There was another car about half a mile back and I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. Was I being followed? Of course there is nothing unusual about having another car going the same direction on a public road and I cursed Holmes for his paranoia-inducing prank. I have enough to worry about as it is.
Five minutes and a highway merge later the car was still there, neither gaining nor losing ground, and I was getting antsy. Of course it was nothing, but rather than fall prey to my own nerves I slowed down to let it catch up and pass.
It didn't pass. It didn't catch up. I began to sweat. Of course it was nothing. I drive a Porsche for a reason, so I put my foot down. I've got after-market pressure boost to the fuel cells and high-torque motors and the acceleration is head snapping. The car vanished from the rearview mirror like a rabbit at a fox party. As soon as I'd lost them around a corner I stood on the brakes and ducked into the driveway for some tenant farmer's double-wide trailer home, got out of the car and waited.
The car didn't come flying around the corner in hot pursuit, it came around reasonably close to the speed limit. It was a nondescript late-model sedan, medium blue, a man and a woman in the front, thirtyish. As they passed the driver noticed me, eyes widening in surprise.
Well, it is surprising to see a shiny new sports car parked in front of a ramshackle trailer, isn't it? Nothing unusual there. As I got back in the car I caught the distant thwopthwopthwop of rotor blades. It couldn't be the government—they'd just monitor my movements from the satellites. Kidnappers? Anyone who can afford a helicopter is unlikely to need to kidnap anyone. Coincidence then, nothing more. I started driving back at the speed limit, watching the surrounding traffic with care. I didn't notice anything unusual—but then after the pull-over incident they'd make sure I didn't, wouldn't they?
They. Faceless, omnipresent, omnipotent they. I shuddered, remembering the time the FBI had kicked in my door in search of illegal electronics. Paranoia goes hand in hand with megalomania, and I certainly had enough of that. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown—or plans on wearing it. I put the thought out of my mind, put my phone on handsfree and told it to call Douglas Straughn. I needed to borrow some money. A lot of money.
That may surprise you, since my personal net worth is twenty billion dollars, give or take a billion or so. I'm sure that seems like a lot of money to you, but when you plan to rule the world the important figure is not how much you have but how much you don't have. Financial figures get fuzzy when they get big, but the global gross national product, if that term makes any sense, is around fifty trillion dollars a year and the amortization-adjusted purchase price for the whole damn globe entire is a whopping two and a half quadrillion dollars. You can see the magnitude of the problem I've set myself. I don't know how much Straughn is worth personally, but the investment fund he controls totals a cool trillion. Power, like money, is difficult to judge on large scales, but by any measure Straughn is on top worldwide. They call him the Wall Street Wolf for his rapacity and cunning, and I needed him on my side—at least until I had the power to grind him under.
So I'm not a big fish in the shark pool Straughn swims in, but twenty billion dollars is enough to get me on the short list of people whose calls he answers. I was in luck, he was in the office. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, necessary social grease before the fencing began.
"Ever hear of Voisey Bay?" It was important to build some background before I hit him up for the cash.
"The big nickel mine up in Canada somewhere."
"In Labrador to be exact."
"So?"
"So every ten years this planet uses a volume of nickel equal to the total reserves at Voisey Bay. There's only another three or four years of it left there, and they haven't found a big new deposit in fifteen years."
"I'm already fully invested in exploration technologies, John." His voice was dismissive.
"That's not what I'm talking about."
"I don't want to hear about some warm and fuzzy civic recycling scheme." He sounded testy and I wondered if I'd caught him at a bad time. That would be bad, even disastrous, but there was no backing out now. "There's no centralization there, no money to be made."
"That's not what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about asteroid mining."
"What?" His voice was incredulous.
"We can't get it anywhere else. Not just nickel, but copper, tungsten, titanium: every element you can imagine. It's all up there for the taking. And we're running out down here. This is the opportunity of a lifetime."
"Impossible. Do you know the current cost per pound delivered to orbit?"
I had the figures at my fingertips and ticked them off as I pulled out to pass a semi-trailer. "NASA claims five thousand a pound for the RSV. Of course, that's raw costs. Double it for support costs."
"Exactly. If you had solid gold just floating in low Earth orbit waiting to be scooped up it wouldn't be worth your while to go get it, even with the Reusable Space Vehicle. And that's just low Earth orbit. You want to talk about the asteroids you're talking ten times that cost, round figures. Maybe more." I knew I had him hooked then. When Straughn decides something is impossible its only a matter of time before he makes it happen. He's like Brian that way. How much he was going to make me pay was the critical question.
"This is where you come in, Douglas." I leaned forward in my seat. "Because there is solid gold waiting to be scooped up in space. What if I told you I had a way to get to the asteroids cheap."
"How cheap?"
"Six million dollars a launch, another six million in mission costs."
I could almost hear his eyebrows going up. Even if he didn't believe in my space mining pitch, figures like those would own the satellite business, and that's a few billion right there. "How do you plan to do that?"
"I can't discuss the details, the technology is still in development." It was true; I'm sure Holmes hadn't finalized his solution in the hour since I'd left Wild Oaks. I leaned back, relaxed now that I knew I had him sold. "It's revolutionary, I can tell you that much."
"You expect me to buy in to space mining based on an as yet unproven technology—sight unseen."
"That's exactly right."
"You're nuts." He said it, but he was still listening.
"I'm not asking you for money right now. Baker Technologies will bear all the development costs." And own all the patent rights, I didn't add. "I need your commitment to put in the venture capital once we've demonstrated that we have the capability to get there. This is going to take a very aggressive exploitation plan."
"How much are you asking for?"
"A hundred billion dollars."
"That doesn't sound like twelve million dollars a launch."
"Trust me, there's going to be a lot of launches."
He didn't answer right away. I'd surprised him with a figure that big, but Straughn didn't get where he was by being afraid of big numbers. "And what am I buying for that?"
"A hundred-million-ton nickel-iron asteroid hunted down, hauled into Earth orbit, smelted into high-grade stainless steel and delivered to the ground."
He was silent for a minute and I heard keys clicking in the background. Doubtless he was checking the international nickel spot price. "A dollar a kilo for stainless. That's barely cost competitive."
"That's fifty percent below the going rate. Check the price history on nickel. Supply is going down. Demand is going up. By the time we're online with this system these prices will be higher. And the steel just covers the operating costs. The real gravy is in the platinum group metals that come with it. Figure on fifty tons each of platinum, palladium and iridium in the mix, plus five or ten tons of rare earths, and some copper, gold and silver too. Run the numbers and you're looking at total profits of close to fifty billion dollars."
"Over what time frame?"
"It's a ten-year project."
"For fifty-percent return?" He snorted. "I can put my money in bonds and double it in ten years wit
h no risk."
"Bonds that good aren't no risk, and what I'm offering isn't a fifty-percent return. I'm offering fifty plus an entire asteroid mining infrastructure installed that will pull in a rock like that every year at first, then two, four, a dozen a year for the indefinite future. World demand for steel is a billion tons a year and growing fast. How would you like to own that market?"
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. He was thinking it over. "The recyclers are planning on providing eighty percent of the market in ten years."
"People are too lazy to recycle. Make steel cheap enough and the recyclers will wither on the vine. And our market control will be unheard of. There aren't any import duties from space, no taxes, no regulations, no possibility of nationalization, no local groups with environmental concerns, nothing. It'll be carte blanche on the biggest Eldorado in human history, and we'll be the only ones with a claim staked."
There was a another long silence on the other end of the line while I waited tensely. "Okay, I'm in. If you can prove your technology works. How long till that happens?"
I held the phone away from my mouth and gave a long sigh of relief. "Six months to know if it's going to work or not, a year to actually make it work."
"That's fast. How far along are you?"
I smiled wide enough that I'm sure he could hear me in New York. "You know I can't tell you that."
"How certain are you it's going to work?" There was doubt in his voice.
"Completely." Well, almost completely.
"That's damn near all the working capital I can break free, you know that?"
"If I'd thought you could give me more I'd have asked for more."
He laughed. "I'm going to have to earmark that money. I need a performance bond to the effect that you'll have a program going in a year."
"How big a bond?" This was the crucial question.
"Twelve percent."
I snorted "Too big. I can get Georgi Stanislaski committed for less than half of that."
"Georgi doesn't stand anything more technical than a corkscrew, but you're welcome to try."
"Six percent."
"The bank will give me six."
"Not on a hundred billion they won't. Eight."
"I'll give you ten."
"Still too high."
"It's high because you need a hundred billion dollars. Who else do you think you're going to get it from?"
"Stanislaski may not understand technology, but he understands opportunity."
"Nine percent. I thought you were certain this was going to work. Why are you worried about the performance bond?"
He had me there, not that I could admit it. "It's good business practice to make the best of every deal. Nine percent, done and done."
"Have your lawyers call mine and get the details hammered out. I'll call you in a week with the funding plan."
"Always a pleasure, Douglas."
I hung up, satisfied with the morning's work, dodged a slow-moving fuel truck and picked up the pace down the highway. I was only slightly stressed about having to take Straughn's terms pretty much as he dictated them. There were only a handful of people in the world who could swing a hundred-billion-dollar financing deal, and of those the number who would take a flyer on something as wild as asteroid mining I could count on the fingers of one finger—Straughn himself. Georgi Stanislaski was known for taking wild risks, but they had to be risks he understood and as Douglas had pointed out, he was strictly a basic-industry man—-petrochemicals, shipping, rail, steel. He never touched anything so frilly as consumer production, which cut out a big chunk of the technology market, and he was unlikely to understand what I was proposing. A nine-billion-dollar performance bond wasn't out of line for what Straughn was delivering, but it represented nearly half of everything I owned. If Brian failed to solve the drive problem I would be hung out to dry. It isn't that I'd wind up impoverished; the eleven billion dollars I had left would still put in me the top ten-millionth of a percent of the world's population so far as wealth went—but I would never recover from the failure. Achieving my goal absolutely required that my net worth continue to rise exponentially, and asteroid mining was not only my ticket to world domination, it was the only ticket I would ever get. I would have rather waited a year, but my own financial structures were in place, and my sources told me that the Seaveni consortium was about to hit Straughn up for absolutely every penny he could swing. They'd be disappointed now. You have to strike when the iron is hot.
Of course Straughn was in the catbird seat. If Brian made the drive work he'd be on the ground floor of the greatest business opportunity in history. If he didn't, he'd make a guaranteed nine percent on a hundred billion dollar investment, risk free. It's hard to get big returns on chunks of cash that large, simply because there are so few places to put so much money at once. By breaking it up, doing a lot of extra work, he could make a couple of more points, but his risk would be higher and it wouldn't be half as easy to realize the returns. The ironic thing about money is—the more you have the easier it is to get more, and the less you actually need.
Now, you may find it surprising that an enterprise so complicated as a complete asteroid mining venture can be started with a visit to a friend and a phone call, and in fact you would be right. I'd spent ten years searching for the way to get my hand around the throat of global commerce and another two years working the numbers to convince myself that asteroid mining was it. While I was doing that I put five years into making contact with the high-end venture capital club, insinuating myself into their social network, setting up the structures I'd need and carefully profiling over two dozen top-of-the-line players before I'd settled on Straughn as my primary patsy. World conquest doesn't happen without a lot of work. You might also think that I've got delusions of grandeur and you'd be right again. At least you can't accuse me of mediocrity. Asteroid mining wasn't just my ticket to absolute global power, it was possibly the only ticket anyone would ever get in the next several generations. Opportunities like this come around only a few times in a civilization's history—Caesar nearly did it by wooing Cleopatra, but Brutus knifed him before he could make his empire encompass the known world. Genghis Khan nearly did it by force, but he died too soon; Rockefeller himself missed the boat on oil, but communications weren't up to a truly global empire then. Nuclear weapons and rockets would have done it for Hitler if he hadn't driven all his best scientists out of the country before the war, and of course we all know what happened to Gates. I was gambling everything now, but the difference between you and me is that I take calculated risks, and you're afraid to.
Five minutes later I slid the Porsche into my personal space by the Baker Technologies helipad and went up to my office. I had a dozen messages waiting. The priority call was from someone at the Securities and Exchange Commission named Warren Burbridge. When the government calls its always bad news. I had Gillian call him back and wondered about it while I waited for her to buzz that he was on the line.
There are really only four sources of wealth in the world: agriculture, minerals, energy and people. People represent labor, and everyone gets the same twenty-four hours in a day. Sure you can develop a lot of power if you get enough people working for you, but people are notoriously fickle; they aren't there because they like you, they're there because they need to be, because working for you allows them to fulfill their own needs. If those needs change, or they get a better offer, they're gone. Agriculture is a tremendous source of power, but to control it you have to control the land that people live on, and because food is so important the agricultural industry is highly regulated. If you try to apply food as a source of leverage people quickly get desperate, and you wind up with civil war. Power generation and minerals are where the real keys to wealth lie—if it cannot be grown it must be mined, and modern civilization wouldn't last a week without electricity. Anyone can have a backyard garden, but no one can make their own steel. Before the hydrogen fuel cell and the vortex cell win
dmill the root of power in the world was oil—at once a mineral and a fuel, it was the ideal product and once upon a time the world's biggest business. Finding it and getting it out of the ground required resources far beyond any individual, and it was available only in certain highly limited areas, easy to control. It was tremendously versatile both as a raw material and as a fuel, and it was fundamentally nonrenewable. Whether burned for power or processed into plastics, the demand was insatiable. Rockefeller could have ruled the world, if he'd developed crude consumption as well as he did production, but the real petroleum economy only developed after he died—and now that era is over.
So my plan is simple, and it works like this. Space is completely beyond the control of any nation on the globe. Those few who even have the capability to get there limit themselves to space because, ultimately, they are focused on the ground. Earth orbit just serves to give them the big picture, for communications, for geosurvey and for navigation. Build the infrastructure up there and you've built yourself a new nation. Base your economy on the provision of metals to Earth's surface cheaper than they can be dug up and sheer economics will drive ground-based mining to extinction. It will take ten years to restart primary production once it stops, reopening mines, rebuilding refineries and extraction plants after they're abandoned—and that's where power comes in to play. Every nation on the planet's surface will depend on me for the raw materials to drive their economies, and given self-sustaining habitats in space, I will be completely beyond the military and economic reach of any Earthbound power. My space mining infrastructure will become the core of a new nation, and it will rule not just the planet but all of Sol System.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 23
