April 2: Down to Earth

by Mackey Chandler

  "I'll be honest. I don't think I can even picture that big an area in my mind very well. It's more than I can get a handle on. I'd be very happy with that. Do you have any idea where you want to do this?" April asked.

  "When I ran it past Jeff, he told me to put it smack on the equator. I had no idea why, but he said that's where you'd want to put a Lunar Beanstalk. You know the materials and problems, still make it iffy to make an Earth Beanstalk, but Jeff says a Lunar one is a lot easier and we have materials for it now, so it would make the site much more valuable."

  April wrinkled her nose up. "Luna turns so slow. The geostationary orbit must be way out there. How far would it have to reach?"

  "With a Lunar stalk you never reach a real geostationary orbit. That would be at the Earth's center, on the nearside. So you just build to the balance point - L1 - and then hang a counterbalance to the earth side a little to keep it under tension. It's pretty far. About fifty eight thousand kilometers."

  "And there'll really be a market for something that slow? Are you sure it won't be passed by when better ships come into service?"

  "Jeff says they had a similar thing with railroads on Earth. They are slow and not convenient at all, but they are still there today, because nothing is cheaper at moving bulk goods. He also pointed out something I would have never have thought of. You don't have to take the cable all the way to the end. You can build platforms at different levels and land and take off from them, easier than dropping to the surface. He figured you could build hotels and apartments along the cable also and the view would be much nicer than off a spinning station."

  "I know two other people that you should recruit," April offered. "This looks so good to me, because we are so limited here what we can do with cubic. Jon has wanted a range where he can train and qualify his people with guns. He already mentioned maybe somebody on Luna had a range we could use. You could offer him a whole area to run exercises for the militia. I'd ask for his support and help and offer to dedicate a nice piece of land for Security. I'd try to find something that isn't just a flat plain. Something with some hills or mountains too, for interesting training. He'd make a fine ally."

  "Sounds good. In fact we should set aside sections for a town square, a park and room for a university and a spaceport. Why not Public Safety too? Who else?"

  "The King of Tonga. He's in about the same situation as we are. They have very limited land. No way to expand. And land is very important to them. Owning land is a right under their system, but they just don't have the land to give everybody a piece. I bet they would be your first permanent residents if you wanted. They did jump right in and recognize us and work for the Japanese to lift Tongan flagged vessels to bring us supplies. We owe them and they can give you guarantees of Earth landing rights, in exchange for land and access to lunar trade. I think you should make Tongan vessels free of any port fees and give them special protection and priority. You can either offer him his own territory near ours, or some kind of special guarantees of access for Tongan citizens. He's tied to Home already. I've seen Pa 'anga notes circulating already. I just don't know how he would feel about so many of his people mixing in with an electronic democracy. He might think it would undercut his government. You have to think of some way to make everyone feel secure."

  "Maybe if we adapted a constitutional monarch, they could buddy and irritate the hell out of the Americans together," Heather suggested.

  April laughed at that. "But who would be King?" she chuckled.

  Chapter 13

  April canceled her other plans for the day, to see her gramps about this mystery envelope. She headed home to meet him there. He had partitioned off a section of their cubic for his own apartment, with a separate entry on the corridor, but it was cramped and they all met in the big apartment if they could. When her parents were out during the day it didn't hurt anyone's privacy. With both her and her older brother growing up, she could see that dividing the space further would reduce the space left to her parents, to a cramped uncomfortable volume. Fortunately she could also see, that in just a few years, having enough money free to buy a sizable place of her own, was going to be no problem. Living at home still was no particular burden yet, since they were rarely all there at once. She was just grateful her parents were not in any rush to move her out and have a more spacious place.

  But she was aware her brother seemed to have no such inclination. At one of the rare dinners recently, where they had all managed to get together to eat, he had brought up the idea he would be needing a place of his own. His dad had immediately agreed that would be a fine thing. He went on to quickly say they could remodel if he did that and they could have a walk in closet and add some room back onto the living area. Bob had scowled at his plate and not brought up the idea again, as spending his own money for cubic was not where he'd been going with the idea. April had always gotten along with her brother, compared to a lot of siblings pairs she knew, but as time went along she felt he was getting more and more selfish in personality. Their courier business was doing fine and he had other businesses in which she had no interest. But it seemed as he gained wealth, he got cheaper instead of loosening up.

  When she got home her grandpa was sitting on the sofa working off his pad, linked to the big thin screen on the wall. He shut that down once she showed up, picked up a plain white paper envelope and offered it to her. She sat close beside him and pulled the aikuchi and inserted the blade in the gap at the end of the gummed flap, slitting the long side open. The letter inside was handwritten on plain sheets. It had been such a long since she had read anything other than a short note in cursive, that it looked odd, but it was in a lovely hand, neatly done and legible. Her grandpa didn't lean in to read along, letting her go through it first, waiting patiently. It said:

  Dear Miss Lewis,

  I am Lieutenant Isaac Freidman and my associate is Lieutenant Eric Brockman, who was my comrade in the Naval service of the USNA.

  During the recent campaign Home carried out against the USNA we were assigned to the personal protection unit, guarding the person of the President. That was the duty we were discharging when your forces destroyed the deep bunkered facility in West Virginia, known as the Deepwell complex, or now referred to in the media as the Charleston Bunker.

  If you are not aware of it, the President and a number of his line of successors were at the Deepwell facility when it was destroyed. Lt. Brockman and I however did succeed in extracting President Hadley overland to a civilian area of safety, outside the complex.

  We were loyal and honorable officers, serving to the best of our ability. We had neither hidden sympathies, nor interest in acting on your behalf. However circumstances changed, so that President Hadley and several of his detail died at our hands, not by your military action.

  It was generally unknown and may never be known by the public, that the day to day conduct of the Office of the Presidency had deteriorated, to where it was run by simple whim and decree, rather than any orderly process of law. During the period of hostility with Home, a large number of high officials and ranking military men were imprisoned and even executed, for simple displeasure with their service by President Hadley.

  In our case we followed all the established procedures to remove the President from harm's way. However president Hadley resisted removal and would have died in Deepwell if we had not forcibly removed him. He repeatedly and irrationally attempted to return, after the facility was collapsed and destroyed.

  Upon delivering the President to outside forces we witnessed him demanded our immediate execution within his sight, before he would consent to continue his evacuation.

  Asked to surrender our weapons and face an immediate firing squad by such illegal orders, we engaged the members of his receiving detail in a gun battle and prevailed. Although we are aware of the amnesty program you demanded, we doubt we would be regarded as beneficiaries of that plan, given the circumstances we just related. From a practical perspective, nothing has changed sinc
e the Republic's surrender. It is still the normal order of business for people to be snatched from public view, to be held without public accusation or trial.

  Although this affair did not start that way, we now see allying ourselves with Home and attempting to travel there as our best option. We feel we can embrace the political atmosphere and goals to which Home is working, better than any place we could seek shelter on Earth. We desire to be contacted by laser com at -70.3478 W. 45.6231 N. where we will monitor for the next month. If you have occasion to send any representatives to the continent, we ask you to consider having such persons escort us on safe transport to lift for Home.

  We decided to communicate with you Miss Lewis, because of the few individuals from Home visible in the media, you both risked yourself for freedom and have gained no office or title from it. Obviously our trust of people with political aspirations is seriously compromised.

  We await your communication and hopefully a meeting.

  Sincerely,

  Isaac Freidman and Eric Brockman

  April passed the letter to her gramps and got up. "I'm getting tea would you like some?"

  "Please, little gal. That would be nice."

  When she came back she waited for him to finish the long letter.

  "Wordy fellow, but it makes sure we know exactly where they are coming from." he said.

  "The way they say we don't have agents to enforce their surrender, makes me wonder if we did the right thing. Perhaps we should not have demanded anything we can't enforce. If they can get away with stopping travel to Home, maybe that will embolden them to try lifting an armed shuttle next, which we really would respond to with arms." April offered.

  "Possibly. But we can't back up now and grant them leave to close travel. It's too late even if it was a mistake. But yes, it could help them get slowly get bolder, working themselves up to defying us. President Wiggen was put in to finish Hadley's term, but there are those already pushing for her impeachment for surrendering. I don't think they'll succeed in bringing that, but still I doubt she'll get another term."

  "What other choice did she have? Can't people see that?"

  "Seems the greater part of the public doesn't agree. They stayed safe in their homes and the power never went out. They lost their sat TV, or the phones didn't work well for awhile. They had a disruption because the stores had to distribute things without check outs. But for most people it wasn't a hardship. For some of them, it was free food for a couple months. Sometimes better than what they would have bought. They are already used to not traveling and the government has already been very skilled at covering up the death of troops, because of occupying the Trans Arabic Protectorate and other areas around the globe."

  "How do they do that? Aren't there funerals and upset relatives?"

  "They stopped shipping the bodies of enlisted men home and now if you tell others you lost a family member, it's considered a breach of national security. So they can strip the family of badly needed death benefits. If any of the rest of the family are military, their career effectively ends also if they blab. That's quite a lever on people, who join the service for a job and security. They'd all end up on the pavement, with no insurance and no housing. The prospects of a civilian job aren't very good with a black mark against you either. Nothing we can do about that. We can't take on the job of reforming North America."

  "What I'm fretting about, is who will replace Wiggen when she goes? The choices are mostly bad and worse. The choices are between somebody that wants to hit us right away, or one that wants to wait a bit, to build up their forces first. You can see them cranking up the propaganda machine already, to fight us again. We have been getting terrible press. A few of us older guys talked about broadcasting video, to show our side of things, but a we finally decided it was pointless. We examined how that sort of program has been working for the Americans in the Pan Arabic Protectorate and the Greeks in Macedonia. The time such a propaganda machine worked is just over. Anybody with an I.Q. bigger than their shoe size doesn't even believe video images now. What we need, is for the media outlets to pursue us. Just like when Genji Akira did that web piece on you. That piece and the video off the Happy left such an impression, you still have high public recognition when people are tested."

  "You polled people about remembering me?" she asked, starting to get irritated.

  "No, no we just bought generic polls, that ask people about a whole list of people in the news the last year and you tested way up there on the list," he assured her. "People use them to decide who to ask to help sell ground cars or whatever. I'd have been afraid to commission an actual survey about you alone, because that might tell somebody we intend to use your celebrity. And what is really helpful, is even people that don't like Home at all, still responded favorably to you as an individual."

  "This is horrible," April muttered. "I have no desire to be a public figure."

  "But you are, whether you want to be or not. Especially among the young people. So what I'm going to say worries me as your grandpa, but I see it as one of our few options. I think you should go down and take a vacation in North America and rub their noses in the rights we demanded in their surrender. They need reminded they lost. You should travel without permits, wear your pistol and go to clubs and parks, where you'll cause a fuss and create problems. I shouldn't try too hard to have kind words for the politicos and I wouldn't let them bustle you off out of sight, with the pretense it is special treatment. When you get interviewed and you will, don't smooth over you fought in the war. Nobody has to be ashamed of it and you can publicly, just matter of fact, tell of sinking aircraft carriers and destroying bases, that they are trying to keep from the public. It will create a real problems for them. We don't care if you even reveal the Great San Diego earthquake was a miscalculation. After all we didn't do it on purpose. If I did it they'd just arrest my butt and nobody would care. If they do it to a young, popular girl it looks horrible."

  "Wouldn't they deny what I say?"

  "Yes, they will, but it's against the law to mechanically verify the truth of what someone is saying in North America right now, unless you have their permission. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be a politician alive who could make a speech. So my suggestion is, to invite them to verify everything you say with analyzing software. All the newsies have it and use it. They just can't say what it told them. And if anyone contradicts you, point out they don't have the courage to allow their own statements to be run through the test."

  "Are you sure anyone will be interested? I won't be telling them anything fifty others couldn't tell them. There are some things I'd like to do down there, such as to go to the Air and Space Museum, but I always figured it would be too big a hassle to do. I'm not even sure I could afford it. I have all kinds of things going on to do up here." April related to him her agreement with Heather, to help grab Lunar real estate.

  "Things are cheap dirtside. You can stay in a nice hotel, for what an eight hour sleep shift in a hot slot drawer costs up here. We all kicked in money to fund it. We thought we could probably get folks to fund an official embassy in Washington, that wouldn't help us at all, but didn't want to ask the general population of Home for what looks like your private vacation, even though we think it will do much more good. All your friends kicked in. Even Ruby and Easy gave travel vouchers for your flights."

  "We would have come up with about five million Euro, but Eddie has gotten filthy rich in the markets while building his ships. He insisted on giving twenty-five million. We actually tried to talk him out of it. We thought you'd object to taking that much. But he pointed out it might avert a war and if we do go to war we will probably bombard all the things off the map, that his wealth is based on. A lot of his stocks and securities would be worthless. So he considers it an investment. He swears it is less than twenty percent of what he is worth too. He's talking about financing another habitat himself, so I believe him. If anything he probably fudged a hair on that, to cover up how much he really has and
I bet it is closer to five percent of what he's worth," he confided.

  "What he said specifically, is you should flaunt it, that the North Americans respect money almost as much as military power, so make them aware how much wealth Home has. The newsies paint our wealth as unfair, but honestly, almost nobody would turn down a chance to share in it. Eddie recommended buying a vacation home outright and shopping so the gossip columns carry it. In fact he said if you need more, just call him up and he'd transfer it. Now with these two," he said tapping the letter, "you'll have something else to get you in the news. Just try not to get your little butt shot off."

  "If I do, will you work with Heather instead of me, to get her land company going?"

  "Sure. I'll do whatever she needs. I'll even go to Luna myself, if I need to. Deal?"

  April thought a minute. Their appeal to her by name was strong, but she also resented being put on the spot. It smelled of a set-up, that they'd taken up a collection before talking to her and it was sort of an imposition, but a tremendous compliment too.

  "Yeah, I'll go. But I think I'll get that gene mod from Jerry before I go," she said.

  "Then get your pad out and I'll beam you what we have collected. It's about thirty million EM and you can convert it, or move it around, or spread it among accounts. Whatever you want. It's yours and you use it however you feel is best. If you have any left over when you come back, it's yours for the risks you're taking.