“Mr. Randolph?”
The face Dan saw in the palm-sized phone screen looked almost Mephistopholean: thick black hair that came to a point almost touching his thick black brows; a narrow vee-shaped face with sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin; coal-black eyes that glittered slyly, as if the man knew things that no one else knew. A small black goatee.
“Yes,” Dan answered. “And you are… ?”
“Lyall Duncan. I’ve come to take you to the test site,” said the caller, in a decidedly Highland accent.
Dan puffed out a breath. They certainly aren’t wasting any time. I’m not even unpacked yet.
“Are you ready, sir?” Duncan asked.
Dan tossed his shaving kit back onto the bed. “Ready,” he said.
Duncan was short, rail-thin, and terribly earnest about his work. He talked incessantly as they drove in a dusty old Volkswagen van out into the sun-drenched countryside, past scraggly checkerboards of farms and terraced hillsides, climbing constantly toward the distant bare peaks of the Sierras. The land looked parched, poor, yet it had been under cultivation for thousands of years. At least, Dan thought, it’s far enough from the sea to be safe from flooding. But it looks as if it’s turning into a brown, dusty desert.
“… tried for many a year to get someone to look at our work, anyone,” Duncan was saying. “The universities were too busy with their big reactor projects, all of them sucking on one government teat or another. The private companies wouldn’t even talk to us, not without some fancy university behind us.”
Dan nodded and tried to stay awake. The man’s soft Scottish burr was hypnotic as they drove along the winding highway into the hills. There were hardly any other cars on the road, and the hum of the tires on the blacktop was lulling Dan to sleep. Electric motors don’t make much noise, he told himself, trying to fight off the jet lag. He remembered that auto makers such as GM and Toyota had tried to install sound systems that would simulate the vroom of a powerful gasoline engine, to attract the testosterone crowd. The GEC had nixed that; silent, efficient, clean electrical cars had to be presented as desirable, not as a weak second choice to muscle cars.
“… none of them wanted to see that a compact, lightweight, disposable fusion generator could work as well as the behemoths they were building,” Duncan droned on. “No one paid us any attention until we caught the ear of Mr. Martin Humphries.”
Dan perked up at the mention of Humphries’s name. “How did you reach him? He’s pretty high up in the corporate food chain.”
Duncan smiled craftily. “Through a woman, how else? He came to Glasgow to give a speech. The anniversary of his father’s endowment of the new biology building, or something of that sort. He took a fancy to a certain young lady in our student body. She was a biology major and had quite a body of her own.”
With a laugh, Dan said, “So she did the Delilah job for you.”
“One of the lads in our project knew her—in the biblical sense. He asked her if she’d help the cause of science.”
“And she agreed.”
“Willingly. ‘Tisn’t every day a lass from Birmingham gets to sleep with a billionaire.”
“Oh, she was English?”
“Aye. We couldn’t ask a Scottish lass to do such a thing.”
Both men were still laughing as the car pulled into the test site’s parking lot.
It wasn’t much of a site, Dan thought as he got out of the car. Just a flat, open area of bare dirt with a couple of tin sheds to one side and a rickety-looking scaffolding beyond them. Rugged hills rose all around, and in the distance the Sierras shimmered ghostlike in the heat haze. The sun felt hot and good on his shoulders. The sky was a perfect blue, virtually cloudless. Dan inhaled a deep breath of clean mountain air; it was cool and sharp with a tang of pines that even got past his nose plugs.
Dan thought about taking them out; it would be a relief to do without them. But he didn’t remove them.