Page 92 of Project Hail Mary

Stratt and I sat down opposite him. The guards closed the door behind us.

The man looked at us. He tilted his head slightly, waiting for someone to speak.

“Dr. Robert Redell,” Stratt said.

“Call me Bob,” he said.

“I’ll call you Dr. Redell.” She pulled a file out of her briefcase and looked it over. “You’re currently serving a life sentence for seven counts of culpable homicide.”

“That’s their excuse for me being here, yes,” he said.

I piped up. “Seven people died on your rig. Because of your negligence. Seems like a pretty good ‘excuse’ for you to be here.”

He shook his head. “Seven people died because the control room didn’t follow procedure and activated a primary pumping station while workers were still in the reflector tower. It was a horrible accident, but it was an accident.”

“Enlighten us, then,” I said. “If the deaths at your solar farm weren’t your fault, why are you here?”

“Because the government thinks I embezzled millions of dollars.”

“And why do they think that?” I asked.

“Because I embezzled millions of dollars.” He adjusted his shackled wrists into a more comfortable position. “But that had nothing to do with the deaths. Nothing!”

“Tell me about your blackpanel power idea,” Stratt said.

“Blackpanel?” He drew back. “It was just an idea. I emailed that anonymously.”

Stratt rolled her eyes. “Do you really think email sent from a prison computer lab is anonymous?”

He looked away. “I’m not a computer guy. I’m an engineer.”

“I want to hear more about blackpanel,” she said. “And if I like what I hear, it could reduce your jail time. So start talking.”

He perked up. “Well…I mean…okay. What do you know about solar thermal power?”

Stratt looked at me.

“Uh,” I said. “It’s when you have a whole bunch of mirrors set up to reflect sunlight to the top of a tower. If you get a few hundred square meters of mirror focusing all that sunlight onto a single point, you can heat up water, make it boil, and run a turbine.”

I turned to Stratt. “But that’s not new. Heck, there’s a fully functional solar thermal power plant in Spain right now. If you want to know about it, talk to them.”

She silenced me with a hand motion. “And that’s what you were making for New Zealand?”

“Well,” he said. “It wasfundedby New Zealand. But the idea was to provide power for Africa.”

“Why would New Zealand pay a bunch of money to help Africa?” I asked.

“Because we’re nice,” Redell said.

“Wow,” I said. “I know New Zealand is pretty cool but—”

“And it was going to be a New Zealand–owned company that charged for the power,” Redell said.

“There it is.”

He leaned forward. “Africa needs infrastructure. To do that, they need power. And they have nine million square kilometers of uselessland that gets some of the most intense continuous sunlight on Earth. The Sahara Desert is justsitting there, waiting to give them everything they need. All we needed to do was build the damn power plants!”

He flopped back in his chair. “But every local government wanted a piece of the pie. Graft, bribes, payoffs, you name it. You think I embezzled a lot? Shit, that’s nothing compared to what I had to pay in bribes just to build a solar plant in the middle of fucking nowhere.”