Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

There was no way to know if the author was actually correct, but he’d heard the rumours winging their way through the political mainstream. Young men and women with the drive and determination to succeed were signing up for lunar settlement in vast numbers; the waiting list, he’d heard, already included millions of names. And these men and women wouldn’t just be determined to succeed, they’d also be natural supporters of the GOP. The party was watching its natural voter base threaten to erode.

But it was likely to cause other problems too. What would happen, he asked himself, if he tax burden on the average American citizen continued to rise?

“The transition has to be carefully managed,” Cavendish said. “We must elect a new government that will guide America through the next few years.”

Gunter lifted his eyebrows. “Are you planning to run for President?”

“I think so,” Cavendish said. “But matters are undecided at the moment.”

“Because half of the GOP thinks that most of their representatives in Washington are RINOs,” Gunter said. “Or traitors.”

He sighed. It was another problem, one that bedevilled all political parties. At base, they were political consensuses , compromises between different attitudes and viewpoints that allowed them all to stand under the same banner. But when large parts of the organisation felt betrayed, they tended to make their displeasure felt. Even without Steve Stuart and the alien technology, the GOP would probably have had a few uncomfortable years. But then, it was probably true of the Democrat Party too. Hope and change had simply not materialised.

“I would also like to open up talks with Mr. Stuart directly,” Cavendish added. “His endorsement would be very useful.”

Gunter doubted that Stuart would offer anything of the sort. “I can certainly give him your number,” he said. “But he was pretty alienated from mainstream politics even before he started his own country. He might have nothing to say to you.”

“There’s no harm in asking,” the Senator said. “And besides, I have other plans for the future.”

Sighing inwardly, Gunter settled in for the long haul.

Shadow Warrior , Mars Orbit

“Back on Earth, there are people — know-nothings — protesting about what we are doing here,” Steve said. He hated giving speeches, but he had to admit there was a certain satisfaction in giving this one. “They think what we’re doing is morally wrong. They think that we’re the bad guys for slamming a few asteroids into Mars. They think we’re” — he held up his hands to make quotation marks — “damaging the environment.”

There were a handful of chuckles from several of his listeners. They’d all suffered at the hands of environmentalists or environmental regulations, regulations designed by bureaucrats who knew next to nothing about farming or anything else they sought to regulate. And the whole idea of opposing the terraforming of Mars, they all agreed, was absurd. Humanity needed more places to live.

Steve smiled and went on. “But we are the builders , the ones who make it possible for humanity to live,” he continued. “Mars is a dead world, utterly dead. There are no giant slugs or rock snakes crawling over the surface, nor are there any traces of a long-gone civilisation. What is the harm, I ask you, in turning Mars into another homeworld for mankind?

“There isn’t any harm,” he concluded. “Let the protesters exhaust themselves shouting and screaming down on Earth. Let them bemoan what we’re doing, here and now, just as they bemoan our ancestors who settled America. But somehow I doubt they will refuse to visit Mars in the future, just as they don’t go home to Europe and abandon America. Today, the future belongs to those who dream and build a better world.”

He lifted his glass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I give you the future.”

On the display, seventeen asteroids tumbled towards Mars. They’d been carefully selected, then nudged towards their targets with nuclear bombs Steve had purchased from Russia. The environmentalists had howled about that too — nukes in space, they’d wailed — but the whole system had worked perfectly well. Mars would get its first infusion of water, the Russians would get a handful of fusion power plants and a number of nuclear weapons would be removed from Earth. The Russian weapons had been crude, according to the techs, but perfectly functional. And they’d been used to build rather than destroy.

But we’re going to need more of them , he thought. Talks with America over the production of additional nuclear devices — they’d been trying to stay away from the word bomb — were going nowhere fast. We’re going to have to set up breeder reactors of our own .

They did have several advantages over Earth, he knew. Nuclear waste — always a problem — could be simply launched into the sun, where it would vanish without trace. He’d actually offered to take the nuclear waste from various countries on Earth and dispose of it, although those negotiations weren’t proceeding any faster. Fear of a shuttle accident, it seemed, was delaying the talks. Never mind that there hadn’t been a single shuttle accident in three months…

He shook his head, then looked back at the display. It did look destructive, he had to admit, but the icy asteroids would melt within Mars’s scant atmosphere and increase the water content of the dead world. The water would match up with seeds the terraforming crews had already scattered, starting the slow development of a breathable atmosphere. Brute-force terraforming, as the aliens called it, would still take upwards of a hundred years, but by the time it had finished Mars would live again. The only real problem was warming the planet long enough to develop a proper greenhouse effect.

I wonder if the environmentalists will stop screaming about the asteroids long enough to start screaming about the greenhouse effect , he wondered, nastily. That’s another evil buzzword for them .

But it was necessary, he knew. Mars was a cold world. The heat of the sun was already diluted by the time it reached the planet, forcing the engineers to develop an ozone layer to keep as much heat as possible trapped on the planet. There was a perfectly natural version of the greenhouse effect on Earth, after all, and it had worked very well for thousands upon thousands of years. Duplicating it for Mars was an urgent requirement.

The small crowd fell silent as the first asteroid plummeted into the planet’s atmosphere. Even though the atmosphere was thin, it left a fiery trail as it fell downwards and eventually slammed into the planet’s surface. Steve sucked in his breath sharply as the display pulled out, revealing the atmospheric patterns slowly spreading out over Mars. They were oddly beautiful, even though he knew that anyone within a hundred miles of the impact would be very unlikely to survive. He couldn’t help wondering if they had created a new art form.

We should have learned from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs , he thought, remembering one of Keith Glass’s impassioned anti-NASA rants. Nothing NASA could have done would have saved humanity, if a large asteroid had plummeted towards the Earth and smashed into the planet. Indeed, reading between the lines in the alien files, it seemed that asteroid impacts were often used to depopulate worlds, with everyone involved swearing blind that it wasn’t actually deliberate genocide. Not that the victims would have cared by then, he suspected. Anyone lucky enough to survive the impact would die soon afterwards, killed by environmental change or the destruction of civilisation.