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closer.
    “An opportunity?” Alex said in a voice that came out as a low growl. Time and again, since the death of his family, he had shielded his emotions behind a wall of weariness and apathy; at rare times, though, the wall cracked to expose a furnace blazing inside. He had never been a violent man, but he had been walking on the thin ice of intensely charged emotions for months.
    Alex flexed his right hand; the pain inside made his breath like ice knives, and Mitch stood just too damned close . Suddenly lashing out, he shoved Mitch backwards—not hard, but enough to knock the other man over a chair, sprawling to the floor.
    “You’re right, Mitch,” Alex said, “but you don’t have to be such an asshole about it.”
     
     
     
    Chapter 3
     
    Spencer Lockwood shielded his eyes from the glaring sun. The wasteland around White Sands, New Mexico, looked more like the surface of the Moon than a restricted national preserve. Bleak gypsum sand stretched to the horizon, broken only by scrub brush, yucca plants, and lava rock. The rugged peaks of the Organ Mountains shimmered like a mirage. The heat made the dusty air smell like gunpowder.
    Numerous rocket and guided-missile systems had been tested at the White Sands missile range in its half century of existence. Mountains in the east stood over Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb had been detonated in 1945. To the north, the five-mile-long ramp of a prototype railgun launcher ran up Oscura Peak, where a month earlier it had accelerated its first test satellite to low Earth orbit. History, plenty of history.
    Spencer was determined to add not just a footnote to the story of White Sands; he was after an entire chapter.
    For now he devoted his attention to the small metal antennas that dotted the compound. Thousands of whiplike microwave receivers blanketed a circular patch of desert two kilometers in diameter, making it look like a huge pincushion. A barbed-wire fence surrounded the “antenna farm.”
    Spencer knelt by one of the frail-looking antennas and fingered the flexible wire. Work for me today, baby ! He had cobbled the whole project together on a shoestring budget, and he dreaded that his experiment might fail because of a stupid glitch. A preventable glitch. Then the bureaucrats would shut down the whole circus.
    “Hey, Spence!”
    He jerked his head up. Surrounded by the small wire constructions, he seemed to be standing in the center of a field of metallic cornstalks. Shading his eyes, he saw a gangly woman wearing an Australian hat walk toward him. Rita Fellenstein was a technical whiz herself, but she had taken it upon herself to be a combination den mother and butt-kicker for the solar satellite group—including Spencer himself.
    “It’s gonna work,” Rita said. “Stop hovering over it.”
    “Just checking the connections one last time.” Spencer wiped his hands against his pants.
    Rita stepped around the wires. “Well, don’t get all anal retentive about it. You’re starting to act like Nedermyer.”
    “He could get you fired for a remark like that,” Spencer said.
    “Fire a national lab employee? Get real. Come on, let’s get back to the command trailers. The reporters want to talk to you.”
    Spencer felt a tug at his gut. “Uh, I’ve got to check this stuff.” It seemed that every time they got the array hooked up they lost contact with one of the antennas, usually due to a kangaroo rat gnawing through the cables.
    “No you don’t need to check it. You’ve already done it. I’ve already done it. And the technicians have already done it. Now go talk to the newsies before first light comes down.”
    “I just hate it when they ask stupid questions.” He realized he was not much sounding like a history-making visionary.
    Rita put her hands on her narrow hips. “Well, Nedermyer doesn’t mind talking to the press. He’ll come across as an important Department of Energy watchdog over us brash young scientists. And if you