Stephen Baxter: Time

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,” Reid Malenfant said. 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 at all? 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: commu-

nications, 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 was true. “You really are talking about going to the asteroids, aren’t you? Why, for God’s sake?”

George Hench answered. “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,” Malenfant said, “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 and unreliable and are 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,” Hench said. “And every time they were 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’s launching spaceships 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?”

“By building incrementally,” Hench said. “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 United States 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, was 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, McDon-nell 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, of course, that 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 launchpad.

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 that had killed earlier turf-threatening new initiatives — forces that had pushed Malenfant himself into this covert scheme, obviously concocted over years, in absolute secrecy even from her.

But now that 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 naysayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the lawn 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 U.S. or equivalent.