Evan Innes - America 2040 Book 03 - City In The Mist

AMERICA 2040 Volume 3

CITY IN THE MIST

Evan Innes

ISBN 0-553-26204-1

CITY IN THE MIST

PROLOGUE

From the journal of Evangeline Burr, official historian, theSpirit of America

In the brief time that we have been on our new planet, the odd and wonderful Omega, so much has

happened that I have fallen behind in keeping my records. It has been a time of hope and disappointment,

of bizarre discoveries and terrible tragedies.

Our new world presented a kind face to us at first. In Eden, the committee-chosen name for the area of

land we have made our own, the climate was mild and the wildlife posed no threat. The only visible

predator, a small, lionlike cat, liked to have his tummy scratched, and the bees did not have stingers. That

Omega might have hidden perils was made clear to us when we lost a woman to a giant worm similar to

a slug, later to be called a miner because of the beast’s ability to burrow deeply into solid rock.

Our commander, Captain Duncan Rodrick, became seriously concerned when a mineral exploration

party led by Stoner McRae discovered an ancient city built of stone. We still do not know who built the

city, where they are now, or why they abandoned it. How far might that civilization have progressed since

the time when the city was built—if the culture still survives—and does it pose a threat to us now?

But our greatest tragedy to date, one that not even Rodrick’s care could have prevented, was sadly

unnecessary and came as the result of the dissatisfaction of the egotistical first officer, Rocky Miller.

Commander Miller stirred the fires of a dissident group of scientists and led a party of ninety families,

some two hundred men, women, and children, into a deadly ambush staged by one of the indigenous

intelligent life forms, the insectlike Whorsk. Dr. Mandy Miller, the commander’s wife, was the only

survivor of the Whorsk attack.

Aside from the hostility of the Whorsk, our most serious challenge is the lack of heavy metals in

Omega’s crust. Without rhenium, the metal that fuels our starship, Captain Rodrick would never be able

to complete his mission to take theSpirit of Americaback to Earth with a cargo of Omega’s fine food

plants, which have great potential for making the arid areas of the Earth green again. The lack of heavy

metals is now being overcome with the help of the giant miners. They trade the metallic ores they have

extracted from far beneath the surface for a synthetic lubricant we manufacture for their boring teeth .

We’ve had a number of births and several weddings, the most notable of which was the double

ceremony of Captain Duncan Rodrick and Lieutenant Jackie Garvey, and Chief Engineer Max Rosen

and Dr. Grace Monroe. And although it does not make up for our losses, one person has been added to

our little colony. She’s a former marshal of the Soviet Union, no less. Theresita Pulaski was the only

survivor of the great starshipKarl Marx.She survived an incredible epic journey through Omega’s jungles

to be taken captive by the Whorsk, later to be rescued by Jacob West, a scout-ship pilot and Apache

Indian with a PhD in physics.

We’re still mystified by Theresita Pulaski’s experiences, for, although it is biologically impossible for

Whorsk and humans to interbreed, it has been discovered that Theresita is pregnant. Under drugs and

hypnosis, she can vaguely remember—almost as if it were a dream—making love with a very handsome

and very human man. This could only have happened during the time she was recovering from being

seriously mauled by a large predator along the Great Misty River, so our investigations are concentrated

on that river. If there is a life form on Omega so similar to humans that interbreeding is possible, we all

want to know about it. However, every surveillance flight of that area is fruitless because of a thick mist

that hangs over the entire river valley. It cannot be penetrated by our detection instruments.

And our main worry still plagues us: Was the Earth destroyed in a nuclear holocaust after our takeoff?

We didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved when we discovered that Theresita Pulaski did

not have the answer either. Although theKarl Marxleft Earth after the Spirit of America,she too lost her

communications with Earth. Thus it was that Theresita will remain as ignorant as we, about whether the

Earth’s leaders blundered into a final nuclear war, until we can accumulate enough rhenium to send the

Spirit of Americaback through space .

Meanwhile, life is good in Eden, although the work hours are long and our ability to establish the kind of

technological civilization necessary to continue our space travel has been severely impaired by the deaths

of many skilled people. I am confident, however, that with God’s help we will overcome and that soon

our great ship will roar upward on her rockets to return to the Earth and there discover whether we are

the last representatives of the American nation left alive. On a personal note, I am quite far along in my

study of Portuguese. I’ve had a chance to practice my Russian with Theresita, and she says my accent is

improving. I think I’m adequate at Portuguese since it is so similar to Spanish, and, should we ever

contact the Brazilian expedition into space, aboard theEstrêla do Brasil,I will be able to converse with

them .

I

WARNINGS FROM A SPACE BEACON

ONE

Jennie Hamilton had become a morning person since having left the turmoil and daily crises of her role as

America’s First Lady. Living now with her husband, ex-President Dexter Hamilton, in western North

Carolina, she liked to watch her peaceful, private world brighten before the sun burst over the mountain

to the east. On a morning when spring had definitely established itself against any vagrant urge by winter

to make one final assault, she clasped her coffee mug in both hands, sat sidesaddle on the railing of the

eastern balcony of a house she had come to love, and watched the glory of rhododendron blooms

emerge from the predawn darkness.

The house had been built by an industrialist of the old school, and it was shamefully extravagant in an age

when rat-pack cities sprinkled the nation like algae on a stagnant pond, ever growing. Behind her was

one of the few remaining wilderness areas and to the east an unbuildable, steep, seemingly bottomless

chasm and a sheer mountain. At night, however, the glow of light from the metro sprawl of Asheville

dimmed the stars.

Jennie did her best thinking in the early morning. The habit had grown from an inability to sleep, and then

it had become a curative process, which over a period of months began to soothe her resentment and

frustration about the way the so-called pundits and political writers had handled the retrospective

assessment of her husband’s presidency. It had all been rather terrible.

They were calling Dexter Hamilton’s two terms in the White House the most disastrous eight years in

American history. Republicrats were blaming the growing isolation of the United States on Dexter, but in

view of recent events, more and more people were beginning to question the Republicrats’ attempt to

blame their failures on Dexter’s Conservative administration.

More and more common people in the overpopulated cities were beginning to remember that Dexter

Hamilton had at least made a stand. He had fought the Russians in South America, and he had destroyed

Soviet power in the Western Hemisphere, even if the victory had been pyrrhic, with crippling losses to

America’s air and sea power.

The people of the United States were frightened. The country was becoming an isolated island of

democracy in a hostile world. One by one the smaller nations of South and Central America had

deserted their alliances with the United States to cast their lot with fascist Brazil—a political giant equal to

the Soviet Union and the United States, with a nuclear arsenal comparable in destructive power to that of

either of the aging superpowers and a space program second to none.

For the first time in modern history, the United States was fighting a border war. Mexico was in turmoil,

torn between the last-surviving Communist party in the Americas and the Brazilian-backed nationalists.

The civil war spilled over the border with both right-wing and left-wing guerrilla groups bringing death

and terror from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific.

That situation could not be blamed on Dexter Hamilton. In a recent interview, he had stated, “It is time

for the Republicrat administration to mobilize the reserves and to establish law and order on our southern

border, even if it means we have to march all the way to Mexico City.”

Jennie and a precious few others knew that it was unfair to blame the uncontested, swift, and devastating

Russian conquest of Europe on the Hamilton administration, but the political writers were all in agreement

that if Hamilton had not forced the showdown in South America with the Russians, they would have been

content to leave Western Europe nominally free… although the Western European countries had long

since fallen into the Soviet orbit.

It was a frightening world. In all of Europe only Switzerland had sovereignty over its affairs, because,

Western cynics explained, even Soviet strongmen needed secret Swiss bank accounts. The exhausted

English had at long last granted total independence to Scotland and Ireland, and oddly enough the three

nations were working more closely than ever, for only their frail lifeline extending across the Atlantic

Ocean to the United States protected them from becoming yet another Soviet province.

Japan was still independent, in spite of being surrounded by the Communist horde. The old men who

ruled in the Kremlin following the assassination of Premier Yuri Kolchak had realized that the industrial

capabilities of Japan and the United States were so meshed that a Soviet attack on Japan would force

the United States into war, most probably with the use of nuclear weapons.

Australia and New Zealand, awash in a Red sea, were hardly worth the effort of conquest, and there

was a risk to the Soviets because of Australia’s and New Zealand’s ties with their English-speaking

American allies. South Africa, that nation of mad dogs, glowered from behind its ramparts at Communist

black Africa and was left alone, for the men in the Kremlinknew that the nukes would fly from South

Africa at the first sign of an attack, and that tiny tip of the continent was not worth the loss of a dozen or

more Russian cities and a good portion of Africa.

Although the Republicrats tried to blame it all on Dexter Hamilton, the facts that had led to the South

American war were still classified as top secret. Only a few knew that Hamilton had had no choice, save

surrender, in the face of Yuri Kolchak’s threat to have a Red world or a dead world before he died of

his incurable disease.

Jennie Hamilton knew that historians, if there were to be any, would state that Dexter Hamilton had

shown great bravery and love of freedom and that he had stopped the surge of communism in the

Western Hemisphere. At first the barrage of criticism had bothered her, but now she was at peace. She

knew what her husband had faced and what he had accomplished. His record in world affairs would

eventually stand on its merits.

However, there was another area of criticism, which was for months the heaviest of all. It came from the

spokesmen and -women for the eighty percent of the population who lived on government money, either

a federal or state paycheck, or one of the multiple forms of welfare. What Hamilton considered to be his

greatest achievement, the building of theSpirit of America , was viewed by most as an egghead

experiment that had wasted billions of dollars, which should have been spent on the masses. He had sent

an untested ship into space, and that was, they accused, his worst folly.

There would have been heavy criticism of theSpirit of America even if it had been a success. But when

communications were lost with the ship before it reached the point of lightstep, when it was evident that

all aboard were dead, the voices of the masses rose to near hysteria.

Even Jennie had her doubts about theSpirit of America . She tried, but she could not share Dexter’s

optimism about the ship. Harry Shaw, builder of the starship and the inventor of the rhenium-powered

drive that had made interstellar travel possible, had tracked her past the far orbit of Pluto, but he had no

evidence that anyone was alive aboard her. There had been a tiny disturbance on a recording tape,

enough to make Shaw and Hamilton hope and pray that the ship had used her rhenium drive; but at that

great distance the ship was only a tiny mote in space, and the disturbance on the tape could have been,

as the cynics said, a glitch in the electronics. The ship, most people felt, was a dead hulk, speeding away

from the solar system at sublight speed to travel forever into the depths of space.

Now the sun was up, and an hour later, so was Dexter Hamilton. A maid served breakfast on the

balcony. Hamilton did not look like a reviled and defeated man; only in his late fifties, he was youthful,

vibrant, and energetic. He made many public appearances and spoke often on the viewscreen, for, after

all, he was the only living ex-president, and Americans honor their past presidents regardless of their

actions in office. Hamilton was writing his memoirs. He worked well at Starview—that was the name

Jennie had given to the estate in the North Carolina mountains—and he enjoyed the privacy. He was

near enough to Asheville to look in now and then on the construction of the Hamilton Presidential

Library, and he had an old friend in residence most of the time at Starview. Oscar Kost, former scientific

adviser at the cabinet level and still complaining of his aching neck, had his own suite of rooms in an

isolated wing of the huge house, from which he ventured out now and then to have a bourbon on the

balcony or to make lecture appearances at various universities.

Hamilton was having his second cup of coffee and enjoying the view—the beauty of both the mountain

spring and his wife—when his secretary brought a cellular telephone to the table and said, “It’s Harry

Shaw, Mr. President.”

Jennie didn’t get much from the conversation. Hamilton’s end of it was brief, consisting of affirmatives

and a final, “That’s great, Harry.” Then he smiled at her and said, “He wants to come down and bring a

couple of friends.”

“It’ll be nice to see him again,” Jennie said.

Harry Shaw had left government service. After the apparent failure of theSpirit of America , all space

development funds had been cut. The government was pushing hard to turn Shaw’s invention of the

century, perhaps of all time, into a weapon. Harry Shaw had made it possible for a spaceship to travel

faster than the speed of light, but all the Pentagon in Washington could think of was the explosive

potential of antimatter-bombarded rhenium, Shaw had wanted no part of that. With enough nuclear

warheads in place to demolish the Earth ten times over, who needed a doomsday machine? Shaw felt

that his invention, transformed into a weapon, could not only split the Earth into small asteroids but

destroy nearby planets and affect the life cycle of the sun itself. There were times when he wished he had

never started working with the peculiar properties of rhenium.

A man has to live, and a man of Shaw’s character has to work. He had taken private employment with

Transworld Robotics, where Dr. Grace Monroe had developed the computer brain that had made

android construction possible. Transworld Robotics had allowed Shaw to write his own contract, given

him almost unlimited funds, and allowed him to pursue any line of research he chose. For a long time he

had ignored his work with rhenium, for even to think of it put pictures of failure, devastation, and death

aboard ship into his mind. He knew that he was expected to explore further the properties of

rhenium—and to his surprise Transworld had provided him with a couple of pounds of that rarest of

metals—but for long months he continued to resist all efforts to get him talking about the Spirit of

America project. Then, one day when his current speculation had led him into a dead-end box for the

thousandth time, he punched up the lightstep file, mused through it, then sat up with a jerk. He did some

swift calculations, walked the floor for a while, sat down at the computer terminal, and repeated the

calculations a half-dozen times, then requested a line to the office of Brand Roebling.

Roebling’s voice was crisp. “Yes, Harry?”

“If you have time, I’d like to see you in my lab,” Harry said. He was not much on protocol. During

Project Lightstep he had been the boss.

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Roebling said.

Brand Roebling was the great-grandson of Brandon Roebling, the founder of Transworld Robotics. He

liked to tell people that he could trace his ancestry to John Roebling, who had invented wire rope and

used it to build the Brooklyn Bridge, an edifice that was still standing in New York, although no vehicular

traffic was allowed on it. Brand had sprung from a long line of achievers, and he himself had not

depended on family wealth. He had developed his own electronics company, and it had not been family

money but his own that he had used in the corporate takeover of Transworld, thus regaining control of

the company lost by his father. Not yet sixty-five, he had accumulated. one of the largest private fortunes

in the world. He was absolutely disgusted by the events of recent decades, events he saw as the total loss

of American power and prestige. He saw no future for his son, in his midthirties, and daughter, in her

early twenties, as long as the country was in the hands of the fumbling, cowardly Republicrats.

Harry Shaw was seated, his feet on his desk, when Roebling was admitted by Shaw’s private security

guard. Shaw merely nodded and waved a hand at a chair in front of his desk as if he were the boss

instead of Roebling.

Roebling looked at Shaw’s face, seeking a clue to what was obviously a summons, but saw only a small,

dark, pleasant-faced man apparently completely at ease. Shaw was his kind of man. Their relationship

had not become intimate because Roebling was a busy man and Shaw a private one, but Roebling had

enjoyed Shaw’s company the few times they had talked.

Before Roebling could speak, Shaw said, “Damn, I was stupid.”

“Wrong, maybe. Stupid, no. But I do admire modesty in scientists.”

“We wasted tons of the stuff,” Shaw fumed.

“That’s interesting,” Roebling said, not having the slightest idea of what stuff Shaw was talking about.

“You can get the same power out of a couple of ounces as you can out of two tons,” Shaw said, rubbing

his wide forehead.

Roebling felt a prickle go up his spine. He was very familiar with Project Lightstep, and there were

interesting implications in Shaw’s revelation. If theSpirit of America had not been destroyed or damaged

beyond function, there was going to be a wait of years before the world would know the results of the

expedition because the ship had not carried enough rhenium to make a return trip.

“I’d like to borrow a rocket,” Shaw said simply. “A Truman I.C.B.M. will do. And there’s a lightstep

probe engine sitting in a shed down at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Do you think you could get your

hands on it?”

“I can twist a few arms,” Roebling replied. He was persona grata at the Pentagon because he had

simplified Grace Monroe’s admiral design, taking out some of the sophistication that had made the

admiral so human but leaving the android all his fighting skills and military sense. “Am I to understand that

you want to send out a lightstep probe?”

“Got a couple of things I need to check out,” Shaw said.

“I might have a little trouble,” Roebling said. “You know how this administfation feels about new space

ventures. It’ll be hard to sell anyone on the idea of spending money on a project that won’t reach critical

point for two years after launch.” He was talking about the long trip out of the solar system, which had

been required for theSpirit of America before her lightstep engine could be engaged.

“Two hours, not two years,” Shaw said.

Roebling rubbed his forehead. He was balding, and the length of forehead made his narrow face look

longer. “All right, Harry, maybe you’d better stop speaking in shorthand and tell me what’s on your

mind.”

“That I’m damned stupid,” Harry repeated. “It was there right in front of me all the time.”

“Are you saying that you can engage a lightstep engine inside a planet’s gravity well without causing the

king of all explosions?”

“Yes. It happens so fast,” Harry explained, “that the reaction takes place and the ship is gone before the

field it generates leaves the vehicle. We can go lightstep from Earth orbit, and we can do it with two

ounces of rhenium. We’ve got two pounds of it here. We could make sixteen jumps, of any chosen

distance, with two pounds. With the tons of stuff on theSpirit , they could have explored the universe. ”

Roebling was deep in thought. “If I understand you, we could take a shuttle vehicle and go to the stars.”

Shaw nodded. “But a shuttle wouldn’t carry enough rocket fuel and oxygen for much exploration.”

“But we wouldn’t need something as big and as complicated as theSpirit of America .”

“Nope.” Shaw let his feet crash to the floor. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. We could have been moving

colonists all this time.” He looked at Roebling. “Do you think there’s any chance of getting government

help on this?”

“Two chances—slim and none.”

“We’ve got to do it, Brand,” Harry said.

“Let me give it some thought. Harry. I’ll get back to you.”

Roebling made no commitment until several weeks later, when Harry Shaw pushed a button and a

rocket that had been built to carry multiple nuclear warheads deep into the Soviet Union lifted off from

Vandenberg Air Force Base and, closely tracked by Brazil and the Soviet Union as well as by Shaw’s

own instruments, reached for orbit. There, as far as the Brazilian and Soviet observers were concerned, it

malfunctioned and exploded. Only Shaw’s team knew that the explosion had been a dummy and that the

third stage of the Truman I.C.B.M. had winked out of existence and emerged over eleven light years

away. Within hours the third stage was back, just another piece of space debris, which was recovered by

a shuttle chartered by Transworld and later delivered to Harry Shaw’s lab.

Brand Roebling was there when Shaw removed the information-gathering instruments from the vehicle.

The tapes projected a picture of a sun with a family of planets, 61 Cygni A, theSpirit of America’s prime

landing objective.

Roebling was silent but awed. It was difficult to believe that he was seeing pictures that had been made

so far away; the light captured on the tapes would not reach the Earth for over eleven years. Shaw was

tense as he watched the results of measurements of the sun’s planets. He grinned when he saw the data

on the third planet—a planet of water and free oxygen and green growing things. “If they made it, they’re

there,” Shaw said. “On that planet.”

“Any indication?” Roebling asked.

“Hold one. We’re scanning all wavelengths.” Shaw pushed buttons and heard only the static of space for

a long moment as the instrument scanned the recordings; then his eyes went wide as a human voice

spoke, the words swimming in space static.

“All ships, all ships,” the voice said in the calm, measured tones of a space jock. “TheSpirit of America

has diverted to 61 Cygni B. Do not attempt landings on the third planet of 61 Cygni A. Repeat, do not

attempt landings on the third planet of 61 Cygni A. All ships, all ships—”

They listened to it for a second time, and then Shaw turned it off. “They made it!” he said, his face

beaming. “They had some kind of trouble on the A planet and left a space beacon to warn us, but they

made it.”

“There’s no assurance that they found anything better in the other system,” Roebling said.

“No, and that’s why we’ve got to go out there,” Shaw said with great intensity. “If they didn’t find a

habitable planet in the 61 Cygni B system, they’re stranded. All we have to do is get a ship out there and

tell them what we now know, and we can use theSpirit to explore the galaxy.” He leaned forward. “We

owe it to them, Brand. I don’t care what it takes, we owe it to them. And we owe it to ourselves, to

humankind. We could have the means now to relieve all the overpopulation of the world. Hell, we could

move the total population of the United States to other planets and let the Brazilians and the Russians

have this one. ”

“It takes money, Harry.”

“Not nearly as much as it took theSpirit of America . We won’t need all the extensive life-support

systems because we won’t have to spend years in space. We can be at 61 Cygni in hours. We can

explore a dozen or more star systems in a month.”

Rbebling rose and paced the floor. “Have you seen the news lately?”

“No. I’ve been too busy.”

“The Brazilians are moving into Mexico. Washington is making a lot of noise about it but doing nothing

concrete. Brazil has her nuclear forces on full alert. The Russians are yelling about overt aggression

against the last Communists in the Western Hemisphere, and they’re threatening to move on Japan to

‘secure their Asian flank.’ ”

“So we have our little problems,” Shaw said, with a cynical smile. “So what makes this series of crises

different from any of the others of the past decade or so?”

“Harry, you know and I know that sooner or later some fool is going to push the little red button.”

Harry nodded in silence, remembering the tense times late in Dexter Hamilton’s second term when it

seemed that the rockets would fly and the bombs would start falling from the space stations at any

moment.

“That’s another reason why we have to go,” Harry explained. “I’d like to be sure that Dexter Hamilton’s

dream isn’t dead. It’s almost as if we’ve been given a second chance. We can take a ship out there for a

fraction of what it cost to take theSpirit . We could even move a colony group, just like the one on the

Spirit , and have enough rhenium to assure that we’d find a habitable planet this time.”

Roebling was deep in thought. He saw images of his beloved son and daughter, Derek and Jean. He

saw the bombs going off, leaving a cold and lifeless world.

Brand Roebling was not a Republicrat, but he was not without influence in Washington. At midmorning

the next day he was seated across the desk from a small, nervous man who could not meet his eyes. It

made Roebling even more uneasy to see that the man who was President of the United States had

lost—or was in the process of losing— his nerve. He stated his case quickly, and for the first time the

President looked him in the eye.

“There will be no money poured down the rat hole of space during my term in office,” the President said.

At the Pentagon Roebling was told, “Brand, I wish we could do something. But we’re not even sure

those people on theSpirit of America are alive. After what Hamilton did with the contingency funds, we

have no money squirreled away. I can’t even buy myself a new staff car. Maybe things will change after

the next election. Let’s keep it in mind.”

Roebling flew back to Transworld Robotics, and there, where the communications system was a bit

more secured against electronic surveillance than even that of the Pentagon, he began to make calls. He

awoke Harry Shaw at three in the morning. “Harry,” he said, “I think you’d like to go out to the Cygni

system.”

“Even at three o’clock in the morning,” Shaw said, all symptoms of sleepiness washed quickly away.

“I’m going to have a few friends over to the house tomorrow night,” Roebling said. “We’ll eat at eight.

See you there.”

TWO

Brand Roebling’s personal aeroyacht was a converted multipurpose attack bomber. As one of the more

important military-industrial contractors to the Pentagon, he had certain privileges and the money to pay

for turning a deadly weapon of war into a means of private transportation. The yacht could go ballistic on

its rockets and circle the globe in mere hours, or it could land in an area just large enough to

accommodate its length and wingspan. The hover jets of the yacht hissed and roared, sending crashing

echoes bouncing in three directions around Starview, and then, as it touched down on the pad carved

from the side of a mountain, there was quiet disturbed only by the startled cries of crows as they fled the

area.

Dexter Hamilton was standing in the shelter beside the pad. He walked out as the jets whined down into

silence, saw a delighted Harry Shaw appear in the hatch, and raised his hand in greeting. He recognized

the others who followed Shaw from the yacht, and although his face continued to show a smile, he was

startled. The people with Shaw represented great power and wealth, and in the past that power and

wealth had contributed to several Dexter Hamilton campaigns. He walked rapidly forward to meet his

guests, shaking hands one by one.

There was plain old Bill Farlock, the farmer. That was the way Farlock thought of himself, although in

reality Farlock, in his mideighties, had amassed the largest landholding ever put together under the

free-enterprise system. If all his hundreds of thousands of acres in several states could be combined,

Farlock Farms would represent the second-largest green area in America, bettered only by the National

Park and Wilderness holdings. Farlock Farms produced a significant percentage of all the fresh

vegetables, fruits, and grains that made up the American diet. Farlock was lean and wrinkled, scorning

the available wrinkle removers and the surgeons who could make the old look young. His nose showed

sunburn under his wide-brimmed straw hat, and his hands were the rough hands of a working man.

The attractive woman was Maryann Ward, daughter of the founder of Synthafoods, Inc., the firm that

had put artificial protein on American tables in a form that replaced the eating of fatty, unhealthy animal

flesh. Under her control, Synthafoods had become one of the most powerful conglomerates in the nation.

Tall, elegant, and energetic, she had the look of a woman who has the self-esteem to be at her best at all

times—a woman in her prime late fifties.

White-maned Karl Zeitz, the eldest of them, was a cantankerous man who preferred the company of his

computers to that of any human being. His hair hung in a mass to his eyes, as if he wanted a curtain to

hide behind from the rest of the world. Although he was almost one hundred years old and a bit paunchy,

he walked with the strength of a man of fifty, and his handshake was firm.

The last passenger off the yacht was Brand Roebling, and he completed an impressive foursome. Dexter

Hamilton could not even guess at the number of billions of dollars in assets represented by the four

industrialists who joined him in the short walk from the landing pad to Starviews small lawns and

overhanging balconies.

Jennie met the group at the main entrance and was her usual charming self, quickly putting even the

misanthropic Karl Zeitz at ease. Of course everyone knew everyone. Jennie offered them a chance to

refresh themselves, and Zeitz rumbled, “I’m not tired. Any of you monkeys tired?”

“I gather you’d like to get right down to the business that has brought you here, ” Hamilton said.

“If that’s all right with you, Mr. President,” Harry Shaw replied.

“Fine with me,” Dexter said, as Jennie took Karl Zeitz’s arm and led them into a large, sunken seating

area with a glass wall and a spectacular view of the gorge below.

“Since we’re in the South, Jennie,” Zeitz said, “a tad of bourbon and branch water might loosen our

tongues a little.”

Jennie touched a hidden signal button with her toe, and a maid quickly came to stand in the doorway.

Even before the group had found seats, the maid was rolling a portable bar into the room, and in a few

minutes, everyone was holding a cool glass except Harry Shaw, who sat on the edge of his seat

impatiently. Farlock and Maryann Ward were looking out the window and commenting on the view.

Shaw spoke over the low voices. “Mr. President—” Hamilton held up one hand. “Harry,” he said, “that

‘Mr. President’ stuff is fine for public appearances and shows respect for the office, but I’d appreciate it

if you’d just call me Dexter.”

Evan Innes - America 2040 Book 03 - City In The Mist

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