“You want me to look at this proposal over lunch? You think I can make a technical decision about this in an hour or less?”
Dan shrugged disarmingly. “If you can’t, you can’t. All I’m asking is that you give it a look.”
Freiberg gave Dan a look that was far from happy.
Yet five minutes after noon he climbed up through the open door of Dan’s big mobile home.
“I might have known,” he muttered as he stepped past Big George, standing by the doorway.
The van was luxuriously fitted out. George was Dan’s major domo and bodyguard. An attractive young Japanese woman, petite and silent, was stirring steaming vegetables in an electric wok. Dan was sitting in the faux-leather couch that curved around the fold-down dinner table, a suede jacket draped over his shoulders even though the van felt uncomfortably warm to Freiberg. Zack could see the crease across Dan’s face that the sanitary mask had left.
“Drink?” Dan asked, without getting to his feet. A half-empty tumbler of something bubbly sat on the table before him.
“What are you having?” Freiberg asked, sliding into the couch where it angled around the table’s end. The table was already set for two.
“Ginger beer,” said Dan. “George turned me on to it. Non-alcoholic and it’s even good for the digestion.”
Freiberg shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Okay, I’ll have the same.”
George quickly pulled a brown bottle from the refrigerator, opened it, and poured Freiberg a glass of ginger beer.
“Goes good with brandy, y’know,” he said as he handed the glass to Freiberg.
The scientist accepted the glass wordlessly and George went back to his post by the door, folding his heavy arms over his massive chest like a professional bouncer.
After a sip of his drink, Dan asked, “Might have known what?”
Freiberg waved a hand around the compartment. “That you’d be living in the lap of luxury, even out here.”
Dan laughed. “If you’ve got to go out into the wilderness, you might as well bring a few creature comforts with you.”
“Kind of warm in here, though,” Freiberg complained mildly.
Dan smiled gauntly at him. “You’re accustomed to living in the wild, Zack. I’m not.”
“Yeah, guess so.” Freiberg glanced at the painting above Dan’s head: a little girl standing by a banyan tree. “Is that real?”
“Holoprint,” said Dan. “A Vickrey.”
“Nice.”
“What’re you living in, out here?”
“A tent,” said Freiberg.
Nodding, Dan said, “That’s what I thought.”
“It’s a pretty good tent, as tents go, but it’s nothing like this.” His eyes swept the dining area appreciatively. “How many other rooms in here?”
“Just two: office and bedroom. King-sized bed, of course.”
“Of course.”
“You like it, it’s yours.”
“The holoprint?”
“The van. The whole shebang. I’ll be leaving later this afternoon. If you can find somebody to drive George and me to the airstrip you can keep this for yourself.”
Surprised, Freiberg blurted, “Can you afford to give it away? From what I’ve heard—”
“For you, Zack,” Dan interrupted, “my last penny. If it comes to that.”
Freiberg made a wry face. “You’re trying to bribe me.”
“Yep. Why not?”
With a resigned sigh, the scientist said, “All right, let me see this proposal you want me to look at.”
“Hey George,” Dan called, “bring me the notebook, will you?”
Almost an hour later, Freiberg looked up from the notebook’s screen and said, “Well, I’m no rocket engineer, and what I know about fusion reactors you could put into a thimble, but I can’t find anything obviously wrong with this.”
“Do you think it’ll work?” Dan asked earnestly.
“How the hell should I know?” Freiberg snapped irritably. “Why in hell did you come all the way out here to ask my opinion on something you know is outside my expertise?”
Dan hesitated for several heartbeats, then answered, “Because I can trust you, Zack. This guy Humphries is too slick for me to believe. All the experts I’ve contacted claim that this fusion rocket is workable, but how do I know that he hasn’t bought them off? He’s got something up his sleeve, some hidden agenda, and this fusion rocket idea is just the tip of the iceberg. I think he wants to get his paws on Astro.”