“A little, yes.”
“How soon can we deploy a microwave radar to search for the Newburn?”
“I’ll have an estimate for you by tomorrow, sir.”
Carl listened to the friendly, open way Cruz drew information out of the woman, commented on it, made a little joke that set the crowd to laughing. Now that’s how to lead, Carl thought. He’s in touch with everything, and never looks worried. I wonder if I’ll ever earn the knack.
He would have liked to stay longer, but he wanted to find Virginia He discovered her in a laughing group of varicolored Hawaiians, her dress a blue shimmer that suggested without revealing The semiautonomous state of Hawaii had financed twenty percent of the expedition’s cost. As the true capital of the pan-Pacific economic community, they invested heavily in space. Their representatives lent a cheery air to most ship functions.
He waited for a lull in conversation, caught Virginia ’s eye, and drew her away to an alcove. He quickly described Jeffers’s complaints. “Do you think he might be right?” he asked.
“You mean, will the Orthos try to rake off whatever they can?” She smiled speculatively. “Sure. This isn’t a charity operation.”
“I didn’t come just to make money.” Carl drew back, folding his arms. He knew it would probably be smarter to appear urbane, even a shade cynical-at least that’s what he thought attracted Earthside women. But somehow his real self always came out.
“Offended?” Virginia smiled, her full lips drawing back to reveal startlingly brilliant teeth. “Don’t be so straitlaced. Even idealists have to eat.”
“Did you sign any quiet little agreements Earthside?”
Virginia frowned. “Of course not. Look, there’re always going to be rumors that so-and-so has a sweet extra deal to leak expertise. Who knows, maybe somebody’ll tightbeam stuff back before we return, have a bundle waiting for him in a Swedish account.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. With four hundred people taking turns standing watch over seventy years, there’ll be plenty of chances to cheat.”
Virginia moodily stirred her bulb goblet of pina colada with a pink straw. To Carl the festive colors of the lounge seemed out of place when cold steel and vacuum lay only meters away. The psychologists probably thought tropical splashes of amber, green, and gold would take people away from raw reality, but for him it didn’t work.
Virginia said slowly, “There’s an old saying: Ordinary men choose their friends, but a genius chooses his enemies.”
Carl grimaced. “Meaning?”
“The Orthos run this expedition, granted. If we create friction, they can do a whole lot more to make it hot for us.”
He thought for a moment. “Okay. Conceded. That doesn’t change my aims, though.”
Virginia nodded. “Ah yes. Plateau Three.”
Carl knew she thought his opinions were too simplistic, too much a rubber stamp of the NearEarth colonies’ doctrine. Still, he honestly didn’t see how she could disagree.
A century of struggle had finally given mankind the technology to exploit the solar system—efficient transport, mech’d mining and assembly, integrated artificial biospheres of any size needed.
Now was the moment, the colonists argued, to move out.
Unmanned satellites had been the first level of space exploitation—Plateau One. As far back as the 1980s people had made billions with communications satellites. Saved lives with weather sats.
Automated space factories using lunar materials had been the next rung up—Plateau Two.
Each Plateau had been climbed by a few who saw the benefits well in advance and took huge risks for that vision. Plateau Two had nearly failed, then became a roaring economic miracle-helping to pull the world out of the Hell Century.
Each ascent seemed to provoke an Earth-centered apprehension—first, that the investment might go bust, then that the birthplace of mankind was being relegated to a mere backwater. This was aggravated by Earth’s never-ending social problems—malaises that the space colonies, by design, did not share. The Birth and Childhood Rules, which commanded that each spaceborn child must spend at least its first five years on the ground, were a legal expression of an underlying fear.
PlateauThree was a dream, a political issue, an economic sore point, a faith—all rolled into one. But big rotating colonies were possible now. The colonists now looked on the Birth and Childhood Rules as symbols of apronstrings they had long out-grown. They wanted to exploit the rocky asteroids and moons, but needed volatiles as well, for propellants and for biospheres. They’d even funded a small Ganymede ice mine, but that hadn’t worked out well.
Some saw comets as the key, and fervently believed that humans could scatter through the solar system like dandelion seeds, if they could only learn to herd the ancient snowballs to orbits where they were usable.
Virginia leaned back languidly in her web-chair. “You can’t expect Mother Earth to let go so easily.”
“They have everything to gain! We’ll bring them asteroids galore, raw materials, provide new markets—”
She held up her palm. “Please, I know the litany.” An amused expression of feigned longsuffering patience flitted across her face, instantly disarming him. Perhaps It wasn’t t intended that way, but with a single gesture she could make him see himself as gawky, thick-wilted, too obvious. Well, maybe I am. I’ve lived in space over half my adult life.
“Just ’cause it’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Carl, do you really think mining comets for volatiles is going to ring in the millennium?”
“Where else can we get cheap fluids?” To him this was the trump card, a cold economic fact. At the very beginning of the solar system, the hot young sun had blown most of the light elements outward, away from the inner solar system. Only Earth had retained enough volatile elements to clothe its rocky mantle with a thin skin of air and water. When humans ventured into space to exploit the resources there,—asteroids, the moon, Mars-they had to haul their liquids up from Earth.
“Sure,” Virginia said. “Get ice from comets! In eighty years we’ll be back, Hail the conquering heroes! But by then somebody may’ve discovered frozen lakes deep in our own moon. Or even found a cheap way to chip iceteroids out of the Jovian moons—who knows?”
Carl was startled. “That’s crazy! No way you can pay the expense of dipping into Jupiter’s grav well, just for water and ice. Jupiter Project is proving that.”
She smiled impishly. “So? Chasing comets is easier?”
Her dark eyes teased, and Carl knew it, but he couldn’t let go.
“It’s worth a try, Virginia. Nobody’ll find a way to steer comets unless we make the outgassing method work. Nobody’ll find volatiles hiding on the moon or Venus because they’ve been baked out. You can’t prospect and mine the asteroids with mechs alone—because finding metals is still a craft, not a science. Dried-up comets like Encke can’t be herded precisely because there’s no way to use their outgassing to steer them. So—”
“I surrender, I surrender!” She held both hands high.
Carl blinked. Oh hell, he thought. Why do I always get carried away?
A deep male voice said from over Carl’s shoulder, “Do not rush into defeat, Virginia. Ask for reinforcements first.”
Carl turned as Saul Lintz settled into a soft green web-chair nearby and put his drink into a hold notch on their table. He was lean and weathered, his movements in low gravity deliberate.