He answered just as quietly, ‘Of course. Always, dear lady.’
That night I gave him more details. ‘The next road to be converted will be the
Jersey Turnpike, an eighty-mile-per-hour road as compared with this fiddling
thirty-mile-per-hour job we saw opened today. But the Harriman Highway -‘
‘Harriman?’
‘The D. D. Harriman Prairie Highway from Kansas City to Denver will be a
hundred-mile-per-hour road that will grow a strip city thirty miles wide from Old
Muddy to the Rocky Mountains. It will boost Kansas from a population of two million
to a population of twenty million in ten years… with endless special positions for
anyone who knows it is going to happen.’
‘Maureen, you frighten me.’
‘I frighten myself, George. It’s rarely comfortable to know what is going to
happen.’ I decided to take the plunge. ‘The rolling roads will continue to be built
at a frantic pace, as fast as sunpower screens can be manufactured to drive them –
down the east coast, along Route Sixty-Six, on El Camino Real from San Diego to
Sacramento and beyond – and a good thing, too, as the sunpower screens on the roofs
of the road cities will take up the slack and fend off a depression when the
Paradise power plant is shut down and placed in orbit.’
George kept quiet so long I thought he had fallen asleep. At last he said, ‘Did I
hear you correctly? The big atomic power pile in Paradise, Arizona, will be placed
in orbit? How? And why?’
‘By means of spaceships based on today’s glide rockets. But operating with an escape
fuel developed at Paradise. But, George, George, it must not happen! The Paradise
plant must be shut down, yes; it is terribly dangerous, it is built wrong -like a
steam engine without a relief valve.’ (In my head I could hear Sergeant Theodore’s
dear voice saying it: They were too eager to build… and it was built wrong – like
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a steam engine without a relief valve.’) ‘It must be shut down but it must not be
placed in orbit. Safe ways will be found to build atomic power plants; we don’t need
the Paradise plant. In the meantime the sunpower screens can fill the gap.’
‘If it’s dangerous – and I know some people have worried about it – if it is placed
in orbit, it won’t be dangerous.’
‘Yes, George, that’s why they will put it in orbit. Once in orbit, it would not be
dangerous to the town of Paradise, or the state of Arizona… but what about the
people in orbit with it? They will be killed.’
Another long wait – It seems to me that it might be possible to design a plant to
operate by remote control, like a freighter rocket. I must ask Ferguson.’
‘I hope you are right. Because you will see, when you return to Kansas City and open
my envelope number six and also number seven, that I prophesy that the Paradise
power plant will be placed in orbit, and that it will blow up and kill everybody on
board, and destroy the rocketship that services it. George, it must not be allowed
to happen. You and Mr Harriman must stop it. I promise you, dear, that if this can
be stopped – if my prophecy can be proved wrong – I will break my crystal ball and
never prophesy again.’
‘I can’t make any promises, Maureen. Sure, both Delos and I are directors of the
Power Syndicate… but we hold a minor position both in stock and on the board. The
Power Syndicate represents practically all the venture capital in the United States;
the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was suspended to permit it to be formed in order to build
the Paradise plant. Hmm… a man named Daniel Dixon controls a working majority,
usually. A strong man. I don’t like him much:
‘I’ve heard of him, haven’t met him. George, can he be seduced?’
‘Maureen!’
‘George, if I can keep fifty-odd innocent people from being killed in an industrial
accident, I’ll do considerably more than offer this old body as a bribe. Is he