Morrison came to see him the next day in the Oval Office. Still wearing his trademark T-shirt and jeans, he slouched into one of the chairs opposite Brannon’s desk and said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t tell you this was coming.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Brannon admitted.
“Because we needed this depression. You got the country back in the black, but people were still basically voting themselves bread and circuses. This was the only way to convince them to take the next step.”
“Excuse me? We’re a trillion dollars in the hole again. Unemployment’s at 30 percent. We need this like we need a nuclear war.”
“That would have done it, too,” Morrison said, “But I figured this was a better way.”
“A better way to do what? Drive the country to its knees?”
Morrison picked at a hangnail, said idly, “You ever wonder why I picked you to give the program to? Out of all the politicians in the country?”
Brannon laughed. “I always assumed it was because I was desperate enough to listen to you.”
“Right. But it wasn’t just you. Remember what Wyoming’s economy was like when we started this whole business? The whole state was desperate. It had to be desperate to get behind an unknown independent politician with a pipe dream. But they did it, and now Wyoming’s the richest state in the union. I figure—actually the program figures—that the whole US is just about desperate enough now to do the same thing.”
“We’ve already got a space program,” Brannon reminded him.
Morrison laughed. “That? Satellites and planetary probes? You call that a space program? Let me show you a space program.” He tugged a thick wad of paper from his hip pocket and unfolded it on Brannon’s desk. The top sheet was a diagram of two cylinders side by side, each one divided lengthwise into long strips. “It’s called an O’Neill colony,” Morrison said. “And it’s twenty miles long.”
Brannon didn’t see a whole lot of Morrison in the next few years. Brannon was too busy retooling the national defense industry into an orbital construction industry, and Morrison was just as busy coordinating all the private companies that would supply the colony project once the superstructure was finished.
Brannon would sometimes go outside at night and look sixty degrees to the west of the Moon, where the colony was already a naked-eye object scintillating in the perpetual sunshine of its Lagrangian orbit. He had close-up photos of it all over his office, but he preferred to look at it with his own eyes once in a while. The week they spun it up to speed he declared a national holiday and spent the entire time outside, watching through a telescope as the immense fusion engines fired long pinwheels of flame from along the dual cylinders’ entire length.
Morrison showed up a couple of weeks later. His T-shirt said, “Stay Alive In L-5,” and showed a wrinkled-up prune of an old woman grinning ear to ear as she threw her walker out the zero-g living section’s airlock.
“What do you want now?” Brannon growled at him. He was becoming a crotchety old fart in his own right nowadays, and he knew that Morrison only came to him when he wanted to stir things up.
Sure enough, as he slid into a chair opposite Brannon, Morrison said, “The first load of colonists goes up next month. Everything’s all set for them except for one little detail.”
“Yeah, right,” said Brannon. “What? Air? Water?”
“No, no, we’ve got plenty of that. Made it ourselves from Comet Goodloe. What we need now is somebody to run the place. A mayor.”
Brannon snorted. “Details, details. Good grief, you forgot to install a government?”
Laughing, Morrison said, “We didn’t forget. It just didn’t seem like a high priority. After all, the job’s mostly symbolic anymore. We’ve got voting stations in every house, and there’ll be an issues channel on the multivid, so all you’d be doing is rubber-stamping whatever—”
“House?” Brannon asked. “You have houses up there? I thought it would all be apartments.”
Morrison looked at him askance. “Haven’t you been reading the briefings I send you?”
“Of course I have!” Brannon protested, but when Morrison started to laugh he said, “Well, most of them. I can’t read everything that comes into this office, and I figured I could trust you to do your job right.”
“And you think ‘right’ is a bunch of crackerbox apartments in a tin can? Good grief, I’ve built paradise right under your nose—well, OK, over it—and you haven’t even paid attention.” Morrison laughed again. “You like to fish, don’t you?”
“When I get time,” Brannon replied, wondering what Morrison was getting at now.
The answer didn’t take long. “We’ve got four hundred miles of trout streams in either half of the colony. We’ve got two oceans. The salmon are already migrating in the east cylinder.”
“Why not in both?” Brannon asked, figuring he’d try a subject shift of his own.
“Because it’s six months out of synch, that’s why. You think we want the whole colony to have the same seasons at the same time? Boring.” Morrison propped his feet up on Brannon’s desk. “What do you say? Our job’s done here. Why don’t you blow this two-bit planet and come live where the action is?”
Brannon thought about it. President of the United States wasn’t exactly a chump job. But he had to admit, Morrison’s forecasting program had transformed it from the old power seat to a mostly managerial position. Mayor of humanity’s first space colony wouldn’t be so cushy, no matter what Morrison said about it. His program couldn’t predict all the failure modes of something as new as this. Humanity’s first permanent step away from Earth was a step into completely unexplored territory, and there would undoubtedly be problems. Brannon knew he wasn’t the most innovative thinker in the world, nor the most dynamic leader, but he figured he could do the job as well as anyone. It sounded like an interesting challenge.
And if it wasn’t—well then, fishing sounded good. Maybe Morrison’s program could even tell him what they were biting on.