by Ben Bova
“To Astro Manufacturing, Incorporated, Your Honor.”
“I see. Is there a representative of Astro Manufacturing in this chamber?”
Dan got to his feet. “I represent Astro, Your Honor. My name is Daniel Hamilton Randolph.”
All three judges smiled at Dan the way Torquemada might have smiled at a rabbi. Dan smiled back and said:
“Your Honors, Astro is quite willing to pay the penalty that you have already decided to assess against Mitchell Mining and Smelting.”
Dan knew that the penalty was already recorded in their computer file of this proceeding. If they changed it now, because Astro could afford an astronomically larger fine or because they hated Dan Randolph’s guts, it would give Astro’s lawyers a perfect excuse to claim prejudice and demand a new trial.
The three judges put their heads together and conferred briefly, hands over the tiny microphones imbedded in the desktop before them.
Finally the chief conciliator, her face grim, leveled a hard stare at Dan. “Mr. Randolph, this tribunal cannot help but believe that your acquisition of Mitchell Mining and Smelting is nothing less than an obvious ploy to thwart justice.”
Dan put on an expression of injured innocence. “But Your Honor, the truth is exactly the opposite. I’m sure that the fine you’ve assessed against Mitchell would bankrupt his company and drive him out of business. His assets would become the property of the Global Economic Council. The GEC would have to assume the burden of running the mining and smelting operation—”
“GEC management would see that the operation remained within its allotted quotas,” the chief conciliator snapped angrily. “There would be no attempts to illegally increase profits by dumping excess ores on the world market and driving prices down from their mandated levels.”
Dan’s smile turned slightly impish. “Yes, we all know GEC operations never show any profits. Somehow, when the GEC takes over a company, it always seems to run at a loss.”
His lawyer made a polite little cough, a warning to get off that tack. This is no time for sticking the needle into them, she was telling Dan.
Still facing the judges, Dan went on, “However, Astro Manufacturing is quite willing to pay the fine you’ve assessed. And Astro will manage Mitchell Mining and Smelting at a profit, I’m sure, while staying within the GEC’s mandated quotas. That will generate more tax revenues for the GEC. Everybody gains. It’s a win-win situation.”
“And what of Mr. Mitchell?” the chief conciliator demanded. “What punishment will he receive for his blatant disregard of the law?”
Dan smiled his brightest. “Why, he’ll have to work for me. That ought to be punishment enough.”
Dan and his lawyer rode alone in his private trolley back to Astro’s main base at the great ringed plain of Alphonsus, where Yamagata Industries had set up its first and still largest lunar center.
One of the privileges of great wealth was privacy. Another was convenience. Dan was one of only two men who had a private trolley vehicle on the Moon. The other was Saito Yamagata, once Dan’s boss, for many years now his friend and sometime partner.
Like cable cars that climb mountains or cross chasms on Earth, the lunar trolleys were suspended from cables made of lunar aluminum and titanium. Cryogenically cooled, the cables carried electricity at low resistance that powered the trolleys swiftly and smoothly ten meters above the battered lunar terrain.
“You almost blew it, boss,” said his lawyer. She was sitting in a softly yielding padded chair, swirling a drink she had fixed for herself at the minibar.
Dan looked up from the display screen built into his desktop. “Close doesn’t count, except in horseshoes, Scarlett.”
“My name is Katherine,” she said, with a slight frown. “My friends call me Kate.”
“And what should I call you?”
The frown turned into a grin. They had played this little game a thousand times in the years that she had worked for Dan Randolph. “Ms. Williams will do.”
“Scarlett,” he said. “With that bricktop of yours, your name has to be Scarlett.”
She went back to frowning.
“That is your natural hair color, isn’t it?” Before she could answer, Dan added, “Doesn’t matter. It’s gorgeous. Never change it.”
She cocked an eyebrow as if she were going to retort, but thought better of it and sipped at her drink. Dan went back to scrolling through the messages that had accumulated during the morning. One of them was from Zachary Freiberg, his chief scientist.
Dan routed all the other messages to the people he hired to get things done. Zach Freiberg he called himself. The scientist’s message was marked Urgent and asked Dan to call immediately, regardless of time zones on Earth. Dan called out Freiberg’s name to the computer and within seconds his face appeared on the screen.
“Wha’s wrong, Zach?”
Freiberg was obviously in his office in California. Tawny brown hills showed through the window behind him, with palm trees and cypresses framing the view. From the angle of the sun Dan guessed it was midmorning in Pasadena. He registered all this during the couple of seconds it took for his words to reach Earth and Freiberg’s reply to return the quarter-million miles to the Moon.
Zachary Freiberg had one of those faces that would look boyish to the day he died: round apple cheeks, round chin, soft features and soft blue eyes. His wiry strawberry-blond hair no longer flopped over his broad forehead, though; in the ten years that Dan had known Zack, the slow recession of his hairline had been the one sign of aging he could see.
Zack looked troubled. “Can we go to security mode?”
“I’m on the trolley, moving too fast for a laser link.”
Freiberg bit his lower lip.
“We can scramble,” Dan suggested. “Or wait till I’m back in the office and we can use the laser.”
“Scramble, then,” said Freiberg two and a half seconds later.
Wondering what could be making him so upset, Dan typed in his private security code. The screen flickered briefly, then steadied once again.
“What is it?” he asked.
Unconsciously, Freiberg hunched closer to his screen, like a man about to whisper a secret in a neighborhood bar.
“I’ve been looking at the long-term climate trends,” he said. “You remember, you wanted to get a better fix on the greenhouse effect?”
Dan nodded, glancing at Kate Williams. She was staring through the window by her seat, watching the pockmarked Mare Cognitum whiz by. How big are her ears? Dan wondered.
“I remember asking you about the long-term effects of the greenhouse warming, yeah,” he replied to Freiberg. “If the sea level keeps rising we’ll have to build a dike around the launching center at La Guaira.”
“Right.” Freiberg’s round face took on an even more anguished look. “Dan—if what I’ve come up with is right, and I think it is, we’re in for bigproblems. I mean, major catastrophe.”
“Will we have to abandon the launch center?”
“It’s worse than that, Dan. A whole lot worse. It’s not just Astro. It’s the whole fucking world!”
Dan had never heard Freiberg use that expletive before. The guy’s scared!
Without waiting for Dan to ask, Freiberg went on, “It’s a cliff, Dan. The climate doesn’t change gradually, it all of a sudden shifts and bang!you’ve got the glaciers melting down, Greenland and Antarctica melting down, the sea levels going up thirty meters, rainfall patterns radicallyshifting, all the coastlines on Earth inundated—it’s a mess, a goddamned catastrophe like out of the Bible!”
Dan sank back in his chair. Kate Williams saw the expression on his face and stared at him.
“Nobody’s considered the gas hydrates in the deep-sea sediments,” Freiberg was almost babbling, “and under the tundra all across the Arctic. They release methane when they’re disturbed and the pressure conditions—”
“When?” Dan asked. “How soon?”
“Soon. A few decades. May
be as soon as ten years from now.” He ran a hand across his forehead. “I think maybe it’s already started.”
“You’re sure? Certain?”
Freiberg nodded unhappily. “I’ve had half a dozen people check it out. It’s real. Floods, killer storms, croplands turned to deserts—the whole thing. All that stuff the environmentalists have been spouting for the past fifty years. It’s all going to happen, Dan. And it’ll happen so fast there’s practically nothing we can do about it.”
“We’ve got ten years?”
“Maybe more. Maybe less.”
Dan sucked in a deep breath. He knew he should feel alarmed, frightened. But he did not. He was more annoyed than anything else. His mind accepted what Freiberg was saying; he knew intellectually that this was a real emergency looming, a disaster of incalculable proportions. But deep in his innermost animal being he felt no terror, no panic. The reality of this threat was too remote, too academic, to spark his emotions.
And that’s the real danger of it, he told himself. It’s too far in the future to stir the guts, even though it’s close enough to kill us all.
To Freiberg he said, “Haul your ass up here, Zach. I want to go through this with you inch by inch.”
Freiberg nodded glumly. “The numbers aren’t going to change, boss.”
“Yeah, I know. But there must be something we can do about it.”
“Learn to swim,” said Freiberg.
FOUR
THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL WAS headquartered in Paris, a city just beginning to brighten once again after the turmoil of the past few decades.
Western Europe had found it much more difficult to digest Eastern Europe than even the most pessimistic economic forecaster had predicted. After more than four decades of stagnation and repression, the peoples of Eastern Europe shouted for democracy and freedom. What they really wanted was the economic well-being of their Western neighbors, the higher standard of living that they saw in the capitalist nations.
But the capitalist idea of working hard was foreign to them. At first they demanded bread and meat and milk for their children. And they got it, for it was impossible for the West to deny humanitarian aid to their impoverished brethren. But quickly they began to demand the toys and trinkets of capitalist societies—without working to produce the wealth that could pay for them.
A whole generation simmered in distrust and bitter animosities as slowly, painfully, the peoples of the formerly socialist world learned that it was the capitalists who truly followed Marx’s original dictum: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his work.”
At last the Poles and Czechs and Romanians and even the Russians learned to work once again, learned to produce the goods and services that paid for their happiness. The Hungarians reasserted their marketing craft. The centuries-old hatreds between ethnic groups were subdued—but not entirely forgotten—in the new rush to obtain expensive gadgets and personal wealth. Now Paris was a happy city once more.
The economic boom was partially fueled from space.
Much of the wealth that allowed Europe and the rest of the world to prosper came from the energy, the raw materials, the manufactured products produced in space. From the Moon came raw materials for space construction and isotopic fuel for Earth’s fusion power generators. From factories in space came new alloys and electronics crystals, medicines and vaccines of incredible purity, solarvoltaic cells cheap and efficient enough to turn a family home’s rooftop into a self-sufficient solar energy generator. And hovering in orbit around the Earth, giant solar power satellites converted unfiltered sunlight into electricity and beamed it to energy-hungry cities and factories cleanly, without polluting the atmosphere.
The economic boom that was just getting started was heavily dependent on this new wealth streaming in from space. Five and a half centuries after Europe began the exploitation of the New World, all of Earth was beginning to benefit from the exploitation of cislunar space—a harsh frontier that was rich in real wealth and entirely unpopulated, except for the ten thousand or so men and women of Earth who went there to find their fortunes.
Slowly the Earth was healing from the wounds inflicted by the Industrial Age. Slowly the smokestacks were being replaced by fusion or solar energy. Slowly the petroleum-burning engines were converting to methane or synfuels. Slowly the burgeoning population of Earth was stabilizing at the twelve-billion level.
Too slowly.
Vasily Malik was not concerned, at this precise moment, with these great questions of wealth and the environment. Head of the Russian Federation’s delegation to the Global Economic Council, Malik was deep in conversation with the woman who had been the chief conciliator at the trial of Willard Mitchell.
“You have all the necessary documentation?” Malik asked.
He studied the conciliator’s face while his words headed toward the Moon at the speed of light. She had a lean, hard face, not easily given to smiling. A spinster’s face, Malik thought, knowing that it was chauvinist of him but thinking he was right just the same.
Vasily Malik was handsome enough to be a video star. He was tall for a Russian, brushing six feet; broad-shouldered and heavily muscled, he kept his body in good trim through a rigid schedule of daily exercise. Once he had worn his golden hair modishly long. Now it was trimmed to an almost military burr. His ice blue eyes could sparkle with laughter, but at this moment they were glittering with hope born of a deep and abiding hatred.
“Yes,” said the chief conciliator. “He talked Mitchell into selling out to him. If we had known that it would be Randolph we were dealing with we would have tripled the fine. Quadrupled it!”
Malik’s broad features eased into a relaxed smile. “You did your best. Randolph is a clever rascal, we must grant him that.”
When his words reached her, she nodded bitterly. “It’s not fair. Mitchell was guilty. He should have been driven out of business. But now Randolph owns his company and he’ll continue to operate.”
Malik made a few sympathetic noises and ended the conversation by asking her to send all the documentation on the trial to him immediately.
Then he leaned back in his imposing leather chair, put his booted feet on his immaculately gleaming desktop, and waited for the fax machine to begin spitting out Dan Randolph’s comeuppance. I only wish it were his death sentence, Vasily Malik said to himself.
Nearly three hours later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Paris time, the weekly meeting of the Global Economic Council’s executive committee convened in the small conference room down the corridor from Malik’s office.
Muhammed Shariff Sibuti of Malaysia, chairman of the committee for this session, was already seated at the head of the gleaming table when Malik entered the room. A lightweight, in every dimension, thought Malik. Sibuti looked shriveled and old, too small for the chair in which he sat. His starched white high-collared shirt made his wrinkled dark skin look almost as black as the leather of the chair’s padding.
“We must begin,” Sibuti said, in a voice that sounded like rusty hinges groaning. “We have a very long agenda. A very difficult agenda.”
The other committee members were milling around the room, largely ignoring their chairman. Malik saw Jane Scanwell at the long table that had been set out with refreshments and finger foods.
He went to her, under the pretext of pouring himself a glass of hot tea from the silver samovar in the center of the table.
“I have good news from Copernicus,” he said softly.
Jane Scanwell glanced up from the coffee cup she had just filled.
The former President of the United States was a handsome woman, nearly as tall as Malik in her heels. She was wearing a skirted suit of forest green over a pale green silk blouse. Her richly auburn hair was neatly coiffed up off her long graceful neck. She surveyed Malik with the cool green eyes of a Norse goddess.
“What did you say?”
“Good news from Copernicus,” Malik repeated. “Dan Randolph has mad
e one clever move too many. He has fallen into a trap that I concocted for him.”
Jane’s sculptured face gave no hint of emotion. She merely said, “You must tell me about it, after the meeting.”
“I’ll be happy to.”
As the meeting droned on, Malik could barely suppress his eager anticipation. Randolph had bested him in so many ways, over the years. It was Randolph who had broken the Russian monopoly on space industry, after Malik had slaved for a decade to drive all competition out of business. Randolph had married the woman Malik had been engaged to, and even though she had divorced the American eventually and had come back to him, there was no real love in their marriage. Both he and his wife were settling for second best.