“Welcome back,” shouted some people in the crowd, and “Good to have you home,” shouted others. Hauptmann just smiled, but Chin was joining in the hollering.
Of course, Plato wasn’t alone. One by one, his two dozen fellow explorers backed down the ladder into the summer heat. The members of the crowd—some of who, Hauptmann gathered, were actually descendants of these men and women—were shaking the spacers’ hands, thumping them on the back, hugging them, and generally having a great time.
At last, though, Captain Plato turned toward the White House; he seemed somewhat startled by the holographic Great Eats sign that floated above the rose garden. He turned back to the people surrounding him. “I didn’t expect such a crowd,” he said. “Forgive me for having to ask, but which one of you is the president?”
There was laughter from everyone but the astronauts. Chin prodded Hauptmann in the ribs. “How about that?” Chin said. “He’s saying, ‘Take me to your leader’!”
“There is no president anymore,” said someone near Plato. “No kings, emperors, or prime ministers, either.”
Another fellow, who clearly fancied himself a wit, said, “Shakespeare said kill all the lawyers; we didn’t do that, but we did get rid of all the politicians… and the lawyers followed.”
Plato blinked more than the noonday sun demanded. “No government of any kind?”
Nods all around; a chorus of “That’s right,” too.
“Then—then—what are we supposed to do now?” asked the captain.
Hauptmann decided to speak up. “Why, whatever you wish, of course.”
Hauptmann actually got a chance to talk with Captain Plato later in the day. Although some of the spacers did have relatives who were offering them accommodations in their homes, Plato and most of the others had been greeted by no one from their families.
“I’m not sure where to go,” Plato said. “I mean, our salaries were supposed to be invested while we were away, but…”
Hauptmann nodded. “But the agency that was supposed to do the investing is long since gone, and, besides, government-issued money isn’t worth anything anymore; you need corporate points.”
Plato shrugged. “And I don’t have any of those.”
Hauptmann was a bit of a space buff, of course; that’s why he’d come into the District to see the landing. To have a chance to talk to the captain in depth would be fabulous. “Would you like to stay with me?” he asked.
Plato looked surprised by the offer, but, well, it was clear that he did have to sleep somewhere—unless he planned to return to the orbiting mothership, of course. “Umm, sure,” he said, shaking Hauptmann’s hand. “Why not?”
Hauptmann’s weblink was showing something he’d never seen before: the word “unknown” next to the text, “Trustworthiness rating for Joseph Tyler Plato.” But, of course, that was only to be expected.
Chin was clearly jealous that Hauptmann had scored a spacer, and so he made an excuse to come over to Hauptmann’s house in Takoma Park early the next morning.
Hauptmann and Chin listened spellbound as Plato regaled them with tales of Franklin’s World and its four moons, its salmon-colored orbiting rings, its outcrops of giant crystals towering to the sky, and its neon-bright cascades. No life had been found, which was why, of course, no quarantine was necessary. That lack of native organisms had been a huge disappointment, Plato said; he and his crew were still arguing over what mechanism had caused the oxygen signatures detected in Earth-based spectroscopic scans of Franklin’s World, but whatever had made them wasn’t biological.
“I really am surprised,” said Plato, when they took a break for late-morning coffee. “I expected debriefings and, well, frankly, for the government to have been prepared for our return.”
Hauptmann nodded sympathetically. “Sorry about that. There are a lot of good things about getting rid of government, but one of the downsides, I guess, is the loss of all those little gnomes in cubicles who used to keep track of everything.”
“We do have a lot of scientific data to share,” said Plato.
Chin smiled. “If I were you, I’d hold out for the highest bidder. There’s got to be some company somewhere that thinks it can make a profit off of what you’ve collected.”
Plato tipped his head. “Well, until then, I, um, I’m going to need some of those corporate points you were talking about.”
Hauptmann and Chin each glanced down at their weblinks; it was habit, really, nothing more, but…
But that nasty “unknown” was showing on the displays again, the devices having divined the implied question. Chin looked at Hauptmann. Hauptmann looked at Chin.
“Thafe a problem,” Chin said.
The first evidence of real trouble was on the noon newscast. Plato watched aghast with Chin and Hauptmann as the story was reported. Leo Johnstone, one of the Olduvai’s crew, had attempted to rape a woman over by the New Watergate towers. The security firm she subscribed to had responded to her weblink’s call for help, and Johnstone had been stopped.
“That idiot,” Plato said, shaking his head back and forth, as soon as the report had finished. “That bloody idiot.” He looked first at Chin and then at Hauptmann, and spread his arms. “Of course, there was a lot of pairing-off during our mission, but Johnstone had been alone. He kept saying he couldn’t wait to get back on terra firma. ‘We’ll all get heroes’ welcomes when we return,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll have as many women as I want.’”
Hauptmann’s eyes went wide. “He really thought that?”
“Oh, yes,” said Plato. “‘We’re astronauts,’ he kept saying. ‘We’ve got the Right Stuff.’”
Hauptmann glanced down; his weblink was dutifully displaying an explanation of the arcane reference. “Oh,” he said.
Plato lifted his eyebrows. “What’s going to happen to Johnstone?”
Chin exhaled noisily. “He’s finished,” he said softly.
“What?” said Plato.
“Finished,” agreed Hauptmann. “See, until now he didn’t have a trustworthiness rating.” Plato’s face conveyed his confusion. “Since the day we were born,” continued Hauptmann, “other people have been commenting about us on the web. ‘Freddie is a bully,’ ‘Jimmy stole my lunch,’ ‘Sally cheated on the test.’”
“But surely no one cares about what you did as a child,” said Plato.
“It goes on your whole life,” said Chin. “People gossip endlessly about other people on the web, and our weblinks”—he held up his right arm so that Plato could see the device—“search and correlate information about anyone we’re dealing with or come physically close to. That’s why we don’t need governments anymore; governments exist to regulate, and, thanks to the trustworthiness ratings, our society is self-regulating.”
“It was inevitable,” said Hauptmann. “From the day the web was born, from the day the first search engine was created. All we needed was smarter search agents, greater bandwidth, and everyone being online.”
“But you spacers,” said Chin, “predate that sort of thing. Oh, you had a crude web, but most of those postings were lost thanks to electromagnetic pulses from the Colombian War. You guys are clean slates. It’s not that you have zero trustworthiness ratings; rather, you’ve got no trustworthiness ratings at all.”
“Except for your man Johnstone,” said Hauptmann, sadly. “If it was on the news,” and he cocked a thumb at the wall monitor, “then it’s on the web, and everyone knows about it. A leper would be more welcome than someone with that kind of talk associated with him.”