look important. Driver was head of several engineering sections, including APT. Like so many others in Anson, he had been promoted to his level of incompetency: a perfect example of the Peter Principle. Under his less-then-brilliant leadership APT had managed to avoid developing anything more advanced than a short-range drone aircraft that ran on ethanol. It didn't fly very well, but the ground crew used the corn-based fuel to make booze that would peel the paint off a wall just by breathing at it from fifteen feet away.
I let Grand do the talking, of course. And, equally of course, he made Driver think the SSZ was his idea instead of mine.
"A supersonic zeppelin?" Driver snapped, once Grand had outlined the idea to him. "Ridiculous!"
Unperturbed by our boss' hostility to new ideas, Grand said smoothly, "Don't be too hasty to dismiss the concept. It may have considerable merit. At the very least I believe we could talk NASA or the Transportation Department into giving us some money to study the concept."
At the word "money" Driver's frown eased a little. Driver was lean-faced, with hard features and a gaze that he liked to think was piercing. He now subjected Grand to his piercingest stare.
"You have to spend money to make money in this business," he said, in his best Forbes magazine acumen.
"I understand that," Grand replied stiffly. "But we are quite willing to put some of our own time into this—until we can obtain government funding."
"Your own time?" Driver queried.
We? I asked myself. And immediately answered myself, Damned right. This is my idea and I'm going to follow it to the top. Or bust.
"I really believe we may be onto something that can save this company," Grand was purring.
Driver drummed his manicured fingers on his vast desk. "All right, if you feel so strongly about it. Do it on your own time and come back to me when you've got something worth showing. Don't say a word to anyone else, understand? Just me."
"Right, Chief." I learned later that whenever Grand wanted to flatter Driver he called him Chief.
"Our own time" was aerospace industry jargon for bootlegging hours from legitimate projects. Engineers have to charge every hour they work against an ongoing contract, or else their time is paid by the company's overhead account. Anson's management—and the accounting department—was very definitely against spending any money out of the company's overhead account. So I became a master bootlegger, finding charge numbers for my APT engineers. They accepted my bootlegging without a word of thanks, and complained when I couldn't find a valid charge number and they actually had to work on their own time, after regular hours.
For the next six weeks Wisdom, Rohr, Kurtz and even I worked every night on the supersonic zeppelin. The engineers were doing calculations and making simulator runs in their computers. I was drawing up a business plan, as close to a work of fiction as anything on the Best Sellers list. My social life went to zero, which was—I have to admit—not all that much of a drop. Except for Driver's luscious executive assistant, Lisa, who worked some nights to help us. I wished I had the time to ask her to dinner.
Grand worked away every night, too. On a glossy set of illustrations to use as a presentation.
We made our presentation to Driver. The guys' calculations, my business plan, and Grand's images. He didn't seem impressed, and I left the meeting feeling pretty gunky. Over the six weeks I'd come to like the idea of a supersonic zeppelin, an SSZ. I really believed it was my ticket to advancement. Besides, now I had no excuse to see Lisa, up in Driver's office.
On the plus side, though, none of the APT team was laid off. We went through the motions of the Christmas office party with the rest of the undead. Talk about a survivor's reality show!
I was moping in my cubicle the morning after Christmas when my phone beeped and Driver's face came up on my screen.
"Drop your socks and pack a bag. You're going with me to Washington to sell the SSZ concept."
"Yessir!" I said automatically. "Er . . . when?"
"Tomorrow, bright and early."
I raced to Grand's cubicle, but he already knew about it.
"So we're both going," I said, feeling pretty excited.
"No, only you and Driver," he said.
"But why aren't you—"
Grand gave me a knowing smile. "Driver wants all the credit for himself if the idea sells."
That nettled me, but I knew better than to argue about it. Instead, I asked, "And if it doesn't sell?"
"You get the blame for a stupid idea. You're low enough on the totem pole to be offered up as a sacrificial victim."
I nodded. I didn't like it, but I had to admit it was a good lesson in management. I tucked it away in my mind for future reference.
I'd never been to Washington before. It was chilly, gray and clammy; no comparison to sunny Phoenix. The traffic made me dizzy, but Driver thought it was pretty light. "Half the town's on holiday vacations," he told me as we rode a seedy, beat-up taxicab to the magnificent glass and stainless steel high-rise office building that housed the Transportation Department.
As we climbed out of the smelly taxi I noticed the plaque on the wall by the revolving glass doors. It puzzled me.
"Transportation and Urban Renewal Department?" I asked. "Since when . . . "
"Last year's reorganization," Driver said, heading for the revolving door. "They put the two agencies together. Next year they'll pull them apart, when they reinvent the government again."
"Welcome to TURD headquarters," said Tracy Keene, once we got inside the building's lobby.
Keene was Anson Aerospace's crackerjack Washington representative, a large round man who conveyed the impression that he knew things no one else knew. Keene's job was to find new customers for Anson from among the tangle of government agencies, placate old customers when Anson inevitably alienated them, and guide visitors from home base through the Washington maze. The job involved grotesque amounts of wining and dining. I had been told that Keene had once been as wiry and agile as a Venezuelan shortstop. Now he looked to me like he was on his way to becoming a Sumo wrestler. And what he was gaining in girth he was losing in hair.
"Let's go," Keene said, gesturing toward the security checkpoint that blocked the lobby. "We don't want to be late."
Two hours later Keene was snoring softly in a straightbacked metal chair while Driver was showing the last of his Powerpoint images to Roger K. Memo, Assistant Under Director for Transportation Research of TURD.
Memo and his chief scientist, Dr. Alonzo X. Pencilbeam, were sitting on one side of a small conference table, Driver and I on the other. Keene was at the end, dozing restfully. The only light in the room came from the little projector, which threw a blank glare onto the wan yellow wall that served as a screen now that the last image had been shown.
Driver clicked the projector off. The light went out and the fan's whirring noise abruptly stopped. Keene jerked awake and instantly reached around and flicked the wall switch that turned on the overhead lights. I had to admire the man's reflexes.
Although the magnificent TURD building was sparkling new, Memo's spacious office somehow looked seedy. There wasn't enough furniture for the size of it: only a government-issue steel desk with a swivel chair, a half-empty bookcase, and this slightly wobbly little conference table with six chairs that didn't match. The walls and floors were bare and there was a distinct echo when anyone spoke or even walked across the room. The only window had vertical slats instead of a curtain, and it looked out on a parking building. The only decoration on the walls was Memo's doctoral degree, purchased from some obscure "distance learning" school in Mississippi.
Driver fixed Memo with his steely gaze across the conference table. "Well, what do you think of it?" he asked subtly.
Memo pursed his lips. He was jowly fat, completely bald, wore glasses and a rumpled gray suit.
"I don't know," he said firmly. "It sounds . . . unusual . . . "
Dr. Pencilbeam was sitting back in his chair and smiling benignly. His PhD had been earned in the 1970s, when newly-graduated physicists were driving taxicabs on what they glumly called "Nixon fellowships." He was very thin, fragile looking, with the long skinny limbs of a preying mantis.
Pencilbeam dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out an electronic game. Reformed smoker, I thought. He needs something to do with his hands.
"It certainly looks interesting," he said in a scratchy voice while his game softly beeped and booped. "I imagine it's technically achievable . . . and lots of fun."
Memo snorted. "We're not here to have fun."
Keene leaned across the table and fixed Memo with his best here's something from behind the scenes expression. "Do you realize how the White House would react to a sensible program for a supersonic transport? With the Concorde gone, you could put this country into the forefront of air transportation again."
"H'mm," said Memo. "But . . . "
"Think of the jobs this program can create. The President is desperate to improve the employment figures."
"I suppose so . . . "
"National prestige," Keene intoned knowingly. "Aerospace employment . . . balance of payments . . . gold outflow . . . the President would be terrifically impressed with you."
"H'mm," Memo repeated. "I see . . . "
I could see where the real action was, so I wangled myself an assignment to the company's Washington office as Keene's special assistant for the SSZ proposal. That's when I started learning what money and clout—and the power of influence—are all about.
As the months rolled along, we gave lots of briefings and attended lots of cocktail parties. I knew we were on the right track when no less than Roger K. Memo invited me to accompany him to one of the swankiest parties of the season. Apparently he thought that since I was from Anson's home office in Phoenix I must be an engineer and not just another salesman.
The party was in full swing by the time Keene and I arrived. It was nearly impossible to hear your own voice in the swirling babble of chatter and clinking glassware. In the middle of the sumptuous living room the Vice President was demonstrating his golf swing. Several Cabinet wives were chatting in the dining room. Out in the foyer, three Senators were comparing fact-finding tours they were arranging for themselves to the Riviera, Bermuda, and American Samoa, respectively.
Memo never drank anything stronger than ginger ale, and I followed his example. We stood in the doorway between the foyer and the living room, hearing snatches of conversation among the three junketing Senators. When the trio broke up, Memo intercepted Senator Goodyear (R., Ohio) as he headed toward the bar.
"Hello, Senator!" Memo shouted heartily. It was the only way to be heard over the party noise.
"Ah . . . hello." Senator Goodyear obviously thought that he was supposed to know Memo, and just as obviously couldn't recall his name, rank, or influence rating.
Goodyear was more than six feet tall, and towered over Memo's paunchy figure. Together they shouldered their way through the crowd around the bar, with me trailing them like a rowboat being towed behind a yacht. Goodyear ordered bourbon on the rocks, and therefore so did Memo. But he merely held onto his glass while the Senator immediately began to gulp at his drink.
A statuesque blonde in a spectacular gown sauntered past us. The Senator's eyes tracked her like a battleship's range finder following a moving target.
"I hear you're going to Samoa," Memo shouted as they edged away from the bar, following the blonde.
"Eh . . . yes," the Senator answered cautiously, in a tone he usually reserved for news reporters.
"Beautiful part of the world," Memo shouted.
The blonde slipped an arm around the waist of one of the young, long-haired men and they disappeared into another room. Goodyear turned his attention back to his drink.
"I said," Memo repeated, standing on tiptoes, "that Samoa is a beautiful place."
Nodding, Goodyear replied, "I'm going to investigate ecological conditions there . . . my committee is considering legislation on ecology, you know."
"Of course. Of course. You've got to see things firsthand if you're going to enact meaningful legislation."
Slightly less guardedly, Goodyear said, "Exactly."
"It's a long way off, though," Memo said.
"Twelve hours from LAX."
"I hope you won't be stuck in economy class. They really squeeze the seats in there."
"No, no," said the Senator. "First class all the way."
At the taxpayers' expense, I thought.
"Still," Memo sympathized, "It must take considerable dedication to undergo such a long trip."
"Well, you know, when you're in public service you can't think of your own comforts."
"Yes, of course. Too bad the SST isn't flying anymore. It could have cut your travel time in half. That would give you more time to stay in Samoa . . . investigating conditions there."
The hearing room in the Capitol was jammed with reporters and camera crews. Senator Goodyear sat in the center of the long front table, as befitted the committee chairman. I was in the last row of spectators, as befitted the newly-promoted junior Washington representative of Anson Aerospace Corp. I was following the industry's routine procedure and riding the SSZ program up the corporate ladder.
All through the hot summer morning the committee had listened to witnesses: my former boss John Driver, Roger K. Memo, Alonzo Pencilbeam and many others. The concept of the supersonic zeppelin unfolded before the news media and started to take on definite solidity in the rococo-trimmed hearing chamber.
Senator Goodyear sat there solemnly all morning, listening to the carefully rehearsed testimony and sneaking peeks at the greenery outside the big sunny window. Whenever he remembered the TV cameras he sat up straighter and tried to look lean and tough. I'd been told he had a drawer full of old Clint Eastwood flicks in his Ohio home.
Now it was his turn to summarize what the witnesses had told the committee. He looked straight into the bank of cameras, trying to come on strong and determined, like a high plains drifter.
"Gentlemen," he began, immediately antagonizing the women in the room, "I believe that what we have heard here today can mark the beginning of a new program that will revitalize the American aerospace industry and put our great nation back in the forefront of international commerce—"
One of the younger Senators at the far end of the table, a woman, interrupted:
"Excuse me, Mr. Chairman, but my earlier question about pollution was never addressed. Won't the SSZ use the same kind of jet engines that the Concorde used? And won't they cause just as much pollution?"
Goodyear glowered at the junior member's impudence, but controlled his temper well enough to say only, "Em . . . Dr. Pencilbeam, would you care to comment on that question?"
Half-dozing at one of the front benches, Pencilbeam looked startled at the mention of his name. Then he got to his feet like a carpenter's ruler unfolding, went to the witness table, sat down and hunched his bony frame around the microphone there.
"The pollution from the Concorde was so minimal that it had no measurable effect on the stratosphere. The early claims that a fleet of SSTs would create a permanent cloud deck over the northern hemisphere and completely destroy the ozone layer were never substantiated."
"But there were only a half-dozen Concordes flying," said the junior Senator. "If we build a whole fleet of SSZs—"
Before she could go any farther Goodyear fairly shouted into his microphone, "Rest assured that we are well aware of the possible pollution problem." He popped his P's like artillery bursts. "More importantly, the American aerospace industry is suffering, employment is in the doldrums, and our economy is slumping. The SSZ will provide jobs and boost the economy. Our engineers will, I assure you, find ways to deal with any and every pollution problem that may be associated with the SSZ."
*
I had figured the somebody, sooner or later, would raise the question of pollution. The engineers back in Phoenix wanted to look into the possibilities of using hydrogen fuel for the SSZ's jet engines, but I figured that just the mention of hydrogen would make people think of the old Hindenberg, and that would scuttle the program right there and then. So we went with ordinary turbojet engines that burned ordinary jet fuel.
But I went a step farther. In my capacity as a junior (and rising) executive, I used expense-account money to plant a snoop in the organization of the nation's leading ecology freak, Mark Sequoia. It turned out that, unknown to Sequoia, Anson Aerospace was actually his biggest financial contributor. Politics make strange bedfellows, doesn't it?
You see, Sequoia had fallen on relatively hard times. Once a flaming crusader for ecological salvation and environmental protection, Sequoia had made the mistake of letting the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hire him as the state's Director of Environmental Protection. He had spent nearly five years earnestly trying to clean up Pennsylvania, a job that had driven four generations of the original Penn family into early Quaker graves. The deeper Sequoia buried himself in the solid waste politics of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chester, Erie and other hopelessly corrupted cities, the fewer dedicated followers and news media headlines he attracted. After a very credible Mafia threat on his life, he quite sensibly resigned his post and returned to private life, scarred but wiser. And alive.
When the word about the SSZ program reached him, Sequoia was hiking along a woodland trail in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia, leading a scraggly handful of sullen high school students through the park's soot-ravaged woodlands on a steaming August afternoon. They were dispiritedly picking up empty beer cans and gummy prophylactics—and keeping a wary eye out for muggers. Even full daylight was no protection against assault. And the school kids wouldn't help him, Sequoia knew. Half of them would jump in and join the fun.
Sequoia was broad-shouldered, almost burly. His rugged face was seamed by weather and news conferences. He looked strong and fit, but lately his back had been giving him trouble and his old trick knee . . .
He heard someone pounding up the trail behind him.
"Mark! Mark!"
Sequoia turned to see Larry Helper, his oldest and therefore most trusted aide, running along the gravel path toward him, waving a copy of the Daily News over his head. Newspaper pages were slipping from his sweaty grasp and fluttering off into the bushes.
"Littering," Sequoia muttered in a tone sometimes used by archbishops when facing a case of heresy.
"Some of you kids," said Sequoia in his most authoritative voice, "pick up those newspaper pages."
A couple of the students lackadaisically ambled after the fluttering sheets.
"Mark, look here!" Helper skidded to a gritty stop on the gravel and breathlessly waved the front page of the newspaper. "Look!"
Sequoia grabbed his aide's wrist and took what was left of the newspaper from him. He frowned at Helper, who cringed and stepped back.
"I . . . I thought you'd want to see . . . "
Satisfied that he had established his dominance, Sequoia turned his attention to the front page's blaring headline.
"Supersonic zeppelin?"
Two nights later, Sequoia was meeting with a half-dozen men and women in the basement of a prosperous downtown church that specialized in worthy causes capable of filling the pews upstairs.
Once Sequoia called his meeting I was informed by the mole I had planted in his pitiful little group of do-gooders. As a newcomer to the scene, I had no trouble joining Sequoia's Friends of the Planet organization, especially when I FedEx'd them a personal check for a thousand dollars—for which Anson Aerospace reimbursed me, of course.
So I was sitting on the floor like a good environmental activist while Sequoia paced across the little room. There was no table, just a few folding chairs scattered around, and a locked bookcase stuffed with tomes about sex and marriage. I could tell just from looking at Sequoia that the old activist flames were burning inside him again. He felt alive, strong, the center of attention.
"We can't just drive down to Washington and call a news conference," he exclaimed, pounding a fist into his open palm. "We've got to do something dramatic!"
"Automobiles pollute, anyway," said one of the women, a comely redhead whose dazzling green eyes never left Sequoia's broad, sturdy-looking figure.
"We could take the train; it's electric."
"Power stations pollute."
"Airplanes pollute, too."
"What about riding down to Washington on horseback! Like Paul Revere!"
"Horses pollute."
"They do?"
"Ever been around a stable?"
"Oh."
Sequoia pounded his fist again. "I've got it! It's perfect!"
"What?"
"A balloon! We'll ride down to Washington in a non-polluting balloon filled with helium. That's the dramatic way to emphasize our opposition to this SSZ monster."
"Fantastic!"
"Marvelous!"
The redhead was panting with excitement. "Oh, Mark, you're so clever. So dedicated." There were tears in her eyes.
Helper asked softly, "Uh . . . does anybody know where we can get a balloon? And how much they cost?"
"Money is no object," Sequoia snapped, pounding his fist again. Then he wrung his hand; he had pounded too hard.
When the meeting finally broke up, Helper had been given the task of finding a suitable balloon, preferably one donated by its owner. I had volunteered to assist him. Sequoia would spearhead the effort to raise money for a knockdown fight against the SSZ. The redhead volunteered to assist him. They left the meeting arm in arm.
I was learning the Washington lobbying business from the bottom up, but rising fast. Two weeks later I was in the White House, no less, jammed in among news reporters and West Wing staffers waiting for a presidential news conference to begin. TV lights were glaring at the empty podium. The reporters and camera crews shuffled their feet, coughed, talked to one another. Then:
"Ladies and gentlemen: the President of the United States."
We all stood up and applauded as she entered. I had been thrilled to be invited to the news conference. Well, actually it was Keene who'd been invited and he brought me with him, since I was the Washington rep for the SSZ project. The President strode to the podium and smiled at us in what some cynics had dubbed her rattlesnake mode. I thought she was being gracious.
"Before anything else, I have a statement to make about the tragic misfortune that has overtaken one of our finest public figures, Mark Sequoia. According to the latest report I have received from the Coast Guard—no more than ten minutes ago—there is still no trace of his party. Apparently the balloon they were riding in was blown out to sea two days ago, and nothing has been heard from them since.
"Now let me make this perfectly clear. Mr. Sequoia was frequently on the other side of the political fence from my administration. He was often a critic of my policies and actions, policies and actions that I believe in completely. He was on his way to Washington to protest our new supersonic zeppelin program when this unfortunate accident occurred.
"Mr. Sequoia opposed the SSZ program despite the fact that this project will employ thousands of aerospace engineers who are otherwise unemployed and untrainable. Despite the fact that the SSZ program will save the American dollar on the international market and salvage American prestige in the technological battleground of the world.
"And we should keep in mind that France and Russia have announced that they are studying the possibility of jointly starting their own SSZ effort, a clear technological challenge to America."
Gripping the edges of the podium tighter, the President went on, ""Rumors that his balloon was blown off course by a flight of Air Force jets are completely unfounded, the Secretary of Defense assures me. I have dispatched every available military, Coast Guard, and Civil Air Patrol plane to search the entire coastline from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras. We will find Mark Sequoia and his brave though misguided band of ecofr . . . er, activists—or their remains."
I knew perfectly well that Sequoia's balloon had not been blown out to sea by Air Force jets. They were private planes: executive jets, actually.
"Are there any questions?" the President asked.
The Associated Press reporter, a hickory-tough old man with thick glasses and a snow-white goatee, got to his feet and asked, "Is that a Versace dress you're wearing? It's quite becoming."
The President beamed. "Why, thank you. Yes, it is . . . "
Keene pulled me by the arm. "Let's go. We've got nothing to worry about here."
*
I was rising fast, in part because I was willing to do the legwork (and dirty work, like Sequoia) that Keene was too lazy or too squeamish to do. He was still head of our Washington office, in name. I was running the SSZ program, which was just about the only program Anson had going for itself, which meant that I was running the Washington office in reality.
Back in Phoenix, Bob Wisdom and the other guys had become the nucleus of the team that was designing the SSZ prototype. The program would take years, we all knew, years in which we had assured jobs. If the SSZ actually worked the way we designed it, we could spend the rest of our careers basking in its glory.
I was almost getting accustomed to being called over to the West Wing to deal with bureaucrats and politicians. Still, it was a genuine thrill when I was invited into the Oval Office itself.
The President's desk was cleared of papers. Nothing cluttered the broad expanse of rosewood except the telephone console, a black-framed photograph of her late husband (who had once also sat at that desk), and a gold-framed photograph of her daughter on her first day in the House of Representatives (D., Ark.).
She sat in her high-backed leather chair and fired instructions at her staff.
"I want the public to realize," she instructed her media consultant, "that although we are now in a race with the Russians and the French, we are building the SSZ for sound economic and social reasons, not because of competition from overseas."
"Yes, Ma'am," said the media consultant.
She turned to the woman in charge of Congressional liaison. "And you'd better make damned certain that the Senate appropriations committee okays the increased funding for the SSZ prototype. Tell them that if we don't get the extra funding we'll fall behind the Ivans and the Frogs.
"And I want you," she pointed a manicured finger at the research director of TURD, "to spend every nickel of your existing SSZ money as fast as you can. Otherwise we won't be able to get the additional appropriation out of Congress."
"Yes, Ma'am," said Roger K. Memo, with one of his rare smiles.
"But, Madam President," the head of the Budget Office started to object.
"I know what you're going to say," the President snapped at him. "I'm perfectly aware that money doesn't grow on trees. But we've got to get the SSZ prototype off the ground, and do it before next November. Take money from education, from the space program, from the environmental superfund—I don't care how you do it, just get it done. I want the SSZ prototype up and flying by next summer, when I'm scheduled to visit Paris and Moscow."
The whole staff gasped in sudden realization of the President's masterful plan.
"That right," she said, smiling slyly at them. "I intend to be the first Chief of State to cross the Atlantic in a supersonic zeppelin."
Although none of us realized its importance at the time, the crucial incident, we know now, happened months before the President's decision to fly the SSZ to Paris and Moscow. I've gone through every scrap of information we could beg, borrow or steal about that decisive day, reviewing it all time and again, trying to find some way to undo the damage.
It happened at the VA hospital in Hagerstown, a few days after Mark Sequoia had been rescued. The hospital had never seen so many reporters. There were news media people thronging the lobby, lounging in the halls, bribing nurses, sneaking into elevators and even surgical theaters (where several of them fainted). The parking lot was a jumble of cars bearing media stickers and huge TV vans studded with antennas.
Only two reporters were allowed to see Mark Sequoia on any given day, and they were required to share their interviews with all the others in the press corps. Today the two—picked by lot—were a crusty old veteran from Fox News and a perky young blonde from Women's Wear Daily.
"But I've told your colleagues what happened at least a dozen times," mumbled Sequoia from behind a swathing of bandages.
He was hanging by both arms and legs from four traction braces, his backside barely touching the crisply sheeted bed. Bandages covered eighty percent of his body and all of his face, except for tiny slits for his eyes, nostrils and mouth.
The Fox News reporter held his palm-sized video camera in one hand while he scratched at his stubbled chin with the other. On the opposite side of the bed, the blonde held a similar videocorder close to Sequoia's bandaged face.
She looked misty-eyed. "Are . . . are you in much pain?"
"Not really," Sequoia answered bravely, with a slight tremor in his voice.
"Why all the traction?" asked Fox News. "The medics said there weren't any broken bones."
"Splinters," Sequoia answered weakly.
"Bone splinters!" gasped the blonde. "Oh, how awful!"
"No," Sequoia corrected. "Splinters. Wood splinters. When the balloon finally came down we landed in a clump of trees just outside Hagerstown. I got thousands of splinters. It took most of the surgical staff three days to pick them all out of me. The chief of surgery said he was going to save the wood and build a scale model of the Titanic with it."
"Oh, how painful!" The blonde insisted on gasping. She gasped very well, Sequoia noted, watching her blouse.
"And what about your hair?" Fox News asked.
Sequoia felt himself blush underneath the bandages. "I . . . uh . . . I must have been very frightened. After all, we were aloft in that stupid balloon for six days, without food, without anything to drink except a six pack of Perrier. We went through a dozen different thunderstorms . . . "
"With lightning?" the blonde asked.
Nodding painfully, Sequioa replied, "We all thought we were going to die."
Fox News frowned. "So your hair turned white from fright. There was some talk that cosmic rays did it."
"Cosmic rays? We never got that high. Cosmic rays don't have any effect on you until you get really up there, isn't that right?"
"How high did you go?"
"I don't know," Sequoia answered. "Some of those updrafts in the thunderstorms pushed us pretty high. The air got kind of thin."
"But not high enough to cause cosmic ray damage."
"Well, I don't know . . . maybe . . . "
"It'd make a better story than just being scared," said Fox News. "Hair turned white by cosmic rays. Maybe even sterilized."
"Sterilized?" Sequoia yelped.
"Cosmic rays do that, too," Fox News said. "I checked."
"Well, we weren't that high."
"You're sure?"
"Yeah . . . well, I don't think we were that high. We didn't have an altimeter with us . . . "
"But you could have been."
Shrugging was sheer torture, Sequoia found.
"Okay, but those thunderstorms could've lifted you pretty damned high."
Before Sequoia could think of what to answer, the door to his private room opened and a horse-faced nurse said firmly, "That's all. Time's up. Mr. Sequoia must rest now. After his enema."
"Okay, I think I've got something to hang a story on," Fox News said with a satisfied grin. "Now to find a specialist in cosmic rays."
The blonde looked thoroughly shocked and terribly upset. "You . . . you don't think you were really sterilized, do you?"
Sequoia tried to make himself sound worried and brave at the same time. "I don't know. I just . . . don't know."
Late that night the blonde snuck back into his room, masquerading as a nurse. If she knew the difference between sterilization and impotence she didn't tell Sequoia about it. For his part, he forgot about his still-tender skin and the traction braces. The morning nurse found him unconscious, one shoulder dislocated, most of his bandages rubbed off, his skin terribly inflamed, and a goofy grin on his face.
I knew that the way up the corporate ladder was to somehow acquire a staff that reported to me. And, in truth, the SSZ project was getting so big that I truly needed more people to handle it. I mean, all the engineers had to do was build the damned thing and make it fly. I had to make certain that the money kept flowing, and that wasn't easy. An increasingly large part of my responsibilities as the de facto head of the Washington office consisted of putting out fires.
"Will you look at this!"
Senator Goodyear waved the morning Post at me. I had already read the electronic edition before I'd left my apartment that morning. Now, as I sat at Tracy Keene's former desk, the senator's red face filled my phone screen.
"That Sequoia!" he grumbled. "He'll stop at nothing to destroy me. Just because the Ohio River melted his houseboat, all those years ago."
"It's just a scare headline," I said, trying to calm him down. "People won't be sterilized by flying in the supersonic zeppelin any more than they were by flying in the old Concorde."
"I know it's bullshit! And you know it's bullshit! But the goddamned news media are making a major story out of it! Sequoia's on every network talk show. I'm under pressure to call for hearings on the sterilization problem!"
"Good idea," I told him. "Have a Senate investigation. The scientists will prove that there's nothing to it."
That was my first mistake. I didn't get a chance to make another.
I hightailed it that morning to Memo's office. I wanted to see Pencilbeam and start building a defense against this sterilization story. The sky was gray and threatening. An inch or two of snow was forecast, and people were already leaving their offices for home, at ten o'clock in the morning. Dedicated government bureaucrats and corporate employees, taking the slightest excuse to knock off work.
The traffic was so bad that it had actually started to snow, softly, by the time I reached Memo's office. He was pacing across the thinly carpeted floor, his shoes squeaking unnervingly in the spacious room. Copies of The Washington Post, The New York Times and Aviation Week were spread across his usually immaculate desk, but his attention was focused on his window, where we could see fluffy snowflakes gently drifting down.
"Traffic's going to get worse as the day goes on," Memo muttered.
"They're saying it'll only be an inch or so," I told him.
"That's enough to paralyze this town."
Yeah, especially when everybody jumps in their cars and starts fleeing the town as if a terrorist nuke is about to go off, I replied silently.
Aloud, I asked, "What about this sterilization business? Is there any substance to the story?"
Memo glanced sharply at me. "They don't need substance as long as they can start a panic."
Dr. Pencilbeam sat at one of the unmatched conference chairs, all bony limbs and elbows and knees.
"Relax, Roger," Pencilbeam said calmly. "Congress isn't going to halt the SSZ program. It means too many jobs, too much international prestige. And besides, the President has staked her credibility on it."
"That's what worries me," Memo muttered.
"What?"
But Memo's eye was caught by movement outside his window. He waddled past his desk and looked down into the street below.
"Oh, my God . . . "
"What's going on?" Pencilbeam unfolded like a pocket ruler into a six-foot-long human and hurried to the window. Outside, in the thin mushy snow, a line of somber men and women were filing along the street past the TURD building, bearing signs that screamed:
STOP THE SSZ!
DSON'T STERILIZE THE HUMAN RACE
SSZ MURDERS UNBORN CHILDREN
ZEPPELINS GO HOME!
"Isn't that one with the sign about unborn children a priest?" Pencilbeam asked.
Memo shrugged. "Your eyes are better than mine."
"Ah-hah! And look at this!"
Pencilbeam pointed a long, bony finger farther down the street. Another swarm of people were advancing on the building. They also carried placards:
SSZ FOR ZPG
ZEPPELINS SI! BABIES NO!
ZEPPELINS FOR POPULATION CONTROL
UP THE SSZ
Memo sagged against the window. "This . . . this is awful."
The Zero Population Growth group marched through the thin snowfall straight at the environmentalists and anti-birth-control pickets. Instantly the silence was shattered by shouts and taunts. Shrill female voices battled against rumbling baritones and bassos. Placards wavered. Bodies pushed. Someone screamed. One sign struck a skull and then bloody war broke out.
Memo, Pencilbeam and I watched aghast until the helmeted TAC squad police doused the whole tangled mess of them with riot gas, impartially clubbed men and woman alike and carted everyone off, including three bystanders and a homeless panhandler.
*
The Senate hearings were such a circus that Driver summoned me back to Phoenix for a strategy session with Anson's top management. I was glad to get outside the Beltway, and especially glad to see Lisa again. She even agreed to have dinner with me.
"You're doing a wonderful job there in Washington," she said, smiling with gleaming teeth and flashing eyes.
My knees went weak, but I found the courage to ask, "Would you consider transferring to the Washington office? I could use a sharp executive assistant—"
She didn't even let me finish. "I'd love to!"
I wanted to do handsprings. I wanted to grab her and kiss her hard enough to bruise our lips. I wanted to, but Driver came out of his office just at that moment, looking his jaw-jutting grimmest.
"Come on, kid. Time to meet the top brass."
The top brass was a mixture of bankers and former engineers. To my disgust, instead of trying to put together a strategy to defeat the environmentalists, they were already thinking about how many men and women they'd have to lay off when Washington pulled the plug on the SSZ program.
"But that's crazy!" I protested. "The program is solid. The President herself is behind it."
Driver fixed me with his steely stare. "With friends like that, who needs enemies?"
I left the meeting feeling very depressed, until I saw Lisa again. Her smile could light up the world.
Before heading back to Washington to fight Sequoia's sterilization propaganda, I looked up my old APT buddies. They were in the factory section where the SSZ was being fabricated.
The huge factory assembly bay was filled with the aluminum skeleton of the giant dirigible. Great gleaming metal ribs stretched from its titanium nosecap to the more intricate cagework of the tail fins. Tiny figures with flashing laser welders crawled along the ribbing like maggots cleaning the bones of some noble whale.
Even the jet engines sitting on their carrying pallets dwarfed human scale. Some of the welders held clandestine poker games inside their intake cowlings, Bob Wisdom told me. The cleaning crews kept quiet about the spills, crumbs and other detritus they found in them night after night. I stood with Bob, Ray Kurtz, Tommy Rohr and Richard Grand beside one of those huge engine pods, craning our necks to watch the construction work going on high overhead. The assembly bay rang to the shouts of working men and women, throbbed with the hum of machinery, clanged with the clatter of metal against metal.
"It's going to be some Christmas party of Congress cancels this project," Kurtz muttered gloomily.
"Oh, they wouldn't dare cancel it now that the Women's Movement is behind it," said Grand, with a sardonic little smile.
Kurtz glared at him from behind his beard. "You wish. Half those idiots in Congress will vote against us just to prove they're pro-environment."
"Actually, the scientific evidence is completely on our side," Grand said. "And in the long run, the weight of evidence prevails."
He always acts as if he knows more than anybody else, I thought. But he's dead wrong here. He hasn't the foggiest notion of how Washington works. But he sounds so damned sure of himself! It must be that phony accent of his.
"Well, just listen to me, pal," said Wisdom, jabbing a forefinger at Grand. "I've been working on that secretary of mine since the last Christmas party, and if this project falls through and the party is a bust that palpitating hunk of femininity is going to run home and cry instead of coming to the party!"
Grand blinked at him several times, obviously trying to think of the right thing to say. Finally he enunciated, "Pity."
But I was thinking about Lisa. If the SSZ is cancelled, Driver won't let her transfer to the Washington office. There'd be no need to hire more staff for me. There'd be no need for me!
I went back to Washington determined to save the SSZ from this stupid sterilization nonsense. But it was like trying to stop a tsunami with a floor mop. The women's movement, the environmental movement, the labor unions, even Leno and Letterman got into the act. The Senate hearings turned into a shambles; Pencilbeam and the other scientists were ignored while movie stars testified that they would never fly in an SSZ because of the dangers of radiation.
The final blow came when the President announced that was not going to Paris and Moscow, after all. Urgent problems elsewhere. Instead, she flew to Hawaii for an economic summit of the Pacific nations. In her subsonic Air Force One.
*
The banner proclaiming HAPPY HOLIDAYS! drooped sadly across one wall of the company cafeteria. Outside in the late afternoon darkness, lights glimmered, cars were moving and a bright full moon shone down on a rapidly-emptying parking lot.
Inside the Anson Aerospace cafeteria was nothing but gloom. The Christmas party had been a dismal flop, primarily because half the company's work force had received layoff notices that morning. The tables had been pushed to one side of the cafeteria to make room for a dance floor. Syrupy holiday music oozed out of the speakers built into the acoustic tile of the ceiling. But no one was dancing.
Bob Wisdom sat at one of the tables, propping his aching head in his hands. Ray Kurtz and Tommy Rohr sat with him, equally dejected.
"Why the hell did they have to cancel the project two days before Christmas?" Rohr asked rhetorically.
"Makes for more pathos," Kurtz growled.
"It's pathetic, all right," Wisdom said. "I've never seen so many women crying at once. Or men, for that matter."
"Even Driver was crying, and he hasn't even been laid off," Rohr said.
"Well," Kurtz said, staring at the half-finished drink in front of him, "Seqouia did it. He's a big media hero again."
"And we're on the bread line," said Rohr.
"You got laid off?" I asked.
"Not yet—but it's coming. This place will be closing its doors before the fiscal year ends."
"It's not that bad," said Wisdom. "We still have the Air Force work. As long as they're shooting off cruise missiles, we'll be in business."
Rohr grimaced. "You know what gets me? The way the whole project was scrapped, without giving us a chance to complete the big bird and show how it'd work. Without a goddamned chance."
Kurtz said, "Congressmen are scared of people getting sterilized."
"Not really," I said. "They're scared of not being on the right bandwagon."
All three of them turned toward me.
Rohr said, "Next time you dream up a project, pal, make it underground. Something in a lead mine. Or deeper still, a gold mine. Then Congress won't have to worry about cosmic rays."
Wisdom tried to laugh, but it wouldn't come.
"You know," I said slowly, "you just might have something there."
"What?"
"Where?"
"A supersonic transport—in a tunnel."
"Oh for Chri—"
But Wisdom sat up straighter in his chair. "You could make an air-cushion vehicle go supersonic. If you put it in a tunnel you get away from the sonic boom and the air pollution."
"The safety aspects would be better, too," Kurtz admitted. Then, more excitedly, "And pump the air out of the tunnel, like a pneumatic tube!"
Rohr shook his head. "You guys are crazy. Who the hell's going to build tunnels all over the country?"
"There's a lot of tunnels already built," I countered. We could adapt them for the SSST."
"SSST?"
"Sure," I answered, grinning for the first time in weeks. "Supersonic subway train."
They stared at me. Rohr pulled out his PDA and started tapping on it. Wisdom got that faraway look in his eyes. Kurtz shrugged and said, "Why the hell not?"
I got up and headed for the door. Supersonic subway train. That's my ticket. I'm going back to Washington, I knew. And this time I'll bring Lisa with me.