Time

Here’s the living room. Sorry, I folded up the cam. There. Can you see now? You notice I got the video wall replaced, finally. Although I hate to think what the down payments are going to do to our bank balance. Maybe we could have got by with the old one, just the hundred channels, what do you think? Oh, I got the solar-cell roof replaced too. That storm was a bitch.

Here’s Billie’s bedroom. I’m whispering because she’s asleep. She loves the hologram mobile you sent her. Everybody says how smart she is. Same as her brother. I mean it. Even the doctors agree about Billie; they’re both off the, what did they say, the percentile charts, way off. You managed to give birth to two geniuses here, June. I know they don’t get it from their father!

I’ll kiss her for you. There you go, sweet pea. One from me too.

Here we are in the bathroom. Now, June, I know it’s not much as part of the guided tour. But I just want to show you this stuff because you’re not to worry about it. Here’s my med-alert ribbon, this cute silver thing. See? I have to wear it every time I leave the house, and I ought to wear it indoors too. And here are the pills I have to take every day, in this bubble packet. The specialist says they’re not just drugs but also little miniature machines, tumour-busters that go prowling around my bloodstream looking for the defective cells before breaking themselves up and flushing them out of, well, I won’t show you out of where. Here I am taking my pill for today. See? Gone. Nothing to worry about.

The Big C just ain’t what it used to be. Something you have to live with, to manage, like diabetes, right?

Come on. Let’s go see if Tom will let us into his room. He loves those star pictures you sent him. He’s been pinning them up on his wall …

Emma Stoney:

Emma was still furious when she drove into work, the morning after her trip to the plant.

Even this early on an August morning, the Vegas streets were thronged. People in gaudy artificial fabrics strolled past the giant casinos: the venerable Caesar’s Palace and Luxor and Sands, the new TwenCen Park with its cartoon reconstructions of 30s gangster-land Chicago and 60s Space Age Florida and 80s yuppie-era Wall Street. The endless lights and laser displays made a storm of colour and motion that was dazzling even against the morning sunlight, like glimpses into another, brighter universe. But the landscape of casinos and malls didn’t stay static; there were a number of vacant or redeveloping lots, like missing teeth in a smiling jaw.

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.