Analog SFF, June 2011 Read Online Free PDF Page A

meeting room anywhere. High ceiling. Cheap carpet and cloth-covered walls to muffle the audience noises. Sidewalls comprised of narrow segments that, folded into accordion pleats, would open into other, similar rooms for additional space. Recessed ceiling lights. Amplifier and loudspeakers deployed across the foot of the dais. Holo projection console.
    Men and women filled the rows of chairs, and yet more people had queued up in the aisles for turns at the audience microphones. At the right-hand mike, a tall, balding man, his sleeves rolled up, was gesturing grandly. Marcus had arrived too late to catch the man's point. If he had a point. They often didn't.
    ". . . would be a better use of public land,” the balding man finally concluded.
    "Thank you for your comment,” Lisa Jackson began. As she—as all the panelists—had been trained. “We agree that parks are important. That said, so is a sufficiency of electrical power. We at the Department of the Interior must consider both."
    The novelty of powersat town meetings was long past; the room's lone tripod-mounted camera might feed only the municipal Internet server. With no media visible the protocol would have been the same, because half the audience sat holding comps or phones or datasheets. Any slip-up would be on YouTube within minutes. So all panelists were trained in changing the subject. Better a non-answer than an impolitic one.
    If inconvenient questions were to be evaded, what was the point? Why hold these town meetings at all? Marcus had asked, and his question, evidently, was also impolitic. “It's policy,” a long-ago boss had once told Marcus in similar circumstances. “It doesn't have to make sense."
    But coaching by a NASA spin doctor was not what had made Marcus a cynic.
    He half listened, half pondered how and when to move to the front of the room. On the dais, behind the long, skinny table and its billowing, ruffled skirt, sat eight chairs: two places each for Interior, Energy, the EPA, and NASA. The lone unoccupied seat was Marcus's.
    With Lisa expounding from five chairs away from the empty seat, this seemed as good a time as any for Marcus to claim his spot.
    He edged through the least crowded aisle, murmuring apologies as he went, answering dirty looks by tapping the NASA ID badge clipped to his suit lapel. I'm with the government. I really am here to help.
    Once through the crowd, he slid into the empty chair at the speakers’ table.
    Ellen Tanaka, NASA program manager for the powersat—and Marcus's boss—looked weary. They all did. Her eyes, too myopic for LASIK, were owllike behind thick, round lenses. She covered her mike with a hand. “Good of you to join us,” she whispered.
    That he had texted ahead changed nothing. Everyone had made the drive that morning from somewhere in metro DC. She would not want to hear about the rain, the line at the gas station, or signals flashing red throughout Fairfax County because the traffic management system had crashed or been hacked. He would not have, either.
    "Car trouble,” he mouthed. “Sorry."
    Lisa was still answering the balding man. “We'll be using property already dedicated to power generation, in this case for ground-based solar power. In particular, we'll retrofit selected solar farms with arrays of short antennas suited to receiving power downlinks. Land recycling, if you will—very environmentally correct. The antennas will be vertical, scarcely blocking any sunlight to the solar cells on the ground. So, you see, the powersat demonstration does not preempt any parkland."
    "But that land shouldn't be wasted on—"
    "Thank you for your comment,” Ellen interrupted. “I'm afraid that's all the time we have with so many others still waiting.” She pointed to the head of another line, where a middle-aged woman, rail thin, her face tanned and leathery, clutched a folded sheet of paper. The woman wore the judgmental expression of a Resetter. “Yes, ma'am?"
    Marcus and Ellen took turns