All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  All in Good Time

  Mackay Chandler

  Cover by Sara Hoyt

  © 2020 Mackey Chandler

  Chapter 1

  Jeff Singh, Irwin Hall, and Eddie Persico sat away from the crowd, by the back wall in the old cafeteria, drinking coffee and conspiring. On Earth that would have been like the Governor of the Federal Bank, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the CEO of Amazon-Walmart-Fuji (AWF) meeting in the corner booth at a Waffle House. On Home, the social and political strata related to wealth and power still existed, but was exhibited in very different ways. None of them had bodyguards or felt the need to have a special secure conference room to keep such meetings secret.

  Markets wouldn’t change value wildly on rumors the three were seen together, because those sorts of public markets didn’t exist on Home. If anyone on Home held Earth stocks they were traded on Earth exchanges, with all the risks that applied to foreigners operating in a different legal system. Eddie did so, but retained one of the three resident attorneys on Home who served Home citizens to deal with the complexities of Earth laws and taxes.

  Most businesses on Home and Central on the Moon were sole proprietors or partnerships. So far the Assembly hadn’t seen giving legal status to corporations as desirable. Several speakers objected to allowing foreign corporations any special rights of personhood, arguing that would diminish personal responsibility when such a thing was proposed. Earth corporations had little representation on Home because their agents would be held personally responsible for their corporate conduct. That effectively negated the reasons to do business as a corporation. There were three banks and two delivery services brave enough to pay somebody very well to do that, and their terms of service were very different on Home than what the Earth branches of their companies offered.

  Jeff and Irwin ran the two banks that were exclusively spacer owned, and Eddie was the richest person on Home, at least in terms of actual liquid cash assets. Eddie was aware Jeff with his partners Heather and April probably had more potential for wealth looking a few decades into the future. Far from being competitors, they both intended to informally support and accommodate each other as having complementary business interests even if they weren’t actual partners.

  Irwin was their link to Earthly interests, given Jeff was effectively isolated from using most Earth banking systems. Not that Earthies were all that thrilled with Irwin’s Private Bank of Home, but there was trade between the habitat and Earth that was too large and important to run underground. Home made biologicals and electronics that couldn’t be produced in gravity. The illegal trade was always much more expensive too. The de facto currency of Home was the solar, a monetary unit based on a twenty-five gram gold or platinum coin, which was illegal to hold or trade in North America or China.

  As long as the coins carried the name of Jeff’s System Trade Bank on its face instead of Irwin’s Private Bank of Home the Earthies ignored the fact that much of the metal the System Trade Bank coined came from Irwin’s deposits and went straight back to him for a minimal seigniorage. There wasn’t really an alternative way to carry on an exchange that wouldn’t cost more or look worse. So Irwin kept access to four bank clearing systems, though only the Russian Federation and India treated him as a full peer in their system.

  Eddie wanted to build a second companion habitat to Home, opposite it in a halo orbit around the meta-stable point that Home circled out beyond the Moon. Actually, he wanted to build two of them, but he didn’t quite have the funds to build one alone, so he was discussing how to bring in Earth money with the two bankers. It bothered him not to keep total control of the project that sole ownership would allow, but he was worried the Earth economy was recovering sufficiently somebody else might undertake the project and get in ahead of him. The slots in the orbital path were up for grab, ever since Home had made clear the UN or any other Earth agencies weren’t going to be able to tell the Homies where they could park. China had lost a couple trillion Yuan of ships and their crews trying to enforce that defunct idea. The UN didn’t exist anymore, except as some obsolete agreements on paper without agency.

  If Eddie didn’t get some construction started opposite Home there was a real possibility a consortium of Japanese, Australian, and other partners might put a smaller habitat there to establish squatter’s rights until they could build on the initial station. Jeff and Irwin both agreed that was a danger, and would rather deal with Eddie controlling a new hab than some unknown. It would be glaringly hypocritical to object someone else couldn’t do the same thing Home had done and stake out an unoccupied space.

  “I don’t want to just build an unspun hub,” Eddie insisted. “I want it to be obvious we intend to ultimately build a series of rings just like Home has, but with more cubic and stiffer so it can be moved easier if we need to in the future. So I want the start of a beefy spindle and two cylindrical sections at the end of two arms that investors can visualize being extended over time each way until they complete a ring. You’d leave closed off sections on the hub where two more spokes would be extended too. It needs to be built strong enough to spin up to a full g when the ring is completed all the way around. I want it to be obvious it’s just a start and where stuff will be added on next.”

  “That would be hard to keep balanced out without a full ring to carry a balancing circuit,” Irwin pointed out. “You’d have to pump against the throw clear to the hub to transfer to the other side. It wouldn’t be near as fast as pumping around a full ring.”

  “That’s another reason why we’d only spin it up to half speed until we have a full ring,” Eddie said. “Do you really have serious doubts about the feasibility? Have you read the engineering studies and alternate proposals? Neither of you are aerospace architects. If you have specific doubts somebody must be feeding them. Is somebody I’m not aware of speaking against the project?”

  Irwin shook his head no. “They aren’t serious objections. I pretty much skipped all the detailed stuff about early construction and went to the architectural concept drawings and important numbers at the end. All the deep stuff about moment arms and skin loadings was Greek to me. It’s just that when you start talking about it, all these objections easily pop to mind. I know just enough from living in Home to have ideas about what can go wrong.”

  “It’s probably better to not bring all that stuff up unless you are talking with a space nut or a construction worker who is just fascinated with every detail,” Irwin told Eddie. “I have to pretty much trust the people you hired to know what they are doing. You have to trust me to be able to say whether the needed money can be attracted to the project no matter how physically sound and practical it is. Some of my job is stoking the desire to do the project. Have you decided on a name for the hab? I can’t just keep describing it in general terms to people who would put their money into it. A name makes it real to them.”

  “We’ve just been calling it Beta,” Eddie said. “I figure when there are enough actual inhabitants somebody will propose a name. Who would have predicted Mitsubishi 3 would become Home? The designers have been speaking of Gamma too, but I’m trying to restrain myself from sounding like I’m wildly optimistic. I’ll talk about a third hab after Beta is well started and a reality.”

  “I can work with Beta,” Irwin said. “It’s actually good. It reminds the investors that this isn’t a new concept, it’s just another hab like has already been built and in use.”

  “I know just enough about shipbuilding to understand some of the terms,” Jeff Singh said. “It’s like a person who knows how to do simple line drawings looking at an oil painting. They are both art and may share some similarities of perspective and composition. But that doesn’t mean that because you can do a decent pencil sketch tha
t you can actually do an oil painting. Likewise, I know a little banking, but Irwin understands the Earth’s banking systems and what their people want to hear from him better than me. So, I have to trust both of you to a large degree.”

  Irwin believed Jeff had no idea how to schmooze with Earth bankers. Stories about his confusion and inappropriate responses in social situations abounded. In fairness, a lot of them were old and simply wouldn’t go away. His ladies seemed to have done a great job of grooming both his manners and his public appearance. He even dressed better now. But he could still present as normal for days and then suddenly turn strange for the oddest reasons. Irwin, however, suspected his dependency on him to deal with Earth bankers was more in the nature of a convenience than necessity. There were other socially skilled gracious spox to be hired if needed. If the required response was less than gracious Jeff seemed to handle that fine himself.

  When Jeff’s bank was cut out of Earth settlement systems over the creation of his currency, he hadn’t begged for acceptance and a way to make amends. Rather, Jeff very publicly stopped accepting their currencies, dumping the dollars and euromarks his bank was holding like two-day-old fish with sunken eyes. Doing so through shady Russians in a way that was just private enough it was hard to denounce, and public enough not to fool anyone about what was happening. The audacity of the action was something no Earth banker would have anticipated. Irwin certainly hadn’t expected it. It was then their currencies that had declined sharply rather than solars.

  Irwin suspected that without his help to retain some connection between the banking systems it would have gotten a lot uglier, and he wouldn’t bet that Jeff wasn’t capable of creating a full-blown panic in the Earth financial systems. He had the damnedest knack of saying the unvarnished truth nobody wanted to hear at the worst possible moment.

  Jeff still denied deliberately engineering that devaluation. Irwin had been tempted back then, and still occasionally thought about running Jeff’s statements through verification software. He’d discussed doing that with his most trusted employee, Dan Prescott, who handled their IT. Dan had asked just what Irwin expected to do if he got answers he didn’t like? He also predicted Irwin would be tempted to script words and phrases into his conversations with Jeff to try to elicit answers the software could quantify better.

  “Do you think that would work?” Irwin asked, intrigued at the idea.

  “I think he’d catch on to it about the third time you said something that isn’t your usual pattern of speech. You’d substitute a stronger word for your normally mild euphemisms trying to elicit a response. Think about it. If you knew someone was checking it for veracity I bet it would change your speech even if you tried not to let it. Once he saw you were fishing for certain keywords and topics he’d lead you about with false responses until you ended up knowing even less than you did before.” Dan said.

  “You really think he is that smart?” Irwin demanded.

  “I know he is. I’m smart enough to know that he’s a lot smarter than me, even if like most very smart people, it makes him a bit strange. Now, the next thing you are going to be tempted to say is, ‘If he’s so smart maybe you should go work for him.’ I’ve heard you say variations on that to other people. If you say it out loud to me I will go see if he’ll hire me.”

  Irwin didn’t say it, but he didn’t deny thinking it either. Dan had a big enough interest in the bank now it would be awkward to have him go work for Jeff. They cooperated but tried to maintain a public separation. He also knew Jeff was smarter than him, and suspected Dan was too. He certainly was about computers and security. Irwin had that twinge of insecurity so many feel to have an employee smarter than them. He’d resisted acting on it so far because he’d seen other businesses fail from limiting themselves that way.

  What Irwin didn’t understand, was that it was a positive factor in retaining Dan. If he quit, Dan had pretty much two choices, start his own bank, for which he lacked the capital to do so alone, or go to work for Singh. He wasn’t comfortable with either bringing in partners or working for somebody that much smarter than him. He felt much more secure with Irwin.

  “If you have the basics, why not go ahead and learn how to build stations?” Eddie asked Jeff, cutting off Irwin’s worrying over his insecurities.

  “There isn’t enough time to know everything. In the last few years, I’ve had a hand in designing and building a dozen ships with a lot of help from others. Yet I couldn’t start to design an Earth-style ship to Earth standards. Even that is too specialized. How long do you think it would be before I got to help design a dozen stations? I had to get a lot of help just to design the zero-g temporary housing we built. The payback period on that deep and difficult of a course of study is too long for me. Let somebody else do it who thinks it’s fun.”

  “That pretty much describes the two fellows I’m using,” Eddie said. “I swear they would do it on their own time if they couldn’t find anybody to pay them for it. They’re just disappointed they can’t show off by doing fancy stuff like the park that one guy keeps suggesting to the Assembly.”

  “They haven’t had to vote to shut him up the last couple of assemblies,” Jeff reminded them. “My Lady April suggested such a thing would be much easier to do on the Moon. I understand he intends to move there once he finds a job opening that suits him. Heather is not opposed in principle to dual-use farming and parkland, but the conditions that prevail in most of the cabbage mines may put this fellow off who would see it used as a park too.”

  “Not enough open space?” Eddie guessed.

  “That can be worked around,” Jeff said with a dismissive gesture, “But a lot of the crops are too susceptible to disease to let a couple of hundred people a day march through. Working gloved and stepping in antiseptic and then a rinse entering the grow room is standard with a lot of things. Ginger still gets contaminated even doing that. I think the mold may ride in on our clothing. Mo just recently started making the workers wear paper suits and hair covers to tend ginger.

  “Most grow rooms are sealed behind a lock because they have higher CO² levels, and the lighting is often shifted to odd parts of the spectrum to promote growth or enhance a certain desired yield. Will people enjoy a park shifted to red or yellow lighting? They’ll work out something for limited areas to be dual-use, but not in a week or even a year from now.”

  “I’ll be happy if we just have some decorative planters or wall gardens in the public areas of the new station,” Irwin said.

  “You need that in your concept drawings for your presentations and eventually public announcements. Having some flowers and plants is good PR even for a business like a hotel. To whom do you plan to make the early presentations?” Jeff asked.

  “The situation is not stable enough in Hong Kong for foreigners,” Irwin said, “And even Singapore requires too much security for me to want to risk it. I’m planning on doing a small private meeting with bankers and aerospace people in Darwin. It’s readily accessible by air. If enough Japanese declare a strong interest, I might do another meeting in Tokyo rather than inconvenience them to come to Australia.”

  “You aren’t going to teleconference?” Jeff asked, a little alarmed.

  “These are the sort of negotiations where various parties want to meet after to speak in their own privacy and security envelope. You end up doing two or three private meetings in the evening after the one in common. I’ll get a lot more accomplished face to face. If there is sufficient interest I might go to Cuba. It has made a very good thing for itself being a neutral banking center between South America and its huge dysfunctional neighbor to the north. North America still bans hypersonics. Even those leaving their coasts, so everybody goes to Cuba to reroute to Asia or Europe. From there I can get a hypersonic back west to Hawaii to lift for Home, or east to Europe if there is interest to be followed up on there.”

  “I’m concerned for your personal safety,” Jeff said. “I’ve heard of a few people visiting states that are ve
ry liberal about genetic mods, but you could still have problems making safe connecting flights. I don’t trust Earthies. Look how they shot at me two years ago. They can’t decide from one day to the next whether or not we have a treaty with them.”

  “I think you would be surprised how many have made business trips in the last year,” Irwin said. “They don’t advertise they are going for security concerns, but some of my customers told me privately they wouldn't be available for a week or two and why. In fact, some go to the effort to not appear absent at all by making their usual contacts and com calls. Not everybody is as big a target as you,” Irwin said pointedly. “I doubt anyone would waste a missile on me, and certainly not riding in a commercial craft with a hundred others.”

  “I suppose. I pretty much had to promise my ladies I wouldn’t make myself a target by going down to the Slum Ball again,” Jeff revealed. He wouldn’t even admit they were his ladies to most people, but Irwin and Eddie were close friends beyond any business interests. He wondered if April knew Irwin was planning a trip to Earth what she would tell him?

  * * *

  Heather, Jeff, and April found three days that they could all be together at Central before Jeff had to return to Home on business. It seemed like pleasant days spent together were more and more difficult to schedule the wider the reach of their business interests grew. It wasn’t simply about making money, it was about maintaining their political independence and safety. Now that they had a star drive, Jeff said he’d like to find a habitable planet so far away the Earthies would be centuries finding it and just leave all the turmoil and stress of dealing with them behind. Neither of his ladies took it for a serious proposal, but they understood his feelings.

  Heather had the deepest roots put down, being sovereign of Central with hundreds of subjects and owning a great deal of lunar real estate, but she agreed even before April.