“The French and Germans, by contrast, worked the other way around: government followed by exploitation and trade. By 1900 colonial occupation had cost the French government the equivalent of billions of dollars. We don’t want to make the same mistake.
“We believe the treaties governing outer space resources are antiquated, inappropriate, and probably unenforceable. We believe it
is up to the U.S. government to revoke those treaties and begin to offer development charters along the lines I’ve described. What we’re offering here is the colonization of the Solar System, and the appropriation of its resources as appropriate, on behalf of the United States — at virtually zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer. And we all get rich as Croesus in the process.”
There was a smattering of applause at that.
He stepped forward to the front of the stage. Before him there was a sea of faces — mostly men, of course, most of them over fifty and therefore conservative as hell. There were representatives of his corporate partners here — Aerojet and Honeywell and Deutsche Aerospace and Scaled Composites and Martin Marietta and others — as well as representatives of the major investors he still needed to attract, and four or five NASA managers, even a couple of uniformed USASF officers. Movers and shakers, the makers of the future, and a few entrenched opponents.
He marshaled his words.
“This isn’t a game we’re playing here. In a very real sense we have no choice.
“I cut my teeth on the writings of the space-colony visionaries of the sixties and seventies. O’Neill, for instance. Remember him? All those cities in space. Those guys argued, convincingly, that the limits to economic growth could be overcome by expansion into space. They made the assumption that the proposed space programs of the time would provide the capability to maintain the economic growth required by our civilization.
“None of it happened.
“Today, if we want to start to build a space infrastructure, we’ve lost maybe forty years, and a significant downgrade of our capability to achieve heavy lift into orbit. And the human population has kept right on growing. Not only that, there is a continuing growth in wealth per person. Even a pessimistic extrapolation says we need total growth of a factor of sixty over the rest of this century to keep up.
“But right now we ain’t growing at all. We’re shrinking.
“We lose twenty-five billion tons of topsoil a year. That’s equivalent to six 1930s dustbowls. Aquifers — such as those beneath our own grain belt* — are becoming exhausted. Our genetically uniform modern crops aren’t proving too resistant to disease. And so on. We are facing problems that are spiraling out of control,
exponentially.
“Let me put this another way. Suppose you have a lily, doubling in size every day. In thirty days it will cover the pond. Right now it looks harmless. You might think you need to act when it covers half the pond. But when will that be? On the twenty-ninth day.
“People, this is the twenty-ninth day.
“Here’s the timetable I’m working to.
“We need to be able to use power from space to respond to the global energy shortage by 2020. That’s just ten years from now.
“By 2050 we need a working economy in space that can return power, microgravity industrial products, and scarce resources to the Earth. We might even be feeding the world from space by then. We’ll surely need tens of thousands of people in space to achieve this, an infrastructure extending maybe as far as Jupiter. That’s just forty years away.
“By 2100 we probably need to aim for economic equivalence between Earth and space. I can’t hazard what size of economy this implies. Some say we may need as many as a billion people out there. We can figure it out later.
“These are targets, not prophecy. We may not achieve them; if we don’t try, we certainly won’t. My point is that we’ve sat around with our thumbs up our butts for too long. If we start now, we may just make it. If we leave it any longer, we may not have a planet to launch our spaceships from.”
“And,” he said, “in the end, have faith.”
In who? You?
Malenfant smiled.
His speech was well rehearsed, and it almost convinced him. But Cornelius’ Carter stuff nagged away at the back of his head. Was all this stuff, the exploitation of the Solar System for profit, really to be his destiny? Or — something else, something he couldn’t yet glimpse?
He felt his pulse race at the prospect.
Behind him, the softscreen’s software-generated images gently morphed into a shot of a Big Dumb Booster, real hardware sitting on the pad, a pillar of heavy engineering wreathed in vapor under a burning blue sky, a spaceship ready for launch.
Damn if he couldn’t see some glistening eyes out there, shining in the transmitted desert light. “This is a live image,” he said. “We’re ramping up for our first smoke test. People, this is
just the beginning. I’m going places. Come aboard.”
He waited for the applause. It came.
Emma Stoney:
It only took a week before Dan had designed and set up his first message-from-the-future experiment, at a place called the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia. Emma was relieved that the funding required was modest, comparatively anyhow, and that Malenfant was able to pull strings to get his way without, as far as she could tell, any visible damage to the company.
Translation: nobody had found out yet what the hell they were doing.
Weeks went by, and the experiment produced nothing useful. Malenfant shuttled between Vegas, the Mojave, and West Virginia.
After a month of trying to convince Malenfant to come back to work, Emma cleared her diary and caught a flight to West Virginia.
She had a Bootstrap driver take her out to the radio observatory. She arrived at midnight.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory proved to be set in a leafy valley surrounded by forest-clad hills. In the cloudless October sky a sliver of Moon floated among the stars.
As her eyes dark-adapted Emma made out a cluster of upturned dishes, each cluttered with spidery receiving equipment. The dishes seemed to glow, silver and white, as they peered up hopefully into an impenetrable, infinite sky. Occasionally one of the dishes would move on its fragile-looking stand, with a grind of heavy equipment, at the obscure command of one of the observers in the low, cheap-looking buildings. She wondered how many of the researchers here were now working for Bootstrap or for Eschatology — in either case, presumably, funded by Malenfant’s money.
She was taken to a grassy area where half a dozen folding lawn chairs had been set up. Malenfant, Dan Ystebo, and Cornelius Taine were working their way through a couple of six-packs. All of them were bundled up against the chill.
Dan, crumpled and slightly drunk, looked as if he hadn’t changed his T-shirt since Florida. Cornelius wasn’t drinking. He was wearing his customary designer suit, neat and seamless; somehow he seemed sealed off from this environment: green hills and silence and stately nature.
Malenfant was pacing, restless, his footprints dark against the dew on the grass.
She sighed. Malenfant, in this obsessive mood, took some management. Well, she’d expected this to take some time.
She sat down gingerly on a spare chair and accepted a beer. “I should have brought a heavier coat.”