by Ed Finn
The “right to mine” industry took off then. Brokers traded those rights and gathered capital. Only when shipments started did he fully own the rock he had paid options on. There were plenty of tricky accounting riffs to play, especially since the rules kept changing. The U.S. Geological Survey, which originally had been formed in 1879 to discover ore and stimulate the mining industry, was still in the Department of the Interior. It soon became an interplanetary agency. Then under the North American Community rules, taxes and deductibles became even more fraught with peril.
Plus a new one: hijackers could grab the cargoes in flight. It did not take long for other companies operating in near Earth space to figure this out. Such pirates then inadvertently supplied a defense against the main danger—big masses missing their targets and slamming down through Earth’s atmosphere. But with better beacons and tracking, piracy dropped off.
Three multiseason series about the exotic gangs of ’roid pirates had run on worldwide 3-D—all before Harold ordered arming of his robot ’roid escorts.
2045
He got to Katherine Amani’s office within an hour. “Where is it?”
She grinned. “Less than a light-year away. Small, cold, but there.”
“How?”
She blinked, used to his abrupt questioning style by now. “We had those suspicions, recall? Early estimates predicted as many brown dwarfs as typical stars, but the WISE survey showed just one brown dwarf for every six stars. So how could we have missed some? If they were close to us, they could move enough between our two surveys. Not showing up again eliminated them.”
He nodded eagerly. “So you looked at them again.”
She nodded and showed him a star map of many small blotches. One she circled. “It took a while. Atmosphere temperature is a tad above this room’s.”
He pursed his lips and leaned forward. “Wow, lower end of the Y dwarf range. And close!”
“As you wished.” She smiled.
Harold got up, started pacing, then looked at her intently. “You saw last month’s discovery—an Earthlike with an ozone line?”
“Yes, great, clearly a biosphere. Nearly a hundred light-years away. All attention’s focused on it. Both the Chinese and USA/Euro want to put up new satellites to pick up as many pixels as they can, analyze the atmosphere, maybe get a picture.”
He stopped pacing, sat down. “It’ll get all the attention. Let’s keep this quiet for now. How about putting WISE 2 up?”
Her eyes widened. “Withhold—? Ah, I see. Let them ignore infrared studies while we get more data.”
“If you don’t mind.” What’s my action item here? he always asked himself. “I like springing surprises, but they have to be substantiated.”
“There’s not much chance anyone’s going to revisit this old data soon. If you have the money to put up another, better WISE . . . I suppose so . . .”
There. “Done, then.” She blinked. Her mouth opened and nothing came out. She’s being handed a hundred million bucks, after all. I know CEOs who can keep their cool at moments like this, but they are few. So . . . keep it mellow . . . “Let’s keep all this quiet for now. Meanwhile, I want to put some money behind a way to get there.”
“But our rockets would take—”
“Better than rockets. We can leave the engine on the ground.”
2052
He discovered a useful rule: If you want to know what’s going on, don’t ask the person in charge. To get the truth, especially from the edgy government bodies that regulated space industries, you had to come in from the top management, and then drill down.
That was how he learned of a new profit angle—asking actual astronomers, not NASA managers. The craters near the moon’s north and south poles were like the dusty attic of the solar system—an attic in a deep freeze. In a hundred-square-kilometer area there were a billion gallons of water in the top meter of dirt—and even better, the same load of mercury. Water made the place livable for the few shivering humans who had to run the robot teams mining the metals. Pure hydrogen poured out when a reactor’s waste heat warmed the soil, capturing the harvest in big balloons inflated by the gases. This rocket fuel spread throughout the swelling fleets of mining craft.
All this wealth squatted in the dark craters. After exhausting the several hundred asteroids that were energetically easier to reach than Luna, the frozen poles were the latest economic hot spots.
2055
By now Harold Mann was one of the ultras, the chummy though distant club of the trillionaires. Some said there were mysterious others, the transcendental rich, or “transrich,” but Harold didn’t think they existed. If they did, they left no signs among the vast and fast trading markets. The constrained AIs who governed those provinces would not say if any transrich existed, but then, they were coy.
Definitions didn’t interest him. He was of the determined elderly now, rich and harboring the ambition of those who knew they had little time to accomplish more . . . much more.
Sara said, “You’re exercising those stock options close to the line, given all this new legislation.”
They were swimming off Maui, so the subject seemed odd. “I need cash for R&D.”
“I’ve picked up some legal sniffers around my operations,” she said. “The North American Community needs cash so—”
“They always do. Hey, see if we can bodysurf this wave!”
His advisors told him not to discuss his ambitions so much, and certainly not his intricate finances, what with all the suffering in the world. The vast differences between economic levels had led to the fashionable view humans had messed up enough worlds already. So if life were detected on a distant Earthlike world, humanity had best leave it alone.
The same argument had arisen over the subsurface life discovered on Mars decades before. That life, organized through microbial plants, was remarkably strange and showed clear signs of consciousness. It was entirely anaerobic, oxygen-free, and of separate and earlier origin than Earth’s. Many scientists thought that the undeniable connections between Martian and Earthly DNA, going back to the Archea ages, proved that we were Martians. Thus we were not damaging an entirely separate phylum of life. There was no damage anyway, since human Martian colonies had no biological transactions with the true Martians at all, which were far below ground.
Still, Harold made no secret that he had plans for future exploration. He wouldn’t say what they were, ever. He funded propulsion studies by exercising stock options in several minor companies, taking his profits, then plowing them into secretive companies pursuing low-probability/high-payoff technologies.
Secrets created their own fandoms, in the sprawling, intensively interacting solar economy. He was quite surprised when the mysterious aura around his name made the public like him more; people wanted intriguing puzzles now, a sense of things coming.
2059
Some asteroids were icy, with up to 20 percent water and frozen carbon dioxide; miners called them iceteroids. Melt the ’roid rock with circulating nuke heat fluids and the water comes off first. Condense and separate it out, squirt it into expando spheres for packaging and let it freeze in free space. Hang the spheres on frames holding a bare nuke engine, with no shielding needed. Then robo-ship the whole unlovely contraption to near Earth habitats for life support or, with the CO2, for propellants.
The rocky, metal-rich asteroids got teams of mining craft that deployed smart minebots, which could siphon off metals by weight and fluidity. Platinum was the biggest prize, so prospector bots sought it first when they touched down on a new rock. “Fat plat” was pure strain metal that could go straight into Earthside catalytic converters. Auto-facs and 3-D printers made electronics or even jewelry. High-value ore shipped in low-energy orbits arrived at Working Earth Orbit space with its market value already set—never less than $50,000 New Bucks a kilogram—because it had been mass spectrum sorted by bots along the way. Those rugged devices could take all the time they needed to get the measures rig
ht. They were slaved to the MarketWatch integrators, beyond question more honest than a human could even pretend to be. The lesser stuff—iron, copper, aluminum—got fed into orbital factories to make spacecraft fittings and hulls in vacuum-dry foundries. Behind all this was the laser comm Net that kept bots coordinated and standards aligned.
Yields accelerated in what became known as the Astro Moore’s law, though in fact the similarity was superficial. The true driver was the plentitude of free fresh mass, coasting out there among the planets.
His was not the first mining company to go out into the main asteroid belt. It wasn’t even the tenth. But it lasted.
So did Harold’s personal R&D budget. He was surprised one morning to find a news story calling him the biggest research funder except for China, the USA, and Europe, in that order.
2060
Dr. Katherine Amani handled the press well. Harold sat in the back and watched her proclaim discovery of not one but two dwarf stars nearer than Alpha Centauri. Yes, she said, she had taken the years of study essential to be quite sure these stars were truly there. One of the virtues of not reporting to government panels, he thought, but said nothing.
Press attention was still focused on the distant, Earthlike world called Glory by the public. Of course no expedition was feasible, but reporters immediately asked about this new star. Did Redstar, the nearest, have planets?
Dr. Amani demurred. It was too early to tell, but “anonymous donors” were readying a far more sensitive infrared study of the region close around Redstar.
The possibility of going there got little attention in the press. The current worldwide depression had bled most of the sense of opening possibilities from the general class who paid attention to more than just getting through their difficult days.
And who named this dull dwarf Redstar, anyway? Surely the International Astronomical Union had naming rights?
Dr. Amani opened her mouth and looked at the back of the room, but Harold was already gone. You get better coverage if the media uncover the story themselves, he had learned—then feed their eager faces.
2063
Harold sighed. “Did you ever think that we’re just stuff, the odd sort of stuff that comes into consciousness, reproduces, swims through this universe, and dies, that’s it?”
Sara frowned. “You don’t believe that.”
“No, I don’t. But I could.”
They were inside a tight capsule of Mooncrete, heavy shielding against a solar storm of great lancing ferocity. This first trip to the L1 resort was not turning out very well and Harold felt claustrophobic—the most common affliction among deep space travelers.
She kissed him. “Have another glass of wine.”
2069
Often when he was in an immersion tank having his body scanned, inspected, and improved, he would reflect that the meeting about WISE 2 was where his life began to accelerate. The sensation of time collapsing along its own axis was common with aging, of course. It arose from the lack of novelty in later life. Travel, new friends, fresh hobbies—these helped. But he had been to every country he wondered about, eighty-seven of them when he stopped. Friends were fine, too, though he never had hobbies. Intense interests outside of work, yes—but they were always pointed at the sky, the solar system, the stars.
First came the sails. Entrepreneurs had already developed the fundamentals of solar sailing, a thrifty way to survey and prospect myriad asteroids. The sun’s photons were free, but skimpy. Better to focus a microwave or laser beam on a sail and shoot it out of Low Earth Orbit, saving it years of climbing up Earth’s gravity well. Better still, coat its inner face with a designer paint that, heated by the beam, would blow off—an induced rocket effect.
But the real kick came from diving deep. Sundiver I had already plunged to within a few radii of the sun, shed the asteroid that shielded it, and unfurled before the furnace star. Its gossamer disk carried an intricately designed burden that now warmed furiously. Painted on, this layer blew off under high temperatures, a momentary rocket exploiting a bit of Newtonian physics: change velocities when the craft has high speed, and the boost gets amplified. A blue-white jet arced for tens of minutes. Once gone, the painted fuel revealed a blazing white sail. That intense hour sent it shooting outward at speeds rocketeers only dreamed about.
Sundiver I had entered the far reaches of the Kuiper Belt by the time Harold assembled the Inner Network System of microwave and laser beams. This INS made considerable profit by lowering commcosts among mining communities, asteroid habitats, bases on Mars, and even the new exploration teams around Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
Sail development accelerated, making quick exploration of the outer solar system efficient. Harold bought into several small sail start-ups. By the time they had found some ripe iceteroids ready for steering into the inner worlds to be harvested, he exercised his options and extracted profits on the expectations bounce tech stocks often get—for a while.
By the time Sundiver XI came speeding out from its searing solar encounter, the INS system was ready to pour radiance on its kilometer-wide sail whenever it passed nearby. Timing was exquisite, intricate, a marvel equated in the media to ballet. THE INS GOES OUT one headline proclaimed. Headed for Redstar.
2073
Fusion nuke rockets had become the Conestoga wagons of the solar system, and the lunar poles were their frigid watering station. The reversed-magnetic-field configuration had finally made big-bore fusion rocket chambers practical, and they had higher thrust per kilogram than fission. Shipping got cheaper.
Harold had a piece of polar development, mostly because he wanted to drive toward ever-larger nukes. The Chinese and Arabs who threw in with them tried the same approach, but proved to be slower to respond to the myriad problems that arose. The poles were cold and gear refused to work unless warmed by the waste of big operating and distilling nuke plants. Harold had investments in breeder reactors and recycling reactor wastes, so he benefited from both ends of the enterprise.
Soon AI piloted nukes ran whole mining parties to asteroids. Complexes grew, which demanded humans to supervise the smart but limited AIs who had narrow intuition and common sense.
On carbon-restricted Earth, such work cut back on wasteful, inefficient, and polluting processes to mine and smelt. There was much less digging, grinding, and greenhouse gas emission. Social benefits rebounded, wealth spread through largesse, and the workweek fell. Workaholics immigrated into space, where opportunity and hundred-hour weeks abounded. All that fervor and wealth came from spinning habitats and solar mirrors melting rocks way out in space.
2074
Harold imposed strict rules on how supplies and parts for his asteroid habitats got delivered. The specs laid out exact sizes of the storage canisters, plus where the securing bolts went, how latches fitted, corner configurations, and thickness down to the millimeter. His suppliers grimaced but complied, wondering why he was so exact.
“Your competitors aren’t so damn picky,” one said.
“But I pay more for it,” Harold said. “You want the contract?” He smiled at the grudging nod.
He told no one the reason. His work crews dutifully unloaded the supplies and parts in zero grav, handing them to the bots who did the assembly of borers and smelters. Only then did the next bot crew appear, taking the shipping canisters apart, clicking together the light carbon-fiber walls—and producing the actual outer walls of the habitats. Spun up, the tight joins held full atmospheric pressures. He had gotten them delivered at the suppliers’ cost, not his.
2081
“We can hold them off for a while but not forever,” Lin said.
“You’ve done that for decades now,” Harold said, hands clasped in front of him at the conference table. Sara sat beside him, shaking her head.
“Decades?” Sara said. “I forget details . . . Writing all the development costs off—”
“As business investment, yes,” Lin finished for her. A 3-D lattice condensed in the air over
their table. It mapped in axes of time, dollars, and legal spending avenues. A spaghetti of multicolored strands connected big orange dots. Like a nightmare medusa, Harold thought.
“All this was legal, deductible back when—”
“You started, yes.” Lin gave him a wan smile. “Not anymore.”
Sara looked startled as she followed the info-dense tangles. “These topo maps in cash and progress indices—there’s a whole development line just in ion engines!”
Lin grimaced. “That doesn’t get us off the hook anymore.”
Harold nodded. “Our poor old planet has seen a lot. Environ damage, the greenhouse not going away as fast as we thought, resource scarcity, big collective regimes. So they go after offworld cash.”
“And change the rules in the middle of the game,” Lin said. “You’ve been in the game a long time, so you have to change the most.”
“So . . .” Sara was still entranced by the luminous spaghetti and its projected territories. “ . . . you can pay some back taxes?”
“Sure, if I strip myself of most that I own,” Harold said. “Or—”
“You can fight,” Lin finished for him. She obviously knew her boss well, Harold saw, and was one jump ahead of him. “Legal dodges, evidence of sequestering funds offworld, not available for testimony—”
“The whole suite of dances every business learns the hard way,” Sara finished. “Let me guess—back taxes doubling every three years, retroactive penalties, a post facto nightmare.”
“Can I go back to Earth?” Harold asked, eyes veiled.
“I don’t advise it.”
Sara jerked as though she had just come awake. “What?!”
