April 3: The Middle of Nowhere

by Mackey Chandler

  "Thank you, but no. We had a breakfast in our hotel room and I was quite satisfied. My husband has only recently included me in any of his, activities. I don't know the name of the banker he is speaking with, but may I assume you are a member of his household?"

  "Banker? I suppose that would translate well. Investment advisor, business broker, insurance underwriter, yes he is very close to many of these expressions. I am impressed you are being taken into his confidence for business matters. I am the daughter of his second wife and none of his three wives need concern themselves with any matters of business."

  "We live very differently and I mean no criticism by that," Huian was quick to say. "I'd have no idea how to adjust to your world. I suspect however I'm about to be uprooted and make just as big an adjustment, if different."

  Chen came in just then, holding a heavy carry-on and hesitating like he was not certain what to do. He pulled out a chair and sat down. "We have some changes of plan," he told her. "I am informed I am singled out for a particular object lesson for other agents and dare not proceed to the east as that is what they expect." Part of the reason was that his wife and children had proved impossible to arrest, helping others escape and killing the very official in charge of rounding them up. But he decided not to lay the burden of that on her right now. After all, she only did exactly what he'd told her.

  "We shall go west and seek to lift from the European area, possibly Crete or the Canary Islands. I had thought to stay on Earth for a time, but that looks inadvisable now."

  "Would you help my wife with her garments and adjusting this carrier to her body?" he requested of the young woman. He withdrew a vest-like shape that appeared to be body armor, but with maybe a hundred tiny pockets.

  "It would be my pleasure. Help yourself," she waved at the refreshments, "and call out for anything else you need." She smiled at Huian and led her by hand out a side door.

  * * *

  To someone who saw April in a news video like the war footage from the Happy Lewis her brother sold to the BBC, or the footage Adzusa sent to her boss of April blazing away with laser fire in the corridors of home, or her own footage of shooting Preston Harrison and his thugs, she must seem like a terrible publicity hound seeking the camera. Truth was she'd be very happy to stay in the background and encourage others. In her own mind she hated speaking up. She had a dread of making a fool of herself in public, but when push came to shove she'd speak up if the alternative was worse. She had been forced to speak up in the first assembly of Home or they would have treated her like a little kid and marginalized her. She never got hostile unless she was directly threatened. Preston Harrison had sworn to her face he would destroy Home and kill all her friends and family. What did any rational person expect when you made those sort of promises? All this sort of thing could be avoided if people just didn't push her into a corner and disrespect her.

  She really didn't want to look bad in public. She'd be just as happy as could be if the public was unaware of her at all. She refused to look at a couple online sites that promoted her 'look' to teenagers as a fashion style. But she did have just a few people whose opinion of her mattered a great deal more to her than any public perception. Her grandpa, Heather, Eddie and Jon. Her father and friends Ruby and Easy. Even Dr. Ames or Jelly as he liked to be called and her Earth hosts the Santos now. She especially didn't want to look silly to Jeff, because she suspected he was so much smarter than her he had to be patient and wait for her to catch up with what he had figured out months ago. Not that that wasn't true of most people and him, but she still didn't like it. She wasn't even as brave as Heather in telling him not to soar off in flights of fancy and first prove out the smaller projects before deciding to move planets whose orbit didn't suit him.

  Unfortunately when she had suggested they might start a bank she had no idea it would lead to Jeff suggesting she needed to become familiar with economics. She dove into understanding it with the same direct push she had applied to fomenting a revolution or obtaining her orbit to orbit pilot's certification. It appeared to her after some examination that the whole system was actually over due for a down-turn, slump, recession, depression, panic or whatever they wanted to call the next big financial belly flop.

  She'd have never seen it if Jeff hadn't motivated her to look into it. Life was good on Home, or anywhere else in orbit for that matter. There was no shortage of work, the food was good. People lived in cramped quarters, but they were thoughtfully decorated, comfortably designed cramped quarters. There was no pollution or commuting problems. No blackouts or tornados or wildfires or mudslides. No mosquitoes or cockroaches and very little disease that was slowly getting worse on Earth every year. She never worried about getting mugged for her pocket money or somebody breaking in their cubic and stealing their flat screen.

  Even if they had cause, it was their own fault there was a shortage of building materials. They had after all shot up all the North American production facilities to make such exotic items as shuttle tires and laser gyroscopes. It took a long time to rebuild the special tooling and begin production again. Other countries were picking up the slack faster than North America was rebuilding.

  What she saw now after her research was that things were not nearly so rosy down below. Wages had not kept up with prices for five years now and the trend was accelerating. Personal debt was getting out of hand. Defaults on credit had been rising for seven years. Prices of materials were up not just here, but down below too, yet wholesale prices were down and companies were running tighter margins. Despite all that stock prices were up against all rational expectations.

  The talking heads on the news services right now had only good things to say about the economy. When she looked at the archives of newspapers in the 1930s it was the same thing. Their spox all were full of joy and encouragement all the way through the long slide down into the Great Depression. Come the next Big Slump in the 2010s they had declared the recession over and recovery, visualized as green shoots, in progress for years as it continued to get worse. The public could be fooled for a limited time by propping things up with borrowed money. Then for an even shorter time by simply printing money when nobody would lend any more.

  Obviously the media and government spox were lying shills or fools. It was terrible when being a honest fool was the less repugnant accusation to level at someone. This sort of major crash seemed to happen with a period that approximated the high side of the human lifespan. It definitely was time again. It would be really, really nice if Life Extension Therapy broke that cycle, she thought.

  The investment money flooding Home from Earth seemed a good thing to her when Eddie and Jeff told her about it. Now it seemed to her it was money fleeing for a safe haven by those smart enough to have already seen what she had just figured out.

  She felt she had to report back that she had looked into it as Jeff had asked, but she was really uncomfortable telling him the conclusions she'd come to. It wasn't just reporting the general familiarization she had expected, her views had become sharply predictive. If she was wrong it was going to be hugely embarrassing.

  She'd have never had the nerve to say anything to someone who had years of effort in studying economics. Who was she to go against what all these experts were saying? But none of her people had that formal training. She decided to run her ideas past her grandfather first. He had become close to Jeff working with him and familiar with his thinking. As his only granddaughter she was pretty sure he'd forgive almost any silly thing she said and just chuckle and kindly correct her rather than dismiss her as a fool. He was back temporarily from the moon and she wanted to have breakfast with him and hear about the lunar project anyway.

  After explaining her research over pancakes she concluded. "So I think things are going to get tough for folks down below pretty soon. I'm still not sure what that is going to mean for us. There was no orbital population last time there was a big Depression. What do you think?"

  "I thought that was a possibility
twenty years ago. I was pretty sure it was a dead certainty three years ago," he admitted. "It was definitely a part of why I stayed her after helping build the place and bought a cubic and wanted my family here."

  "Then why didn't you say anything to me?" she asked surprised.

  "Would you have been interested?" he asked her.

  She thought back, three years ago was a long time at her age, to what she was doing. What her brother was involving her in for his projects, her classes and things her mom had her doing, including visiting her grandparents in Australia. Money and work was not a very big part of her life at all back then. "No, I would have nodded politely and wondered what any of that had to do with me," she admitted.

  "Would you have done anything different?" he asked too.

  "I hope not. Everything that happened worked out pretty good in the end. Bad stuff happened but it could have been much worse. We could have ended up on the slumball with Home under tight martial law and the Rock nationalized. Bob was older than me, did you by any chance tell him there might be a depression coming?"

  "No and I'm glad I didn't. I don't have to wonder if worry about it drove him to go all weird and act like he did. I can't see how telling him would have had any benefit," he added.

  "So you don't think I'd look silly to mention the same things to Jeff?" she asked.

  "Not at all. I'm sure Jeff and Eddie both realize we are deep in the end cycle of an economic peak. Eddie is very forthright about trying to turn all his suddenly gained paper assets into real tangible things. Jeff, when we were working together, would make remarks that made me realize he knew the score too."

  "Like what?" she said scrunching her eyebrows up.

  "Like when we were designing the fast couriers, we had to consider how many hours they could sustain before a major bare-frame overhaul. He'd make a comment that something should last just fine for as long as he expected there to be a demand for the kind of high priority freight they were designed to carry. He definitely saw such work dropping off in the not too distant future," he remembered.

  "Knowing that is of limited usefulness however. You never can predict such things with the kind of precision to actually time business plans based on it. On the other hand you could decide it is too close and sit on your hands for years, never doing anything because you aren't sure things won't crash and ruin your venture. Or you can go into something that depends on way more time than you have to show a profit. Either one is a trap. You just have to get on with your life and deal with it when it happens," he assured her.

  "That's a remarkably calm viewpoint," she said, not sure she could adopt it.

  "When you were sailing around with your friend Santos did a storm ever come up?"

  "As a matter of fact one big one in particular did hit us after we passed the equator. It was scary but exhilarating. I have some video of it."

  "How did he act when he saw it coming?"

  "He saw the dark clouds behind us and took down the big sails and just left the smaller triangular sail at the front. He closed up the clamshell doors on the wheelhouse and made sure even his experienced deckhands had safety lines on."

  "Well it's the same thing. You see some dark clouds gather on Earth. You know it's going to get rough. You just don't know when the first gusts are going to hit. Best to have your sails trimmed to not get damaged and be ready to ride it out. No way can you change it. The storm is a bigger force than you can deflect at all. You could shout from the rooftops and tell folks and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. These sort of events are the sum of so many little things going back further than you can see that there is no understanding them fully, much less trying to keep them from happening."

  "The economists and the politicians all deny up and down anything is wrong!" she protested.

  "Can you really blame them?" her grandpa asked her. "Most of the passengers are so stupid they'll blame the captain for whistling up the storm or ask why he steered in front of it. As if there was any way to undo or avoid something so big. I wouldn't waste my breath trying to explain it to somebody who has never stood at the wheel and kept the boat from getting crossways to the wind. Most of the passengers are pretty useless when you get right down to it. Just tell them they don't know what a bad storm really is, shut up, get below and try not to puke in your bunk."

  "Thanks gramps. You really help me put things in perspective."

  Chapter 25

  "One of Dakota's people showed me another lunar process they've been hoarding today," Jeff told Heather. "He can separate iron from regolith magnetically. It is nano-particle size and can be sintered and laser heated to finished size for things like air locks and machine parts. They are going to make residential buildings and greenhouses of microwave melted regolith ceramic with native steel airlocks. They want us to import nitrous oxide and solid carbon to make air and carbon dioxide for the plants."

  "I know Home has lots of cheap iron from the Rock, but could you sell them this nano-particle iron for quick prototyping at a price that would beat them making their own from the bulk solid?" Heather asked.

  "That's an excellent idea," Jeff acknowledged. "Also, Armstrong brings some air in as nitrous oxide for rovers and suits so they are very familiar with it. The carbon dioxide they bring in liquid, but that is no big difficult change. They intend to keep the air for the greenhouses separate and optimized for the plants."

  "I've been thinking. Importing solid carbon from Earth is fine for now, but I'd like to eventually ram scoop hydrocarbons from Jupiter or Titan. It doesn't even need to be a manned vessel for such a long voyage, it could be automated," Jeff suggested.

  "How fast is the tunnel machine working now?"Heather asked.

  "It has averaged a meter every three hundred seconds for long stretches. Cutting out blocks instead of needing the power to shatter the entire face to grit has made a huge difference. We have much less cracking in the wall from thermal effects too. Cutting the tunnel square instead of round makes it much more efficient to use for the effort put into it too. That was brilliant," he complimented her. She just smiled. "I just know eventually we'll think of some use for the blocks," he predicted, "people are using them for simple stuff like building shelving, but that hardly puts a dent in the pile."

  "When you build your beanstalk you'll need a big counterweight at the end, won't you?"

  "That I will," Jeff said, looking surprised.

  * * *

  Maine was lovely this time of year. It was past the heat of summer but not yet cool except at night. The leaves were getting a little patches of color out among the green. The lobster were abundant this year and they bought them at the dock and cooked them back aboard. Lin had seen somebody watching them from the marina store Saturday the first of two weekends they were to be available and assured him the man was not a professional observer.

  The next day another fellow cruised past in a small boat and spent too long looking at their stern. When the other fellow returned to the store Lin confronted him.

  "I've seen you hanging around, are you looking to crew?" he asked him directly. "We have a berth open on our boat if you are qualified."

  "I am, but I'm expecting a particular boat soon. The Tobiuo was supposed to come in about this time and they promised us an opening for both myself and a friend."

  "You haven't heard then. The Tobiuo is thought to have been lost in the Drake passage. Her dinghy and various bits of debris were found washed up," Lin told him.

  "Has that been confirmed?" the man said looking worried.

  "The ocean is large," Lin said shrugging. "That kind of thing may never be finally confirmed," he explained. "Why don't you and your friend come speak to my master tonight? I think that you will find The Sly Spy is exactly the same, under the skin, as the Tobiuo. If you were qualified for her I'm sure the owner will accept you."

  The fellow looked like he was getting the drift of it but wanted to be told plainly. Lin wasn't going to do that standing here in the store. "He's been look
ing for just the right people since April," he assured him. "If you hesitate he might be gone after next weekend."

  "In that case I'll get my buddy and come tonight," he agreed. That was finally plain enough for him, thank goodness.

  "Come early enough for supper and bring everything you don't want to leave behind," Lin instructed. "If you are coming with us it might be a long time before you return."

  "Yes, I expect that. You're a long range cruiser, aren't you?"

  "Indeed our master has expressed a desire to go much further next time than he has before."

  "We'll see you about 17:00 then."

  "That sounds fine," Lin agreed.

  * * *

  "They say they are going to bring in a new executive crew and the four administrators who worked with Loesher will be returned to Earth," Ted said reading the message flimsy. "In consideration of dropping the embarrassing lawsuit we'd have all administrative charges dropped and new contracts signed that guarantee civil liberties and freedom to stay on the moon."

  "What happens to the creeps they send back to Earth?" his wife asked.

  "It doesn't say. I figure they get another Federal job or maybe straight to a cushy retirement given their skill sets are not in big demand elsewhere," Ted predicted.

  "We already had guarantees of our liberties," she pointed out bitterly. "It was called the Constitution. It wasn't any defect in documents that created a problem, it was a defect in people who wanted to dominate us and make our lives miserable. It's the same team and I don't trust them. If we go back they will just find new ways to oppress us. It's what they do."