Smash Cut:

Damn, the sweltering, overweight man thought, these Orientals just don't sweat.

Robert J. Thibodeaux, the sixty-year-old president of the Louisiana Power Company, leaned to his left as the chopper banked and headed upriver toward the ghostly white images ahead and below. The helicopter had lifted off only minutes before, leaving behind the stifling traffic of the Crescent City as it inched along in its morning rush-hour crawl.

"This beats driving, don't it!" Thibodeaux yelled. Sweat beaded on his forehead, above his upper lip, and around the collar of the short-sleeved polyester dress shirt. Even in the air-conditioned helicopter, the summer heat was tough on a body.

The man next to him, who'd left his suit coat on, turned and stared. The lack of expression on his face and the absence of visible moisture anywhere on him quietly astounded Thibodeaux.

Andrew Kwang's mind and voice were calm. He had learned many years ago not to let his discomfort betray him.

Thibodeaux sweats not only from the heat.

The city was receding behind them now as the pilot slid the chopper upriver beyond the skyscrapers and the automobiles. Miles behind them, the Louisiana Superdome faded to golf-ball size, and the river bridges came to resemble pieces from a child's erector set. There was some turbulence in the morning air, but Kwang didn't notice. His mind was centered on what lay ahead of him. Only he could make the final decision, the result of months of negotiations and hard, painstaking compromise.

Out of the hazy early-morning blend of humidity and pollution from the upstream refineries, the massive, sprawling facility gradually came into focus.

To the left was an enormous blockhouse of concrete and steel. By itself, it covered an area the size of several football fields, but it was dwarfed by the staggeringly huge cooling unit that stood next to it. The cooling unit looked like an enormous hourglass, Kwang thought, only not so pinched in the middle. It stood hundreds of feet tall and was the biggest single piece of poured concrete he'd ever seen.

Thibodeaux reached in front of him and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. When the young man turned, the older man made a circling motion with his bare forearm, his thumb and index finger held to a point. The pilot nodded; the helicopter began a circling descent.

In seconds, they were hovering over the open throat of the tower. It seemed to go down forever into darkness. Try as he might, Kwang could not see down to the bottom. He had the figures in his head, but they had been meaningless until he'd actually seen the tower. It was titanic, bigger than anything he had imagined. He nodded slightly. The pilot circled again, to within a couple of hundred feet of the tower itself.

Yes, Kwang thought, it would do nicely.

Thibodeaux tapped the pilot's shoulder again and made a thumbs-up gesture. The pilot pushed in the throttle. The whine of the turbine grew as the chopper climbed and headed back toward the city.

"Well, Mr. Kwang, that's it," Thibodeaux shouted over the noise. "The Riverbend Nuclear Power Plant. What do you think?"

Kwang pasted on his inscrutable Oriental smile, his one concession to Occidental expectations.

"I'11 take it," he said in a normal voice, confident that the sweating Thibodeaux could read his lips.

So what do you think? Drop me a line....