Even as we move into Space, I fear we shall take our evils with us.
-- Samuel Edward Konkin III
Barry Gibbon knew that there existed a market for the promise of power. He had promised it for over four decades and never had to deliver. He held the ears of ten presidents, thousands of congressmen, and millions of scientists, students, and common people around the world. His message never changed: someday, human beings would live and work in space, on the Moon, on Mars, and among the stars. He enjoyed filling young minds with visions of such moving immensity. The hopeful masses who saw space as a way out of their problems -- as a relief valve for overpopulation perhaps, or an escape hatch for the discontented and the adventurous -- flocked to Gibbon and his National Organization of Space Supporters. They needed him. And he needed them.
Gibbon had not always been interested in space. In his youth, architecture fascinated him. Though the minutiæ of building design and construction failed to hold his interest, the concept of city planning imbued him with a firm sense of purpose. He studied ancient Rome and Greece for clues to the minds that devised and oversaw the construction of such huge social organisms. He pored over old maps of London and Paris, watching the cities grow. For a while, until guided away by a helpful professor, he tried to solve the mystery of the Mayan and Anasazi ruins and how such great civilizations vanished utterly, their works consumed by jungle and desert.
After a while, it became clear to him that none of the ancient cities grew out of any coherent plan. They simply appeared to spread like bacterial colonies on a Petri dish. Modern cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Tokyo were the worst. Driven by the engines of competition and commerce, they exploded haphazardly like tumors. Gibbon could not stand the sight of them. His family lived near the most planned city in his country, Washington, D.C., and it was there, in the summer at the end of the war in Europe, that he encountered his epiphany.
He held no sympathy for the defeated Nazis, yet he possessed a secret, grudging respect for Adolph Hitler's ability to inspire a nation. Gibbon understood what Hitler -- another student of architecture -- offered: a vision of power to the powerless masses. Gibbon, just twenty and in college during the last years of the war on a deferment courtesy of a frat brother's father in the War Department, already knew that he, too, required a vision, a vision that would unify the masses for good instead of evil.
A college chum -- "Lud" Woolsey, page to a first-term senator -- ran up to him with a newspaper clutched in his hand.
"We've got Von Braun!" he cried, shoving an article under Gibbon's nose.
"Von Braun?" Gibbon took the paper from his friend's plump hand and looked it over.
"The Nazi's top rocket scientist!"
"Oh yes," Gibbon muttered. "Just saw a newsreel about it."
"Right! He surrendered to the army with a slew of others and an arsenal of A-4's!"
"A-4's?"
"The rocket bomb! The V-2! Enough parts to build dozens of them."
Gibbon handed the paper back to Lud with a benign smile. "What do we need them for? To blitz Rhode Island?"
"For testing! Von Braun says that the design could be made even bigger. Longer range. Maybe even put men into space!"
Gibbon smiled wanly. He had just read a pulp story by Rex Ivarson about such a plan, though he would never admit such a failing to Lud. "You've been to too many Saturday serials. When did you first have the urge to wear silver tights?"
"This is serious, Chimp. A man in orbit with a telescope could observe troop movements, watch for storms, pinpoint sinking ships."
Despite Lud's use of his annoying nickname, Gibbon stopped walking for a moment to think. Living in outer space required food and water and shelter, everything that man originally took from the land. Yet there existed no land between planets. A city in outer space demanded a totally artificial construction, planned from the very start. Every room, every hallway, every bolt and rivet must follow a rigidly determined blueprint. A city in orbit would not grow like some fungus spreading chaotically outward but would crystallize like a snowflake suspended in the frigid night, expanding according to rigid rules.
As nature made the rules for snowflakes, so Barry Gibbon would make the rules for spacemen.
He grasped the arms of his friend. "Why, we could be living in outer space within this generation!"
"Well, I don't think it's as easy as all that, Chimp old chap. No one in government seems to know quite what to do with the huns."
"They'll know what to do with them," Gibbon said, his dark eyes alight with excitement. "They'll know because I'm going to tell them!"
In the early 1950's, rocketry stumbled along through a series of hardware refinements. Flights that did not end early in a fireball lasted only a few minutes longer as even the best designs failed to lob anything into orbit. It mattered not to Gibbon. The dream was all he needed or wanted. The promise and the vision sufficiently filled his requirements.
He organized a small discussion group at Harvard, gathering around him the finest minds he could attract. Several afternoons a week, the Society for the Advancement of Rocketry met in the tearoom of an aging physics professor to discuss their plans for the newest New World. Evangeline served the tea quietly, listening intently but, Gibbon feared, totally opaque in her ability to comprehend their discussions. He allowed her to serve them more out of familial loyalty than any expectation that she might contribute intellectually to the exchange.
The group continually attracted forward-thinking young men who loved to lounge and bandy about ideas concerning how central authority could be more easily maintained in the closed environment of a space station, or how an orbiting city would be truly international, passing as it did over dozens of different countries every hour or two. They modeled their orbital government after the new United Nations, minus the concept of a Security Council in which single states held veto power over resolutions. They shared the vision of democracy triumphant, of extraordinary men working single-mindedly for the common good of ordinary persons.
Twenty years. In twenty short years, men -- "and women, too, of course," he added with a languid wave of his hand -- would live in outer space in huge orbiting cities overseeing the epochal march of progress.
He graduated from Harvard with a degree in political science. When asked why he chose that field instead of physics or engineering, he merely smiled and said, "There will be enough men to build and pilot rockets. Who, though, will pilot the pilots?"
Barry Gibbon never held a job; he cultivated positions: chairmanships, advisory panels, consultations. He derived an income from these and from lecture honoraria. When the Russians launched Sputnik, his career skyrocketed. Magazines and newspapers that otherwise depicted space enthusiasts as four-eyed eggheads delighted in Gibbon's urbane manner and calm assurances that the future was just two decades away. Students consulted with him about what careers to choose that would lead to a life in Space. The most promising he steered away from such ephemeral pursuits as chemistry or engineering and into psychology and the social sciences. "Why design the rockets men build," he often said, "when you can design the men who build the rockets?"
When the president announced that man would set foot on the Moon within the decade, Dr. Gibbon of the sar declared that man would -- within a generation, just thirty years or so -- have a permanent foothold in space.
The Society grew, though not as fast as Gibbon's prestige.
Throughout the new Space Age, the Society published glowing predictions for the New Frontier. Copies of a booklet by Gibbon, Your Future In Space, were distributed free to elementary schools. Filled with gorgeous illustrations of huge orbiting space stations, the text told of a world of peace and prosperity, where teams of scientists worked together in orbiting laboratories solving the world's problems, where television communications would make the planet a single community, where -- since no nation could reasonably claim outer space -- all nations co-existed as one. For that reason, spacecraft and spacesuits in the illustrations always depicted the insignia of the United Nations.
None of the paintings showed a lone astronaut -- they always worked in groups.
No one questioned Gibbon's optimism or his consistent idealism. He strove, after all, to make Space the new Commons.
The thirty-year prediction served Gibbon well for over thirty years. Whenever setbacks occurred, such as the Apollo disaster, the Soyuz catastrophe, or the Challenger tragedy, he resolutely declared such mishaps an inevitable part of the sacrifices required by such a vast and noble undertaking. Nothing, though, must stop the forward progress to establish humanity in outer space within the next three decades. Whether or not humanity ever achieved a permanent toehold in Space, Barry Gibbon possessed the pull, the clout, the power to control and guide that destiny.
Power, though, seldom resides where it seems to. Washington, DC, though it hosted the White House, Capitol, and Pentagon, actually contained little of value to the power structure of the United States. While the politicians and the news media danced in the nation's capital for all to see, the true work of Earth's final empire proceeded quietly in the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia.
In Fort Meade, Maryland, stood the sprawling structure that housed the National Security Agency. Deep within it, in a room with no windows and only one door, sat one of the few men in the federal government who possessed a true awareness of the power he wielded.
Montgomery Barron held a small sphere suspended on the tips of his white cotton-gloved fingers. About the size of a golf ball, it was constructed of a transparent, optically perfect material. Fast inside it lay an electronic maze of sophisticated circuitry. He marveled at its intricacy, its beauty, its deadly potential.
He held in his hand the key to Space.
Barron, a smoothly handsome man of forty-eight, possessed short dark hair with a pleasing natural wave that years ago would have guaranteed him a crack at movie star status. His height, not immediately apparent while seated behind his desk, was considerable and impressive. He peered appreciatively at the sphere through dark grey eyes, then lowered it gently back into its pink anti-static nest beside two other identical globes.
Power, Barron mused, hides in the strangest places. Not just in men or institutions, but sometimes in something as obscure as a ring laser gyroscope that exceeds all others in accuracy and reliability.
He removed the cotton gloves and keyed his telephone.
"Stansfield," a voice on the other end answered.
"Monty here," Barron said. " The cook just delivered the gyros.' "
"I see. Will we be having lunch at the airport?"
Barron smiled. "I'm feeling hungry," he said, and returned the handset to its cradle.
Washington Naval Air Station, compared to nearby Andrews Air Force Base, comprised a medium-sized airfield attached to a cramped military facility. One of the smaller hangers off the right runway housed an NSA project that consumed relatively little room in relation to its importance. Compared to such public secrets and well-known black projects as stealth aircraft and pulse-detonation jets, this small and comparatively inexpensive effort operated unnoticed, off the books, unknown even to the guards who stood on duty outside the hanger.
Though the ensign knew Montgomery Barron by sight, he still performed the requisite security check every time the man arrived, as he did for the same dozen workers who arrived every morning, entered the hanger, and exited twelve hours later to be checked out by a different guard.
"Good morning, sir," he said to Barron, who strode from his limousine with the easy grace possessed by only a few men in civilian authority. The ensign had seen many important dignitaries in his time, but most of them exuded either an aire of inattentiveness, as if concentrating on their performance, or an aura of nervousness, as if they constantly searched for that one betrayal that would bring them down in an instant.
Barron, though, simultaneously radiated a thorough alertness and a calm self-assurance that comforted the ensign and made him a little more proud of his country. If only the government had more men such as he, the ensign thought, we'd have fewer problems.
Barron entered the hanger through the first set of double doors, sealed them, and stroked his passcard through the checkpoint at the second set. With a sigh, he lowered his head to stare into the biometric scanner with his left eye, an action he absolutely detested.
The low-power laser fired into his eye, scanning its retinal pattern to compare with the image stored in its memory. Barron, who valued his vision immensely, had never been convinced of the safety of such security devices.
He raised his head and blinked several times. The dotted retention image floating before him alternated between red and turquoise with each blink. Amid the colors, he saw the doors part. Just beyond the threshold, in a bright blue jump suit, stood Charles W. Stansfield, a short man with unkempt greying hair and a languorous New England pattern of speech that belied a sharp intellect.
"I swear," Barron said as he stepped in, "that someday they'll be able to identify all government employees because we'll all be blind in one eye."
"Let's see 'em," Stansfield said. He held out his hand.
Barron passed the small package over. "A clutch of eggs for our bird."
Stansfield nodded. "Eyah. Let's put 'em in the nest."
The pair walked over to the object that filled the hanger. Ten workers clambered all over it, some crammed deep inside the fuselage, some standing on scaffolding around its skin, others sitting on the concrete floor to work on the landing gear.
Longer than an F-115 Eagle at sixty-five feet, its thirty-three foot wingspan narrower, the spaceplane's wings described a long, sweeping delta shape that signified hypersonic capabilities, with upturned winglets on the tips to increase the functional wing area without adding to their width. Its sleek black skeleton consisted of Beta B-120, the same titanium alloy as the late lamented SR-71. Its leading edges, though -- on wings, rudder, stabilizer, and nose -- bore caps of the same grey carbon-carbon material borrowed from space shuttle technology. That was all Barron wanted to use from current NASA research. The rest of the spaceplane relied on older, proven technologies. Barron took chances in many realms, but none where it mattered.
Acquisition of the ring laser gyros was an important step. Even black projects such as Stark Fist had difficulty procuring necessary high-tech equipment, especially when paper trails had to be disguised.
Barron walked once around the spaceplane. Nearly complete, it was the culmination of six years of secretive effort. And shortly he would face the man who sought to undo all of it.
For now, though, Barron contented himself with admiring the beauty of the bird. It looked like the killer he intended it to be.
And that made Montgomery Barron smile.
He smiled rarely, since it did not behoove a government spy to appear as if he was having too much fun.
Barron's face held no trace of a smile while seated before Steven James Milton Jr., head of the National Security Agency. The two men came from different disciplines within the organization. Barron rose through the ranks of Operations, the dirty-nailed half that operated the wiretaps, devised the codebreakers, and performed the actual spying on foreigners and -- as need warranted in the usual manner in which agencies flouted their charters -- on American citizens. Milton ascended from NSA's Analysis division, interpreting the information supplied by operatives such as Barron and applying it under the guiding principal of national security. He viewed Barron as the trusty dog that brings in the newspaper: good at fetching, but wholly incapable of understanding the consequences of his assignments.
Barron's opinion of his superior was that analysts possessed no real-world concept of the dangers faced by the NSA. To them, the day-to-day struggle and danger were invisible, only the position of pieces on the game board held any reality to them whatsoever, and they would push the pieces around even if the walls were falling down on them.
"Monty, my boy," the director greeted him with an affable tone. He was in his sixties, but looked younger thanks to a healthy tan from tennis games played on the courts at some of the finest country clubs in Virginia. Also, being only five feet, three inches tall, he appeared almost boyish. "I have a challenge for you." That usually meant another pointless report.
"What now?" Barron's mind buzzed with the problems of Stark Fist. Technical problems. Computer simulations failed to match predictions. The spaceplane design might not make it to orbit if the specific impulse of the engine on order could not be upped by three per cent or more. Weight might need to be shaved from an already minimalist structure. How much more could--
"What?" Barron thought Milton said something pertaining to him.
"I said, the House Intelligence Committee wants a more thorough accounting of all black projects."
"We're under budget on ours."
"I know. However, the Dedicated Decryption Teraflop Supercomputer is way over budget and still can't break RSA/PGP codes in less than six months of computing time. I want you to decrease your budget by seventeen per cent, retroactive to the first of this year."
The numbers cascaded through Barron's mind. "With inflation, that would be the equivalent of a twenty per cent cut!"
Milton smiled and shrugged. "Times are tight. And though there are no terrorist spacemen flitting about, there are millions of messages, financial transactions, and secrets shooting around this planet that we can't read."
Barron took a long, slow breath and mentally counted to ten, stopping at three to say, "As much as I would love to read every computer user's personal mail, I respectfully suggest, sir, that there is a far greater threat to national security from one single subnational in orbit than in a megabyte of encrypted messages. Just think of what it would mean. We currently have no defense against someone in even Low Earth orbit. And anyone making it all the way to geosynchronous orbit could hold a hundred million dollar satellite for ransom just by threatening to give it a kick. There'd be no need for someone to go up there with weapons and rain destruction down on us -- though they could because we have no effective defense against it, thanks to the downfunding of bmdo -- all anyone would have to do is go from satellite to satellite with a screwdriver and nearly all telecommunications including NSA's could be destroyed. The damage would be in the trillions. Even with the Shuttle and Deltas working full-time, it would take decades to replace what's up there!"
Milton, to his credit, listened without interruption during the tirade, though he had heard it before. "Monty," he said after a moment. "I'm not driving this. Congress is. They don't have the inside knowledge, let alone your... vision. I'm not canceling Stark Fist, I just need some economy."
"Then economize on that black hole of a computer!"
Milton raised his hands helplessly. "They know enough about it to support the idea of being able to examine every bank transaction, every private message, every fax transmission regardless of its encryption method. They view manned spacecraft as just some frustrated desk-pilot's wet dream. No offense, Monty."
Barron had no desire to prolong the conversation. The ship kept calling him back. "I'll see where I can cut."
"Good fellow. It'll keep your program alive and keep those fools on the Hill happy, right?"
Barron nodded, rising quickly to go. His stomach gnawed with anger even while his mind ran rudimentary cost analyses. Meddlers, he thought. Short-sighted bean counters.
The man with one arm knew the value of wealth. Wealth consisted not of the number of dollars one possessed, but of the quality of life one wrested from the universe. Larry Poubelle lived a life of extremely high quality.
Wealth allowed him the means to engineer a right arm and hand that looked real and responded to his will as would a limb of flesh and blood. Wealth paid for the artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic computer imbedded inside the device, which interpreted and acted upon the slightest electrical commands of the muscles in the three-inch stump protruding from his shoulder. Wealth bought the Beech Starship airplane that he piloted down toward the runway beside his mansion. Wealth purchased the sophisticated avionics that guided the plane to the touchdown point almost without Poubelle's assistance.
Wealth served as a tool and -- in using it -- Laurence Norman Poubelle was a master craftsman.
His face looked as though it had been sanded from finest teak. His tanned skin lacked the leathery quality of other sun-worshippers in their mid-forties, since he could afford the treatments to fend off damage from solar radiation. He understood radiation, perhaps better than many physicists. Radiation was his business. Larry Poubelle owned American Atomic, and owned it with a possessive passion most men reserved for a woman.
Despite its quaintly archaic name, American Atomic grew into the world's largest manufacturer of portable nuclear power under Poubelle's ownership. He built it from the economic ruins of a failing nuclear submarine facility a mere four years after returning from the war in Indochina.
Having ditched his useless A-6 Intruder in the fouled waters of the Tônlé Sab, he killed his way to Pnomh Penh and down the Mekong River, and walked out of Cambodia in five days. He dragged into Chauphu with a gangrenous arm only to learn that Saigon was in the process of being abandoned to the armies of North Vietnam. He escaped -- barely -- onboard a fishing boat that navigated out of the Delta to deliver him to the USS Forrestal. He fought his way up the corporate monkey bars with equally single-minded, single-handed tenacity.
The war memory recurred while flying, especially during landings at home. His private oasis lay on the northern shore of the Salton Sea -- two hundred thirty-five feet below sea level in the deserts of Southern California -- sandwiched between the Kane Military Operations Area and the transition area to the airport at Thermal. On approach to his own runway, Poubelle passed over the northern quarter of the inland sea. He suppressed the sudden flash of memory about his controlled crash into Tônlé Sab not because he feared his past, but only because he refused to let the past affect the present.
Poubelle touched the Starship down to the pavement with easy grace and taxied it to the hangar. Only then did he turn to the woman in the co-pilot's seat and smile.
"Cheated death again," he said.
"Don't get cocky, kid," Chemar D'Asaro said, her eyes merry, the dark, smooth flesh of her face beginning to glisten in the desert heat. Her eyes provided the most striking feature of her stunning beauty. In startling contrast to her deep mahogany skin, their irises were twin pools of gold flake stirred by hidden breezes. Men -- upon first encountering her -- often gazed into those eyes as if hypnotized. They stared like guileless children, ignoring all the lovely curves that in other women would be the focii of attention. Her eyes commanded notice whether they glared with anger or scintillated with joy. Larry Poubelle first met those golden eyes when Chemar served as a helicopter pilot in the Antilles. He watched the way they glowed with intense concentration as she skillfully jockeyed a rickety Sikorsky SkyCrane over a sunken shipment of plutonium pellets he sought to recover. He hired her on the spot to be his personal co-pilot and trouble shooter. She had never disappointed him.
Together, they powered down the Beech and stepped out of the hot, heavy shoreline air into the relative cool of the hangar. Inside, amid the smells of avgas, jet fuel, and oil, stood two other aircraft. One, a glistening silver DC-3, the other a cherry-red Stearman, tricked out for ærobatics. Both planes -- and the Starship -- displayed immaculate maintenance.
They climbed down the Starship's steps, flight satchels in hand, to face a half-dozen men in three-piece suits.
"Ah," Poubelle muttered with a grin. "My bloodsucking lawyers."
D'Asaro said nothing. Poubelle slapped on his warmest smile of greeting.
"Gentlemen!" He spread sincerity like cream cheese. "To what do I owe this charming invasion of privacy?"
A man near the middle, who looked as if the desert air had triggered a severe sinus attack, spoke through intermittent near-sneezes. "It's the press, Mr. Poubelle. They're on the warpath about the leaked report."
Poubelle locked down the Beech and walked around it slowly, giving it the careful post-flight inspection it richly merited. "It's a slow news day. They'd grill Mary about the sheep-at-school scandal if they could."
"What do we tell them?"
D'Asaro spoke up in the lush French accent of her native Martinique. "Tell them that backyard nukes are safe and feasible as a way to disconnect homes from the electrical grid, then ask them why they are serving as unpaid hatchet men for the energy oligopolies."
The man glowered and turned again toward Poubelle, who merely hooked his thumb at her and grinned. "What she said." He hefted his black saddle-leather flight satchel and strode with D'Asaro toward the hangar office.
"You can't shrug off public opinion like that, Mr. Poubelle! It only makes things worse."
Poubelle opened the office door and tossed the airplane's keys to the gorilla sitting in an easy chair enjoying a cup of coffee. The short and muscular brute wore a perpetual expression of wry mockery that curled his freckled lips into a near-permanent sneer. The freckles continued across his face up under his shock of curly red hair, stained with wheel grease and jet soot. He caught the keys easily and shifted from his chair into an erect posture. "Turnaround time, boss?" he asked.
"I'll be here a couple of days, Monk."
Monk Patterson sneered happily and left the air-conditioned confines of the office for the supreme joy of running maintenance on the Starship, his personal favorite of the three aircraft Poubelle hangared at Salton Sea.
Poubelle turned his attention back to his associates.
"Public opinion is not what the papers print. That's just their attempt to impose their agenda on the public. I'm closer to the public opinion -- if there is such a thing -- than they are."
"Nobody wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard," an older man with peppery hair said. "The last thirty years proves that."
"All it proves," Poubelle said, "is that nobody wants a huge tax-subsidized, zero-liability nuclear utility sucking them dry. Most people prefer independence. Why do people drive cars when they can take buses? Because they oppose transportation? No. Because they prefer to own their own vehicles. Why do people have guns in their homes when they have the police to protect them? Because they want to control the means of their immediate defense. Why do people buy washing machines when laundromats are plentiful? Why buy homes when barracks would be more economical?"
He flopped down in the same chair vacated by Monk and leaned back; Chemar snorted and leaned against the steel desk and picked up that morning's Desert Tribune.
"Gentlemen," Poubelle continued. "You show me anything -- anything -- that's provided now by a centralized distribution network and I'll show you something that people would prefer owning and controlling themselves. Look at how the telephone destroyed the central telegraph office, how e-mail is destroying the post office. Americans love individual action, gentlemen, because they are not of a collective mind about anything. Most Americans don't seek out a leader to tell them what to think. Sure, some continue to elect them, but look at how few actually vote. Most people conduct their affairs concentrating on the most important things in their lives: their families, business, friends. The more they can disconnect from outside control, the happier they are. The safety of my stratified-bed power cell is not the real issue with the press. The real issue is the implied rejection of central control of the electrical grid. If no central authority controls the amount of electricity a home receives, how could they ever enforce energy rationing? How could they get on anyone's case for drying clothes the wrong time of day? Or for leaving the lights on at night? How could the government penalize certain people for excessive use, in disregard of the fact that the user pays the monopoly -- heavily -- for electricity that ought to be considered his purchased property?"
One of the six men harrumphed. "Without being connected to the grid, how could a drug agency target hydroponic farms by analyzing how much power they draw?"
"Exactly!" Poubelle grinned and pulled a fat cigar from his flight jacket and rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. The lighter built into the index finger of his cyborg arm emitted blue fire to light the tobacco. He blew out the flame and after a few puffs said, "You own what you control. Control the grid, control the people."
"That's not what I meant--"
Poubelle gazed up slyly at the suits. They goggled back at him like mystified schoolboys. "I'm a betting man," he said slowly. "You seem to think that I need some favorable public relations. What would you suggest? Should I backpedal and insist that the report was old news and that we would never endanger the backyards of this nation with such dangerous devices?"
After a moment of hesitation, the man with the bad sinuses said, "Well... yes."
"How about if we just ignore it and come back with something different?" The man with one arm smiled. "Something that will deflect attention and prove my point about the American spirit?"
The men looked edgy. They hated it when their boss talked that way. It was not something they had learned to deal with at business school. The previous year's trapshooting bungee-jump wager still haunted the nightmares of the survivors.
He glanced at D'Asaro. From behind the lowering edge of the business section, her aureate eyes glowed with excitement.
"She knows what I'm talking about. On what does central authority have the greatest stranglehold these days?" He waited.
Knowing they were on the spot to come up with something, the men grasped at straws.
"War?" one asked hesitantly.
"Good guess. Except that there are about two hundred wars going on in the world today, a lot of them almost ad hoc." He took a deep drag on the cigar and blew a series of smoke rings. "Try again."
"Information?" another ventured.
"You're fired," Poubelle said with an icy calm. "Nobody that ignorant should be here. Information is the most decentralized commodity. Has been, ever since the microchip. Take a hike."
The others shifted nervously as the young man picked his jaw up off the deck and slowly turned to step wordlessly out of the office. No one else said anything.
"You gutless button sorters. You're just a collection of college degrees with the souls squeezed out of you. I'll give you the answer. Space. There is only one space power: NASA. Europe, Japan, China, Germany, and all the others are just lobbing up hardware. Even Russia is coasting on past glory. Only one organization has the current ability to put people in orbit and only one has the ability to seize hardware that's already up there. You own what you control, gentlemen, and right now NASA owns the rest of the Universe, as far as Earth is concerned. That's a greater monopoly than any power utility or government service could hope to gain."
They stared at him blankly. He had never rambled so before. To them, his words made no sense whatsoever. He might as well have been discussing the Man in the Moon. Incomprehensible as it might have been to them, he was.
"Less than a decade ago, a man and a woman took off from an airport a few miles from here in a specially designed airplane and flew around the world, non-stop, on one tank of gas. They did it without any help from the government. In fact, they flew over some countries whose governments did not even know of the flight. They were small, they were high up, they were independent of any government protection or control. They were individuals, gentlemen, and do you know who paid for it?"
He knocked cigar ashes on the floor. "Other individuals. They raised the funding in the old-fashioned way: they infused thousands of people with their dream, their vision. They only wanted to set a flying record that had never been made before. Pretty frivolous. Yet in the same year that NASA was covering up the deaths of seven astronauts, these two pilots seized the imagination and hope of a nation and became the symbol of individual initiative. That's what I plan to do."
"Break their record?" a balding exec with a too-large briefcase ventured hopefully.
Chemar laughed from behind the paper, folded it away, and smiled at Larry.
"You could say that," he said. "We'll definitely be circling the world on one tankful. Only it won't take nine days. More like ninety minutes."
"You're talking crazy..." the oldest man in the group said meekly.
"Harold! You constantly surprise me with your outbursts." He turned to his co-pilot. "Chemar -- increase Harold's stock options by five per cent. He's getting backbone in his dotage."
Chemar pulled a palmtop from her flight bag and entered the information.
"Crazy is American, Harold. Demanding independence from Britain was crazy. Declaring every citizen a sovereign was crazy. Recognizing the individual as the fundamental unit of society was crazy. Building trains and planes and rockets -- the acts of madmen. And I'm proud to be part of that heritage. Crazy enough to build a rocket-plane in this hangar and fly it into orbit. Just because it's never been done before. Just for the hell of it."
Amid the silence, only the faint throb of the air conditioner offered any evidence that time had not stopped in the room. Then the five spoke at once.
"You can't be serious!"
"The liability..."
"--can't you see the negative publicity potential?"
"You mean, go into space?"
"...never get permission."
Poubelle lowered his cigar and answered rapid-fire: "I am serious; any liability can be insured; if I succeed, the publicity's positive, if I fail, I'll most likely be dead and then it's your problem; yes -- low Earth orbit, free-market astronauts, Horatio Alger in the sky; and I don't need anyone's permission to travel into Space any more than Leif Erickson did to travel to America. Watch and see. Now beat it. I've got a parallel team working on pre-publicity. Coordinate with them. Steinmetz is in charge there. Ask her."
The five men departed, leaving Poubelle and D'Asaro alone. He stubbed out the half-smoked cigar and shook his head. "Whenever I see those guys, you know what I wonder?"
"What?" she asked, putting her palmtop away.
"I wonder if agriculture wasn't the biggest mistake mankind ever made."
Chemar instantly made the series of logical connections and laughed with amusement. Then she shifted her long legs and said, "That was the most astounding display of extemporaneous bull-slinging I've ever seen from you."
"And what makes you think I'm slinging?"
"Because you've never discussed any of this with me. Nor with Steinmetz, I'll bet."
"You're a gambling woman," he said with an expansive grin. "That's what I like about you." His feet, shod in short-topped flying boots, clomped onto the counter into grooves worn by decades of other pilot's feet as he leaned back in the chair. "Want to cheat death for high stakes?"
"I'm game." Her face smoothed into impassive seriousness. "Can we do it?"
He flung the extinguished cigar across the room. It landed in a brass cuspidor with a hollow clunk.
"I have no idea. Let's build one and find out."
"It would cost a fortune."
"Chemar, my lovely, Americans spend a fortune on frivolous items every day. The cosmetics industry is a six billion dollar business. Candy bars another two billion. People watch TV with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another, eager to spend their meager earnings on some trinket that they think will brighten their lives. We can offer them trinkets with a purpose, overpriced collector's items that pay for something worthwhile."
The dark centers of her bright eyes deepened. "Worthwhile? A joyride for the two of us?"
"Any spaceship we build would be the prototype for a new fleet. The cargo we take with us -- autographed photos, commemorative coins, patches, et cetera -- will weigh as much as a small commercial satellite or a couple more passengers. This would be a short-term publicity flight that would pay off in long-term business potential."
She leaned closer to him. Close enough for him to smell the jasmine scent adorning her body. All trace of merriment faded from her face; she gazed at him with level gravity.
"Your bull was not impromptu, was it? You've given this long and serious thought."
"I've told you a lot about me," he said, "so you know I don't do anything halfway. Kids your age--"
"I beg your pardon!"
"--don't know what it was like to be young during the real Space Age, back when we were convinced that living in Space would be more than the privilege of a few. Back when it was just naturally thought to be the right of all. It colored everything we did, at least what I did. Why do you think I love flying so much? Why -- back when we had the Learjet -- did you think I kept taking it up to the flight ceiling? Remember how the Moon would look so crisp and clear and close? That's been my dream."
He raised his right arm to flick the built-in lighter. "It was a dream that the war interrupted, but never completely crushed. I built American Atomic because that's what a lunar city would need first: compact power. Power is everything. A rocket needs power to get into Space, humans need power to run an artificial environment, and the common man needs power to fend off those dull oxen with briefcases full of discouragement."
Chemar laid a hand on the cold, hard arm reinforced with magnesium struts beneath the tanned silicone rubber flesh. The sensation filled her with an odd electric thrill, as if she touched a man-machine that was more than human. "Boss," she said softly. "This visit just now didn't trigger all this. What's happened?"
"It's a small thing, really." He opened up his flight case and pulled out a manila folder. In it were two newspaper clippings: one, an article about the Interplanetary Treaty; the other, a short obituary from the back pages of the Los Angeles Times. This one he handed to her. "Thorald von Kleist died yesterday. I never knew him. I knew of him, though. He was one of the German rocket scientists who surrendered at the end of World War Two. He worked on the X-15, the rocket plane. I loved that thing. While other kids were caught up in Mercury and Gemini, I was obsessed with the X-15."
"That model on your office shelf..."
He nodded. "I built it when I was twelve." He took the news clipping back from her to return to the folder. "They're dying, Chemar. Even the test pilots. They're old dying men. Men in their sixties, seventies, and eighties who set speed and altitude records that still stand. Men who came so close to flying into orbit that only political tampering prevented them from going there. NASA was embarrassed by rocket planes. They knew that there was no way to make a big one. They took the X-15 from the Air Force and Navy, made it their own, then killed it.
"Von Kleist was just this old, poor, obscure man when he died. I knew his name, though, as surely as other kids knew of Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle. Even men who walked on the Moon are growing old and dying, one by one. It's as if there's some chasm between then and now. As if our fingers are loosening their grip on the past in one hand and on the future we saw in the other. We're trapped in an endless now where we mortgage our future just to stay frozen in the present." He looked up at her as if waking from a trance. "I don't want to lose that grasp." He flexed the servos on his right hand into a fist. "I'm rich now. I want to buy the deed to that future. And I want to pay off our debt to the past."
The task grew more challenging than he had anticipated. He knew by heart the major facts about the X-15; he read everything he could as a boy and it stuck with him better than baseball stats had with the beer-swilling, sedentary TV addicts he was loathe to call his contemporaries.
The sleek black rocket plane, shaped like nothing so much as a mighty crossbow quarrel, consisted of a frame of titanium and stainless steel covered with a skin of Iconel chrome-nickel alloy. The Reaction Motors XLR-99 rocket engine, powered by liquid oxygen and anhydrous ammonia, produced 57,300 pounds of thrust at sea level. The sea level thrust, though, was meaningless, since the X-15 was launched from under the starboard wing of a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress.
Larry Poubelle sat in the lush and comfortable leather embrace of his office chair. Behind him, from the forty-story vantage of his panoramic office window, spread the sunlit city of San Diego. One glance encompassed the tropical greens and desert browns of the sprawling San Diego Zoo, the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean where it intruded upon the Sea World aquatic park, and the greys and purples of Cayumaca Peak, part of the mountain range that extended from Palm Springs down into Mexico to serve as the backbone of Baja California. Beneath his feet rushed the cars and trucks and messenger motorcycles that fed the business center of the city. He could see that and more if only he turned around. He rarely turned though, absorbed as he was in thought.
In the years since his youth, the spaceplane had become an antique. The people who had designed the X-15 nearly four decades ago and those who had flown it were approaching senescence. The research team he assigned to the task encountered great difficulty in procuring detailed blueprints and engineering data from the original manufacturers. He wondered whether it might be necessary to go to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and ask to inspect the actual rocket plane hanging from the ceiling.
He doubted the necessity of such a trip. The shape was just about the only detail that would remain, and it would be upsized to accommodate a pilot, co-pilot, and cargo. He had learned enough from working closely with his power plant engineers to know that modern alloys, composites, and construction techniques could keep the upscaled version nearly the same weight as the original. And though he had not followed it closely, he knew that there had to have been improvements in rocket engine weight-to-thrust ratios in the last three or four decades.
What would a ground-up redesign of the X-15 cost? The original program cost three hundred million dollars over ten years and resulted in 199 successful flights with only one fatal crash in which test pilot Mike Adams died. Poubelle translated the 1960's dollars in the only way he knew was realistic: he took the current price of gold and divided it by the price of gold for that era, then multiplied that with the three hundred million figure to arrive at a figure just under five billion dollars. Estimating that everything the government does costs ten times as much as private industry, he brought the figure down to a cool five hundred million. He suspected that much of the avionics and the rocket engine itself could be procured off the shelf. That left the airframe and the controls. Most of the cost would therefore be in development of the prototype, so reducing the flights from nearly two hundred to just one and building a single craft instead of three would only reduce the cost to about a quarter of the total.
Over one hundred million dollars.
Not a drop in the bucket, Poubelle mused, but not exactly an outrageous amount. The used 747 he would have to buy and modify to carry it up to launch altitude would cost about a tenth of that, and ten 747's would not get him into orbit.
He could have written a check that evening to pay for the entire project. Laurence Poubelle, though, had plans that ran deeper than that.
Thom Brodsky sat in the corner of the office reading a transcript of the latest UN discussions about the Interplanetary Treaty while Gerry Cooper stared out a window at the setting sun.
"At least," Brodsky muttered loud enough for Cooper to hear, "we have the pleasure of knowing that Gibbon's little brainchild has as many nasty little hands fiddling with it as our design did at NASA. Russia demands that Mir be reactivated as the first UN space station, while the Chinese ambassador is arguing for Mandarin as the official language, based solely on number of speakers. She's enduring some in-fighting from the Cantonese and Manchurian candidates. The British ambassador is half-heartedly calling for 'bold experimentation in freedom,' listing fifteen proposals for social structure, at least ten of which are planks lifted from the Communist Manifesto. The Ecuadoreans and Brasilians are going at it about where the single launch site will--"
"Enough." Cooper swiveled his chair to gaze at his friend. "I can't even think about them shutting down Kennedy. It's the symbol of everything I thought was right about humanity, everything that was good about the future. Listening to them argue about how to kill it -- or worse, how to encourage its suicide -- it's just too much for me."
"Gerry?" The voice at the door drew his attention. He turned in his chair to see his wife framed by the flame orange of sunset. Her hair caught the last rays of daylight to shimmer the hue of gold alloyed with copper. Her athletic body, silhouetted by the fiery light and framed by the doorway, could have been the template from which to draw an idealized image of Woman. She stood there, one hand high against the jamb, the other laid along her hip and thigh.
"Are we still on for dinner?" she asked.
"That's my cue," Thom said, stuffing the newspaper into a bulging briefcase and hefting the mass as he rose. "You both have a good night." With that, he edged past Sherry as she entered. A moment later, a geriatric car engine rumbled grudgingly to life to carry Brodsky off into the sunset.
Sherry walked over to her husband and sat on his desk, legs crossed.
"Dinner," he said with a smile, "will have to consist of leftovers from the freezer. I'm tapped out."
"I know." She smiled. "I'm not in it for the food. I just want your company."
Gerry laughed. "This company? It's worth less than the leftovers."
"You know what I mean. You need a break. You've been marketing this latest version of Starblazer for almost three months straight."
"No one's interested. Not even Gibbon, who got me started on this tack. It's as if he pointed me on this direction and then forgot about me. Why did he do that? Why does he support space travel and then come up with the Interplanetary Treaty? Something that would crush all incentive to get into Space?"
"He must have a reason. Maybe he just doesn't understand how governments operate. Or how the market works. He's just a professor, you know."
Gerry shook his head. "He subscribes to Thom's journal. The articles that run about NASA interference in the bidding process for launch veh--"
"He probably subscribes to everything space-related. And probably doesn't read half of it. He is getting old, you know. Probably more concerned about obituaries than orbitals."
"What about the rest of them? 'The industry.' The half-dozen or so firms that claim they want cheap access to Space but won't invest a dime in a design that could work?"
Sherry picked up the blueprints on his desk and handed them to him. "Does this design work?" she asked in a level tone. "The one you spent a year on for the NASA bid?"
"For a price." Bitterness grew with each word. "It works, despite all the bells and whistles they demanded be part of the final design. It works even though it's loaded down with pointless redundancies, exotic components, and that ridiculous quarter-ton hatch to make it compatible with the Shuttle. It's a goddamned flying elephant, but at least it will fly. And nobody wants it because I can't subsidize the development and launch costs with tax money. Why pay two hundred million to design and fly the prototype when NASA undercuts the market?"
He slammed the sheaf of sketches into a trash can, then turned to call up the master blueprint on the computer workstation. He stared at the overall design for a long time. His wife said nothing. She simply remained seated on the desk, waiting patiently for him to come to a decision.
After long moments of silence, he said, both to Sherry and the world in general: "I'm not going to knuckle under to their way of doing things. I won't allow a committee to dictate spacecraft design to someone who knows better. A rocket, of all things anyone could build, is the purest integration of thought and matter, of will and reality. I've bent my will to theirs for too long. You can dream all you want about space travel, but if the smallest component in your spacecraft does not work perfectly in reality, you'll be dead and all your dreams with you. I know the reality of spacecraft. It's NASA that's dreaming, marching to the beat Congress pounds out on a pork barrel." He picked up the lightpen and started to alter the design. He became lost within the drawing, as if he held the pieces of metal in his hand, shaping it with fingers that handled aluminum and stainless steel like clay in the hands of the finest sculptor.
Sherry slid off the desk to drag a high stool behind her husband and sat there for the next few hours, quietly witnessing Cooper tear the guts out of his spaceship, watching in amazed silence as the man cut away every inessential part, every gram of mass that slowed it, every detail that prevented the rocket from achieving its best performance. Slowly, yet with absolute determination, the shape of the spaceship smoothed: angles that were difficult and expensive to fabricate straightened; engine plumbing that would have cost a fortune suddenly, under his eye and hand, untangled back to simple elegance and more. What he had learned in the last year he also incorporated into the blueprints: every aspect of the vehicle grew simplified, adhering only to the imperative of function. When he finished, no mere spacecraft glowed upon the screen. He gazed at the fundamentally lightest, fastest one-and-a-half-stage hybrid rocket yet designed, the essence of space travel made real by the mind and will of Gerald Cooper.
Sherry realized suddenly that she had not moved from the stool in the entire time Cooper worked at the computer. She glanced around the room. Night stole light from the office. Sherry sat quietly in the darkness, watching her husband with a satisfied warmth. Nothing pleased her more than to see him absorbed in his work. No book she could read, no movie she could watch, no vista she could observe gave her the thrill and excitement of simply watching Gerry as he made Nature conform to his demands while scrupulously obeying Nature's own stern laws.
Scrupulous. The word pleased her, for it so identified Gerry in her mind. He was the most scrupulous of men, the most honest, the most meticulous in his allegiance to reality. She loved him utterly.
SSgt. Patrick Jacobs, USAF, stood near the corporal who held a finger over the red switch.
"Five," the commanding officer intoned over the loudspeakers. "Four."
Jacobs watched the corporal's finger rest lightly on the glowing crimson circle.
"Three... Two... One... Fire!"
The corporal pressed the button firmly. Two miles away there bloomed a mighty explosion. The white fireball rose upward, shooting out miniature glowing white meteors that left smoking streamers in their wake.
The sound reached the group, a thundering boom followed by the rush of wind from the blast. Jacobs turned his eyes from the rising cloud to gaze at the Russians. They smiled heartily, as did the Americans and the newspeople rushing about to photograph this historic occasion. Today marked the beginning of the end for nuclear weaponry. Everyone looked happy. Everyone except SSgt. Patrick Jacobs.
The explosion was not nuclear, it was chemical. The object destroyed was not a nuclear warhead -- that would be dismantled elsewhere and the plutonium stored for future contingencies, such as a return to bomb-building if the treaty failed to achieve its goal. What had gone up in an instant of flame and smoke was the missile to which the warhead had been attached. To glory in blowing up a missile made about as much sense to Jacobs as cheering the demolition of a murder weapon while letting the murderer escape scot-free. A missile is only a tool, he thought, and Jacobs watched those who had been ready to use the tool for destruction cheer the destruction of the tool, as if it contained the evil.
Jacobs turned away from the scene and returned to his squad's jeep. In the driver's seat, Sgt. Deborah Gunn stared at the cloud slowly dissipating in the Utah sky.
"Damn' shame," the short woman said, tapping her fingers wave-like along the steering wheel. Blond hair cropped far shorter than required by military standards framed an intense expression that conveyed seriousness without looking hard or worn. Sometimes she broke into a smile that reminded Jacobs of Peter Pan. This was not one of those times.
Jacobs slid into the passenger seat. "Yep." He nodded slowly, gazing at the cloud of vaporized solid fuel, then at the crowd of backslapping, gladhanding politicos. "You could take a Titan, yank out the warhead, and lob a little orbiting platform into space. Or use it to send hardware up for the space station."
"Even strap a couple together for more payload."
Jacobs shook his head in wonderment. "I came from a dirt poor family. Pappy always said 'Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.' " He started the Jeep's engine. "How he hated it when the revenooers would come in and smash up his stills. Always said that showed how wasteful the government was. At least a regular crook would make off with the goods and use 'em or sell 'em. He considered revenooers to be nothing more than vandals."
Gunn nodded in agreement. "Yeah, well, what can anyone do about it? Can't fight city hall."
Jacobs hit the gas and spun dirt as they raced away from the officials' photo opportunity. "I just wish," he said over the engine noise, "that someone would try!"
A world away in Kazakhstan, a colonel of the Russian Military Space Force watched in silence as the barbarian hordes advanced. That was how Vladimir Tuchapski thought of them, the Kazakhs who had never quite abandoned their nomadic impulses. He watched from the gravely berm as they descended upon Tyuratam, not on horseback, but in military vehicles emblazoned with the Kazakhstani flag.
The barbarians had won. Russia fought hard to retain control of the Tyuratam launch site. In the end, though, as with so many empires in the past, world public opinion forced the Russian bear to let the jewel in its crown slip through enfeebled paws. The task of militarizing the base had failed; his superiors finally surrendered to the United Nations General Assembly vote ordering the closure of the deceptively labeled "Baikonur Cosmodrome" and its cession to the Kazakhstani government.
"Cossacks," he muttered, watching the jubilant troops race through the cosmodrome. Col. Tuchapski ensured, though, that nothing of value remained for them. The spacecraft and launch vehicles were long gone, used in the retrieval of the last cosmonauts from the Mir space station. With Baikonur gone, the only functioning cosmodrome would be the military's own facility in Plesetsk, at a much higher latitude. Manned spaceflight would be difficult from there.
Rifle fire cracked across the barren and rocky desert flatland. Victory shots. The death of Russian manned spaceflight. Though he'd had his run-ins with the Space Agency, Tuchapski firmly supported Mir. The thought of it circling the Earth empty and cold foreshadowed Russia's own fate. As a child, the glowing vision of a Soviet Moon enchanted him with its vast possibilities. Over the decades, as he matured, the promises of Soviet space grew smaller and quieter, until only the tiny sardine can Mir comprised the Soviet cosmonauts' paradise.
Now even that no longer remained.
The trucks disgorged their cheering cargo. The troops trotted through the gutted remains of Tyuratam. After a while, it dawned on the horde that of the cherry they seized only the pit remained. Col. Tuchapski smiled. Seeing their disappointment spread imparted some small satisfaction. They could take back their land, but Russia had smuggled its heart and soul to the mother country.
The colonel, a lean man in his fifties who still possessed the Nordic qualities of the Viking Rus from whom his country derived its name, turned his back on the overrun cosmodrome and walked slowly toward the helicopter. His work there was done. Now he moved on to an even more onerous task: overseeing the destruction of the last five hundred SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The end of the icbm's would signal the end of any possibility that Russia could regain the empire it once had.
He did not cringe from the word empire. He had long ago seen through the fiction of world communism to the core truth: his nation had been the second-mightiest empire in history. Now there remained only the undisputed master. America.
As he calmly witnessed the betrayed Kazakhs run riot through Tyuratam, smashing windows and setting fires, he saw a vision of the same fate for Moscow, Ekaterinaburg, St. Petersburg. There, though, the invading hordes consisted of blue jeans and stereos, vacuous sports and television comedies, hamburgers and soda drinks. The flames that consumed Russia would be those that had already reduced to ashes the American soul: hedonism; the sacrifice of long-term goals to short-term pleasures; the elevation of infantile athletic disputes into national concerns. These weapons destroyed far more thoroughly than any atomic bomb. As a child, he once believed that a dedicated Soviet could be killed but never stopped. Now he realized that a soul can be slaughtered just as easily as a body. Perhaps, he mused, more easily.
Colonel Tuchapski considered himself an atheist. He did not join the rush back to the Church during the temporary weakening of communist power. He did, however, believe in a particular kind of spirit: a national spirit in the heart of every Russian. That spirit started to die by suicide long before the empire ended.
A rifle bullet cracked through the air a dozen yards from where he stood on the berm. A few instants later, he heard the rifle's report. It was time to go, the colonel mused, when Kazakhs pulled close enough to identify as a target a man standing on a hill, let alone to aim in his general direction.
As the helicopter lifted off, the colonel took a last look at the abandoned spaceport and saw every dream and hope he possessed evaporate from him like the black smoke of the fires below. He sought a way to grasp that fleeting ghost of his spirit, some way to hold on to one tiny hope, one small chance.
He only saw the coming fire, the explosions and flames that would mark the destruction of the SS-18s. It would be his responsibility to oversee the demolition of Russia's only remaining instrumentality of defense against conquest and decline.
His head swam. Something stirred within his ravaged soul, something that refused to allow the dream to die.
The missiles!
He felt drunk, light-headed, giddy, terrified, all at once. An insane thought, a mad idea. Reckless ultra-left adventurism. Something only a desperate man would consider. Something only a man with no future would try.
Vlad realized that he had become such a man. The Russia he knew and loved no longer existed. It had fallen years ago, and crows now circled the corpse to pick it clean. One spark of vitality remained, though. One microbe of life still stirred within the dead shell. From it could grow Novii Rossiya -- New Russia.
The tides of history flowed around him. He suddenly grinned like a crazed Viking warrior, no longer feeling any pain at the loss of Tyuratam. It lay behind in the old world. Vladimir Tuchapski suddenly saw brightly spread before him a vision of the new world. Above it all flew a red flag of golden stars in the shape of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear in the sky.
He would need help. After they crossed the border and switched aircraft, the long flight home would give him time to build a list of men and equipment.
His soul returned to him in that moment of decision, he thought with a mad glee, and with it the spirit of Mother Russia itself.
Everyone has a true work, whether one pursues it or not. Chad Haley pursued his true work with a secretive zeal no one ever saw. He pursued his true work without uttering a word to others. That was simple enough -- he had no friends. No friends, at least, that he ever met or spoke to. Haley possessed acquaintances. Shortly after five o'clock, he would rejoin them.
Right now, he stood on an island dotted with palm trees and brightly colored towers. From the shore of Long Beach, the island looked for all the world like a fancy resort or condo or aquatic amusement park. In fact, Chad Haley worked on Island White, an oil pumping station in the Long Beach Outer Harbor, one of four inside the harbor and the center island of the three named after the Apollo 204 space martyrs, the other two being Island Grissom and Island Chaffee.
Haley's job was that of a flow control supervisor, ensuring that the spaghetti tangle of pipes and valves flowed smoothly, delivering oil to the mainland like blood through arteries. When all went well, Haley took the time to stand on the earthworks that concealed the pipeworks from the eyes of touchy natives and tourists, who demanded that the gleaming steel and honest grime that fed their cars and lit their homes hide from view as if work were a sin and the façade of mere decoration a virtue.
Behind him, a waterfall cascaded down a gracefully sloped tower enshrouding a tall rig. The tower and rippling water looked lovely, but Haley saw no difference between its beauty and that of the intricate steel skeleton beneath. Others did. As a young man, this mystified him. Past his mid-twenties now, he had encountered enough people with a mania to make useful things look like anything-but to understand it as a symptom of arrested intellectual development, a child's desire to be surrounded by toys. How else to explain Nouveau Kitsch, the latest fad of making everything in the home look like something else? Clocks that looked like quilts, chairs that looked like open mouths, skillets that looked like tennis racquets.
He gazed at what he had just entered into his wristwatch computer. The device, he noted with comfort, looked exactly like what it was.
Chaos theory proves central economic planning fundamentally impossible. As with weather forecasting, predictions tend to break down beyond a fairly short time horizon. Too many variables. Billions of human minds making trillions of choices every day. How else to explain the unanticipated nature of fads, stock swings, and irreversible monetary collapses?
Not bad, he thought. Could be a new broadside. He ran a hand through his short crop of red hair and squinted out toward the white bubble of the dome that once housed the largest airplane in the world and now served a the first all-weather, all-hours drive-in movie complex.
He could have passed for a local surfer with his lightly freckled tan face and slim, muscular arms; Chad Haley, though, dedicated his life to catching a newer wave.
A horn barked twice. Five o'clock Friday. For the next two days, his life was his own. He pulled the sleeve of his oil-stained orange coveralls over his watch and walked down the berm to a small spit of concrete that served as a harbor for the island. As the other workers filed up the gangplank of a weatherbeaten 24 foot motorboat, Haley jumped into a tiny inflatable raft and cast off, switching on the minuscule electric motor.
The warm May afternoon kept the harbor waters steady. Chad maneuvered the black and red raft around the spit and toward the mainland, steering north by northwest toward the section of bluff above the beach that marked the eastern end of a line of buildings stretching from the regally towering Villa Riviera at Alamitos and Ocean to the small and humble Queen Motel at the end of Cherry Avenue. That gap beyond Cherry marked Bixby Park, where he would make landfall in ten minutes.
The watery commute soothed him. Though it would take as much time for him to use this shortcut, he enjoyed the slap of the waves against the rubber hull, the firm ripple of the living sea a fraction of an inch away from the soles of his feet. He rode atop a gigantic living thing, gliding across the soft skin of Gaia (after spending the day, he admitted, sucking out her vital essence); yet this did not make him feel in any way small. He felt a part of the larger being. Every atom and molecule within him came from the Earth, would return to it, would become part of others who came after him.
He sang a loud pirate chantey as the boat caught a wave that propelled it to the shore. The afternoon beach crowd stared at the man with the matching hair and overalls as he dragged the boat ashore, deflated it, then carried the bundle of rubber and motor up the stairs and into the gaily painted mouth of the pedestrian tunnel running under Ocean Boulevard.
He emerged at the south end of Bixby Park and walked alongside it up Cherry. The Viking had returned from the sea.
Haley earned about as much as any mid-level worker in the oil industry. It proved enough to suit his purposes. He spent the minimum necessary on living, which practice led him to live in a less-than-modest apartment building in East Long Beach. The eleven unit brown-stucco building -- one of the survivors of the 1936 earthquake -- stood unobtrusively on Seventh Street like so many other unimpressive old apartment buildings and homes from the 1920's. Here and there modern three-story apartments and condos replaced some of the homes and older apartments. The differences imparted a glaring disparity to the street, as did the constant rush of old Chevies, new Mercedes, and freight trucks of all sizes and ages along the four-lane street -- technically a section of California Highway 22.
Haley toted his boat up the steps to the second floor. Excitement filled him as he approached the door. He'd spend the whole weekend with Sophia. Two days and three nights in which she would be all his. Sixty hours to use her in any way he pleased.
His key slid into the lock and turned.
"Honey, I'm home!"
At the sound of his voice uttering that particular phrase, Sophia came to life.
"Good afternoon, Chad," a sultry voice whispered. "I missed you. It's been hours."
Haley smiled, stashing his boat beside the well-worn sofa bed. He reached over to the back of the door, took the ash-grey fedora from the coat hook, and set it rakishly on his head.
He smiled. "Let's play."
At those words, Sophia booted her optical disc drives, loading programs to prepare herself for Haley's pleasure. She automatically connected up via the apartment's optical fiber cable to The Net, the world's largest VR computer information service.
Haley plucked a pipe from the rack beside Sophia, loaded it with his favored variety of smoking herb -- Long Beach Rooftop -- and sat in Sophia's chair. The chair was the only piece of furniture in the apartment of post-space age production. Designed for comfort, it was more cocoon than seat. Haley nestled into the soft leather padding that conformed to every angle of his shape. With a gentle buzz the chair rotated so that he lay nearly supine. Soft music -- more accurately, rock and roll played back softly -- surrounded him via the chair's speakers. He slipped on his Sky Pilot brand goggles, a pair of motion-sensing HyperGloves and entered the world of online virtual reality.
The goggles' twin liquid crystal color screens displayed three-dimensional images transmitted by light-wire from a super-computer in Omaha, Nebraska. Connected to that computer were Haley and thousands of other users whom The Net comprised. Each of their computers, when connected to The Net, added to its power. The more people online, the more rich and varied the experience. Some of the images he saw changed daily on the whim of either the programmers or of the members. Some he could change himself.
He floated before a towering citadel of multi-hued, jewel-like facets. In the base of the glittering fortress stood a huge door closed and bolted with massive timbers. He raised his right hand. The sensors built into the HyperGlove detected the motion and sent the information to Sophia, who interpreted the delivered information into an image on the goggles. In the VR world, Haley watched a metal-clad hand rise into view. The armor gleamed like polished stainless steel. He rotated the hand in a precise manner that told Sophia to create a mirror in which he could see his virtual body. This actually ran a systems check. Haley gazed at the face before him in the oval mirror framed by entwined snakes. If Sophia's software detected any error in the programming, it would appear as a wart on his face. Any known computer virus entering Sophia via The Net would appear as a squirming maggot.
The face, which he modeled after that of an idealized version of another redhead -- young Thomas Jefferson -- displayed no mark of imperfection. A small video camera attached to the chair scanned Haley's face and converted any expression he might make into a similar expression on Tom. He ran his hand through his hair and the mirror cracked apart to reveal once again the gate. He pointed in the direction of the tower and suddenly surged toward it at a dizzying velocity. He clenched his hand into a fist. An instant before he hit the door, Sophia transmitted his password to The Net and the barrier vanished in a shower of glitter.
That was a good one, he thought.
Chad lay almost completely at rest, yet glowed with an energy and excitement that would have amazed his coworkers at the pumping station.
He stood inside the Virtual Mall, the nexus of The Net. Wandering through on a programmed "walk," Haley gazed at the other people around him. As usual at this hour on a Friday, crowds clogged the promenade. Every virtual person he saw represented a user online at that very moment. If they walked in the mall proper, they were either entering, leaving, or browsing the system. If they stood inside a particular store or office, they were shopping or participating in virtual discussion groups. In The Net, "face to face" meant virtual image to virtual image. Tom Jefferson might speak to Emily Brontë or John Wayne and neither could be sure to whom he or she spoke in real life. One's image in The Net projected whatever persona one desired.
He recognized some people. Some waved at him. He waved back. If he pointed at anyone (a body language not considered impolite on The Net), he could enter into direct dialog with that person, no matter that he might be ten thousand miles away. He avoided doing so and pointed instead to an office with a sign overhead that read "The War Room."
He flew toward it and entered, looking for familiar faces. Seeing none with whom he cared to converse, he lifted his left hand in a manner that caused a briefcase to appear. Opening it, he scanned the available messages in Sophia and plucked out Broadside Forty-Six. He slapped it on the bulletin board where it unfurled like a piece of parchment. The action loaded the text of his message into the war discussion group's reading file. Some of the members clustered around, indicating that the users were reading the message on their own VR goggles. Several dogs and cats scampered up to the message, too. They indicated users who set their software to download messages automatically while they were away from their computers.
He lit his pipe. Since he did so whenever he was on The Net, he had programmed in the movements so that he saw onscreen an intricately carved virtual meerschaum in his right hand being lit by a cartoon blowtorch in his left.
He took a long puff and said aloud to Sophia, "We'll see how they respond to this idea. Right, babe?"
"Yes, lover," she replied whenever she heard the triggering question. Haley had digitally pored over hundreds of female voices in films, television programs, and commercials to gather all the necessary phonemes to synthesize just the right sound for Sophia. The result was a voice that purred feminine approval with every utterance.
He blew a ring of smoke across the room, though he could not see it and had not programmed in a hand movement that would signal a virtual smoke ring to appear onscreen. Sophia's main components resided safely in the smoke-free environment of the bedroom closet. He smiled. This was what he lived for.
Words appeared on the parchment.
Civilian-based sabotage is an important component of civilian-based defense, and one that has received short-shrift among pacifists. Is it violent to destroy the machinery of an oppressor -- either foreign invader or domestic tyrant -- as long as no living thing suffers?Slashing the tires of a troop carrier is something any school-child can do. It harms no one, yet immobilizes many more troops than the child could hope to by any other non-violent means.
What we need is a definition of non-violence. Is it the utterly passive assembly of large groups of people as practiced by Gandhi (untenable here in an America that still retains a vestige of individualism, and unnecessary among an armed populace, as Gandhi responded in the only way he could, noting that "among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of Arms as the blackest"), or can it include acts of sabotage that simply wreck "property" of the State (property which, by the way, had to have been stolen or paid for with stolen money, since States do not create wealth, only plunder it)? Is the sudden rearrangement of non-living matter a violent act? Or does violence only involve harm to living things?
Civilian-based sabotage is far more accurate than any sort of bombardment that a State offers as "defense." The civilian-saboteur knows who is the oppressor, knows what equipment belongs to the invader, knows the difference between "liberator" and "new master."
The civilian-saboteur is the hero of any war or revolution.
Instead of re-entering the Mall, he took a shortcut to the Economics Room by pointing to a sign on the bulletin board. Once in the nearly deserted grey-upon-grey room, he reached for a virtual microphone to dictate a message, which Sophia's digivox translator converted to a text message for storage.
It is with the discovery of the Chaos theory that economic planning finally receives its fatal blow. The fundamental observation of Chaos is that small, individual changes in the initial state of a complex system can multiply until their effect becomes vast and impossible to predict. This is true of weather, where a small patch of snow suddenly sliding off a branch can alter the albedo of that small area, which changes the thermal output of the surrounding area, which modifies the airflow around the forest, which pushes the jet stream in a way no one can ultimately predict, because there are millions of snow patches and tree branches, billions of insect wings flapping and animals moving and breathing, quadrillions of air molecules bouncing randomly about.And so it is with the economy. Billions of people, each making economic decisions every day. To buy or not to buy this or that item. To save or sell or invest or squander. How can any central authority predict the economy for more than a few moments, when one person suddenly, capriciously buying a diamond ring for a loved one can make the day profitable for a jeweler, who in turn decides she finally has enough to buy a car from a car dealer who takes the profit but needs just a little more to improve his building so he sells a block of stock, which triggers someone's programmed sell order on the stock exchange, which... Well, you get the idea.
Macroeconomics is a fraud. We greet Chaos as the great liberator of individual choice and the final vindicator of spontaneous order.
"There," Haley said. "Sophia -- mark it as broadside fifty-five."
"Yes, lover," the purring voice replied. "Done, big boy," it said an instant later.
He wandered over to another room, this time a futuristic rocket cockpit that contained the Outer Space Round Table.
The joint was packed. When Haley entered, the hatch slammed shut and alarms wailed to indicate that the discussion group was full. The Net needed to allocate more memory space to this extremely popular area, but had not done so yet.
This time, one of the virtual members -- a beefy, bearded rouge of a spacefarer over six feet tall and almost as many wide -- strode right up to Haley. He knew the creator of this persona, a mean-spirited little woman in her fifties who considered the group her own personal bully pulpit.
"Haley!" She pointed at him, putting them in private mode.
"Mathilda," Haley said with a Jeffersonian grin. "You look so... burly today."
"Can it, Chad. Topic Seventeen is supposed to be concerned with drug manufacture in zero-gravity or microgravity environments. By that we mean medicine drugs, not drug drugs. I've deleted everything you posted about how to grow crystalline cocaine hydrochloride. The Net will not permit any discussion of illegal activities--"
"Talking about theoretical chemistry," he said, "is not an illegal activity. Look it up in your Constitution." Haley smiled. Got her adrenaline pumping, at least.
"My room," she said through the stout brute's fat lips. "My rules."
Haley shrugged. That motion did not transfer to his virtual body because Chad still could not afford the full-body VR sensor suit (with optional GenitoMatic to enhance virtual sex) that some members of The Net possessed. So he winked at her instead and switched back to public mode.
"Censorious minx," he muttered, knowing full well that a mutter could be heard by everyone in the room.
"Free-speech fetishist!" she retorted, storming into a sub-category.
Haley took an instant liking to the appellation.
That was when he felt it, the sudden and distinct impression of someone standing behind him, watching. He turned his head. Sensors in his goggles detected the movement and rotated the scene accordingly. People crowded behind and all around him. Some even looked in his direction.
That was not what he detected, though. He felt as if spied upon, a ridiculous feeling in a computer network whose inhabitants existed as mere images -- digital masks -- and everything lay out in the open. His Sky Pilot goggles and HyperGloves contained no circuit to channel emotional feedback. This was entirely an internal, psychological reaction.
To what, though?
No software allowed him to feel evil gazes boring into his back, no frisson interface sent a chill up his spine. Yet he felt watched, observed by someone lurking at the edges of The Net. He called up the mirror again. No warts. No bugs. Hence, no infectious software. The Lurker was something -- or someone -- else.
He clenched his right fist and stuck his thumb back toward his shoulder as if throwing someone out, his signal to disconnect from The Net, which Sophia did quickly. He removed his VR goggles without even watching his virtual self fly out of the castle as the gates swung shut and the huge bolts slammed home.
An hour had passed. He could usually spend four or five at a stretch. He took a deep breath to calm down, gazing at the pipe in his left hand. Too much of this, maybe, he thought.
"Sophia," he said.
"Yes, master?"
"Run the Grand Tour."
"I tremble with delight at the prospect, lover."
Haley snorted. He had programmed in all sorts of responses by which Sophia could indicate affirmative or negative, then put them on random choice. That one came up rarely, but he enjoyed the sarcasm now and then.
Slipping on the goggles, he watched as computer animation launched him from Earth into Space. He raced through starry darkness past the Moon, swinging low to pick up speed. Then he accelerated toward Mars, made a few orbits, explored the asteroid belt, flew a crazy, gravity-defying series of loops around Jupiter and a dozen of its moons, then sped toward Saturn. False-color rings of crimson, emerald, and peacock-blue encircled the jaundiced gas ball.
Music accompanied the tour. Music that soared triumphantly and murmured worshipfully. Regal horns, lush violins, imperious drums.
His eyes grew moist, blurring the view. He put the tour on hold long enough to wipe them dry, then ordered Sophia to resume.
Uranus and Neptune slid by, cold and icily colorful. Pluto, frigid and tiny, sailed past view. The music faded. The eyescreens dimmed to black.
The tour of the planets always boosted Haley's spirits. This time, though, he felt an odd longing. He lit the pipe again, took a deep drag, and held it.
Time for introspection, he mused. A mental systems check.
"Sophia. Run Brainstormer."
"Okay, sugar."
The goggles lit up with pulsating colors. A rhythmic sound throbbed from the speakers in the chair. The sensory stimulation relaxed his mind by directly altering his brain waves into an alpha pattern.
Calm, yet alert, Chad tried to pinpoint his disquiet. Was it work? No, all was well there. Pay was acceptable, stress was moderate, coworkers were easygoing. Friends? Not many offline. No need for them.
Lady friends? Lovers? Sophia gave good speaker, he knew, but without a penile interface, she provided no sexual outlet. Haley knew no women offline. This realization troubled him little. He knew plenty of women on The Net and had even exchanged some pretty hot e-mail with a few. All talk, no action, though.
The thought reverberated. He relit the pipe by feel and took another deep mouthful. All talk, no action. This meant something and not just in regard to women. Women he could do without. Ideas alone excited him. Recently, though, ideas on their own had lost their edge.
I'm twenty-six, he thought. Does that have something to do with it? Is this some form of middle-age panic?
All thought, no action.
All theory, no practice!
All his life, the importance of ideas fascinated Chad Haley. The obsession turned him into an electronic pamphleteer, an online proselytizer for all manner of causes he thought vital to the future of humanity: freedom of thought and speech (to the point of fetishism, apparently), the right to control one's own body (he took another toke and watched the flashing lights) and one's own property, and the freedom to travel (even though he had never left his native Southern California), most especially to travel into Space.
He had written and written and talked and talked online and sometimes offline about these things.
Have I ever put them into action?
He thought and wrote and spoke as he pleased. He certainly put whatever he wanted into or on his body. He ignored every law and social convention he disliked.
What am I doing about Space, though?
The lights and sounds enveloped him, locking him in a tiny room with his perfectly rational mind, cut off from the rest of the world. There he lay, thinking.
What can anyone do about Space? One man alone can't just build a rocket and take off. And the Shuttle is a joke...
A memory hit him. The Shuttle launch scheduled for next week. That triggered all this. Some astronaut going up, about his age. Tammy Reis. That explained it. He fast approached the age that other people were astronauts and he was not.
All talk, no action.
For years he had believed that one day he would live in Space and, as far as actually achieving that goal, all his talk about it had added up to a big fat zero.
Deeds, not words, shall speak me.
Chad Haley laid down his pipe. It was time for action.
The search program would be a snap to run, though it would take time. Haley mused about time while coming down from the high. Meditation consumed time, as did action. Action, however, achieved goals whereas contemplation could only recognize and set them. He spent too much time visualizing his desires, and too little reaching for them.
The time he spent in his advocacy, though, gave him one powerful tool: contacts. Via The Net, he knew thousands of people. More important, in The Net he possessed access to information, the most important possession possible.
The Net allowed him to search billions of words of news stories and magazine articles, millions of financial reports and public documents. Just a few years before, he would have done this through an exhaustive list of key words. Now, though, in his goggles and gloves, he stood before a towering golden Buddha on whose serene face lay the burden of wisdom and the barest hint of an understanding smile.
Chad adjusted the boom mike attached to his headset.
"Oh, master of all knowledge," he said, "before whom I am a mere flyspeck on the light bulb of inspiration, who knoweth all that passeth before thee in thine--"
"Get stuffed, you runny-nosed, gob-faced, pestilent twit," the Buddha replied in a high-pitched British accent gone awry, "and get to the bleedin' point. I haven't got all day."
Chad grinned. "I need to find someone with a lot of money who in his personal or business life has shown an intense interest in space travel or who has the capability to engage in space travel and who is not currently involved in any way in government-sponsored space travel."
The Buddha immediately said, "Define 'space travel' more precisely."
"Manned venture beyond Earth with the goal of inhabiting outer space and other planets. In the short term, either living in Earth orbit or on the Moon."
"Define 'government-sponsored' more precisely."
"Receiving tax subsidies for space projects. Voluntarily subjecting oneself to government control, regulation, or oversight. Involvement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Department of Defense or Space Command to any degree whatsoever."
"Define 'capability to engage in space travel' more precisely."
"Someone wealthy enough in his personal holdings to finance construction of a spaceship costing hundreds of millions of dollars."
The Buddha closed his eyes. His voice was suddenly low and commanding. "This search will take time. Return to me in one hour, thirty-seven minutes and twenty seconds, not counting timeouts. That is all."
Haley spent the time at his virtual keyboard, composing another broadside. The elaborately carved hourglass next to it marked the time. When the last grain of polished black sand fell through, trumpets sounded. He saved his work and rushed over to Buddha.
"I find but two names engraved upon this book," the all-knowing one intoned. "Laurence Poubelle is one. The other is Marcus Grant."
Haley frowned. That's all? "Tell me of them," he said, "while downloading."
The Buddha spoke while Sophia copied in-depth information to her optical disc.
"Laurence Poubelle is a billionaire who recently issued public queries on the whereabouts of former X-15 engineers, conducted a patent search on X-15 components, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all X-15 design data."
"And the other? How could you have possibly picked Grant?"
"Grant Enterprises has never received any money from the government, such as federal subsidies or guaranteed loans. Marcus Grant personally holds all company assets. He has no investment in any space-related field."
"And no one else made the list?"
"Nearly all companies I examined have taken advantage of some federal program or another. Grant is scrupulously clean in this regard."
"He ought to be," Haley muttered. "He makes enough in the black market. How can a nuclear plant owner not consume taxes, though?"
"Upon purchasing American Atomic, Poubelle sought to abolish the Price-Anderson liability limitation act. He was defeated. He has been involved in numerous clashes with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in his efforts to remove his plants from the category of public utility. Most are still pending in the courts. He has lost the rest."
"Why does he keep trying?"
"I have no information to answer questions of motive."
Haley signed off of The Net and removed his gear. What a meager choice. Just two billionaires. One a flake in the nuclear power industry and the other a notorious underworld figure. Poubelle, at least, was making a stab at building a spaceship. Haley considered that aspect for a moment. Would it be better to hitch his wagon to that star? Or to try to convince someone who appeared to have no interest whatsoever?
Posing the question answered it.
"Sophia. Fax résumé code-named Bootstrap to Grant Enterprises. Circumvent Personnel, address to chief executive officer."
"Sure, sugar. Searching fax number database."
He received an answer to his query via an unusual route.
Three days had passed. He was willing to give them a week before calling, and spent the interim time on The Net, uploading broadsides, quarreling with the other denizens, and experiencing the virtual world through pot-tinged eyes and fingertips.
All talk, no action. The thought once again resonated in the large red cavern of his mind as he ran through various rooms in The Net, hammering up text and listening to other people's postings. Suddenly, a pigeon landed on his wrist. This signaled a personal message to him. He plucked the paper tube from around its leg and unrolled it. A woman appeared before him, a gorgeous redhead in a skin-tight crimson spymistress action outfit. That got his attention.
Haley turned down the music to listen as she spoke in a voice as low and sultry as Sophia's.
"I find all your postings here very interesting. You faxed me a job résumé and did not mention that your hobby is electronic rabble-rousing. My true name is Joscelyn Donahue, Chief Executive Officer of Grant Enterprises, and I don't normally answer job inquiries this way. Come to my office at eight-thirty Wednesday morning. Bring a disc of your best ideas."
Haley unconsciously gulped back a feeling of unease. Talk's over. Now here's some action.
What sort of corporate VP -- outside of the computer industry -- perused the round tables of a computer network? Sure, he knew that business types had personal computers and a lot of them linked into The Net, but such things were considered perquisites, and perqs of value often languished unused, the point being simply to receive them. Just his luck that a busy and apparently driven executive such as Donahue signed on to The Net and actually used it. Whatever happened, he mused, to high-tech pursuits being the exclusive domain of tinkerers and fanatics? Maybe she is a fanatic. That's why she works for a counter-economist such as Grant.
"Mr. Haley."
Joscelyn Donahue spoke his name with a firm, crisp voice. She remained seated in the black leather chair, looking down at something on her desk. Her auburn hair cascaded over her shoulders, almost brushing the desktop with its ends. She looked as exciting as her spymistress Net persona, perhaps even moreso. Her hands moved constantly, now tapping at her in-desk terminal keyboard, now manipulating the ten-key, now lifting a black-and-gold stylus to jot a note on the screen.
An unfamiliar tremble forced its way through Haley's gut, like a minor tremor in the earth around a volcano. He faced the necessity of action, rather than just talk. And person-to-person, at that.
"Have a seat," she said, waving a hand toward the pair of Zimbabwe chairs in front of the black-lacquered desk.
He pulled out the one on the left and sat. Air whooshed out from the thick cushions. Though the chair supported him comfortably, it did nothing to ease his disquiet. All the calm he sought to muster vanished in the quiet room. His left leg began to bounce lightly at the heel.
She tapped out a few more lines, typing with the pads of her fingertips in such a way that her long, blood-red fingernails avoided tangling in the keys. This close to her, Haley inhaled the perfume draping her. The sweet floral fragrance reminded him of fresh air in a meadow. It was the only thing about her that put him at ease.
Donahue looked up at him with deep green eyes.
"You wrote all these?" She raised the terminal screen toward him. In sharp black letters on a glare-free white background glowed the title
It had to be that one, he thought, gazing at the words as if they were the edge of a guillotine racing toward his upturned throat. Decapitation, though, seemed almost preferable to a job interview run more like an inquisition. He nodded guiltily.
"It's an interesting discourse," she said, watching him for his reaction. "I read your others, too." She leaned back in her chair.
"It's really just a hob -- "
She interrupted him with a raised hand. "Why don't you apply as much ingenuity to your day job as you do to this after-hours effort?"
Haley said nothing; he only stared. Think. Say something.
"We're interested in employees who can contribute something of value," she said, "not those who simply punch a clock." She reached over to swivel the screen back and down into the desk. Her nails clacked softly against the scarlet monitor case.
"I..."
She waited patiently. Haley knew that the selling moment had come.
"I reserve my talents for companies that merit them. That's why I sought out Grant Enterprises. I've reached the point where I can apply my abilities to any problem you have."
"Grant Enterprises has no problems," she said with a smile.
"Every diversified company has problems." Haley desperately searched his memory, wishing he possessed Sophia's random-access capability. "His -- I mean its -- problem with the Interstate Commerce Commission over unlicensed truckers..."
"How did you know about that?"
Haley took his turn smiling. "I'm on The Net. I asked Buddha to do some information-base searches. I didn't get far, which in itself indicates a company that exerts a great deal of effort to keep its affairs private."
"Thank you for coming by, Mr. Haley," she said crisply, turning her attention back to the realm of her desktop.
For a moment, Haley sat and stared. Then, slowly, he rose, turned, and walked out of the office.
Only after the doors closed did he permit himself the luxury of breathing.
Donahue reread the electronic pamphlet, modifying it with the addition of underlining and bolding for emphasis. She typed in a few notes at the top of the file and closed it out. Smiling, she addressed the file to GRANT.1. In an instant, the file moved to where Marcus Grant would read it.
In that instant, she sealed Chad Haley's fate.
"Very impressive," The rich baritone voice spoke from behind the plush leather chair. "But can he be used?"
Two hours had passed since Donahue sent Grant the document. Now she sat on the edge of her boss's expansive desk and said, "He's all right. A little wimpy, but his ideas aren't. That disc has some bell-ringers. Check them out."
The chair rotated. Grant's eyes met hers. "I don't want another Morgan Brennen."
"He's no maverick, boss. Classic risk-averter."
Joscelyn gazed at Marcus Aurelius Grant. "Risk-averter? Then why does he publish this stuff?" Grant flipped his fingers toward the computer screen inlaid to his desk surface. " 'Chaos Theory and Macroeconomics,' 'God and Man as Fractal Progressions,' 'The Technological Resolution of the Abortion Dilemma,' 'Space Programs Versus Space Travel,' 'The Soul as an Electro-Chemical Ordering' "
"He's totally caught up in theory, Marc. He didn't inherit a goforit gene the way you did."
Grant shook his head in wonderment. "A guy with ideas such as these ought to be rich. What's wrong with him?" He leaned back in the chair and hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets. "I'm no rocket scientist and I've done all right. Doesn't the kid have any initiative?"
"He pumped up the nerve to approach us."
"Well, snare him in."
"Right." She slid off his desk, lowering her long legs to the carpet. Walking to the carved-wood double doors, she added, "I'll have the smelling salts ready if he faints in your presence."
Grant smiled. In a creaky voice, he cackled, "Excellent, child, excellent."
Haley stared at the approaching woman with a sense of dread. Not twice in two days! he thought.
Joscelyn Donahue neared him, dressed in a dark grey business jacket and skirt that did little to hide the stunning curves of her body. Her eyes, though, terrified him. They stared so deeply when they gazed at him, as if laying all his life bare before her.
"Mr. Haley," she said.
"Ms. Donahue! What a pleasure to meet you here." He continued to nail up a broadside. She glanced at it, pulled off a copy, and slid it in her jacket pocket.
"Take a walk with me," she said, glancing to her left and right. "I'd like a private talk."
The statement became a command and a door appeared beside them that read . He followed her into a forest through which golden sunlight filtered. Birds chirped and squirrels scampered.
"You've got the knack for VR, I must say."
She waved her hand dismissively. "I pay someone to program this stuff. I've no time for details. Here's the offer. We turn your ideas into usable products and services. You earn one percent of gross cash inflow or ten percent of net return on investment. Take your pick."
"What's your overhead?" he asked.
"None of your business unless you're working for us."
"One percent of gross, then."
She smiled. "Always the better choice. Here's another. You can work through The Net, but I'd prefer for security purposes to set up our own local area network at the office and have you physically present. Mr. Grant travels quite a bit and you'll undoubtedly be accompanying us."
Haley's head swam. It was all going too fast. "Why... are you putting me on such a fast track?"
Her gaze narrowed. "Don't you want to be on the fast track?"
"Sure. It's just that... how do you know I can do the job?"
She pulled the broadside from her pocket. "This is how I know. Any personal boldness you lack can be learned. I'm a damned good teacher. See you tomorrow at six AM. We like to get a jump on Wall Street." She turned toward the exit, then pivoted about, her hair sparkling in the shafts of sunlight like crimson flame. She held the broadside toward him.
"Incidentally," she added, "You're working for us now. Stop giving it away."
Haley stared at the departing Donahue and said nothing. His mind raced to grasp the implications of the last few moments. He'd unconsciously sought this sort of influence for years. To reach with his ideas someone who could actually change things. Someone who could act upon his ideas. However...
"Ms. Donahue?"
"Yes?"
"I'm pleased that you -- and Mr. Grant -- appreciate my articles. But the ideas haven't been tested in the real world. If I take this position and something we try fails, what then?"
She raised one sardonic eyebrow. "Aren't you the one," she said, "who claims it's possible to calculate the exact cost of trading risk for profit?"
Proceed to Chapter 8 Return to the Table of Contents