Time
And whatever the façade, the scene within was always the same: square miles of lush, ugly carpet, rows of gaming machines fed by joyless punters, blackjack tables kept open twenty-four hours a day by the virtual dealers.
Still, the people seemed to be changing, slowly. Not so fat, for one thing; no doubt the fatbuster pills were to thank for that. And she was sure there were fewer children, fewer young families than there used to be. Demography in action: the greying of America, the concentration of buying power in the hands of the elderly.
Not that it was so easy to tell how old people were any more. There were fewer visible signs of age: faces were smoothed to seamlessness by routine cosmetic surgery, hair was restored to the vigour and colour of a five-year-old’s.
Emma herself was approaching forty now, ten years or so younger than Malenfant. Strands of her hair were already white and broken. She wore them with a defiant pride.
Malenfant had moved his corporation here, out of New York, five years ago. A good place for business, he said. God bless Nevada. Distract the marks with gambling toys and virtual titties while you pick their pockets … But Emma hated Vegas’s tacky joylessness. It had taken a lot of soul-searching for her to follow Malenfant.
Especially after the divorce.
He’d said, So we aren’t married any more. That doesn’t mean I have to fire you, does it? Of course she had given in, come with him. Why, though?
He wasn’t her responsibility, as the e-therapists continually emphasized. He wasn’t even open with her. This latest business with the Shuttle engines – if true – was yet another piece of evidence for that. And he had, after all, broken up their marriage and pushed her away.
Yet, in his own complex, confused way, he still cared about her. She knew that. And so she had a motive for working with him. Maybe if she was still in his life, he might give more thought to his grandiose plans than otherwise.
Maybe he would keep from strip-mining the planet, in order to spare her feelings. Or maybe not.
Her e-therapists warned that this was a wound that would never close, as long as she stayed with Malenfant, worked with him. But then, maybe it was a wound that wasn’t meant to close. Not yet, anyhow. Not when she still didn’t even understand why.
When Emma walked into Malenfant’s office, she found him sitting with his feet on his desk, crushed beer cans strewn over the surface. He was talking to a man she didn’t know: an upright military type of about seventy, dressed in a sports shirt and slacks straight out of Cheers circa 1987, with a bare frosting of white hair on a scalp burned nutmeg brown. The stranger got up on Emma’s entrance, but she ignored him.
She faced Malenfant. ‘Company business.’
Malenfant sighed. ‘It’s all company business. Emma, meet George Hench. An old buddy of mine from Air & Space Force days –’
George nodded. ‘When it used to be just plain Air Force,’ he growled.
‘Malenfant, why is he here?’
‘To take us into space,’ said Reid Malenfant. He smiled, a smile she’d seen too often before. Look what I did. Isn’t it neat?
‘So it’s true. You’re just incredible, Malenfant. Does the word accountability mean anything to you? This isn’t a cookie jar you’re raiding. This is a business. And we can’t win with this. A lot of people have looked at commercial space ventures. The existing launcher capacity is going to be sufficient to cover the demand for the next several years. There is no market.’
Malenfant nodded. ‘You’re talking about LEO stuff. Communications, Earth resources, meteorology, navigation –’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you’re right, although demand patterns have a way of changing. You can’t sell cruises until you build a cruise liner. But I’m not talking about low Earth orbit. We will build a heavy-lift booster, a direct ascent single-throw out of Earth orbit …’
And now she knew that everything Cornelius Taine had told her had been true. ‘You really are talking about going to the asteroids, aren’t you? Why, for God’s sake?’
George Hench said, ‘Because asteroids are flying mountains of stainless steel and precious metals, such as gold and platinum. Or they are balls of carbon and water and complex organics. A single metallic-type near-Earth object would be worth, conservatively, trillions in today’s market. It would be so valuable, in fact, that it would change the market itself. And if you reach a C-type, a carbonaceous chondrite, full of water and organic compounds, you can do what the hell you like.’
‘Such as?’
Malenfant grinned. ‘You can throw bags of water and food and plastics back to Earth orbit, where they would be worth billions in saved launch costs. Or you could let a hundred thousand people go live in the rock. Or you can refuel, and go anywhere. Bootstrapping, like it says on the letterhead. The truth is I don’t know what we’re going to find. But I know that everything will be different. It will be like Cecil Rhodes discovering diamonds in southern Africa.’
‘He didn’t discover the mine,’ she said. ‘He just made the most money.’
‘I could live with that.’
Hench said earnestly, ‘The key to making money out of space is getting the costs of reaching Earth orbit down by a couple of magnitudes. If you fly on Shuttle, you’re looking at thirty-five thousand bucks per pound to orbit –’
‘And,’ said Malenfant, ‘because of NASA’s safety controls and qual standards it takes years and millions of dollars to prepare your payload for flight. The other launch systems available are cheaper but still too expensive, unreliable and booked up anyhow. We can’t hire, Emma, and we can’t buy. That’s why we have to build our own.’
Emma shook her head. ‘But it’s impossible. People have been trying to come up with cheap launchers for years.’
‘Yes,’ said Hench. ‘And every time they are killed by the Gun Club.’
She eyed him. ‘The “Gun Club”?’
‘NASA,’ Hench growled. ‘Bureaucrat lifers with turf to defend. And the space lobby in the USASF, which anyhow has always been overruled by the fighter pilots who run that service –’
She turned back to Malenfant. ‘And the permissions we’ll need? The legal obstacles, the safety rules? Have you thought about any of that stuff? Malenfant, this is such a leap in the dark. Not even NASA are launching space ships right now.’
Hench cackled. ‘But that’s the beauty of it. The excitement. Ms Stoney, we are historically a capitalistic frontier people. We’ve known space is the new frontier since 1950. Now’s the time to wriggle out from under the Gun Club federal guys and do it the way we always should have.’
Malenfant shrugged. ‘Emma, I’ve got the business plans lined up if you want to see them, and potential investors coming out of my ass – bankers, investment brokers, merchant bankers, financiers, venture capitalists from Citibank, Prudential Bache, Morgan Trust –’
‘All of which you’ve kept from me. For God’s sake, Malenfant. Forget your drinking buddies and after-dinner audiences. How the hell do we persuade real investors to risk real money?’
Hench said, ‘By building incrementally. By cutting tin fast. By building a little, flying a little, getting off the ground as fast as we can. That’s how we built the Thor …’ In the 1950s, with the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles already under development, the US defined a need for a smaller, simpler weapon for intermediate range missions, to be based in Britain and Turkey. The Thor, built from Atlas parts, would be the answer. ‘… You’d call it a Skunk Works operation today,’ Hench said. ‘We had that damn bird on the pad a year after the contract was signed. And we did it within budget, too. Not only that, McDonnell took it over and upgraded it to the Delta, and that baby is still flying and making money today. And that’s why I’m confident I’m going to be able to deliver …’
Hench’s eyes were a washed-out, watery brown, and flecked by damaged blood vessels. Malenfant was listening, rapt, to this old man’s reminiscences.
Emma realized that, of course, his decision was already made, the new program under this man implemented and running, a done deal; Malenfant would implicitly trust Hench, his personal Wernher von Braun, to deliver as he promised, and he would take a personal interest again only when there was hardware ready to fly on some launch pad.
But even if the technology worked, even if the costs worked out as Malenfant seemed to believe, there was the Gun Club and all the other opposing forces which had killed earlier turf-threatening new initiatives – forces which had pushed Malenfant himself into this covert scheme, obviously concocted over years, in absolute secrecy even from her.
But now it’s out in the open, what, she thought uneasily, is to stop the bad guys from killing us too? And if they do, where will that leave Malenfant? Where, in fact, will it leave me?
For she knew, of course, that she was already involved: that she would follow Malenfant wherever his latest dream took him, for better or worse. What a schmuck I am, she thought. She resolved to make more time for her e-therapists.
Hench talked on, urgently, meaninglessly, about rockets and engineering projects. For some reason she thought of Cornelius Taine, his cold eyes, his bleak, crazy warnings of the future.
‘… Malenfant.’
‘Yeah?’
‘What are you doing at Key Largo?’
Spaiz Kadette:
> Copy this and pass it on.
> The news is just incredible. After all that coverage over the weekend there can’t be a soul on the planet who isn’t aware of Reid Malenfant and what he’s trying to do out in the Mojave.
> Naturally the usual nay-sayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the law, or is screwing up the environment, or is in some other way irresponsible.
> And there is the usual stench of hypocrisy and decay from the bloated corpse that is NASA, our space agency, the agency that should have done all this for us decades ago anyhow.
> Here’s the pitch.
> Following a hastily-convened gathering in Hollywood, CA, a new society tentatively called the Flying Mountain Society has been formed. If you want to join, it will cost 500 dollars US or equivalent.
> For that investment you won’t get any information or brochures or member services. We will not print glossy magazines or feed a giant staff. In fact we will have no full-time employees. As we are not another NASA booster club you won’t get glossy pictures of spacecraft that will never be built. All you will get is a guarantee that we won’t waste your money.
> FMS isn’t the only space organization, but it does exist solely to get us into space.
> Here’s the catch. Don’t join unless you are a hardworking person. Don’t join unless you support Colonel Malenfant’s goal of developing a space industry in our lifetimes, and are prepared to work for it.
> In fact we’d prefer you didn’t join at all. We’d prefer you started up your own local chapter, affiliated to the Society, which we hope will evolve into a global umbrella organization of pressure groups and activists.
> You can start with a bake sale. You can start by bombarding the schools with images of asteroids. You can start by hiking out to the Mojave, rolling up your sleeves and helping Colonel Malenfant any way he can use you.
> There is incidentally no truth in the rumours propagated in some sections of the press that the Flying Mountain Society is in any way affiliated with or funded by Bootstrap Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates as, quote, ‘a propaganda exercise’. This is in fact counterfactual malice spread by Colonel Malenfant’s turf-warrior enemies.
> If you want to get involved, reply to this mail. Better yet just get to work …
Maura Della:
Open journal. September 3 2010.
It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.
I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.
Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project. Somehow, through the leak and my covert involvement – the fact that I didn’t blow the whistle immediately I got back from the Mojave – I’m becoming seduced into considering not just rocket engine firings, not just a private launch system, but the NEO mission itself.
This seems to be Malenfant’s modus operandi: to build up an unstoppable momentum, to launch first and answer questions later.
The usual forces of darkness are already gathering in Congress to oppose this. It’s going to be a struggle.
But I already know I’m not going to walk away from Malenfant, despite his outlandish, covert scheming.
You see, I happen to think Reid Malenfant is right. For the cost of one more space launch – which is undisputed, financial and environmental – it might be possible to reach a near-Earth object, actually to start exploiting one of those sun-orbiting gold mines, and so, just as Malenfant’s corporate title suggests, bootstrap a new human expansion into space.
I think we’ve all become desensitized to the state of our world.
We live in a closed economy, an economy of limits. Grain yields globally have been falling since 1984, fishing yields since 1990. And yet the human population continues to grow. This is the stark reality of the years to come.
It seems to me our best hope for getting through the next century or so is to reach some kind of steady state: recycle as much as possible, try to minimize the impact of industry on the planet, try to stabilize the population numbers. For the last five to ten years I have, in my small way, been working towards exactly that goal, that new order. I don’t see that any responsible politician has a choice.
I must say I entered politics with rather higher hopes of the future than I enjoy now.
But even the steady state, our best-hope future, may not be achievable without space.
Without power and materials from space we are doomed to shuffle a known – in fact diminishing – stockpile of resources around the planet. Some players get rich, others get poor. But it’s not even a zero sum game; in the long term we’re all losers.
It isn’t just a question of economics. It’s what this does to our spirit.
We are frightened of the future. We exclude strangers, try to hold on to what we have, rather than risk the search for something better. We spend more energy seeking someone to blame for our present woes than building for a better future. We’ve become a planet full of old people – old in spirit, anyhow. Speaking as a sexagenarian I know what I’m talking about.
The point is that if we could open up the limits to growth, then we can all be winners. It’s as simple as that.
That is why I’m prepared to back Malenfant. Not, you’ll note, because I like his methods. But the ends, I suspect, in this case justify the means.
However all this is going to take some extremely delicate opinion management. Especially over what Malenfant is doing at Key Largo …
Sheena 5:
… And, in the warm, shallow waters of the continental shelf off Key Largo:
The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface, which rippled with flat-light. Sheena 5 had spent the night alone, foraging for food among the sea bed grasses. She had eaten well, of small fish, prawns, larvae; she had been particularly successful using her arms to flush out hiding shrimp from the sand.
But now, in the brightness of day, the squid emerged from the grasses and corals, and rose in the water. The shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong that soared in arcs and rows through the water. Their jets made the rich water sing as they chattered to each other, simple sentences picked out by complex skin patterns, body posture, texture:
Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …
It was the ancient cephalopod language, Sheena knew, a language of light and shadow and posture, the ‘words’ shivering one into the other, words of sex and danger and food. It was a language as old as the squid – millions of years old, much older than humans – and it was rich and beautiful, and she shoaled and chattered with joy.
… But there was a shadow on the water. And Sheena’s deep gravity sense told her of an approaching infrasonic rumble, quite characteristic: it was a barracuda, a vicious predator of the squid. This one was young and small, but no less dangerous for that.
The sentinels, scattered around the fringes of the shoal, immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures. Their simple words blared lies at the approaching predator, and warned the rest of the shoal.
Black bands on the mantle, arms limp, swimming rapidly backwards: Look at me. I am a parrotfish. I am no squid.
Clear body, dark arms in a downward V: Look at us. We are sea grass, sargassum, drifting in the current. We are no squid.
A pseudomorph, a squid-shaped blob of ink, hastily emitted and bound together by mucus: Look at us. We are squid. We are all squid.
Turn to predator, spread arms, white spots and false eyes to increase apparent size: Look at me. I am strong and fierce. Flee!
The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would, before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.
Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here, in this garden-like reserve. Sheena recognized the glimmer of steel, the camera lenses pockmarking the too-smooth hide of the beast, the regular churn of the propellers in back. She understood that the shadow could only be a watching Bootstrap machine.
But she sensed a dull recognition of this fact in the glittering animal minds of her cousins, all around her; they were smart too, smart enough to know they were safe here. Besides, so sophisticated were their defences that the squid were rarely troubled by predators. So there was an element of play in the darting concealment and watchfulness of the shoal.
And then came the hunt.
The slim cylinder cruised through the posturing, half-concealed squid. Recognition pulsed through the shoal. Some of them spread their arms, covered their mantles with patterns of bars and streaks. Look at me. I have seen you. I will flee. It is futile to chase me.
Now one of the squid shoal, a strong male, broke free and jetted in front of the barracuda. A pattern began to move over his skin in steady waves, a patchwork of light and dark brown that radiated from his streamlined body to the tip of his tentacles. It was the pattern Dan called the passing cloud. Stop and watch me.
The barracuda cruised to a stop.
The male spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide. Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you.
The metal barracuda hung in the water, apparently mesmerized by the pattern, just as a predator should have been if it had been real.
Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle length, gaze fixed on the fish.
At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly, and started to slide away through the water.
But it was too late for that.
The male lunged. His two long tentacles whipped out – too fast even for Sheena to see – and their club-like pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there.
The barracuda surged forward. It was unable to escape. The male pulled himself towards the barracuda and wrapped his eight strong arms around its body, his body pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening, careless now of detection.
But when the male tried to jet backwards, hauling at the prey, the barracuda was too massive and strong.
The male broke the stand-off by rocketing forward until his body slammed into the barracuda’s metal hide – he seemed shocked by the hardness of the ‘flesh’ – and he wrapped his two long, powerful tentacles around the slim grey body.
Then he opened his mouth and stabbed at the hull with his beak. The hull broke through easily, Sheena saw; evidently it was designed for this. The male injected poison to stun his victim, and then dug deeper into the hide to extract the warm meat beneath. And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.
The squid descended, chattering their ancient songs, diving through the cloud of rich, cold meat, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, her hide flashing in triumph, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.
… That was when it happened.
Maura Della:
‘Ms Della, welcome to Oceanlab,’ Dan Ystebo said.
As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura. The two men here, biologist Dan Ystebo and a professional diver, watched her sheepishly.
She sniffed. ‘Woodland fragrance. Correct?’
The diver laughed. He was a burly fifty-year-old, but the dense air mixture here, hydreliox, turned his voice into a Donald Duck squeak. ‘Better than the alternative, Ms Della.’
Maura found a seat between the two men before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. It featured two small, tough-looking windows, and its switches and dials were shiny and worn with use. The lights were dim, the instruments and screens glowing. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.
The sense of confinement, the feel of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.
Dan Ystebo was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type. Igor to Malenfant’s Doctor Frankenstein, she thought. His face was underlit by the orange glow of his instrument panel. ‘So,’ he said awkwardly. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it feels like one of those old Soviet-era space stations. The Mir, maybe.’
‘That’s not so far off,’ Dan said, evidently nervous, talking too fast. ‘This is an old Navy installation. Built in the 1960s, nearly fifty years ago. It used to be in deep water out by Puerto Rico, but when a hab diver got himself killed the Navy abandoned it and towed it here, to Key Largo.’
‘Another Cold War relic,’ she said. ‘Just like NASA.’
Dan smiled. ‘Swords into ploughshares, ma’am.’
She leaned forward, peering into the windows. Sunlight shafted through dusty grey water, but she saw no signs of life, not a fish or frond of seaweed. ‘So where is she?’