Collision

by William S. Cohen

  Winslow breathlessly hailed SpaceMine for “taking the world into a new realm—the commerce of space.” SpaceMine’s founders, he went on to say, planned to mine asteroids. “These gems of the heavens,” he said, “have higher concentrations of precious metals, such as platinum, than any known ore mine on Earth.”

  At no time did Winslow ever describe how SpaceMine would chip away the asteroids’ treasure. Instead, he ran a cartoonish NASA video that showed huge robotic machinery and vehicles gouging ore out of a landscape consisting entirely of rock.

  The press conference that had launched SpaceMine had been dominated by the hologram of SpaceMine’s CEO, Robert Wentworth Hamilton, the world’s fifth-or sixth-richest man, depending upon what list of billionaires you accepted. There were also two former astronauts and three investment bankers, who looked particularly uncomfortable being projected as spectral holograms. In the following months, GNN had begun producing SpaceMine Special and sold rights to television networks throughout the world.

  SpaceMine seemed to be everywhere—a Facebook site with an ever-growing army of friends; a constantly spouting Twitter with 1,627,435 followers. “SpaceMine” appeared at the top of responses to any Googled query with the word “space” in it. Every special fostered videos and endless comments on blogs, some of them genuinely spontaneous and others written by SpaceMine’s digital hires.

  Each special was a kind of reality show devoted to talks by Hamilton or an astronaut and images of SpaceMine workers at scattered, unidentified sites performing vaguely described experiments or building components of what was called the Asteroid Exploitation System. In the latest special, Hamilton compared the enterprise to the Manhattan Project, which took several routes toward development of the atomic bomb “before deciding which one would quickest lead our nation to its goal.”

  Millions of viewers got used to GNN’s use of holograms, which carried SpaceMine into the borderland of scientific fact and science fiction. There was an aura of secrecy: no interviews, no identification of SpaceMine sites. Because SpaceMine was so much a product of GNN and cable television, newspapers and network television retaliated by giving the corporation little coverage.

  About a year ago, a GNN SpaceMine Special had been devoted to discussing the potential launching of the corporation’s initial public offering. Hamilton, in his usual hologram form, urged viewers to stay tuned for a progress report on the company’s IPO plans, “giving anyone on Earth the opportunity to share in the equivalent of a new ‘gold rush’ in space.”

  Some stock analysts, whose judgments were not particularly reliable, speculated that SpaceMine could exceed the phenomenally successful $30 billion IPO achieved that year by the Bradbury451 Group. The hype had given SpaceMine a few days of publicity well beyond GNN. But Wall Street yawned and soon moved on to other news.

  Falcone was no fan of television, reality or otherwise. He occasionally watched newscasts by CNN, BBC, CCTV, and Al Jazeera to see how different channels covered essentially the same news. He had not paid much attention to the SpaceMine specials until today, when, for professional reasons, he found himself watching and recording one. Hamilton was now a Sullivan & Ford client. The move of a superclient like Hamilton from one law firm to another was as secretive and complex as a CIA rendition operation. One day the client was at Firm X. The next day the client was at Firm Z, and neither X nor Z had any documents that showed who had engineered the transfer or how it was made. Falcone had learned about the acquisition of Hamilton a few weeks before, when a terse, confidential memo had been sent to Falcone and the other senior partners.

  Falcone had no direct connection with the new client. He was watching the SpaceMine special out of curiosity and jotting notes on a yellow pad in the assumption that someday he would be asked to offer some counsel to Hamilton, such as the probable reaction of political and financial decision makers to a corporation operating in space.

  If a corporation is a person, what is a corporation that is no longer a fulltime Earthling? Interesting issue, the lawyerly part of his brain mused.

  SpaceMine had been late to the game of exploiting space assets in our galaxy. Other firms, such as Gold Spike and Moon Struck, had bolted out of the gate the moment that Congress canceled NASA’s ambitious plans to send men to Mars and beyond in the quest for scientific knowledge that could benefit mankind.

  Falcone did not hold Robert Wentworth Hamilton in particularly high regard. It was nothing personal between them. He just resented how our political system had been corrupted by men like Hamilton. Politicians were like crackheads begging for a fix. Not for cocaine, but for money. People like Hamilton were eager to feed their addiction and turn them into grateful lapdogs.

  And now Hamilton had hired Sullivan & Ford to handle all of the legal work associated with his latest adventure into space. This time it was millions for advice, not votes. Given my druthers, Falcone thought, I would have told Hamilton to pound sand with his checkbook. But it had not been Falcone’s decision to make. And, besides, he had to remind himself that it wasn’t personal. Just business.

  *

  As Falcone sat there watching SpaceMine’s latest info-commercial on GNN, he remembered his recent lunch with the Post’s Philip Dake at the Metropolitan Club, one of Washington’s premier establishments, where new and old power players could meet to drink, dine, discuss politics, or close business deals. He had spotted Hamilton sitting at a table located at the far end of the main dining room. He was in deep conversation with Senator Kenneth Collinsworth of Texas, the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations.

  At the end of their lunch, both men rose and shook hands. Falcone suspected that a deal had just been struck. No money had passed hands, of course. The money would come later in the form of a large check from a political action committee masquerading as a nonprofit, tax-free organization dedicated to some innocuous-sounding social welfare cause.

  Hamilton didn’t have to wait long to reap the benefit from the time spent dining on a Cobb salad in the company and surroundings of the club’s elite members. A week later, President Oxley’s NASA budget for space exploration was cut by nearly sixty percent. The cut included NASA’s multiyear asteroid plan: the launching of an unmanned spacecraft to capture a small asteroid and tow it closer to Earth. Astronauts would later travel to the asteroid to examine it, providing science with the first on-site assessment of a near-Earth object.

  Collinsworth’s budget cut shouldered NASA out of asteroid travel and pretty much handed it over to SpaceMine. It was all done in the name of fiscal austerity. It was all so civilized, so legal, and in Falcone’s mind, so perfectly corrupt.

  Dake had worked closely with Falcone during the White House investigation into the Savannah disaster, the subject of a book he had nearly completed. Dake had typically held back details from his Post stories, saving them for the book. Falcone agreed to look over the manuscript before Dake submitted it to his publisher.

  “All I want is tributes and praise. No criticisms,” Dake had said, giving Falcone a quick smile.

  “You’ll get what you deserve,” Falcone said. “And what will you be up to next?”

  “Oddly enough,” Dake said, “it’s that gentleman who just left.”

  “Collinsworth?”

  “Oh, God, no. Not that shyster. He’s bound to be indicted one of these days. Then I might use my talents on him. No. I’m thinking about Hamilton.”

  “So, it’s not by chance that you and he were at lunch in the club on the same day. I imagine you have an understanding with the maître d’.”

  “My life is adorned with coincidences,” Dake said with another smile. “Seriously, Hamilton is a fascinating subject. Even more fascinating for me because the son of a bitch is so elusive, so totally shielded from the public.”

  “Some billionaires have a way of being invisible,” Falcone said. “Comes with the territory.”

  “He’s a challenge, all right. So far, all I have is some background on his fa
ther. Well, the death of his father.” Dake leaned back, and Falcone knew that Dake was taking the floor.

  “When Hamilton was fourteen, his father disappeared. Henry Hamilton was the owner of a small, independent bank in a Boston suburb. He had gone on a whale-watching ship out of Gloucester. A mile or so out, while all the patrons were on one side of the ship watching a whale spout, he was apparently on the other side. No one saw him go over the rail. His body was never found.

  “There were rumors that he had staged his apparent death. Hamilton was just old enough to read the Globe’s stories, which cautiously mentioned speculation about the disappearance. But the insurance company finally paid off the fifteen-million-dollar policy. There were also rumors about the health of the bank. But the chairman of the bank board took over and managed to keep it going.

  “The life insurance payoff was the beginning of young Hamilton’s fortune. Eventually, he bought the bank. He financed private investigations into his father’s death. Supposedly, he is haunted by the belief that his father is still alive.”

  “Interesting,” Falcone said. “But if that’s all you have, you’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Well, I have some more. I talked to one of the investigators. He turned up the fact that Hamilton was born illegitimate and was adopted by the childless Hamiltons soon after birth. They took elaborate measures to appear as blood parents. The wife dressed up in maternity clothes. The husband managed to get some clerk to create a birth certificate showing the Hamiltons as his natural parents. The investigator told me that the adoption had come as a shock to Hamilton. Mama had never told him. That, I’m convinced, is the source of stories that he thinks that in a previous life he was the historical Alexander Hamilton, who was also born illegitimate. And, like the historical Alexander Hamilton, he has a deep belief in a personal God.”

  “Well, does he expect to be killed in a duel?” Falcone asked.

  “In a rare interview—in a little Christian magazine he bankrolled—he was asked how he would describe his faith. He said, ‘I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty.’ The interviewer didn’t realize that those were Alexander Hamilton’s dying words after Aaron Burr shot him.”

  3

  Falcone came out of his reverie as Ned Winslow’s voice seemed to take on a messianic tone. “We are on a commercial voyage to a new place for minerals that are getting rare and expensive to mine on Earth,” he said. “I’m literally speaking of a new world, a world where a mile-wide piece of rock called an asteroid contains platinum and other minerals worth about eight trillion dollars. Palladium goes into cars’ catalytic converters, converting harmful gases into harmless gases. We’re just around the corner from palladium fuel cells that will combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, heat, and water. Palladium is the future!”

  There was a time when NASA had a monopoly on America’s imagination, a time when bold rhetoric of a young president inspired us to put a man on the moon, Falcone mused. But thanks to Hamilton and other government-get-out-of-the-way forces, space now ranked low on the list of budgetary issues being juggled by the White House and Congress. The economic recovery touted by the chairman of the Federal Reserve had proved anemic.

  In his latest State of the Union address, the President had reintroduced his plan to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, putting NASA back in the man-in-space business. Well, Congress shot that down again. Reluctantly, the Oxley administration had been forced to yield a leadership role to the new space buccaneers.

  The moneymen were now in charge. NASA was in the backseat of a grounded spacecraft. That meant that SpaceMine and the others probably wouldn’t have to worry about government interference.

  When it came to Oxley, one never knew if his heart was behind his words, but Falcone genuinely hoped that Oxley would supercharge his support of NASA’s plans and take on his political opponents. The exploitation of space wasn’t science fiction anymore. It was real, and the government damn well needed to stay involved in it.

  It was getting pretty crowded up there. And space was no place to be playing demolition derby where there were no rules and no judges. The mining of the moon and near-Earth asteroids was bound to lure adventurous capitalists, and they would try to make their own laws, as had the gold seekers who stampeded to California and Alaska two centuries ago.

  There was a theoretical barrier in the form of the Outer Space Treaty, which called for international regulation of space activities. The treaty had been around since 1967, but it focused primarily on preventing the use of space for military purposes by states and their governments. Concern for the commercial exploitation of space was, no doubt, deferred for later negotiations, considering the magnitude of the costs and complexities of the issues invoved.

  Falcone made a note to call his friend Dr. Benjamin Franklin Taylor, a NASA veteran who was assistant director of the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum and prospective science advisor to the President. Taylor would know whether SpaceMine’s entry into the race might stir up new interest in the treaty among scientists.

  Falcone was sorting through his thoughts about all of this when Ned Winslow announced the arrival of Hamilton’s hologram “to make what is undoubtedly the most astounding announcement since Neil Armstrong walked upon the moon.”

  Hamilton seemingly stepped out of the hologram and appeared as a slim, middle-aged man in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-gold striped tie. He stood before a huge image of the night sky.

  “Twelve months and eleven days ago,” he said, “from Earth Base SpaceMine, we launched a rocket that last night delivered a payload of scientific instruments to Asteroid USA, the first object in the cosmos to become commercial property. To all of us at SpaceMine, Asteroid USA is now a branch office, an entity of free enterprise. Capitalism—American capitalism—is now in space.”

  Hamilton turned and aimed an object the size of a TV remote. A laser beam shot across the star-studded backdrop and stopped in the great W of Cassiopeia, a constellation named after a vain Greek mythological queen, identifiable by its “W” shape in the northern sky.

  “This is the approximate region where Asteroid USA is located, far away in the northern sky. Soon, SpaceMine’s Asteroid USA will begin sending a signal—U-S-A in Morse code—that will be heard on shortwave radio at approximately four-eight-seven-nine kilohertz.” He paused before adding in his oddly singsong voice: “You will be hearing more about Asteroid USA and SpaceMine in the near future.” Hamilton paused again for a moment, and then went on.

  “Future. What a wonderful word. To put it simply, we are months away from beginning a mining operation on an asteroid. In an amazingly short time, SpaceMine is about to do what the U.S. government—NASA—said was something that would take decades to do. The NASA plan called for putting the captured asteroid into orbit near the moon so that astronauts could visit it by 2025. That asteroid—in the government version—would become a sort of boot camp for humans who would learn how to live and work in distant solar sites, including Mars. Asteroid USA—the capitalist version—will do that far sooner and be a source of wealth, fantastic wealth.

  “This is the most important venture—the greatest adventure—ever launched by an American entrepreneur—or an entrepreneur from any country on Earth. May God bless America and Asteroid USA.”

  Hamilton disappeared and Winslow reappeared. As usual, Winslow did not question Hamilton or give GNN viewers any background on Hamilton’s statement. Winslow began narrating a documentary about SpaceMine. Falcone, although intrigued by Hamilton’s announcement, decided this was the right time for an intermission.

  Near a doodle of a hologram man on his yellow pad Falcone jotted Hamilton’s name and hit the hold button. The building was laid out as a hollow square inside a glass-walled atrium. Partners’ tenth-floor offices were strung along three sides of the atrium, their doors opening onto an inner corridor. On the north side were a large conference room and staff offices. Falcone left his office on the s
outh side and turned left toward the west corridor.

  At the beginning of the west corridor were a reception cubicle and two elevators, one a private express to the tenth floor. When Falcone turned, the express elevator’s door opened and two men stepped out, escorted by the receptionist, Ellen Franklin. Falcone said hello to her as she returned to her cubicle chair. Across from Ellen, on a black couch, sat a young woman wearing a blue dress and an elderly man in a yellow shirt and brown suit, apparently waiting to see a partner.

  The two men from the elevator looked straight ahead and made no attempt to acknowledge Falcone as he passed. Continuing down the corridor, he heard one of the men speaking to Ellen. He had a slight accent of some kind. Falcone made out the words “Al Jazeera” and “Harold Davidson,” the name of a partner.

  They look foreign. Not quite Middle Eastern, not Asian. But, well, not American. The unexpected thought momentarily troubled him; he told himself that the thought had been instinctive, not prejudiced.

  As he continued down the corridor, he tried to understand his moment of bigotry. Or was it something else? He could not dismiss a sense that there was an aura of hostility about the men, and he wasn’t quite sure why that sense sometimes suddenly flared. He had a habit of sizing people up from how they looked, how they walked, and how they engaged with other people. Maybe it was just the thing that scientists called pheromones, airborne odors that sent signals to another member of the same species. Or maybe he was just too quick to prejudge people. Whatever the reason, he didn’t have a good feeling about them.