“Good,” said Fuchs. And he slid the door shut.
Amanda giggled at him. “Lars, you were positively rude to him!”
With a sardonic grin back at her, he said, “I thought his eyes would fall out of his head, he was staring at you so hard.”
“Oh, Lars, he wasn’t. Was he?”
“He most certainly was.”
Amanda’s expression became sly. “What do you think he had on his mind?”
His grin turned wolfish. “I’ll show you.”
Even though they took place in the tropical beauty of La Guaira, on the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, the quarterly meetings of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s board of directors had turned into little less than armed confrontations. Martin Humphries had built a clique around himself and was working hard to take control of the board. Opposing him was Pancho Lane, who had learned in her five years on the board how to bring together a voting bloc of her own.
As chairman of the board, Harriett O’Banian tried her best to steer clear of both groups. Her job, as she saw it, was to make Astro as profitable as possible. Much of what Humphries wanted to do was indeed profitable, even though Pancho opposed virtually anything Humphries or one of his people proposed.
But now Pancho was proposing something that might become an entirely new product line for Astro, and Humphries seemed dead set against it.
“Scoop gases from the atmosphere of Jupiter?” Humphries was scoffing. “Can you think of anything—any idea at all—that carries more risk?”
“Yeah,” Pancho snapped. “Lettin’ somebody else get a corner on the fusion fuels market.”
Red-haired Hattie O’Banian was no stranger to outbursts of temper. But not while she chaired the board. She rapped on the long conference table with her knuckles. “We will have order here,” she said firmly. “Mr. Humphries has the floor.”
Pancho slumped back in her chair and nodded unhappily. She was seated almost exactly across the table from Humphries. O’Banian had to exert some self-control to keep from smiling at her. Pancho had come a long way since her first awkward days on the board. Underneath her west Texas drawl and aw-shucks demeanor, she had a sharp intelligence, quick wit, and the ability to focus on an issue with the intensity of a laser beam. With Hattie’s help, Pancho had learned how to dress the part of a board member: today she wore a trousered business suit of dusky rose, touched off with accents of jewelry. Still, Hattie thought, her lanky, long-legged tomboy image came through. She looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and sock Humphries between the eyes.
For his part, Humphries seemed perfectly at ease in a casual cardigan suit of deep blue and a pale lemon turtleneck shirt. He wears clothes well, Hattie thought, and hides his thoughts even better.
“Martin,” said O’Banian. “Do you have anything else to add?”
“I certainly do,” Humphries said, with a crafty little smile. He turned his gaze to Pancho for a moment, then looked back at O’Banian. “I am opposed to fly-by-night schemes that promise a jackpot at the end of the rainbow but are in reality fraught with technical risks. And human dangers. Sending a ship to Jupiter in a crazy attempt to scoop hydrogen and helium isotopes from that planet’s atmosphere is utter madness, pure and simple.”
Half a dozen board members nodded agreement. O’Banian noticed that a couple of them were not usually on Humphries’ side in these quarrels.
“Ms. Lane? Do you have anything more to say in support of your proposal?”
Pancho sat up ramrod straight and looked squarely at Humphries. “I sure do. I’ve presented the facts, the engineering analysis, the cost estimates and the profit probabilities. The numbers show that scooping fusion fuels is within the capabilities of existing technology. Nothing new needs to be invented.”
“A ship that dives into Jupiter’s atmosphere to collect its gases?” blurted one of the older men down the table. He was paunchy, bald, red-faced.
Pancho forced a smile at him. “A ship that’s being teleoperated from Jupiter orbit. It’s well within existing capabilities.”
“There’s no base in the Jupiter system for a remote operating team; we’d have to set it up it ourselves.”