Stephen Baxter: Time

And, quietly, he began to build a seriously large business empire. For instance, he had pioneered the mining of methane as a fuel source from the big high-pressure hydrate deposits on the seabed off North Carolina. He had leased the technology to other fields, off Norway and Indonesia and Japan and New Zealand, and bought up shares judiciously. Soon methane production was supplying a significant percentage of global energy output.

The giant tents Malenfant’s companies had erected over the sea floor, to decompose the hydrates and trap the gases, had become a symbol of his flair and ambition.

And Malenfant was on his way to becoming remarkably rich.

Space, it seemed, was the place Reid Malenfant had started from, not where he was going.

Until, Emma thought, if Taine is right — this.

“Of course,” Cornelius said, “Malenfant’s ambition is to be applauded. I mean his real ambition, beyond this, umm … diversionary froth. I hope you understand this is my basic position. What grander goal is there to work for than the destiny of the species?” He spread thin fingers. “Man is an expansive, exploring animal. We conquered Earth with Stone Age technology. Now we need new resources, new skills to fund our further growth, space to express our differing philosophies.” He smiled. “I have the feeling you don’t necessarily share these views.”

She shrugged. This was an argument she’d rehearsed with Malenfant many times. “It’s such a gigantic, mechanistic, depressing vision. Maybe we should all just learn to get along with each other. Then we wouldn’t have to go to all the trouble of conquering the Galaxy. What do you think?”

He laughed. “Your marriage must have been full of fire.” And he continued to ask her questions, trying to draw her out.

Enough. She wasn’t prepared to be pumped by this faintly sinister man about her boss, let alone her ex-husband. She buried herself in e-mails, shutting him out.

Cornelius sat in silence, as still as a basking lizard.

After an hour they reached the California border.

There was a border post here. An unsmiling guard scanned Emma’s wrist barcode, her eyes hidden by insectile camera-laden sunglasses. Since Emma and Cornelius proved to be neither black nor Latino nor Asian, and did not intend to take up permanent occupancy in the Golden State nor seek employment there, they were allowed through.

California, Emma thought sourly, is not what it used to be.

Highway 58, heading toward Mojave, took them through the desert. The sun climbed higher, and hard light fell from a hot, ozone-leached sky. The ground was baked, bleached, flat and hard as a paving slab, with only gnarled and blackened Joshua trees to challenge the endless horizontals. Somewhere to her right was Death Valley, which had, in 2004, logged the world’s all-time highest temperature at 139 degrees.

They reached Edwards Air Space Force Base — or rather they began to drive alongside its chain-link fence, forty miles of it running along-side the highway. Edwards, with its endless expanse of dry salt lakes — natural runways — was the legendary home of the test pilot. But from the highway she could see nothing at all — no planes or hangars or patrolling men-in-black guards. Nothing but miles of link fence. The accountant in her began, involuntarily, to compute the cost of all that wire.

Still, the closeness of Edwards, with its connotation of 1960s astronaut glamour, was, she was sure, the reason Malenfant had chosen this area for his newest project. Malenfant’s methods with people were coarse, but he knew the power of symbols.

And it was, indeed, only a little way beyond Edwards that she came to the site of Malenfant’s project.

The main gate was little more than a hole in the fence barred by a crash barrier that carried a small, almost unobtrusive, Boot-strap corporate logo. The guard was a hefty woman with a small, dazzling-bright pistol at her hip. Emma’s company credentials, appended to the UV barcode ID she wore on her left wrist, were enough to get her and Cornelius through the gate.

Inside the gate there was a Portakabin, once more displaying the corporate logo. Beyond that there was more desert. There was no metalled road surface, just tracks snaking to the dusty horizon.

Emma pulled the car over and climbed out. She blinked in the sudden light, felt perspiration start out of her flesh after a few seconds of the desert’s dry, sucking warmth. The shade of the cabin, even badly air-conditioned, was a relief.

She took in the cabin’s contents with a glance. Malenfant’s joky company mission statement was repeated several times: Bootstrap: Making Money in a Closed Economy — Until Something Better Comes Along. There were display stands showing the usual corporate PR, much of it approved by her, about the methane extraction fields, and Bootstrap’s cleanup activities at Hanford and the Ukraine nuke plants and Alaska, and so forth.

Bootstrap had tied up a recent youth-oriented sponsorship with Shit Cola, and so there was a lot of bright pink Shit livery about the stands. Cornea gumbo, Emma thought: too cluttered and bright. But it defrayed the costs. And the Shit audience — sub-age twenty-five, generally subliterate consumers of the planet’s trendiest soft drink — were showing themselves amenable to subtle Bootstrap persuasion, mixed in with their diet of endless softsoaps and thongathons.

No evidence here of giant rocket plants in the desert, of course.

Cornelius was looking around in silence, an amused half smile on his lips. She was finding his quiet know-all attitude intensely irritating, his silences disturbing.

She heard the whine of an electric engine, a car of some kind pulling up outside. With relief she stepped out the door.

The car was a late-model Jeep, a bare frame mounted on big fat tires, with a giant solar-cell carapace glistening like beetle chitin. It carried two people, talking animatedly. The passenger was a woman unknown to Emma: sixty, perhaps, slim and smart, wearing some kind of trouser suit. Practical but a little hot, Emma thought.

And the driver was, of course, Reid Malenfant.

Malenfant got out of the car like a whip uncoiling. He bounded up to Emma, grabbed her arms, and kissed her cheek; his lips were rough, sun-cracked. He was ruinously tall, thin as a snake, bald as a coot. He was wearing a blue NASA-type jumpsuit and heavy black boots. As usual, he looked somehow larger than those around him, as if too big for the landscape. She could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna. He said, “What kept you?”

She hissed, “You’ve a hell of a nerve, Malenfant. What are you up to now?”

“Later,” he whispered. The woman with him was climbing out of the car with caution, but she seemed limber enough. Malenfant said to Emma, “Do you know Maura Della?” ;

“Representative Della? By reputation.”

Maura Della stepped forward, a thin smile on her lips. “Ms. Stoney. He’s told me all about you.”

“I bet he has.” Emma shook her hand; Della’s grip was surprisingly strong, stronger than Cornelius Taine’s, in fact.

Malenfant said, “I’m trying to win the representative’s support for the project here … But I suspect I’ve a little way to go yet.”

“Damn right,” Della said. “Frankly it seems incredible to me that you can attempt to build an eco-friendly project around rocket engines.”

Malenfant pulled a face at Emma. “You can tell we’re in the middle of an argument here.”

“We sure are,” Della said.

Malenfant fetched plastic water bottles from the car and handed them out while Maura Della kept on talking. “Look,” she said, “the space shuttle actually dumps more exhaust products into the atmosphere than any other current launcher. Water, hydrogen, hydrogen chloride, and nitrogen oxides. The chloride can damage the ozone layer—”