“I thought the coleslaw was excellent, Uncle.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Turi John, it’s good slaw. The thing is, it’s supposed to he’p set the stage for the barbecue, not be a star in its own right.” He chewed a mouthful reflectively. “Be raht good with chili, though.”
“Nobody seems to be complaining.”
“Hell, boy, you think the movers, shakers and groupies at this do are going to come around and bellyache about the coleslaw?” Metcalfe threw back his head and laughed. “I’ll bet most of them won’t even leave any on their plates. You here lobbying for that Orion so-called Starship?”
“I’m afraid so, Uncle. It just seemed like it would be such a great thing…
Metcalfe looked at his watch. “I’ll give you five minutes, my boy, because you ah my own flesh and blood. However, there are some other lobbyists here talking up that same cockamamie idea, and since they are paying in the traditional coin of the realm, I feel honor-bound to hear them out.”
“What lobbyists?”
“The usual suspects. Izzy McWilliams, for the Rolls-Royce plant south of Dallas that would be making engines for any new clippers that get built. Billy Sol Harris for Gulf Hydrogen. A few others.”
“They want to make money off of this?”
The senator nodded. “Nephew, they’ll tell me that this bloody starship of yours means good times for Texas in general and them in particular, and how can you blame a man for wanting to make some money?”
“My God, Uncle! We’re getting rid of the curse of nuclear war, we are. for Christ’s sake, going to the stars, and you’re talking about the goddamned pork barrel?”
“Ah, Turi, Turi, Turi. If the good ol’ boys can’t do well by doing good, there’s a lot of good in this world would never get done. The president, he comes around and tells me, George, he says, I hate it, but it looks like we gotta have this one. Why? Because it will get him reelected, that’s why. Does he like giving up the nation’s crown jewels, all them little bomb pits we got stashed away so carefully? No, he does not. And to tell you the truth, neither do I, but if the Russians and the Chinese and the rest are willing, then we sort of have no choice.”
“What’s the point of keeping all that plutonium around if you can’t use it or even threaten to use it, Uncle? Eventually some fool will get ahold of the stuff and blow us all to kingdom come.”
The senator took a bite of barbecue and chewed thoughtfully. “It’s like handguns, Turi John, only worse. For some people handguns are a drug; the guns give ’em a power high. Those people will not give them up. Remember that old bumper sticker, ‘The only way to take my gun is to pry it out of my cold, dead fingers?’ You may not like it, but those people sincerely mean that very thing.”
“I don’t like it, but I don’t understand it either.”
The senator pushed his Stetson back with his thumb. “Power is an illusion, boy—if people think you have power, then you have it. That works both ways, of course. If you have the illusion that you are powerful, then to a degree you are.You walk down the street and people get out of your way because you look so damned dangerous. But if you’re wrong, watch out, you’ll get the crap beat out of you. Or shot dead. That makes no never mind. People still cling to that illusion of theirs, that illusion of power, even though they know that it’s dangerous, because it makes them feel so goddamned good.”
“Nuclear weapons are different,” said Ramos, loosening his Italian silk necktie with a nervous gesture. “Aren’t they?”
“Hey, you were the one working for the UNNDC. When nuclear bombs are outlawed, only outlaws will have nuclear bombs, right?”
The senator does go off on the strangest tangents, thought Turi John. “You think the starship is maybe going to fall through the cracks?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You look too far in the future,Turi John,you get seriously confused. Space stuff is popular, and getting rid of the world’s plutonium is popular. Plus once you build that prototype, you’ve got some momentum, but then will be when push comes to shove about all the hard stuff.”
“You do think getting to Diomedes will help?” asked Turi John.
“Help the starship?” asked the senator, putting more beans and barbecue on his plate. “The slaw is good, Turi John, but a wee bit too tangy. Oh, sure, once Diomedes Station is in place and sending back data to build the real tiling”—he paused to take a forkful of beans—“that’d he’p some, but only with the easy stuff.”
“I wouldn’t call designing a starship easy, uncle.”
The problem is going to be prying those plutonium pits out of all the world’s cold, dead fingers, thought die senator. “You think coaxing some 40,000 pits out of a country like India isn’t going to be hard? India doesn’t even admit to having that many.”
Ramos hesitated and changed the subject. “Whatever.The project will still be a source of pork, and according to you, if there’s money to be made from doing a thing, people will see that it gets done, right?”
Metcalfe shook his head. “Making money is one thing, Turi John, prying peoples’ guns out of their cold, dead fingers is something else.” He looked up; “HEY McWILLIAMS! C’MON OVER! Ah need to talk tew yew!”
Oh well, thought Turi John, piling more barbecue and coleslaw on his plate, the senator looks to be foursquare behind the prototype. He wandered off into the crowd as a Country and Western band struck up a melancholy ballad.
Dr. Sioux Kerry came up the tunnel with Winslow wheeling a basket full of starchy produce, red and yellow yams, russet potatoes, orange pumpkins and sweet corn. They brought the basket in for weighing at the cafeteria kitchen, as Colonel Levsky came up in fatigues with a load of radishes, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers.
“Hello, Sioux,” he said cheerfully. “What do you think of the news?”
“You mean the starship, Pavel Ivanovitch?” said Dr. Kerry. “I’m not so sure it can be done. That’s speaking as a Lunarian agrarian, of course.”
“The physics seems entirely straightforward,” said Levsky. “And once we evaluate the prototype, the engineering looks to be pretty much integrating several well-understood technologies.”
“Chicken farming is a well-understood technology, and we’re still trying to get chickens to thrive in this godforsaken place,” she replied. “A starship will be ten times worse, and that’s not counting eight years of intermittent acceleration at each end of the journey.”
“The acceleration periods will be hard,” he agreed. “But a starship! Man thrives on challenges.”
“Challenges! I’ll give you a challenge, Pavel Ivanovitch. Remember before we put the chickens in the centrifuge? On a six week growout cycle we threw 85 percent of the poor critters into the grinder to ferment and render them back into animal feed.”
“And the animal feed tasted better than the chickens,” Levsky said mournfully. “I remember. Lunar chickens are still tough and stringy, even in the centrifuge. You think we have not yet mastered the biosphere?”
“We aren’t even close. If you fondly delude yourself that we’ve got the biosphere where we want it, look at how we’re eating. You want to go to the stars on yeast protein and milk from that mechanical cow of yours?”
Colonel Levsky held up his hands, “Hey, that milk is for cheese and yogurt, not drinking.”