Society of the Mind

transmit for a couple of minutes on an east-west orbit over the U.S., then cross the Atlantic and begin broadcasting to the U.K. Then it switches to French, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Russian. I don't think we've done a deal with the Kazakhs yet. Then Chinese and back around the world on a more southerly orbit. It might not pass back over the States for another hundred orbits. Since we only have one uplink from earth, those satellites also handle the continuous, real-time transmission of signals from satellite to satellite. It's a highly complex ballet up there round the clock, but the computer handles it all beautifully.'

Gray seemed to have quit talking, a fact that Laura confirmed with a quick glance up from her plate. 'That's amazing,' she said before gulping down the last of her potatoes.

'Oh, take your time,' Gray said graciously just before their empty plates were whisked away and he looked at his watch again.

Type A personality, she guessed. Motor's in high gear around the clock just like his business. He sat back as a sorbet was placed in front of him, and then ate it in three spoonfuls. He was as oblivious to the aesthetics of dinner as he was to the extravagance of his home.

'Here it comes,' he said, and stood up.

She cleaved a ledge of the sorbet onto her spoon, shoveled it into her mouth, and jumped up to follow him to the windows. High in the sky above she saw fire. A long pencil of flame fell lower and lower from the starry night, its rate of descent slowing almost imperceptibly.

'It's a single-stage rocket,' Gray said, continuing his lecture.

She looked at him, and he looked at the stars. From what Paulus and Petry had told her of the young Joe Gray, she had expected a taciturn, almost morose man who had little time for talk. He must have changed, she decided. 'Everything is reusable,' he went on. 'We use liquid fuel, and it only takes three days to relaunch in a normal cycle. We could do it in hours, theoretically.'

'I read that you plan a manned space station some time soon,' Laura said, vaguely remembering an article from the library the day before.

He looked at her and smiled, arching his eyebrows conspiratorially. His first obvious deception, she thought. Laura looked back up at the descending spacecraft. It rode its jet of fire ever lower.

'It's just like in the old movies,' Laura said. 'You know, the silly ones from the fifties. 'Retro rockets' and things like that. Spaceships with little legs that take off on earth and land on the moon or Mars or wherever.'

'It's the most cost-effective way, in the long run,' he said, and Laura felt relieved they'd finally found something to talk about. His work, she thought. How typical! 'We just use ultra-light composites of epoxy and graphite fiber to reduce the weight of the launch vehicle,' he continued, and Laura nodded knowingly. 'Exclusive of the payload, ninety-eight percent of the weight of a fully fueled vehicle is its propellant. For a given cubic foot of volume, that spacecraft empty is lighter than Styrofoam.'

'And it's so quiet, too,' Laura commented. The rocket was slowing to a stop — suspended in air and hovering out over the ocean.

'Not really,' Gray said, thumping the glass with his fingernails. 'Triple pane, one pocket vacuum-sealed, the other filled with argon.'

He went over to the wall and pulled a barely noticeable handle up from the paneling. A roaring sound poured into the room when he opened the door.

Laura followed him out into the brisk night, eyeing the doorframe as she passed. It had been aligned so well with the wall paneling that the seam was practically invisible.

The howl from the rocket's engines rattled the air even at their distance. The landing gear had lowered into place around the fiery exhaust, and as they watched, the rocket slowly began to slide sideways toward the leftmost pad.

'The lateral translation maneuver is the loudest!' Gray said in a voice roused over the violence. 'We put sound insulation in all the island's homes and buildings so we can run twenty-four-hour space operations!'

When the rocket was centered directly above the concrete pad and about at eye level with Gray and Laura — its flat sides now lit by large spotlights from the ground — it began to sink in a straight line toward the earth. All was linear, precise, machinelike — clearly the work of a computer. Laura looked up at Gray's face. It was lit in the faint white fire that glinted also in his eyes. There was an expression on his face — contentment, she guessed. She turned back to the pad, thinking, How can I ever know what he thinks or feels? But she would have to learn. That was her job.

The flames beat at the center of the concrete base beside the gantry and spread ever wider as they pounded the earth. White clouds billowed out of the launch pad toward the sea on one side and the wide brown road on the other, boiling furiously like in a time-lapse film of a developing thundercloud. The jungle and ocean around the pad was well lit by tame spotlights. But the fire from the rocket's engines turned night into day and shone brightly on the nearby assembly building, and on a massive slab of concrete that shared the open field with its more impressive neighbor.

The distinct shadows cast across the lawn by the rocket's blaze grew long, and the rocket's descent slowed almost to a complete stop just above the pad. The engines suddenly shut off, and Laura's heart skipped a beat in the surprising silence as she anticipated the stunning explosion from a calamitous failure. But the rocket sat firmly in its place on the pad, the night again enveloping the brief artificial day of its chemical burn.

She looked back up at Gray. He had a smile of satisfaction on his face, which he tried to hide by turning away. 'This is a volcanic island,' he said in a voice he no longer needed to raise. 'The crater was where the Village is now. This whole face of the mountain' — he motioned at the roughly semicircular wall along the middle of [garbled], perched his house—'was the inside of the crater wall. My geologists tell me the opposite wall blew out in a major eruption about two thousand years ago.'

Laura imagined a continuation of the walls to form a circle and saw that the island had once been little more than the tip of a volcano protruding from the sea.

'Erosion had leveled most of what was left,' Gray continued 'although we had more than a year of earth- moving before we ever began construction. The center of the island down there' — he pointed toward the twinkling lights of the Village—'was a small lake that we had to drain. It was a miserable place, thick with mosquitoes.'

'Was it inhabited before you bought it?'

'It's rented. I've got a ninety-nine-year lease. I'm the governor general under Fijian law.' He had a wry grin on his face when he said it. 'And no. No one could live here. There was no fresh water. I built a desalinization plant over there.' He pointed into the darkness by the coast — the captain standing on his bridge. He lifted his hand, and where he pointed there sprouted creations of unimagined ingenuity.

The creator. The wellspring. Always 'I,' the professional in her noted.

Laura raised her hands to rub her upper arms and hug herself to ward off the chill. 'Shall we go inside?' Gray asked. He had been watching her out of the corner of his eye.

Gray held the door for her. On the table was an enormous portion of chocolate mousse cake, swirls of dark chocolate forming intricate patterns on the plate around the luscious dessert. Gray walked past his seat without noticing.

'Ready to get started?' he asked.

Laura held the napkin she'd found neatly folded over the arm of her chair but quickly dropped it into the empty seat. 'All right,' Laura replied in her most assertive tone. 'Let's get to it.' On Gray's frenetic lead, dinner had taken less than fifteen minutes, but Laura was determined to gain the upper hand once she began the analysis.

There was no other way to guide him gently toward whatever subjects she would find important. 'Where would you be most comfortable?' Laura asked.

'Pardon me?'

'Well, analysis can be a fairly grueling process. There really is no shortcut. You'd be surprised how physically draining some patients seem to find it — depending, of course, on the… on the nature of the problem.'

Gray's mouth was wide-open in surprise. A grin spread across his face and filled his eyes with its sparkle. He burst out laughing.

'So you think…?' he began, but the question was cut short by still more laughter. Laura tilted her head and knitted her brow in confusion. 'I'm sorry,' Gray said. 'I should've guessed. We haven't really discussed your job. I was going to wait until after dinner, which I guess is now.' He cleared his throat, regaining his composure.