Chapter 24

I left a message with Swifty that I was going to be away for several days. I told her that I had to be back home next week – Tribal business, you understand.

It WAS tribal business, after all. I wanted to be there when Steven Lone Pine turned the first shovel of dirt for the Shoshone-Arapaho Power Company’s (SAPC) new fusion power generation site. It was going to be on land owned by the Sho-Arap reservation.

I was glad to see the two tribes had started to eat away at their generations-long hostilities. It was going away primarily due to the financial change that SotH had provided: free electricity in the form of solar power, jobs at the kilns, and the integrated housing for kiln workers and town workers at McKesson Creek. The gradual change in age of the Sho-Arap population was a big factor: young people who were on the same football team at McKesson Creek High were much less antagonistic toward members of the ‘other’ tribe, than their grandparents.

Of course the leaders of the two tribes were to be there: Ted GreySky, Arapaho chief and Robbie Deer Horn, Shoshone chief. This was going to be a huge employer for the people on the res. We also were having the CEO of Rocky Mountain Power, a large florid man with a full red beard and a bald head, ‘Red’ Svenstrom, there to turn a shovelful of dirt. RMP had supplied 25% of the construction costs for SAPC. They took a lesson from Arizona Power. They’d promised – in private, of course – to phase out their coal-fired generation facilities as fusion power came online.

We were planning on building four new fusion plants, each about the same as our NavEl plants. We were still quoting things in terms of ‘Hoover Dam equivalents’ – the four new SAPC plants would eventually supply 2x the electrical output of the Hoover Dam. That should obsolete the need for coal, oil, and gas electrical generation in the upper plains to the Pacific Ocean. Of course, that was counting the enormous hydro generation of the Northwest in Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and Utah.

Progress; it was progress on my official quest for saving the planet in 3750 CE. I was proud. So now, we could supply everything from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to Denver with electricity without burning a single hydrocarbon. Well, ‘we’ included all the other generating sources of power in the western half of the country.

The NATIVE trust was buying solar panels and putting them all over the country to the First People all over Canada and the U.S. They were working on spreading to Mexico, where everybody seemed to have a connection to one tribe or another. We were putting a lot of young people in college – and they weren’t getting degrees in basket-weaving. We were turning out architects, electrical engineers, teachers, and doctors. I was pleased to see none of the recipients of our scholarships were following the money into stock market jobs. There were a few who wanted to be lawyers and politicians. I won’t make a joke about that; I hoped they would be the ‘good’ ones.

We stopped in at Crying Wolf’s place and then we all trooped over to Dark Wolf’s home. The old Medicine Man was doing well, and was very interested in the new SAPC facility. Of course, it would be another couple of years until the complex was built, but it was a big step for the Shoshone-Arapaho tribes.

We made an appointment to meet with Bear Maritsuki’s dad. That old man was still as spry as ever. He was still teaching a younger class as well as the unlimited class of US Army specialists and S-A Policemen. One new thing: there was a woman from the Army, she was good – better than half the men. I peeked into her mind. Lois ‘LL’ Garbon was hoping to finish the course before her twenty year enlistment was up. Major LL Garbon was 39 and was tired of being treated as a ‘mere’ woman. The fact was that she could out shoot and out fight anyone in the battalion – except the Sergeant Major. She’d earned her nickname of ‘LL’ when the First Looey discovered that her middle name was Louise, during her first tour as a Second Lt. It could have been worse. She was a broad-shouldered woman who wore her dirty blonde hair cut short.

Well, I was peeking in on a person I had no intention of getting to know better. That was just rude.

Speaking of female decision makers, it was time to do something about Hillary R. Clinton. I didn’t care two beans about who or how she arranged girls for her hubby – not even one bean. I didn’t even care – much – about the FBI following us to make us terrorists. But now she was working on sending thoughts to Colin Powell. He didn’t really want to run for President. The country would be better if Bill Clinton had a second term. Thoughts like that.

HEY! I thought I was the only one who was allowed to change the course of history, around here.

Bill Clinton’s second term would have been a financial disaster. The stock market was going to take another deep dive, and only eight years after the 1987 crash. The Exxon climate control memo was going to make the company’s stock hit rock bottom, closely followed by the other oil companies. Coal companies were nearing bankruptcy, and that would throw a lot of people out of work. And that wasn’t counting the 941 coal miners who had families that were now fatherless.