CHAPTER 34

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

16 June

The shadow followed Haley through every nook and cranny of The Net. Afraid that the Lurker might trace his data stream back to Grant Enterprises, he tried every evasive tactic he knew.

Finally, he gave up and stopped. In the middle of the Mall, the shadow caught him. For a moment it simply stood before him. Then, pixel-by-pixel, the shadow metamorphosed into the female robot from Metropolis. She held out her hand to offer a scroll to Haley.

Hesitantly, he reached out to accept it.

In an instant, she vanished. He read the scroll.


The Orbital Settlers' Guide
by Luna Celeste

THIS IS A POLEMIC. A practical polemic, meant to refute the notion that only governments are capable of conquering Space. We, as free, thinking human beings, do not seek conquest, we seek the expansion of humanity into the stars. Can it be done without the State? It can and must, for the State is the enemy of space travel.

Why is the State our enemy? One need only gaze around to find the answer. The State murders. The State plunders. The State crushes beneath its jackbooted heel all those who presume to disagree with it. The State is the greatest and most powerful criminal organization in history.

We, the free humans, see its strangling tentacles reach toward the stars and oppose with all our might this incursion of War and Theft into the peaceful quiet of Space.

What is the State? The State is people. People who believe they have a right to rule others. These people are the thieving, murdering brutes responsible for war, conscription, taxation, massacres, slave camps, gas chambers, killing fields, nuclear missiles, and endless death stretching back ten thousand years. The State arose through conquest and shall not confine its ambitions to Earth alone.

Luckily for all, the State is only people. And, generally, the least competent of people. They are the ones who cannot innovate, only steal. They cannot reason, only kill. They are brutes who see the greatest efforts of mankind as loot to seize and control. Yet when they seize the creations of greater minds, the works crumble in their hands, for they cannot control what they are incapable of understanding. They tried to seize space. The fall of Challenger and Constitution proved their folly. UNITO and its effort to monopolize all the planet's space activity is likewise doomed to failure.

Space travel requires free, thinking human beings willing to innovate and experiment. It cannot be accomplished by centralized authority issuing orders at interplanetary distances, paying for everything with stolen money. Nature will judge the State, and punish it mercilessly, automatically.

We, the free humans, declare that we can and will out-compete the moribund State. History is on our side. The government expeditions of Columbus did not settle the New World; Pilgrims and Puritans did by pouring their own fortunes into escape from the Old World. The highly funded government bureaucrat Stephen Langley did not make human flight possible; the struggling Wright Brothers did. A statist airplane did not fly around the Earth without refueling; the private venture of Voyager did. It will not be a bloated bureaucracy that sends multitudes of humans into Space, it will be we, the People.

By the indomitable spirit of mankind, we dedicate our every breathing moment and all we possess to humanity's future in Space. This book will tell you how we can do it...


It read as well, he thought, as anything he had written. Better, in fact. And the only aspect of the piece that amazed him was the fact that he had not written it.

Joscelyn appeared, wearing an all-too-alluring leopard pattern on her virtual skin. "What's up?" she asked.

"Read this," he said, nodding toward the parchment. She leaned over his shoulder. "Where are you right now?" he asked.

"Florida again. You know."

He nodded. He read further, the text on the parchment scrolling at his command.


Look up in the night sky. Gaze at those bright points of light. Seek out Luna, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Squint at the Sun just before morning to see Mercury. Sit in the desert on a moonless night to find Neptune and Uranus. Consider the darkness between us and them. This darkness, this empty black expanse, is the new sea on which we must sail. For we cannot stay bound to the land forever.

We are the new pioneers, the nomads, the wanderers. We are the ones who will advance our species. If the fact of evolution and the theories of natural selection and punctuated equilibrium are correct, our leaving Earth will result in a rapid evolution of our species. We shall change while the earthbound shall stagnate. We shall become the new, vigorous race. Homo Sapiens will languish while Homo asteralis flourishes.

Space travel is the stuff of destiny.


"Pretty stiff drink you're serving," she said.

"I didn't write it."

She stared at him for a moment. "You mean these ideas are percolating around the zeitgeist on their own?"

Haley nodded.

"Who wrote it -- Rex Ivarson?"

Haley shook his head. "The Lurker."


Chapter 1

BREAKING THE SPELL


The idea that only the State can engage in space travel is as much a myth as any other. The State builds dams, but does that mean that only the State can build dams? Let's ask the nearest beaver. Only the State can build roads, or so the story goes. Tell it to the owners of thousands of miles of private highways.

What the State is good at, it turns out, is seizing from private hands the land for roads and dams. It excels at confiscating at gunpoint the funds for construction. When deemed necessary, the State enslaves the manpower needed for construction.

Beavers don't have to be drafted to build dams. Neither do humans need to be conscripted, taxed, or forced aside to make way for progress. They will either join gladly, be open to bargaining, or hold out heroically to what is theirs. All the State does in the name of progress is trample human rights and dignity.

So it is with Space.

The self-aggrandizing statists in the space program have assured us that space travel is incredibly dangerous, unbelievably complex, and overwhelmingly expensive.

And for them, it is.


Donahue whistled lowly, impressed. "I think she deserves an e-mail fan letter."

17 June

Montgomery Barron wondered whether to share the information his subordinates had gathered with Milton. The slaughter at Novosibirsk had been confirmed, explaining why the CIA's mole in GRU, Baumhoff, had not reported back about subnational space efforts in Russia. For Barron, that was all the confirmation he needed. He shredded the report. The tiny diamond slices of paper fell like snowflakes into the waiting bucket of water and bleach beneath, where they dissolved into unreconstitutible mush within moments.

He turned his attention toward Huntress. The spaceplane stood in its hangar like a bird of prey eager to do battle, surrounded by scaffolding as if caged to hold its fury in check. Long, sleek, and white as death it was, its delta wings forming a sharp, narrow-based isosceles triangle. Along the center line lay the wasp-waisted fuselage. At every inch of its winged length, the cross-sectional area equaled that of every other inch. This allowed acceleration to hypersonic speeds with minimal control problems at transition to higher Mach numbers.

The cockpit hatch formed a mere blister on the forward dorsal area; the flush-mounted cameras, forward-looking infra-red sensors, and phased-array radar that would provide data for the pilot's VR headset were nearly unnoticeable.

The engine, tucked away in the stern, was the spacecraft's crown jewel. Rescued from MacArthur-Truitt when NASA funding ended for the National Aerospace Plane, the turbojet/ramjet/scramjet/rocket engine -- a successfully fired 1/3 scale test bed model -- fit Huntress superbly. NASA never publicly admitted that NASP constituted an impossible boondoggle, that there existed no way to build a huge spaceplane. Yet NASA and the trough-feeders wanted a massive project. They obfuscated a fact that Barron discovered in his research, though: small spaceplanes were feasible.

The proof -- he hoped and believed -- lay in the fruits of Project Stark Fist.

There could be no test flights of this secret project, however. That was why he spent so much time in the simulator, even muscling out the actual pilot now and then. Barron wanted to know -- pre-need -- that when the time came to unleash Huntress, nothing would go wrong.

With the exception of the engine itself and the actual weapons, Barron's crew thoroughly tested and impeccably maintained all systems. Storable rocket fuel and oxidation-inhibited jet fuel guaranteed that the spaceplane could be operational within moments of need, once they removed the scaffolding.

That would happen within a week, when the ablative material cured completely. Meanwhile, Barron again heeded the urge to bump the pilot from the simulator.

18 June

A number of pallets marked

LOCKHEED SR-71 SURPLUS TITANIUM
FOR AUTHORIZED SALE ONLY

stood outside a South Bronx warehouse. Davy Crockett shook his head in annoyance, which caused the tail of his coonskin hat to wag back and forth like an impatient animal.

Next to the pallets of titanium struts lay a few more crates with such stenciled information as

JR. PROSPECTOR FIELD ANALYSIS KIT
FARM-IN-A-TUB HYDROPONICS
ALGAE, BLUE, WATER-ACTIVATED, 100 KILOS

"Bernie!" he shouted through the doorway.

Bernadette emerged wearing a white Tyvek painter's overall. The bright sunshine turned her into pure glare. Crockett shielded his eyes.

"How'd your final go?" she asked.

"Aces, I'm sure," he said. "What's all this stuff doing here?"

"Provisions," she answered.

"We're going up there for a day or two, not forever."

"So I'm thinking ahead. It was free."

"Well, can we get someone to move it inside?"

She shook her head. "Two-thirds of the crew are taking finals, and some of the rest have already gone home for summer."

"What about Crush and the gang?" He stepped inside and raised the warehouse door just enough to bring out the pallet jack.

"They're off on their own business. Gang business. I don't wanna know."

"Where's Sam?"

"Where do you think?" she said with a crooked grin. "Proselytizing like the proselytute he was born to be."

***

Friedman stared at the audience before him in the hotel meeting hall. Boy, I wish we had some other scam going instead of this.

He stroked at his Fu Manchu moustache -- the real one, finally grown long enough to replace the lip wig he had started with -- and adjusted his white ghi so that it would look just baggy enough for him to appear at ease but not so loose as to make him look geekoid.

He strode out on stage after a brief introduction by Natasha, who had a way with New York crowds. No one applauded, but some members of the audience began to hum Om.

"Half a millennium before our souls incarnated in their present vessels," he began, weaving as lithely as he could on the hotel stage, "in the ancient Orient, the Chinese invented gunpowder. They used it to power skyrockets, fireworks to send messages to the gods. The human soul has always sought the divine in the night sky, among the stars. Gods and goddesses live up there, or so we believe. Why do we believe?"

He stopped moving, threw his head and arms back in an adoration worthy of any evangelist.

"We were children of the stars!" he cried. "The stuff of our bodies was formed in the heart of exploding suns! We weren't meant to live on Earth, but in the depths of Space. Gravity drags us down, crushes our bones, sags our flesh, collapses our arches, and gives us stretch marks!" Many in the audience nodded. It all made sense now.

"We belong in Space! Our ancestral home! Our dreams of flying saucers are memories of our homeland! We must return to the stars!"

For over half an hour, he channeled an impassioned, mystical speech, urging everyone to contribute to the building of a great Space Ark in which the faithful may return to Space.

It brought in sixteen grand. Less the hotel fees, they cleared fourteen and a quarter.

We still need more, Sam thought at the end of the evening. Space is a drug and we need to score. That brought a smile. We need to mainline is what we need.

21 June

"Hey!" Poubelle said, pointing his cigar at Marcus Grant. "The last time you showed up, I got shot." He hooked the thumb of his cigar-holding hand and pointed it back toward the trophy mounted on his wall. It looked like a damaged prop from a science-fiction film.

Grant strode into the office with a wide grin. His grey hair sparkled in the morning sun angling in through a window. He gave every impression of a man on top of the world.

"You don't associate me with that bit of excitement, do you?"

The other man shook his head. "Nah. My detectives traced her psychiatrist back to a CIA shop in the Eighties."

Grant's smile straightened out to something more worried. "You mean you suspect it was an agency wet job?"

Poubelle mocked a look of horrified surprise. "I'm so shocked! Would my own government attack one of the citizens it is sworn to protect?" He took a puff or two on the cigar and said, "You're talking to a graduate of 'Nam University during the Great Disillusionment. I have the highest regard for my government -- it is capable of anything." He eyed his fellow billionaire. "So what are you doing here?"

Grant turned to gaze at a 747 sitting on the taxiway, awaiting clearance for proceed. Purchased by Grant for the purpose of ferrying equipment and people from all points of the planet to the eastern shores of Africa, the used aircraft bore no paint job, looking bright and polished and smart and new, despite its age.

"Oh," he said casually to Poubelle, "a little desert business." He fixed his attention on the one-armed billionaire. "So I thought I'd sneak a peek at Nomad."

"She's ready for her test flight." He rose from his desk. "Let me show you around."

The warehouse bulged with people. Separated from the crowd of tourists and enthusiasts by a red velvet cord and armed security guards, the ground crew tinkered with the black bolt of a spaceplane. With the exception of a few close-out panels, through which workers made endless adjustments and corrections, Nomad appeared complete.

It's family relationship with the X-15 was inescapable. Though larger by almost thirty percent, the proportioning nearly matched the original design. The only visible difference was that the cockpit enclosed a two-seat tandem configuration and seemed roomier nonetheless.

All the gorgeous curves and angles of the four-decade-old original had been reborn with the Dædalus Project: the twin bulges that ran alongside the fuselage to contain the rocket fuel; the Q-ball nose widening along the line of a prolate parabola, slightly flattened; the stubby, wedge-like wings and tail surfaces, designed for the rigors of hypersonic flight; the streamlined holes for the reaction control system that provided attitude control outside the atmosphere. It also possessed several features the original did not, including extremely powerful guidance and navigation computers, a complete energy-management system, and a pilot/co-pilot ejection pod that could serve as a reentry vehicle on its own.

Grant walked once around the spaceplane with its creator, asking a few questions now and then. He wanted to ask a million questions, but thought that such boyish excitement might tip his hand. He maintained the appearance of a rich man visiting another rich man's aircraft collection.

"And you'll launch this from the back of a Seven-Four-Seven?"

"Yep. Just like the old Space Van concept from the early Eighties."

"No heat shield tiles?"

Poubelle lightly stroked the black skin of the spaceplane. "Nope. The reentry temperatures will be far lower than those of the shuttle orbiter, since the planform loading is less than half. She's a light bird and we're carrying almost no cargo except for a few collector's items. A combination of high-temperature metal and heat-sink methods -- more heat-sink mass than the original, in fact, since the internal-volume-to-surface-area ratio is greater -- ought to give us what we need."

"Ought to?"

Poubelle threw his mechanical arm around Grant's shoulder. "Hey, we can run computer simulations up the kazoo, but you never really know until you try."

Grant thought about that as he glanced out the hangar doors to see his 747 lift off into the summer sky.

***

Leave-taking occupied Chad's thoughts as the aircraft in which he sat as a passenger performed its slow and stately takeoff roll, climbing into the cloudless June sky to leave behind the brownish haze drifting into the Mojave desert from neighboring Los Angeles. Haley glanced south toward the metropolitan area and made his mental goodbyes.

It was a strange thing to leave his native land. Born in California and raised there, he grew up immersed in America's odd combination of melting-pot and pressure-cooker that turned most people into non-cosmopolitan eclectics. He appreciated all cultures but never felt the urge to travel to and immerse himself in them. Now he embarked upon a non-stop trip to Somalia, a place the location of which he had not even been certain a few months before. And after a few months there, he would relocate to an even stranger place.

In the rush of events, the hustle and bustle of designing the revolutionary spaceship, Haley found little time to think about the enormous change he and a handful of other people would soon undergo. He had not even visited all of the western states surrounding California, yet here he stood on the verge of bidding farewell to Earth forever. While enough of an optimist to expect that in a few years travel to and from Grant One would be commonplace (if it weren't, they would all quite probably be dead), he also entertained the possibility of the unpredictable. The engines could blow up in flight; the airflow through the center of the toroid could choke off at transonic speed, causing the flat-plate area to rise sharply, increasing drag beyond any ability of the engines to overcome; unknown factors in the supersonic flight regime might lead to catastrophic destruction of the vessel...

He wondered if he had made his goodbyes properly or sufficiently. He kept few friends, except on The Net, and he could maintain those friendships via satellite links. With no family to speak of, that left the Earth itself. Astronauts, cosmonauts -- they all departed on their trips knowing that they might die, but fully expecting to return to Earth after a mission of determinate length. They were truly residents of Space: there for a specific time and purpose, intending to leave when their goals were accomplished. This trip would be no mere residency for Haley and fifty-nine others; Grant One would be their domicile, their permanent home, their settlement in Space. They would no longer be citizens of their respective states or nations, they would be settlers in a new land -- if one could call the void of Space a land -- as immune from retaliation or assistance as the inhabitants of Plymouth Rock, and with fewer resources than they carried on Mayflower.

Even the most rag-tag and shoddy expedition to the New World, Haley mused, had air, water, and food waiting for them at their destination. We'll have nothing but what we bring.

And what would they bring? Grant remained peculiarly mute on the subject. He took in advice from Haley, Donahue, and a small cadre of experts hired to research the subject, mostly poring over the manifests of Skylab and Mir, and released nothing. He claimed to have the matter well in hand. Haley suspected that Grant had been pondering the subject for some time and already possessed his own list.

The browns of the desert and the ochre of LA smog gave way to the crisp blue of the Pacific. The silvery aircraft carried a great deal of cargo intended for the work crew in Kismayu. Stripped of seats in its lower passenger section, the jet contained sealant and pressure-test devices to ensure complete integrity of the hulls; welding units and every conceivable tool that the construction crew would need to assemble the sixteen individual spheres into humanity's first real space habitat; sewing and serging machines and Kevlar III stretchable ballistic fabric with which to tailor the custom-made pressure suits (and ten full-body sewing dummies piled against one bulkhead like crash victims); test brands of packaged food to determine the best menus for the spacefarers; and -- at Haley's insistence -- scores of water bottles filled with fresh, pure mineral water as an alternative to the local supply.

He tapped at his breast pocket to ensure that his passport still rested there. He pulled it out to admire the forgery. Grant's counter-economic connections could provide anything at a price. They had provided him with the bogus -- yet fully documented -- identity of Murray Rothbart, VP of International Operations at World Habitat Missions. There was something about possessing a passport, even if not in his real name, that filled Chad with all the excitement of a boy playing spy-counterspy. Just a little booklet with his photograph, it identified him as a world traveler. Within half a year, though -- weight restrictions forbidding such useless mass -- it would be left behind on the planet's surface and Haley would become a citizen of the Galaxy.

It would be a long flight to Somalia. Haley settled back in the wide leather seat, shifted it to recliner, and gazed upward at the sky-blue overhead, thinking about the future. This was his first work break in months, and his first opportunity to consider the emotional impact of space travel. Not just space travel, though: space migration. This would be no visit, no week-long Shuttle cruise, no months-long tour of duty onboard an American or Russian space station. That might come later for visitors to Grant One. For the original station inhabitants, though, this was as permanent a destination and as complete a break with America and Earth as the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been for Europeans. He was comforted by the fact that Grant Enterprises apparently would not impose on the occupants of Grant One the sort of communalism imposed on the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop. Grant seemed more like William Bradford, who helped establish private property in the colony, leading to its survival and growth.

Haley had no doubt that the space station could prosper. What he doubted was whether outside forces would permit it to.

It was the leaving, though, that troubled him the most. He had never considered himself a pioneer. Though he may have dreamt about space migration and fancied himself one of the vanguard, he never dwelt upon the actuality of departure. This was it. The moment those nearly 12,000 mini-engines ignited, he would be thrown into an adventure as great as anything ever experienced. He tried to envision exactly what it meant. Death, of course, denoted the extreme negative outcome. What about success, though? What if everything went absolutely right?

He would spend every subsequent day of his remaining life inside the curving confines of the rotating metal toroid. No backyard in which to roam. Or, looking at it another way, a backyard bigger than anyone ever dreamed.

Haley gazed out at the shimmering azure Pacific as the plane turned inland for its flight to Orlando, Florida. Above him hung the sapphire sky with the Sun converted by the crazed acrylic window to a pointed star surrounded by concentric golden arcs. The biggest difference in Space, he thought, would be that he would see much more of the Earth below him in one glance and the sky around him would be black, the atmosphere they struggled so hard to penetrate nothing more than a thin veil on the horizon.

He sat up, unstrapped, and ran down the spiral staircase into the depths of the aircraft.

Despite the cargo it held, it looked positively cavernous, stripped of all its seats and class partitions. He tried to envision it as being curved sharply, part of a corridor five hundred feet long that looped back on itself. That would be about the length of the middle level of the space station, with the outer level a bit longer and the inner level a bit shorter. It seemed roomy enough for twenty people to live and work in. Lots of space for private cabins, materials to be sent up on subsequent flights for such niceties as partitioning and beds.

Twenty people in an expansive space station with a magnificent view. It need not be like an Antarctic base, where isolation sometimes drove people mad. Grant One would not be a remotely ruled government outpost performing subsidized activities with no profit allowed or freedom permitted. With a hydroponics farm and rabbit warren providing food they could live without outside assistance; the free-flying microgravity manufacturing plant they intended to take up with them contained equipment and raw materials to make a number of pricey products, which the crew would package and ship back to Earth in simple, unmanned ærobraking reentry capsules.

He had no idea what other cards Grant played close to his vest, but he knew that not one of them would lose money. That is, if the governments of Earth -- and Grant's industrial competitors -- declined to interfere.

The notion of defending an orbital platorm kept him awake nights. He touched the fuselage wall. Made of aircraft-grade aluminum, it was similar to the wall of the hydrogen fuel tank that would serve as their home in Space. The tank wall -- four-tenths of an inch of aluminum-lithium alloy and strong enough to contain the 300 p.s.i. internal pressure of the fuel -- would easily maintain the pressure differential between the hard vacuum of Low Earth Orbit and the interior 10-15 p.s.i. atmosphere the inhabitants required. The outer wall would also be proof against solar radiation and cosmic rays, but would it withstand the occasional meteoroid or chunk of orbiting space junk? Could a light exo-atmospheric projectile such as those devised by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization devastate and destroy the entire space station?

He returned to his seat and gazed once more through the thin Lexan pane separating him from the frigid, nearly airless realm of the upper troposphere. Chad Haley did not fear the prospect of leaving Earth, he discovered, so much as he feared not leaving it far enough behind.


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