The gentleman from San Francisco had bowed his way out of the room, taking his complex automated models with him. Regan glanced sideways at his wife, who was coolly tracing a green lipstick line around her mouth. Martinelli and various other staff members stood stiffly, expectantly in corners of the room.
‘Well, darling?“ Nola drawled. ”Which shall it be?“ ”Which do you prefer?“ Regan asked. ”I don’t know.“ She shrugged indolently. ”I liked them all. But why don’t you give it to Houston dear? The man from Houston seemed so sincere.“
There was tension among the aides. They were exchanging glances. Would the all-powerful Claude Regan be swayed by his wife’s whim? Would the accolade fall upon Houston?
Regan said, “I don’t think it’ll go to Houston. Or any of the others.”
Ears pricked forward all through the room. “Why should we hold the Fair on Earth at all?” Regan said loudly. “Why not up in space somewhere?”
THREE
In Houston, there was wailing and weeping. In Boston there was gnashing of teeth. In San Francisco, rending of hair. Chicago, New York, New Orleans mourned after their particular fashions.
In the stinking slums of America’s decaying cities, news of Regan’s wild idea was received with incredulity and discussed with passion. Crouching over dinners of roasted rat, alley-dwellers of Manhattan or the Loop or downtown Los Angeles shook their heads and muttered, “He’s crazy! You can’t build a whole goddam planet!”
In Moscow, the Presidium met to discuss the news. High officials pondered it in Peking. There was consternation in Brasilia and dismay in Lagos. Stocks dipped sharply on the Johannesburg exchange, but rose in New York. The Wall Street Journal hesitantly commended Claude Regan’s boldness and vision, but at the same time warned that his grandiose plan could not be financed at the expense of the long-suffering taxpayer. “We hope,” the Journal commented, “that there will be no need to resort to government aid. Let the new space satellite gleam in the heavens as a shining example of the free-enterprise system at its most vigorous!”
Claude Regan read the world-wide comments with keen interest. Only one dismayed him for a moment: the leader in London’s Daily Mail, which said, “Claude Regan, America’s daring young man on the financial trapeze, is about to take a bold leap into outer space. We hope for the young man’s sake that he remembers how thin the air is up there. A failure in this gigantic enterprise could very well be the final step in the dismantling of the United States as a world power.”
That was all very true, Regan knew. For an uncomfortable instant he saw through the veil of time, and a history book of the future lay open before him-a book written in Swahili, or perhaps Mandarin, but perfectly understandable.
The downfall of the American capitalist economy, the passage read, may be directly linked with the rise of an impetuous financier named Claude Regan, who in the closing years of the twentieth century involved his already weary nation in a foolhardy project which ultimately…
The mood passed. Regan regained his buoyancy and drive. Let history pronounce its verdict as it wished! Better to be remembered for a big mistake, he thought, than not to be remembered at all.
Washington, D.C., August 18. By special fax wire. The 1992 Columbian Exposition will take place aboard a space satellite. Claude Regan, Chairman of the exposition’s Executive Committee, made the news public today, one week after he assumed direction of the Fair.
‘We had several cities under consideration,“ Factor Regan declared. The 35-year-old Regan, who is also chief executive officer of Global Factors, Inc., listed San Francisco, Houston, and New Orleans as among the finalists. ”After due consideration, however,“ Factor Regan said, ”the members of the committee regretfully rejected all applications in favor of staging the exposition in space.“
The plan calls for the erection of a World’s Fair satellite in a fixed orbit over the United States at a height of 50,000 miles. The satellite will have 500 acres of exposition space, making it ten times the size of the largest space station currently in orbit. The construction costs, Factor Regan estimates, will be “several billion dollars.” This figure, he stressed, does not include the cost of the space liners that will be built to transport Fair-goers from Earth to the satellite.
Construction is due to begin next month. The exposition itself is scheduled to open on October 12, 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World.
President Hammond said diffidently, “But is it going to work out, Claude?”
‘Of course it will,“
‘But the fare you’ll have to charge to get people up to your satellite-“
‘A round trip will be fifty dollars,“ Regan said. ”Don’t you think people will pay fifty bucks for a trip to a space satellite?“
‘The fare’ to Moon Base is ten thousand,“ the President objected. ”How can you charge only fifty for-“
‘We’ll run the transport at a loss,“ Regan replied. ”The idea is to get people to the Fair, isn’t it?“
Regan extricated himself from the conversation and broke the contact. There was work to do, no time to spend reviewing the ifs and buts of the problem. He had to let the construction contracts for the satellite.
It would be built by private industry. The United States’ government had phased itself out of the space business in 1975, under the administration of President Delafleld and his American Conservative Party. Delafleld had been swept into office in ‘72, on a platform of getting the government back to its tidy old pre-1933 size, eliminating the national debt, repealing the income-tax amendment, and so forth.
The Boom of 1973 had been a direct result of Delafleld’s program. The Dow-Jones Industrials had gone over 2,000 for the first time, and prosperity was rife in the land-rife enough to allow Delafield to go through with his project of turning the activities of the government over to private enterprise. By 1975, he had succeeded, well enough to touch off the Panic of ‘76, with its awkward stock market crash a month before Election Day.
Delafield had carried only Mississippi and Alabama in ‘76. The rest of the country went for the new National Liberal party, and the American Conservatives had been out of power ever since. Space, though, still remained in private hands. The readjustments of the late ’70’s, concentrating economic power in the dozen big factoring concerns, had culminated in an uneasy status quo which nobody in either party wanted to disturb.
The biggest space company happened to be a Global Factors subsidiary. The second biggest was Aero do Brasil, a giant Latin American combine only ten years old. Regan had many reasons for not wanting to give the contract to his own firm, beginning with the obvious one of fearing charges of favoritism. A sounder reason was the fear that any company who took the contract on would ultimately complete it at a loss. Pioneers in this sort of thing always got hurt. Who knew how much it would cost to build a five-hundred acre exposition satellite? Far better to stick the competition with the job than to hurt his own firm’s finances and reap bad publicity in the bargain.
It didn’t make sense to give the contract to one of the other American factoring firms, of course. But if he called in the Brazilians, it might inspire Brazil to contribute in cash to the Fair, by way of a returned compliment. And the Fair needed cash.