CHAPTER 10

The function of a State Space Programme is to police space. The State's programme will pick up spectacularly the moment a lot of marketeers start appearing up there making untaxed money and capital.
-- Samuel Edward Konkin III

September 3

"Just how far can I take this?" Chad Haley asked.

"To its logical extreme," his boss answered.

Joscelyn Donahue gazed around her at the seedy little office in the light of a fly-specked bulb overhead. Dented, ancient wooden filing cabinets overflowed with dog-eared files. Yellowed newspaper clippings cluttered the desk, along with an ashtray holding a ziggurat of butts and a bottle of whiskey only partially full, the tumbler next to it holding a liver-killing amount of liquor. She craned her head about to take in every detail. She was impressed. Glancing over to a dusty mirror, she observed that she wore a tight-fitting red dress and a broad-brimmed fedora. Haley's clothing consisted of brown chinos, a dingy white shirt with the sleeves rolled up way past the elbows, brown suspenders, and a narrow-brimmed hat that looked as if it had been slept upon.

"Then here's the plan." Haley pulled the sheet of paper from the black Remington Standard typewriter and handed it to her. Another sheet appeared under the paper bail with the identical words on it. He referred to the organizational chart on that one.

"The only way to make a leveraged buyout profitable these days is to purchase the company and -- before the first interest payment comes due -- sell off all assets except its core money-maker -- in this case, the handgun manufacturer -- then move the capital equipment to that empty factory you've got sitting in Hoboken, then begin operating the core business on all three shifts. The day shift manufactures completed guns and spare parts in the traditional, batf-approved fashion. Swing and graveyard shifts manufacture pistols and receivers lacking serial numbers or manufacturer's marks in order to sell at higher prices in the counter-economy."

Donahue thought for a moment, then said, "How do we maintain security?"

"Swing and graveyard crews consist of one systems analyst and two gunsmiths. Pay them well so they don't rock the boat."

"Too risky. People get drunk. People blabber."

Haley stared up at the screen. "You... could make the number stamping an automated final phase overseen by just the analyst. It would be computer controlled, switched on and off automatically at the appropriate times. And..." He stared at the chart for a moment, then typed in an extra level. "There. Use robotics when at all possible."

Donahue nodded. "Distribution channels?" she asked.

"Since they're off the record and lack any tracking numbers, the production runs can just vanish from the loading docks. I have a multi-level marketing plan that involves a trio of national distributors who recruit regional marketers in the high-crime areas. They make contact with the more radical elements of Neighborhood Watch. You know -- the people who realize that the cops aren't going to be there when they need them. Or who view police as just a gang of thugs in blue."

"And if the operation is busted anyway?"

Haley smiled and shrugged. "You sold the company to a paperchase corporation and parked the stock with another dummy, didn't you?"

She patted him on the back. "This is a good one. Save me a copy."

"Save changes," Haley said.

"Yes, boss," a sultry voice responded from the front part of the office. Donahue turned to see a buxom blond in a tight turquoise sweater dress slip a folder in a desk tray marked "JD."

"Where did you get her?" Donahue asked Haley with a puzzled expression on her face.

"Built the voice up byte by byte. Movie stars, radio deejays, commercial actresses. Totally synthetic."

Donahue lowered her voice. "I see," she said in a susurrous breath.

Haley frowned. "How did you do that?"

She laughed and tossed her hair over her shoulders. "Any woman in heat can speak that way."

Haley sat there composing a reply, but Donahue beat him to the punch when she picked a newspaper clipping and scrolled through the text. "What the hell is this?"

Haley shrugged. "It's just a think-piece. The concepts certainly don't have to be applied in the way I suggest." He hoped that she would take the bait. The headline she gazed at read


Low-Altitude Cruise Missiles as a Transport Method
of Consumer Goods from Colombia to New Mexico


"Colombia? We are not a company of drug smugglers, Mr. Haley!"

"Of course not, but you gave me wide latitude in what -- "

"That will be all," she said sternly, removing her Sky Pilot HG II goggles. She blinked a few times, readjusting her focus to take in the dimensions of Haley's actual office in the Advanced Systems Division. It was not spacious, but neither was it as small as the 1940's detective's office Haley created in his VR computer workspace. The real office lacked no amenity. The lighting -- soft, low, and golden -- came from a pair of antique Tiffany peacock lamps on the ends of an equally venerable desk at which Chad very rarely sat. He spent most of his days in his electronic cocoon -- a copy of one in his apartment, he told her, except for the more powerful supercomputer it accessed -- spinning threads of thought into maps of action.

"Joscelyn..."

"Yes, Chad?" Donahue glanced at her wristwatch and adjusted the jade comb in her hair.

"I figured out the source of the New Mexico missile some time ago. That's why I ran this idea past you."

Her dark crimson lips formed a wicked smile. "I know."

"Should I be worried about all this?"

"All what? All the money we're making?"

"All the laws we're breaking."

Her smile faded just slightly. With a weary shake of her head, she said, "I do the worrying for Grant Enterprises. And I do it weekends and holidays."

Concerned at her tone of voice, he exited the VR program and removed his goggles to look around the office. Donahue had already departed, her own headset and gloves lying on the polished walnut desk, still emitting the scent of her perfume.

* * *

"I need to know what you think of him." Grant stared at Donahue from the vantage of his leather Recaro executive chair. His penthouse office occupied the entire top floor of the skyscraper. "What sort of a risk is he? Would his fully informed assistance be an even greater asset?"

Donahue stared quietly out at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, a jumble of grey ships and rusting steel cranes. The sea breeze had cleared the shoreline of smog, and a sapphire sky stretched out toward Catalina.

"I think you should ask him yourself. Up front. He's a radical thinker."

Grant snorted. "I'll admit that." He leaned back in the chair, his right hand grasping the handle of a simple black coffee mug that looked almost quaintly austere amidst the wealthy trappings of his workplace. The fingers of his left hand beat out an idle march: one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three-four-five. "He's got wild ideas."

"Ideas that work," she persisted. "Ideas that have brought us money. Substantial money."

"So why not keep it at that? Why pull him in further?"

"Because," she said, sitting on his desk to perch one leg against his chair and swivel it toward her, "I think that, somewhere in the convolutions of the three pound universe that serves as his brain, sits an idea that will shake this planet and bring us more wealth than we can handle. I just have to find that idea."

Grant took a sip of the coffee. "I had ideas once," he said in a rueful tone. "Real ideas. Big plans. Now my ideas are simply... mechanistic. I can look at something and make it run better, more efficiently. I have the ability and the power to take the well-worn path and pave it, raise the speed limit, throw up the billboards." He gazed out at the sea. "That power is nothing compared to the simple ability to blaze the next trail."

* * *

Haley detected the eerie presence of another. The Lurker had returned to the Virtual Mall. He turned swiftly about, so fast that the computer could not generate the illusion of motion. Instead, the image flickered and the new point of view appeared. There, darting out of view, ran a figure in black cloaked in a voluminous cape that reflected no light.

Pointing his finger toward the exit, Haley flew past the crowds and returned to his own virtual office, this time designed like a Louise xiv palace boudoir. He turned toward the virtual keyboard -- now the ornate organ from Phantom of the Opera -- and typed madly.


Don't know what Lurker wants. Perhaps trying to drive me crazy just by hiding nearby. Doesn't anyone else sense him? If not, how can he appear on private face-to-face if I didn't give him my public key access? Is it someone I know? Or did he hack my number?


A hacker would be fairly benign, he thought. Someone is making a concerted effort to follow him, to unnerve him. Perhaps even to spy on his work stored in the Grant supercomputer.

Something scratched at his door. He turned, his point of view shifting to the door. The headphones shrieked with the grating sound of nails against slate.

How can he do that? Any attempt to get his attention would cause Sophia's voice to say "Someone at the door, lover." Screeching fingernails were simply not in the sound files. Unless...

Unless someone has hacked into my own system!

The nails screeched again. He reached toward the ghostly door and yanked it open.

And saw no one.

He saw, in fact, nothing at all. His LCD spectacles registered blackness where there should have been his message room and bulletin board. Shuddering, he pulled the unit from his head, severing the connection.

"Sophia," he said. "Return from Erehwon. Run check for virus, Trojan Horse, tapeworm, logic bomb... anything."

In the minutes that followed, Haley collected his thoughts and tried to calm down. He gazed at the goggles and feedback gloves, suddenly aware that wandering the Virtual Mall might not be any safer than cruising any realm that welcomed the masked and the anonymous.

"Chad?"

"Yes, Sophia," Haley answered.

"I can find no evidence of corruption in my system."

"Thank you, Sophia. Take a message." Hesitantly, he slipped on the spectacles to see Sophia's busty form sashay into his office, notebook in hand, and sit cross-legged on his desk.

"Ready, Chad," she murmured.

Haley took just a moment to point his glove at the office door. It opened to reveal the message room and bulletin board exactly where they should be. He closed the door and locked it; this put the system into an encrypted mode.

"Message to Joscelyn Donahue, carbon to Marcus Grant. Subject -- Safe operating environments." He smiled. Sophia gazed at him, hanging on his every word. He purposely had not programmed in the action of her writing down what he said. He thought it was more amusing this way.

He took a deep breath and began what he considered to be the ultimate test of his position at Grant Enterprises. For a long moment he said nothing. He had spent several months at Grant, building his reputation. Everything he suggested, he and Donahue implemented to the benefit of the company. The time had come to make his case for the most daring black market investment of all time.

"Industry in the modern world is once again coming under fire from the Luddite forces of anti-technology, this time flying the banner of environmental concern. Already free trade, except in the counter-economy, is non-existent. Though the risk of government interference in counter-economic market activity is low and can be lowered even further by the intelligent application of ounces of gold or grains of lead, I suggest that the twin concerns of environmental safety and lowered operating risk can be met by the relocation of manufacturing to a neutral zone.

"This neutral zone would have to be so isolated as to be out of the reach of any government that might try to claim it, and so barren that any environmental pollution could not affect any living part of the planet."

Haley grinned. This will do it, he thought. This will probe how far I can go and how much they'll spend. "Since all deserts are claimed by one State or another and the high seas, though nominally free, are the soup-bowl of life on Earth, there would seem to be no place in the world that can satisfy both conditions. Therefore, Grant Enterprises must leave Earth."

Sophia did not raise an eyebrow.

"Whereas environmental laws and restrictive trade practices make white market business unprofitable and black market business risky, orbital manufacturing with re-entry delivery of goods allows for operations free of government interference. Such an orbital platform could become a base for manufacturing anything without environmental risk. It would be of great interest to the genetic-engineering and fusion power professions, both of which are being legislated against on Earth. And though certain governments may claim to extend their authority into space, and the UN will soon attempt to claim the entire Universe, such laughable pronouncements fail for lack of any realistic means of enforcement. The High Ground is completely defensible.

"That means that -- in addition to legitimate manufacturing and services -- anything goes. Uncensored -- and uncensorable -- TV and radio broadcasts. Drug and weapon manufacturing. Zero-g brothels. Unmanned reentry vehicles delivering any type of good to any point on the globe -- for a price. If Grant Enterprises can be the first to get a toehold in space, it will become the richest, most powerful company on Earth or off of it.

"Details upon request."

* * *

This time, Marcus A. Grant called Haley to his office. Less than two hours had passed since Chad transmitted the message to Donahue and Grant. Haley was working on a list of illegal activities that an orbital facility might house when a great globed head like that of the Mighty Oz appeared before him and -- in a voice that thundered in his earphones -- demanded that he come to Grant's office in five minutes.

Haley entered the large, bright penthouse office to see Donahue sitting in one of the Zimbabwe chairs in front of Grant's spacious, vehemently neat desk. The afternoon sun was a deep purple dot on the tinted picture window behind him.

Marcus Grant, Haley noted, was tall, yet not a large man. He was so well-proportioned that he could actually look shorter than his true height. Silver-grey hair lay combed back over his head in the style of a symphony conductor. The grey appeared to be premature; the quality of his facial skin denoted an age of no later than early forties, possibly just mid-thirties. The man's age held vital importance to Haley: knowing it, he could judge what part of the Space Age influenced Grant's childhood. This just might help.

Grant made no effort at introduction. His first sentence hit Haley like a hammer blow: "No spaceships, Mr. Haley."

That was not the greeting he expected. "Mr. Grant, there's no reason why the company can't expand into Spa--"

"No spaceships, no rockets, no Moon-bases, no astronauts, no crazy Rex Ivarson crap."

Haley's gaze narrowed. "You've read Rex Ivarson?"

Grant's jaw tightened. "Who hasn't -- as a child? We grow up and put away childish things, though. I'm willing to discuss secure sites with you. Siberia, Antarctica, even the ocean floor. But no rockets. Understood?"

Haley frowned. Something was not right. Everything he had studied about the company indicated that Grant ought to embrace the concept. "Mr. Grant -- with all due respect, the attitude of businessmen toward Space -- which you seem to share -- leaves the cosmos wide open for the first company with enough courage and ingenuity to--"

"I said no rockets!"

Donahue nearly jumped from her seat. Grant never raised his voice. If anything, she considered him very nearly emotionless when it came to the cool calculation of business and market position. His rejection of Haley's idea bordered on the hysterical.

"Perhaps," Haley ventured, "we should speak candidly. About ballistic missiles to New Mexico, for instance."

"That was a long time ago, Haley, when I needed to generate operating capital. They were unmanned missiles. You're proposing a black market manned-space program. It's an insane risk with so much profit to be made right here on Earth."

"We trade risk for profit. The opportunity for immense profit exists in Space. Yet no one is willing to risk tapping into it. That's a sure sign of a market niche begging to be exploited."

A palpable pressure welled up in Grant, an inner conflict made manifest by a ruddiness in his face that brought with it small beads of perspiration.

"No spacecraft. You may think I'm some heartless profiteer, but there's no way I'm going to build something that can blow up the way Challenger did. There's no way I'll build something that could roast people the way Grissom, Chaffee, and White got roasted in Apollo 204!"

My God! Haley thought with a shock of insight. This man isn't anti-Space at all. Not one in a thousand people remembered the crew of the Apollo fire. Not one in a hundred thousand knew the correct designation of the Saturn 1-B rocket on which the crew sat. Most who had any memory at all of the event called it Apollo One.

There's got to be some way to get to him. Something needs to be awakened.

"Those were government attempts," Haley ventured.

"If the government can't do it, nobody can." His voice dripped with acid irony.

"You don't believe that, or you would never have built those drug missiles."

Grant let out a laugh that released his ill-disguised tension. "Who told you they carried drugs?"

"Logic. The payload had to have a high value-to-mass ratio, it had to be relatively sturdy to withstand launch and landing, and it had to be something illegal to smuggle from south of the border."

"And you don't think that something else -- let's say, supercomputer chips with high import tariffs -- might not be even more profitable?"

Haley turned the conversation back to the direction he wanted. "It doesn't matter what the rockets carried. They carried the merchandise safely and profitably. They could carry people the same way."

The billionaire asked, with deadly seriousness, "If you're so smart, Haley, why ain't you rich?"

Haley mulled over the question. After a short pause, he said, "Because I've never -- until now -- put my theories into action."

"Right!" Despite the assertive reply, Haley's boss radiated a troubled unease. "I've made a lot of money because I take the initiative. I've also lost a lot of money because there seemed to be factors operating in the world that defied my analysis." He pulled an optical disc from the inside pocket his navy pinstriped jacket and waved it lightly at Haley. "You propose concepts and reach conclusions that are utterly at odds with everything I grew up believing. And yet they fit right in with everything I know works. Do you have a theory to explain that?"

"Perhaps because, while I never put my theories into action, you never put your actions into a theory."

Grant placed the disc gently on his desk and leaned backward in his chair, his eyes glazing. "What do you mean?"

Haley leaned forward, weighing every word he was about to say. "I mean that you have allowed the market to make your choices. You have gone where the money already is--"

"What's wrong with that?"

"--rather than where it will be. You are simply reacting to existing markets rather than creating new markets. Reactionary investing rakes in existing money, no doubt about it, but visionary investing can create new wealth."

"There's nothing visionary about space stations, Haley. They've been promised to us for half a century."

"On what basis, though? As government outposts, as military bases, as scientific playgrounds. All those ideas received the tax subsidies and all have collapsed under government's lack of vision. Space is not a desert fort or exotic laboratory. Space is the only frontier left for humanity. And I think we're all going a little bit insane because we're not reaching out to it."

Grant shifted in his chair as if roused from a troubled slumber. "Insane?" he asked.

"Look at the world around you. A hundred minor wars going on continuously. Murder-suicides of entire families. Rape and brutality, poverty and despair, starvation and slaughter. And nowhere to escape. Nowhere to find freedom, to be left alone to build a new life. People need that. Frustrate that need and insanity -- mass, cultural insanity -- is the result."

"So Grant Enterprises should build spaceships to relieve all this worldwide suffering? What a load of horse--"

"Marc." Joscelyn stopped Grant without even speaking loudly. "Chad isn't talking about charity. What Chad means is that things are so bad on Earth because there is no place to escape. What he is implying, I suspect, is that some people will pay any price to leave Earth. And if Grant Enterprises can provide either transit or destination services, they'll pay that price to us."

"No!" Grant pounded a fist on his desk and rose to stare into the purple sun. "Don't you understand that the future of man is not my concern? We have no future! They stole that future and smashed it! They crushed it in their mailed fist and threw it in the gutter. It's only from there that we can gaze up at the sky." He turned to face them. In his eyes smoldered an anger Donahue had never seen before. "I swore I'd never again gaze at the stars. The gutter is where all the loose change falls."

"Where does the change fall from?" Haley demanded. "And how much doesn't fall and so stays out of your reach?"

"That doesn't concern me. Earth is a gutter unbelievably wide, deep, and rich."

"You could--"

"Think of something else, Mr. Haley. Something... practical."

Haley nodded. "Something more down to Earth."

The grey man turned back toward the setting sun. The window tint painted the sky the color of a vast, ugly bruise. "Yes," he said quietly. "Something down to Earth."

* * *

Donahue joined Haley in the corridor, genuine concern on her face.

"He's never reacted that way," she said. "You hit some sort of nerve. I've brought up ærospace investing before and he's just dismissed it lightly. He looked ready to tear your throat out just to shut you up."

Haley punched at the elevator call button. "So Space is out. We concentrate on other schemes."

Donahue laid a hand on his. "No," she whispered. "Your proposal is important. It could make us a fortune. Marcus knows that, but he's built up some sort of barrier, something I know nothing about. Keep working on it. Develop a step-by-step program. Accumulate the facts. Run a cost analysis. Generate a database of people in ærospace who might be available for hire. I'll help you on this one."

Haley looked at her with a puzzled expression. "You're up to your eyebrows in alligators already. Why take on a speculative project?"

"You don't understand people," she said. "There was hatred and despair in that room. Where there's that much emotion, there's even more passion. I've never known Marcus Grant to be passionate about anything. When he's with you, though, it's as if you challenge his world-view. He thinks he's smarter than anyone; cagier, more aware of how the world really works. You come along and he's suddenly hungry for your opinion, eager to act on your ideas. Then you offer up your best idea and he just as suddenly clams up."

"So you want me to keep at it? In spite of his objection?"

Donahue stepped into the elevator with him and stood even closer to him. The scent of her excitement touched his nostrils. "I want you," she whispered, "to hit him with a plan so overwhelming that it will shatter his defenses."

25 September

The effort required all the research of a full-scale business plan. Haley and Donahue spent the following weeks analyzing the market for a space-based counter-economy. Haley discovered that The Net stored a daunting amount of information on the subject in the form of old surveys conducted by space groups. None of it was very helpful except as a guideline. No legitimate group, for instance, asked how much what percentage of those polled would pay for a night with a zero-gravity hooker. Nor did any of the cost-benefit analyses include estimates of the return on investment of designer drugs manufactured in an orbital facility versus the expense of defending against space narcs. Even the concept of orbiting pirate TV satellites barely received a nod from researchers.

The pair worked in spatia incognita, where every idea implied a dozen preceding points requiring investigation and confirmation. After three weeks, they possessed a report long on speculation and short on hard numbers.

Over those weeks, Haley noticed a warming on Donahue's part, a genuine joy in the study of orbital mechanics and spacecraft design as applied to market analysis. Her calls to him occurred more often as the days went by, the time the spent together after hours grew longer and involved late dinners. Sometimes, she even drifted off to sleep in exhaustion on Chad's couch. Most significantly, her image on their VR system dressed in more exotic clothing and carried itself with an ever more seductive energy. He wondered how long he could resist the attraction he felt toward her.

One evening at his apartment the two lay side-by-side on the couch bed, VR goggles and gloves connected to Sophia. In VR, they stood on a vast desert plain near a huge white balloon that glinted brightly in the morning sun. Below the balloon hung a white cylinder surrounded by six smaller cylinders. Chad -- looking more like an idealized version of himself rather than Tom Jefferson -- wore a khaki safari jacket and pants. Joscelyn wore tan shorts cut about as high on her long legs as they could be and still have a one-inch cuff. Her blouse was white and split open past her navel to disappear at the belt line. An inch or two had been edited from her waistline, Chad noted, and the little diamond plane just below the bridge of her nose that he found so sexy on her actual self had been deleted from her virtual features. He wondered whether she did that intentionally or simply forgot to include it when designing the walking, talking icon.

A flash of sunlight caught his attention, reminding him of the presentation underway.

"Here's an idea that's rarely mentioned in the literature," he said, pointing to the balloon, "even though the technique was used for unmanned rockets decades ago." At the urging of his finger, the huge gas bag rose into the deep blue sky. "The Piccard-style helium balloon is constructed of ici Melinex polyester bonded to ultra-thin dtex rip-stop nylon. I'd considered metalizing it for a hot-air balloon, but that would add the weight of the metal and the unacceptable weight of the propane tanks. Also, the metalized surface would be a radar reflector."

She watched it rise. "How long would it take to lift the rocket to the balloon's service ceiling?"

Chad smiled and stretched out his arms to fly into the air after the glittering object. Joscelyn joined him. They shot up after the balloon, which rose upward at very nearly a rocket's pace. Behind it -- writ across the sky in towering numerals -- the altitude, rate of ascent, and speed of simulation rolled past. They watched the lighter-than-air craft rise at one hundred times its real-world rate.

She found the impression of speed and altitude delightfully dizzying. The sky turned to a deep purple hue. The balloon envelope expanded to nearly double its volume, making the spacecraft suspended below it look like an earring. When the readout displayed 115,000 feet, the simulation suddenly slowed to one-half real time. All seven rocket engines ignited in unison, propelling the spacecraft into and through the balloon canopy. Erupting from the topside, the vehicle roared upward, the flaccid remains of the balloon instantly incinerated in its fiery wake.

Arms outstretched like super heroes, Chad and Joscelyn followed the simulation up into Space, watching as -- two by two -- the boosters extinguished and separated until there was only the payload orbiting amid star-spangled blackness above a blue Earth.

"That's one possibility," Chad said, gazing at Joscelyn floating two hundred miles above Earth without benefit of space suit. He made a motion with his hand and suddenly they hovered above a placid blue sea. For her information, huge turquoise letters floated on the surface spelling the name "Caribbean."

"Here's a second method. Whereas the first design saved fuel and increased payload by launching above ninety-five per cent of the atmosphere, this design takes advantage of economies of scale and simplicity by launching at sea."

They flew over a cylinder the size of a very small supertanker. On the water floated a legend indicating a length of five hundred feet. For comparison, two 747's perched nose-to-tail on the huge rocket then evaporated.

Two barges accompanied the leviathan. The forward ship towed it into position. Off the deck of the aftward ship slid a massive concrete block attached to the rear of the spacecraft. The block sank, slowed by buoyancy bags, until it dragged the exhaust bell underwater. Slowly the nose cone of the rocket arose. Within moments the vehicle pointed perpendicular to the surface of the sea, half submerged, half above water.

"The beauty of this design," Chad commented, "is that you can use standard drydock construction methods, standard barge-handling techniques, and the ocean becomes your launch platform. The water acts both to quiet engine noise and confine the exhaust. No expensive gantries or flame-suppression systems. More important" -- a 3-D rotating image of the engine and fuel tanks appeared amid the azure sky -- "the size of the rocket provides such a gravity pressure gradient that no turbopumps are necessary. Chamber pressures can be much lower than those of the Shuttle -- three hundred p.s.i for the first stage and sixty p.s.i. for the second -- because the fuel is gravity-fed. It's amazing how much weight a four-hundred-foot column of cryogenic fuel--"

"Why don't the sides burst under all that pressure?" she asked.

He halted the playback; the gentle waves froze, the wispy clouds ceased motion. "We'd use heavy-gauge, high-strength steel rather than lighter high-tech stuff."

"Wouldn't that make it too heavy and reduce the payload?"

Chad shook his head. "Remember your solid geometry. A rocket is mostly propellant tanks. The weight of the propellant versus the weight of the structure correspond more or less to volume versus surface area. If this thing were a sphere, it would be the classic cube-square ratio: as the size goes up, the volume increases by the third power while the surface area increases only by the second power. The larger the vehicle, the greater the ratio of propellant to structure. Do you know the basic rocket equation?"

"Vaguely."

"All other things being equal -- cæteris paribus is the term you MBA's use, right? -- the total weight injected into orbit increases at the same rate as the propellant weight. Since the structural weight increases less rapidly than the propellant weight, the bigger the rocket, the greater the percentage of its GLOW -- its gross liftoff weight -- it can devote to propellant instead of to structure."

"Well, that settles that." Even in VR, she smiled wryly.

"Just for comparison," he said, and a chart spread across the sky.



                      Saturn V            Leviathan
GLOW                 6.4 million pounds     40 million pounds
1st stage thrust     7.7 million pounds     80 million pounds
LEO Payload              240,000 pounds    1.5 million pounds

The simulation continued and the chart vanished. They dove beneath the waves to see the single house-sized engine ignite, generating a cloud of steaming bubbles. Explosive bolts released the concrete ballast and the lumbering ship rose upward.

"Slo-mo?" she asked softly, though Chad heard every word over his headset.

"Nope. Real time. It's slow on lift off, if only from the skewed visual cues you receive from something so big."

The spaceship rose nearly three hundred feet in the air before its exhaust bell cleared the surface. When it did, the water erupted like an undersea volcano. The flame -- a bright orange-white -- reached down to lap at the deep crater its pressure made in the water. Clouds of steam billowed outward in all directions like a bomb blast.

"Let's follow it!" Chad's excitement was not the least bit simulated.

Into the sky they dogged the burning giant. At the region of maximum dynamic pressure, where the ship received the most buffeting from the atmosphere just before going supersonic, Chad pointed out the structural strength of the solidly-constructed rocket by switching to a false-color image that demonstrated ærodynamic forces at Max-Q. Few points on the structure showed any signs -- in the simulation, at least -- of undue stress.

At staging, the huge first stage separated spectacularly, drifting along behind the second stage, which sprouted an expanding exhaust bell like an unfolding corrugated sheet-metal umbrella. The engine ignited and pulled swiftly away from the first stage, which sprouted a drogue chute to reduce its tendency to tumble and to prepare it for splashdown and recovery.

They followed the second stage into orbit, Chad commenting: "The wider exhaust nozzle is more efficient in a vacuum. And since the chamber pressures are so low, radiation keeps the bell cool. No need for fancy plumbing. Internal gas pressure is all you need to keep it open."

The engine shut down. They were in orbit.

"Here's where you get a true idea of the scale."

Tiny figures swarmed out of a cargo hatch. They looked like ants swarming over a length of sugar cane. Out of nowhere, an entire Space Shuttle appeared, external tanks, SRB's, and orbiter. The complete spacecraft could have fit inside the payload bay with just the tips of the orbiter's stubby wings sticking out.

"This is amazing," Donahue said, almost breathless. "This is as good as going into space for real."

Suddenly, the spacecraft, Earth and stars vanished into a murky grey.

"No," Chad said in a level tone. "We can't fool ourselves into thinking VR is as good as real." He removed his goggles and gloves. "True, I can take a tour of the planets on this thing that blows my mind every time, but we can't become so obsessed with the simulation that we neglect going there for real."

Joscelyn removed her own feedback devices. "Well, those two plans are both magnificent steps along the way. Especially the big one."

"Leviathan. Yes, I'm partial to that one myself."

"How did you ever come up with that?"

Haley smiled. "I didn't. It was once called Sea Dragon and proposed by a guy named Bob Truax."

"And no one's built it yet? It's such a brilliant, cutting-edge concept, why hasn't anyone jumped on it?"

"Ask NASA. They rejected the proposal in the nineteen-sixties."

Donahue's jaw dropped. "What?"

"Too simple a concept. Practically no funding needed for research. NASA hates mature technologies. They never wanted to be in the business of space travel."

"We've got to show this to Marc."

* * *

Montgomery Barron crashed Huntress five times that morning. True, he practiced in a simulator, and even more true, he would not be the pilot of the hunter-killer. Still, Barron wanted to know all he could about the spacecraft. In that, he was an unusual operative in the NSA. He possessed no interest in codes and ciphers, no desire to decrypt and listen in on the terabytes of information flowing around the planet on phone lines, data fibers, and satellite beams. He knew what he had to know: that something happening right now on Earth could soon affect the cosmos.

His inferiors performed the drudge work of snooping and spying. The reports they handed him sufficed to tantalize and worry him. Most blatant, of course, was Laurence Poubelle and his X-15 knockoff. A success there might encourage a dozen other crackpots. Then what?

Next down stood startup launch-vehicle companies such as Freespace Orbital, Singapore Spaceways, Ltd., and Deutsche Raumschiff GMBH. NASA and DOT controlled the American ones easily enough, but other governments lacked such efficient chokeholds on access to Space.

Their failures defined Barron's mission. He unstrapped from the simulator and took the data discs with him, performance information on Huntress being his own personal responsibility to keep secret, which he did with ferocious care.

Another cloudy, humid, windy day clobbered Bethesda, where the simulator occupied a small warehouse on a back street. The hurricane season, in full swing, lashed South Carolina and made the local weather about as lousy as it gets in late September.

Barron slid his substantial body into the confines of a nondescript federal four-door sedan and headed back toward the Capitol to do what he dreaded: perform emergency osculation on the gluteus maximi of seven senators in order to keep Project Stark Fist going. This peculiar feat had to be performed without informing the sub-committee exactly why he needed the money.

The atmosphere in the committee room hung as stifling as the air outside, even though conditioned and de-humidified. Barron broke into a sweat born more of anger than trepidation as he gazed one-by-one at the members of the oversight group. Dean, McWhirter, Juliano, Phan, and Woolsey.

Sounds like a law firm, Barron mused, then realized that it could have been, every one of them being attorneys.

Ludlow Woolsey III picked up a sheet of paper to peruse through the reading glasses perched low on his bulbous nose. Silver-grey wisps of hair, still curly decades after losing their color, lay combed back in dignified -- if archaic -- argent waves.

Hides his alcoholism well, Barron thought, but his body reveals it nonetheless. Barron's respect for the legislative branch had evaporated years before and he chafed at every command performance.

Woolsey, as chairman of the oversight committee, led off the inquiry.

"Mr. Barron, I hold in my hand a photocopy from you of yet another budget requisition with the entries concerning your project blacked out with what I can only assume is a very broad and very messy marking pen. Or was it a crayon?" He passed the copy around to the other members.

"Senator Woolsey, gentlemen," Barron said. "As I have stated previously, this is a black project concerned exclusively with national security matters of high-reaching importance. This committee receives enough annual paperwork to orbit the Earth, and I would not want to take up a disproportionate amount of your time if it were not so vital to maintaining the high ground for the United States." There. You'd have to be an idiot not to get the drift.

"Mr. Barron, it has been the tradition in such proceedings for the general outlines of such black projects to be presented to the committee in closed session so that we may ascertain a sort of... outline of what you intend to do with the taxpayers' money."

As if the taxpayers had a choice. Barron's heartbeat rose. His right foot began to tap imperceptibly against the lush carpeting beneath the table. "With all due respect to the committee -- and most of all to its distinguished chairman -- may I remind the members that it is within NSA prerogatives to limit access to sensitive material and information even to members of the oversight committee."

Woolsey puffed up like an owl splaying its feathers, bringing to Barron's mind the observation from another senator that some men grew in public service -- others simply swelled. He knew that the senator was about to become extremely polite in response to Barron's own forced politesse, a sure sign of contempt on the Hill.

"No one is as quick to acknowledge the honorable and meritorious service of the NSA and its worthy and competent public servants." Here comes the slam-dunk. "Nonetheless, the committee finds that without something more to consider than a series of parallel black lines with your name at the top, we must put the matter of your funding into abeyance until such time as we receive something approaching a general idea of what you are up to with seventeen million dollars of the taxpayers' money."

Funny how it's only the taxpayers' money when they don't want to give it out.

Barron nodded in their direction and rose to leave.

"Has this committee dismissed you?" Woolsey asked with a raise of his feathery eyebrows.

Barron bit the inside of his cheek, then forced a smile. "No, your honor."

Woolsey smiled with amused satisfaction and said, "You may go, Mr. Barron. And remember whose money it is you have been spending."

Barron picked his briefcase off the floor and rose to leave, thinking: As if you thought about it when you spent it on your mistresses, you bloated, boozy tick of a plutocrat.

That evening he flew the simulator a dozen times, scoring devastating hits on every sortie.


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