Regan weathered the storm. It was all over, in. a few days. With Congress not in session, there could be no investigation. Since terms of the contract were not made public, the other bidders could not claim that they had been jobbed. The fact that Regan had obviously bent over backward to avoid giving the contract to Global Factors was considered a point in his favor.
Aero do Brasil wasted no time-not with a non-completion penalty staring them in the face. Rockets came off the shelf, plans were drawn. Much of the construction work had to be subcontracted back to the United States, which mollified public opinion there to some extent. Late in September, Claude Regan was back in Brazil, this time out at the Matto Grosso launching site, to watch the official start of construction work.
Three gleaming Amazon rockets stood on the launching pad, each carrying a titanium girder. The satellite would have to be constructed in space, of course; no booster yet devised-could lift a satellite with a surface area of five hundred acres, and no booster of such capabilities was likely to be devised, since the recoil would be enormous. Girder by girder, the exposition satellite would be rocketed up piecemeal, and woven together by workmen with shoulder-harness rockets. Without gravity to hamper them, they could put the satellite together five or ten times as fast as a similar job could be done on Earth.
Or so Regan and Aero do Brasil hoped.
He had a few misgivings just now. They had used, as their master plan, a blowup of a blueprint some Global Factors engineers had worked out for a hundred-acre space resort. Since there was no time to start drafting from scratch, they had merely multiplied the specs by five. But it wasn’t always that simple to do things, Regan knew. He could only keep his fingers crossed.
By his sides, flanking him, stood Novaes and Moeller, respectively Chairman and President of Aero do Brasil. They were look-alikes-two plump, short, cheerful-looking men of about fifty, with glossy dark hair, olive skins, and irrepressibly bubbly personalities. Moeller waved a pudgy hand, an engineer closed a contact with an almost negligent flick of a finger, and one of the three rockets on the launching pads soared skyward. It had all happened quickly enough; the Aero do Brasil people had long ago outgrown the fingernail-biting stage of rocket launching, and failure was the startling exception now, not the rule.
Novaes began to sing, in a cracked, off-key basso. Regan’s newly acquired Portuguese was not up to the task of translating, but the song sounded jovially bawdy to him. Moeller clapped Regan on the back and boomed, “We are launched, Senhor Factor! We are begun!”
Someone handed Regan a glass. Brazilian champagne, sweet to the point of sickliness. The Brazilians had not yet developed a taste for brut. Eyes were on him. Regan quaffed the champagne as though it were ambrosia. His glass was immediately refilled. A second rocket zoomed from the pad. Novaes started to sing what was apparently a Portuguese translation of Wagner. Regan, fearful of that next refill, took his time over the second glass.
He looked upward, into the painfully bright blue tropical sky. The third rocket curved beyond the horizon. Soon, he thought, a metal moon would be taking shape up there-the largest artificial satellite ever built.
He could remember-it was one of his earliest memories-. staring up at the moon as it gleamed like a battered silver coin in the heavens.
‘I want it,“ he had said, and his father had laughed indulgently. ”I want it! I want it!“
‘Maybe you’ll have it when you grow up,“ his father had told him.
That had been in 1959, when he was four. Man was just learning to launch his first feeble satellites. Thirty-one years had passed, and Regan still didn’t own the Moon. It was beyond his grasp forever, mandated as a United Nations Trust Territory under international control. He had been there, twice, as he had been once to Mars, and that set him apart from most people. But he could not own the Moon.
Well, now he was building his own. It was Claude Regan’s way of doing things. “I want it!” he had shrieked at the Moon, and, failing in that ambition, he was building a moon of his own, Claude Regan’s moon, to gleam on through the centuries after he was gone.
FOUR
Of course, it takes money to build moons.
The United States had contributed a billion dollars. Soon after, Brazil voted to appropriate two hundred million dollars toward the expenses of the Fair. It was a beginning-but he had billions of dollars to go. He had to line up commitments from participating nations, and outright grants wherever he could get them.
He was deeply enmeshed in the operations of the Fair, now, and Global Factors, Inc., had receded to second place in his scheme of things. He kept in touch, and visited Denver as often as his pressing schedule would let him. But most of the work there remained in the hands of Regan’s deputy, Tim Field. Field was doing a good job-good enough so that Regan was thinking of awarding him the title of Factor in another year or so.
Regan had cannibalized his own Global Factors staff to help him with the Fair. By October, his organization sheet looked very much like that of Global Factors, a steeply rising pyramid with himself at the summit, two or three trusted lieutenants just below him, half a dozen capable decision-makers on the next rung, and a broader staff structure at the bottom. His own ferocious energies were insufficient to see him through the double task of running the Fair and running the world’s biggest corporation single-handedly.
The problem of money obsessed him.
‘We need six billion bucks right away,“ Hal Martinelli reported. ”The Brazilians will be dunning us next month for the next installment, and we’ve got to get moving on the official pavilions.“
‘How will we raise it?“ Lyle Henderson asked.
‘Bond issue,“ Regan snapped. ”Three percent bonds, maturing serially between 1993 and 1998. Pay them off out of the profits of the Fair.“
Henderson goggled. “Six billion bucks in bonds? Nobody’s ever floated an issue of that size before!”
‘Nobody’s ever built a satellite like ours before either,“ Regan retorted. ”We’ll do it. Don’t worry about that. We’ll sell those bonds if I have to buy every damn one of them myself.“
The customary way of floating a bond issue of any size- say, half a billion dollars-was, Regan knew, to form a syndicate of underwriters. The dozen big factoring firms would go into the syndicate, and those of the Wall Street investment banks that had survived the Panic of ‘76 and the subsequent readjustments in the capitalist system. The members of the syndicate would then turn around and peddle the bonds to all and sundry.
That was the tried and true system, centuries old. But Regan didn’t care for it right now. It was wasteful-for, on a six-billion-dollar bond issue, goodly millions would slip into the hands of the underwriters as recompense for their promotional activities.
‘We’ll form our own corporation,“ Regan said, ”and sell the bonds ourselves.“
He flew to Denver and called a meeting of Global Factors to explain what he had in mind. The Board of Directors filed glumly into the sumptuous board room, and Regan’s Uncle Bruce, as Chairman of the Board, called the meeting to order.
Bruce Regan was a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered man in his early sixties, scowling and embittered. He had good reason to look bitter, his nephew thought. Old Bruce had founded Appalachian Acceptance Corporation and had held it together through the worst business convulsion since 1929. He had transformed it into Global Factors, Inc., and had helped to make it the world’s most powerful corporation. Along the way, Bruce Regan had taken a viper to his bosom-. his nephew Claude, now Factor Regan, who had quietly and cunningly achieved a foothold in the directorate and who had, in the fall of 1989, given Uncle Bruce the heave-ho from his own corporation.