“Dan, could I speak to you for a moment?” asked Harriett O’Banian. She’d been on the board for more than ten years, ever since Dan had bought out her small solar-cell production company.
“Sure, Hartie,” he said, walking her slowly to the far corner of the big conference room. “What’s on your mind?”
Hattie O’Banian was a trim-looking redhead who had consummated her buyout by Astro Manufacturing with a month-long affair with Dan. It had been fun for them both, and she’d been adult enough to walk away from it once she realized that no matter who shared his bed, Dan Randolph was in love with former President Jane Scanwell.
Glancing over her shoulder to make certain no one was within eavesdropping range, O’Banian half-whispered, “I’ve been offered a damned good price for my Astro shares. So have half a dozen other board members.”
Dan’s eyes flicked to Humphries, at the other end of the room, still chatting with the directors gathered around him.
“Who made the offer?” he asked.
“A straw man. Humphries is the real buyer.”
“I figured.”
“The trouble is, Dan, that’s it’s a damned good offer. Five points above the market price.”
“He’s gone up to five, has he?” Dan muttered.
“With the stock in free-fall the way it is, the offer is awfully tempting.”
“Yep, I can see that.”
She looked up at him and Dan realized that her emerald green eyes, which could be so full of delight and mischief, were dead serious now.
“He can buy up enough stock to outvote you,” O’Banian said.
“That’s what he’s trying to do, all right.”
“Dan, unless you’re going to pull some rabbit out of your hat at the meeting today, half your board is going to cash out.”
Dan tried to grin. It came out more as a grimace. “Thanks for the warning, Hattie. I’ll see what kind of rabbits I’ve got for you.”
“Good luck, Dan.”
He went to the head of the conference table, tapped the computer stylus against the stainless steel water tumbler there, and called the meeting to order. The directors took their seats; before he sat down, Humphries complained of the glare from the window and asked that the curtains be closed.
The agenda was brief. The treasurer’s report was gloomy. Income from the company’s final solar-power satellite construction project was tailing off as the project neared completion.
“What about the bonus for finishing the job ahead of schedule?” asked a florid-faced graybeard. Dan thought of him as Santa Claus with hypertension.
“That won’t be paid until the sunsat is beaming power to the ground,” said the treasurer.
“Still, it’s a sizeable amount of money.”
“It’ll keep us afloat for several months,” Dan said, waving the treasurer to silence.
“Then what?”
“Then we have to live off the income from existing operations. We have no new construction projects.”
“That’s the last of the power satellites?” asked the board member that Dan had privately nicknamed Bug Eyes. His eyes were even wider than usual, as if this was the first time he’d heard the bad news.
Dan clasped his hands as he answered carefully, “Although there are several orbital slots still available to accommodate solar power satellites, the GEC refuses to authorize any new construction.”
“It’s those damned Chinese,” growled one of the older men.
“China is not alone in this,” said a plump oriental woman sitting halfway down the table. Dan’s name for her was Mama-San. “Many nations prefer to build power stations on their own ground rather than buy electrical power from space.”
“Even though the price for that electricity is more than twice as high as our price,” Dan pointed out. “And even higher, if you count the costs of sequestering their greenhouse gas emissions.”
“Their governments subsidize the greenhouse amelioration,” the treasurer pointed out.
“The people still have to pay for it, one way or another.”
“What about beaming power from the Moon?”
“You wouldn’t need the GEC to allocate any orbital slots for that, by god!” Santa Claus thumped the table with his fist.
“It’s a possibility,” Dan admitted, “and we’ve talked about it with the officials of Selene —”
“Selene doesn’t own the whole damned Moon! Go off and build solar energy farms in the Ocean of Storms. Cover the whole expanse with solar cells, for god’s sake!”