“So how rich are you?” she asked abruptly.

Humphries didn’t sputter into his champagne, but he did seem to swallow pretty hard.

Pancho added, “I mean, do you own any of this or are you just livin’ in it?” He thought a moment before answering. Then, “My grandfather made his fortune in the big dot-corn boom around the turn of the century. Gramps was smart enough to get into the market while it was still rising and get out before the bubble burst.”

“What’s a dot-corn?” Pancho asked.

Ignoring her question, Humphries went on, “My father took his degrees in biology and law. He bought into half a dozen biotech firms and built one of the biggest fortunes on Earth.”

“What’re your degrees in?”

“I have an MBA from Wharton and a JD from Yale.”

“So you’re a lawyer.”

“I’ve never practiced law.”

Pancho felt alarm signals tingling through her. That’s not a straight answer, she realized. But then, what do you expect from a lawyer? She recalled the old dictum:

How can you tell when a lawyer’s lying? Watch his lips.

“What do you practice?” she asked, trying to make it sound nonchalant. He smiled again, and there was even some warmth in it this time. “Oh… making money, mostly. That seems to be what I’m best at.”

Glancing around the luxurious library, Pancho replied, “I’d say you’re purty good at spendin’ it, too.”

Humphries laughed aloud. “Yes, I suppose so. I spend a lot of it on women.” As if on cue, a generously-curved redhead in a slinky metallic sheath appeared at the doorway to the dining room, a slim aperitif glass dangling empty from one manicured hand. “Say, Humpy, when is dinner served?” she asked poutily. “I’m starving.”

His face went white with anger. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “that I have a business meeting to attend to. I’ll be with you when I’m finished here.”

“But I’m starving,” the redhead repeated.

Glancing at Pancho, Humphries said in a low voice, “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”

The redhead looked Pancho over from head to toe, grinned, and flounced off.

Visibly trying to contain his fury, Humphries said, “I’m sorry for the interruption.”

Pancho shrugged. So I’m not invited for dinner, she realized. Should’ve known.

“Is that your wife?” she asked coolly.

“No.”

“You are married, aren’t you?”

“Twice.”

“Are you married now?”

“Legally, yes. Our lawyers are working out a divorce settlement.” Pancho looked straight into his icy gray eyes. The anger was still there, but he was controlling it now. He seemed deadly calm.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s finish up this business meeting so y’all can get down to dinner.”

Humphries picked up his glass again, drained it, and placed it carefully back on the bar. Looking up at Pancho, he said, “All right. I want to hire you.”

“I already have a job,” she said.

“As a pilot for Astro Manufacturing, I know. You’ve been working for them for more than six years.”

“So?”

“You won’t have to quit Astro. In fact, I want you to stay with them. The task I have in mind for you requires that you keep your position with Astro.” Pancho understood immediately. “You want me to spy on them.”

“That’s putting it rather crudely,” Humphries said, his eyes shifting away from her and then back again. “But, yes, I need a certain amount of industrial espionage done, and you are ideally placed to do it.”

Pancho didn’t think twice. “How much money are we talkin’ about here?”

CUENCA

Dan Randloph felt a wave of giddiness wash over him as he stood at his hotel window and looked down into the rugged gorge of the Jucar River. This is stupid, he told himself. You’ve been in high-rises a lot taller than this. You’ve been on top of rocket launch towers. You’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you’ve done EVA work in orbit, for god’s sake, floating hundreds of miles above the Earth without even an umbilical cord to hold onto. Yet he felt shaky, slightly light-headed, as he stood by the window. It’s not the height, he told himself. For a scary moment he thought it was one of the woozy symptoms of radiation sickness again. But then he realized that it was only because this hotel was hanging over the lip of the gorge, six stories down from the edge.

The old city of Cuenca had been built in medieval times along the rim of the deep, vertiginous chasm. From the street, the hotel seemed to be a one-story building, as did all the buildings along the narrow way. Inside, though, it went down and down, narrow stairways and long windows that looked out into the canyon cut by the river so far below.

Turning from the window, Dan went to the bed and unzipped his travel bag. He was here in the heart of Spain to find the answer to the world’s overwhelming problem, the key to unlock the wealth of the solar system. Like a knight on a quest, he told himself, with a sardonic shake of his head. Seeking the holy grail. Like a tired old man who’s pushing himself because he doesn’t have anything else left in his life, sneered a bitter voice in his head.

The flight in from Madrid had turned his thoughts to old tales of knighthood and chivalrous quests. The Clippership rocket flight from La Guaira had taken only twenty-five minutes to cross the Atlantic, but there was nothing to see, no portholes in the craft’s stout body and the video views flashing across the screen at his seat might as well have been from an astronomy lecture. The flight from Madrid to Cuenca, though, had been in an old-fashioned tiltrotor, chugging and rattling and clattering across a landscape that was old when Hannibal had led armies through it.

Don Quixote rode across those brown hills, Dan had told himself. El Cid battled the Moors here.

He snorted disdainfully as he pulled his shaving kit from the travel bag. Now I’m going to see if we can win the fight against a giant bigger than any windmill that old Don Quixote tackled.

The phone buzzed. Dan snapped his fingers, then realized that the hotel phone wasn’t programmed for sound recognition. He leaned across the bed and stabbed at the ON button.

“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.