Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  That’s what we’re part of, he thought. The real, ultimate way the universe is, not just this moist curtain above a sandy stretch. Reality, big and strange and wonderful.

  2023

  At twenty-two he decided to tint his black hair gray to appear on his first business panel, about resource extraction from asteroids. With dark glasses and long sideburns the tinting made him look older. The moderator was the famous Interplanetary Resources exec Peter Diamandis, who deftly kept the talk flowing without digressing.

  A steely-looking woman in a stylish blue suit got into an argument with a panelist guy from NASA, saying, “Your main goal appears to be not to fail. In the bigger space companies and academia, the mission has to work. So you gold plate everything and your price soars.”

  “And you’re about profit, period,” the guy shot back.

  “People give us money, their choice, we pay them with dividends. You take taxes with laws.”

  He said slowly, “Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, the rest—they have great track records.”

  “They’re monuments, this is a movement.”

  The audience murmured and people started arguing with each other. Harold surveyed the discontent with a bemused smile.

  He’d seen their likes before. Merit-driven products of the test-prep industry, capable cogs. And yet they did their jobs while thinking they were countercultural rebels. Their generation loved the Standard Storyline: insurgents fighting the true establishment, that distant dull group that was always somebody else. They were sharp and from Ivy Leagues, Stanford, Caltech. That unconscious attitude prevailed in corporate boardrooms, so they could rail against the establishment over cabernet in the evenings.

  As he watched this woman he reflected that in a way he had accomplished the life goals his parents had taught him, mostly by example. He had found a good way to make a living, had started a business, and enjoyed it all. He got up each morning eager to get to the office. But this woman made him realize he had other goals left to achieve.

  The focused woman said, “If you’re young and lean, things can fail. For the big space companies the whole competition is just getting the government contract, then it’s all risk aversion. It’s not at all about doing something cool, first to market, then making money so you can do more. That’s what I like: not playing it safe. To shift gears, to follow your nose.”

  She seemed startled when she got applause. Harold nodded and smiled at her. His talk was next. Fairly technical, about universal joints, AI linkages, and space applications—but she listened intently as he outlined a rock-prospector team of robots he had worked out and tried in the Arizona desert.

  Moving on, Diamandis commented that for robots, deserts might be easier than space. Then on a concluding note, he asked where all this work would lead. “Prosperity!” the woman said. Someone in the large audience called, “To the stars!,” and another voice shouted, “The stars? Impossible! Why do it anyway?”

  She glanced at the moderator and said, “Why go to the stars? Because we are the descendants of those primates who chose to look over the next hill. Because we won’t survive on this rock indefinitely. Because they’re there.”

  The panel met in the bar with Diamandis for drinks after. He could not take his eyes off her, even when she was talking to Diamandis. He learned her name was Sara-no-h—Sara Ernsberg. As the group broke up he said impulsively, “Do you dance?”

  They got back to the hotel at 3 A.M. He slept in her arms till noon, and they missed the entire morning session, including his own talk.

  2029

  “You’re going off the deep end,” Sara said. They were in his office with a big view of Pike’s Peak. The slender mountain had snagged a looming purple thundercloud on its slopes. Lightning flashed in its belly. Mine too, Harold thought.

  “I can make a billion in a year if we can repeat the old Air Force test trials, make ’em work,” Harold said. “It’s a calculated risk.”

  “Look, the public’s against nuclear rocketry.”

  “Has anybody really asked? The nuke flies up cold as a salmon. SpaceX can deliver it. We turn it on after we’ve flown a tank of hydrogen up and mated it to the nuclear thermal unit. That assembly flies my robot team to the candidate asteroid and runs a nuke power source for their exploration.”

  She twisted her mouth in a skeptical red-lipsticked torque that he loved. “It never comes back into Low Earth Orbit?”

  “Never. We use it for smelting in orbit beyond the moon.”

  Sara said, “I prefer more conservative invest—”

  “In five years this will be conservative. It’ll be raining soup and we’ll have a bucket.”

  “So this is gambling on a certainty.”

  “Launching a nuke rocket core, piggybacking on a two-stage to orbit, it makes economic sense.”

  “Nukes. The UN can block you.”

  “Elon says he can launch us from mid-Pacific. His platform’s not a UN member—or subject to nation-state controls.” Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson—they had been like the Carnegies and Rockefellers of high vacuum, just a generation before, and were still big players.

  “Any skeptical legal advisor will say”—she frowned, did a bass growl—“ ‘You could be sued for every double-yoked egg a hen lays after launch.’ ”

  Harold flicked on a complex legal flowchart. “Ah, that old mink case as ‘proximate cause’? Nope, we’d legally have to be sued on the moon. The parent company is Blue Sky Nuclear, incorporated as of today on Luna.”

  “Luna? There’s no—”

  “I and some investor friends sent a robot office clerk there. They’ll have to argue for years over whether that’s a legal registry. I’m happy to let them go trotting down that alley.”

  “Sorry. You’ve still got enough minimum contacts with the planet for them to get personal jurisdiction. It just might take a while—or you might end up losing that Laguna mansion.”

  Harold shrugged. “Keegan over at Consolidated will be after us for sure.”

  “Then there’s the Outer Space Treaty—the United States is a signatory.”

  “Yeah, Consolidated will work that. That’s how the Microsoft competitors shamelessly worked with the Clinton administration to take down Microsoft.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Nope, just the fun parts. The rest I leave to you.”

  “Me?!”

  “I need a pretty face with a razor mind to present our target asteroids to the excited investing public.”

  “I haven’t said I’ll put anything into this swan dive off a skyscraper—”

  “Take your pick.” He flashed a list onto the wall using his thump command.

  Most Cost-Effective: 2000 BM19, a very small O-type asteroid (diameter less than 1 km). Makes several close approaches to Earth. Estimated value is $18.50 trillion and an estimated profit of $3.55 trillion (USD).

  Most Accessible: 2009 WY7, small asteroid with regular close approaches of less than 1 AU. A silicaceous or “stony” object that has a high accessibility score on Asterank of 7.6577. Some hints of water content. $1.53 trillion.

  Most Valuable + Most Profitable: 253 Mathilde, a 52.8-km-diameter carbonaceous asteroid. Estimated mineral/metal value of over $100 trillion. After robot mining and transport, estimated profit $9.53 trillion.

  She shook her head. “Your audience is venture capital guys, not astronomers.”

  “I want to snag their economic ambition, not their intellect. You can charmingly smooth over the distinction. Now, come with me into the board meeting.” He spread his arms wide, gave her a sunny smile.

  “What?!” She looked terrified, which was actually rather attractive.

  Five minutes later he was gesturing at a 3-D PowerPoint slide without looking at it. Always face the audience.

  The nuke fission rocket idea he had prepared the board for, so it took only some cheerleading from Sara and a fast finish after the tech details: “Look, remember the 1990s and the 20
00s? Computers toppled and then rebuilt industries. Retail sales—Walmart and Amazon. Banking—ATMs, online services. Finance—high-speed online investing down to milliseconds, global markets you needed a stopwatch to work in. Entertainment—web streaming, downloads, YouTube. Publishing—e-books took down old-style print media, aggregators did in paper news, so nobody goes to ‘press’ anymore. The march of time.”

  A well-known savvy techno-skeptic sniffed and gave them all a bemused scowl. Harold had invited him on the board, knowing the name alone would raise stock value. “Thanks for the history lesson. How’s that tell us what comes next?”

  “The big demand now is for raw material.” Harold stood up and spread his hands expansively. “So we butt into the old mining company territories by bringing in new sources—the asteroids. Next we do communications—we provide cheap, easy repair to geosynchronous comsats that have gone dead. Energy—we go get the Helium-3 that’s just sitting in the first few meters of the moon’s surface, along with plenty of rare earths as a bonus.”

  This provoked a full hour of discussion, some heated. The skeptic stormed out, angry—only to return fifteen minutes later, red-faced, claiming he’d just gone to the bathroom. Sara got in some telling jabs, even some laughs. Finally the board turned to a plausible scenario for the mining operation. As usual, many trade-offs and unknowns, as always in blue sky investing—“or black sky,” one board member joked. Harold grinned and decided to go radical on them.

  “Friends, a chunk of high-quality metal twenty meters across generates an impact explosion on the scale of megatons, granted. But!—without radioactive fallout, and it doesn’t spray much on impact, especially if it hits sand.” He flicked a wrist and a satellite view of Earth rotated on the wall screen. The board leaned forward, studying sites picked out in livid color. A graphic showed a fiery dot skating down through the atmosphere, diving in suddenly, and spiking into a bleak tan Mexican desert.

  “There are plenty of remote deserts we can hit to make an impact safe. All the miners need do is to find a mostly metal asteroid on the appropriate orbit, give it a calculated nudge. Let our robots work metal and rare earths out of its crust. Save that, bundle the sludge with some orbital debris, and fuse it as a shell over the refined metal. Do your smelting where the robots can blow it off. The solar wind picks up the waste, takes it to interstellar space. Do this while the rock’s in transit. Get the robots off with an unmanned shuttle. Pilot the metal into orbit so it can skim along the upper atmosphere, maybe skip it like a rock on a lake. Then bring it down, slam it in, mine it.”

  He finished with a 3-D budget, detailing axes: profit and loss and cost. “I’ll take you the board to, let’s say, Libya to watch the fireworks.”

  Mermin raised his big hand. “Reality check. You’ll never get clearance.”

  “Your reality check will bounce. The UN Security Council is a debating society. Current ideas evaporate in societies struggling to feed their people. If a desert country can gain a new industry by letting rocks drop into their land, they will. Libya already says it will.”

  An investor said mildly, “Genuine realpolitik trumps wishful-thinking realpolitik these days.”

  Bo Duc Anton, CEO of Astroprospects, smoothed her classic Chinese cheongsam and said, “Start small.”

  “How?” Harold asked.

  “My company has a Spacefarer contract to find and de-orbit debris. I can compact some of the space junk we collect with robots: booster rockets, lost gear, urine-icicles, dead satellites. We just grabbed Explorer I! Not typical—we’ll bring it down to sell to collectors. Real junk we can bundle and drop back in as a trial, into a desert.”

  “Isn’t all that supposed to go into the ocean?” someone shot back.

  Bo Duc shrugged. “Sometimes we miss.” Laughter. She blinked; it had just popped out, before she had a chance to really think it through. Harold knew how to get momentum going. Another objection about bad publicity made him shrug, saying, “Some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.”

  “Make it a small mass,” Sara said. “You need to test targeting anyway.”

  Another woman said, “Better to start out clean, have a contract with Libya. They need the cash and the mining business.”

  The corporate lawyer began, “Risk is too high to allow—”

  “Committees don’t open frontiers—people do,” Harold said. “We’ve got to look beyond the Official Future people learn in business school. It’s risky to not do this.”

  2031

  Their trial package came screaming down like an orange arrow. It hit within two hundred meters of their bull’s-eye and Sara shouted as the shock wave hit them in a rolling roar, from two kilometers away. Sand rose in a tan wave above the Libyan desert and crashed in front of them like dirty foam.

  She and Harold were the only ones who dared to stand this close. His simulation group was confident that with the cladding Sara’s company provided, made from orbital junk, it would shed red-hot debris and follow a predictable path. Unlike the earlier satellites that had come flaming down, this was dense and hard and so kept to its programmed path.

  The shock wave blew her hair straight back in the thunderclap roar and she laughed as he kissed her.

  He realized then that others had sports like golf, or risky rich-guy hobbies like flying experimental aircraft, or just ran through a series of ever more expensive women . . . and he didn’t. He liked to work, and Sara was just the right balanced love he needed, no more.

  Whenever he needed to feel his inspiration, he could turn from his meetings and engineering details and deal-making . . . and simply look up into the night sky. The frosty splendor of stars glimmered there, eternally beckoning.

  2032

  His company had an executive retreat of a rather different sort in the high Sierras. They all went backpacking out from Mammoth Lakes and after some grunting and swearing got camped around Deer Lake at ten thousand feet. Harold liked to see how people did when not behind a desk. Some seemed to see the natural world as an exotic, hostile place. One groused about no cell-phone service.

  Lying outside and staring lazily into the crisp, clear night sky, he recalled the same sensation of awe at the grand silvery sweep of the Milky Way that he had felt as a boy. He couldn’t see Alpha Centauri from here. Could a star be closer, yet undiscovered? Could he get there? The planets he would reach, sure, but stars . . .

  As a boy in 2013 he had read a book about starships and how they might be built, following a century of burgeoning interplanetary commerce. After all, Columbus had found the New World in caravels designed for warm, tranquil Mediterranean waters, not the Atlantic. But within a generation the promise of gold and land spurred rugged craft that grew steadily larger.

  Going to the stars would be harder than anything ever done, maybe more than life’s laboring up out of an ocean and onto land. The true vast extent of the problem was the charm of it, too.

  The next night around their snapping campfire along the John Muir Trail he talked about building capability to reach the stars. It would be a step-by-step process, a side effect of developing the solar system economy.

  His execs rolled their eyes and looked at their CEO as if he was going loopy on them. Well, maybe I am, he thought. For now.

  2033

  One year later the Chinese tested a nuke rocket engine in the open air, just as the USA had in the 1960s and 1970s. There was little escaped radiation. They even blew up a nuke configuration with implanted explosives and found very low residual radiation—also as the Americans had. Intelligence found the Chinese had simply bought the entire program developed by the Soviets at Semipalatinsk; the Russian nation was having a fire sale. Now the Chinese were rapidly improving on the old designs.

  This alerted the world and became the next “Sputnik moment.” It was almost as if the new Chinese semidemocracy, struggling to pacify its nationalist faction, was trying to deflect internal stresses into an external competition. Soon enough, it quite ob
viously was.

  Suddenly capital rained from the skies. Harold was ready with his bucket. He had made his deals to get a program under way for his company, FarVoyager, and their test bed results were good. They orbited the first test nuke half a year later.

  The Chinese were still reorganizing after the overthrow of the old Red regime, their politics a factional scramble. They decided to not launch a nuke rocket from the ground, even though there was little escaped residual radiation. So they converged on the American design of assembly of the cold nuke rocket and command module with regularly supplied fuel tubes that inserted into the big liquid pods. This became the standard method for fission transport.

  HAROLD WAS A PRIVATE sort of man who made a point of letting no one at all, even Sara, call him Harry. Still, at the celebration of the first nuke burn from Low Earth Orbit, he let himself go. It had gone perfectly, the hydrogen jetting out in luminous fury to boost a major tonnage of comsats and a few working zero-grav laboratories to high orbits. Proof of principle. Now the whole solar system seemed to yawn open at last.

  COMMITTEES DON’T OPEN FRONTIERS—PEOPLE DO.

  Somebody on his staff had put it up without asking. Good, he thought. Then he burst into a song he had written:

  A fact without a theory is like a ship without a sail.

  Is like a boat without a rudder.

  Is like a kite without a tail.

  A fact without a theory is as sad as sad can be.

  But if there’s one thing worse

  in this universe,

  A fact you just can’t hack—

  it’s a theory

  without a fact.

  Though he hit every note perfectly, he never sang in public again.

  SOON SPACEX LOFTED ANOTHER long gray tube of liquid hydrogen to fly alongside the FarVoyager engine. Specially designed Astrominer bots mated fuel to engines. The craft ignited and left orbit, bound for a near Earth asteroid to carry out a prospector mission. It visited five water-rich asteroids that were energetically easier to reach than the surface of the moon. Orbital Sciences and Virgin Galactic, deeply into their orbital hotel businesses, offered their services for a second flight.