“I’d have thought the rapid capital growth they’d derive from that would be good for the Enterprise. Why keep it secret?”
“Good for the Enterprise does not necessarily mean good for everyone associated with the Enterprise. There are individuals involved who stand to make a great deal of money by buying low, before the bourse generally realizes what an asset the VR Complex is to the project, then re-selling high after the word gets out. The Enterprise will get its needed capital, but certain VIP middlemen will derive their own benefits first.”
“I see, and Otis is not likely to keep quiet about this?”
“Otis… probably wouldn’t understand the financial ethics being circumvented here. It’s just not the sort of thing he’d focus on. But he’ll cry blue murder when he finds out what’s, going to happen to the habitat. Once the atmosphere of the planet has been reduced to terrestrial norm, the Volcano’ll be poking right up into Marjolin’s mesosphere. Outside atmospheric pressure’ll be less than a millibar, temperature’ll drop to minus seventy—maintaining its current internal temperature will be an expensive proposition. So it’ll get colder inside too… much colder, arctic cold. It’ll be impossible to maintain a tropical ecosystem here. If the Enterprise decides to keep the dome at all, it’ll most likely be for use as a giant warehouse, inflated with argon at only a few hundred millibars of pressure. But they probably won’t even keep it for that. Hawking Mons habitat will just cease to exist.
“Otis needs to be taken out of here, so that he loses the temptation to figure out what is going on. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, after all.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” she said, vanishing beneath a cloud of knitted silk which settled in satiny contours over the warm curves of flesh which had filled the hollows of my palms just minutes ago. I wanted to reach out and pull her back to me, but I could sense that thin bubble-wall which divides the time for love from all the other times in my life, and I knew she really didn’t want me to ignore it, “So where are you going to have Otis sent after his promotion?”
“I think Planet Serengeti could use a new conservator—”
“A new chief conservator.”
“A new chief conservator. It’s a long way from the Core Worlds, but it is a whole terraformed planet which has been set aside for gene banking. They need to maintain an extremely complex ecosystem with niches for highly specialized life forms being squeezed out of the more developed worlds, but which might be useful someday in terraforming projects and ecological repair jobs. Its biological diversity is even greater than Earth’s…”
“Oh, Otis will love it!”
“I can’t make any promises.” I said.
“You don’t have to. Remember, Shade, I know you. You’re one of the movers and shakers in this Galaxy. If there’s enough money at stake, you’ll get the board of directors to give you whatever you want. Otis will finally get the chief conservatorship he deserves.
“I’ve got to go now. He’ll be back from the office soon, and with kids—well, little Shade has been known to wake up in the night after a bad dream, and come looking for his mama…”
“Lulu, if this all works out, I would still like to see you again—maybe in less than ten years this time?”
She smiled, gave me a kiss, and told me she’d take it under advisement, before walking out my lockless door. I watched her go again, wondering who it was this time who’d actually gotten all they wanted out of our dealings. I didn’t exactly feel like a mover-shaker at that moment.
“…Cheaper doesn’t always mean better, not even when cost is the major consideration. It is important you understand this, if what I’m to say is going to mean anything to you at all.
“The domed habitat in the crater of Hawking Mons was the lowest cost solution to a specific problem. However, in the long term it costs an unacceptable amount just to maintain so delicate a closed ecology, and it can only be done by consciously under-utilizing the most valuable resource in Epsilon Indi’s inner system: a terraformable world. The lowest cost solution is not cost-effective. It is time we consider that fact, Boardmembers.
“Nature left Planet Marjolin a Venusian wasteland. But we have the knowledge and technology to change that now. The… agreement I have concluded with representatives of both E-Indi Enterprise and Sharawaggi Information Technologies Group will guarantee Weltverbesserungswahngesellschaft’s place as the Prime Contractor for the entire planet, with unlimited cost-overrun provisions. And given the delicate nature of some of the information now in our possession, I think we can safely say this contract is iron-clad.
“In view of this, I suggest to you that it is in our mutual best interests to let events unfold as originally planned.
“And I expect each and every Boardmember will agree that promoting Mr Fremont to Chief Conservatorship of the Serengeti project is the most cost-effective long-term way of ensuring that all involved parties share in the expected benefits of developing the fallow planet, beyond the Volcano.”