“I wouldn’t volunteer that,” Milly said. “Speaking with construction people at Armstrong and Central I got an approximate number of three point seven billion Australian dollars it cost the Chinese to lift everything from Earth over the life of the colony. Very little of it was made of lunar materials on site. There’s simply no way to recoup that. Now, things are made from lunar iron and materials from the Rock. You could duplicate most of it now for a third of the price. Also, you are excluding the residences. Just some of the power equipment and electronics would need to be imported today. Again, they would be more modern too.”
“So, the final number you’d suggest asking?” Jeff asked.
“I’d ask one point nine billion Australian dollars for the full land parcel the Chinese claimed, the infrastructure, and the casino as a going business including the name.” Milly stopped and looked at him expectantly.
“Why Australian dollars?” Jeff asked.
“It’s the most widely sought hard currency in that part of the world where we will need to market Camelot,” Milly said.
“That makes sense. We can use Australian dollars. We do a fair amount of business with them, and they’ve been more stable than most Earthie currencies. I tell you what,” Jeff said, doing an approximation in his head. “Offer it for that number of Australian dollars, but also discounted to eight metric tons, if paid in gold. I know that’s a crazy discount if you believe the few official prices, but I don’t think they reflect reality. That number might find an offer.
Milly had been prepared for Jeff to argue either way. She hadn’t been prepared for him to accept it so easily. The potential fee was more than her lifetime earnings.
“I got it basically for free,” Jeff reminded her. “Anything I can get out of a white elephant will leave me way ahead. A cheeseburger next Tuesday is starting to sound pretty good.”
“I’d be shocked if any private buyer can come up with that much gold,” Milly said. “But a group of banks might consent to do a financing package in dollars.”
“There are lots of sovereign nations that can payout that much gold without making much of a dent in their holdings,” Jeff said. “Maybe India or Indonesia would like to have a lunar colony all at once, with no risk it will run into problems or cost over-runs.”
“I’ll write up the listing and send you a copy to put your chop on it,” Milly said.
Jeff frowned and considered. “You are taking a risk with your time on this. I don’t expect you’d care to risk unlimited advertising expenses. You’ll need a lot of things such as translation services you don’t normally have to payout. If you write up a plan, I’ll fund it and take the risk of it being wasted effort if we don’t find a buyer. You can reimburse me for it out of your commission, but only if we find a full price buyer, or you agree with me accepting a lower offer. Does that sound workable to you?”
“More than fair. You’ve got yourself a deal.”
* * *
“This is even harder than I expected,” Alice complained. The stream was recent snowmelt, ice-cold, and bone-chilling to hands or feet and she’d worked all morning and only collected about the same volume of fine gold flakes as an aspirin tablet.
“You’re young,” Vic reminded her. “You have no idea how it makes my old hands ache just to sort out the larger cold stones. Remember, it’s voluntary. You can stay home and house-sit if you want and I won’t complain at all.”
“I want to be able to buy some stuff at the fall festival or maybe even order it when you get some stuff from Nevada. How else am I going to get any money?”
Vic never stopped working his homemade rocker box but answered her.
“You don’t need money to get anything at the fair. Just trade goods. You can grow something to sell if you want. I’ll let you put in a garden anywhere close to the house it doesn’t interfere with our crops or kitchen garden. You are welcome to anything in the woods if you want to trap or gather wild plants. You could grow feed and raise chickens or rabbits to sell. Eileen would share her instructions and let you hand copy them,” Vic said. “That’s a few ideas just off the top of my head.”
Alice didn’t say anything for a long time. Vic wasn’t sure if she was put out at him or considering going back to the house. It turned out she was thinking about it.
“If I do something like that, I have to work at it every day,” she said finally. “If I get sick or just feel bad it can’t wait. This is hard but once I have the gold it can’t die on me or have a hawk or raccoon carry it away and eat it like rabbits and chickens, or go bad like eggs if you don’t seal them well enough.”
“That’s pretty much what we figured too,” Vic agreed.
Later, when Alice went off in the bush to ease nature and Eileen brought a bucket of pay dirt over, Vic remarked to her, “That girl is a thinker. She may take a while to turn a problem over and look at all the sides of it, but eventually, she seems to be able to reason things out.”
Eileen laughed. “I think she takes so long because she’s arguing with herself in her mind as much as she argues with us out loud.”
Vic grinned. “You might have the right of that too,” he concluded.
* * *
“Doctor Holbrook asked to demo something to us the next time all three of us were on the Moon,” Heather said. “I asked him to come by after dinner and show us. He says he has reproduced one of the alien devices and has a practical application.”
“Why didn’t you ask him to dinner too so we could get the talk-talk part of it out of the way? Jeff wondered.
Heather frowned and hesitated to answer right away. Prolonged silence from her partners meant she couldn’t get out of answering.
“Holbrook is brilliant,” Heather admitted. “The trouble is he knows it. He’s also good at extracting the best in the people under him. Despite that, I never hear him credit those people who he mines for ideas. I hear the little half-second pauses as he talks to me where he stops to think of a shorter word or simpler phrase. I’m pretty sure he is talking down to me but there is no way to call him on it. The man is very useful, but when you add up all those things, I don’t like Dr. Holbrook very much. Certainly not enough to want to upgrade him from employee to being our social peer.”
“Fair enough,” April agreed. “But if I think he’s talking down to Jeff I’ll call him on it and make him explain himself.”
“Go right ahead,” Heather said, amused. “That should be entertaining.”
* * *
Alice was raking the extra soil off the top of the row of potatoes they left in the ground over the winter, filling in the dip where they’d harvested the adjacent row last fall. Vic was driving a fork under them and turning the loose soil over to break it up. Eileen was filling one bucket with spuds to eat and another with small and misshapen potatoes to cut and harden to be replanted.
“I have two grams of gold now,” Alice said out of the clear blue sky.
“I know, I saw you set it on the scale,” Vic reminded her.
“It’s your gold,” Alice said in a troubled voice.
“Your potatoes too for that matter,” she added when he said nothing.
“Is that bothering you?” Vic asked. “Do you feel they are begrudged or something? I don’t plan on asking the gold back after you’ve panned it or the potatoes back after you’ve eaten them. Set your mind at ease if you were worried.”
“No! I’m trying to say thank you,” Alice said, exasperated.
“Oh, you finally got around to the point of it. You’re welcome,” Vic said.
* * *
“This is damaging to our use of you,” Linda’s handler explained after running the interview with Linda’s daughter Lindsey. “Physically abusing a child to the point of their requiring medical attention doesn’t set well with the public. It’s the sort of thing that you can’t effectively excuse or try to cover up. We aren’t going to schedule any more appearances for you.”
“What does that mean?” Linda asked. “Ar
e you just cutting me loose”
“Not at all,” the agency man said. “You’ve simply been on loan from the Bureau of Labor Allocation. We’re releasing you back to them. I imagine you will be processing applications and issuing assignments. That’s what the bulk of their people do, working from home online. I’ll request of them that they don’t assign you to survey work where you have to beat on doors and verify compliance. That can be very challenging I’m told.
“A lot of people would kill for this sort of a cushy position with them. It comes with an apartment assignment and a C level ration card, instead of negative tax barracks for singles and a public cafeteria pass that requires a weekly kitchen assignment. We will still regard you as an asset held back. You are one of only a few hundred people who have lived on Home and returned to North America. One of fewer yet who are free to return because you weren’t expelled from Home. If we need you, we’ll call on you.”
“Thank you,” Linda forced herself to say. She made a brittle smile that looked more like a grimace. It didn’t fool her handler but she was compliant. This meant she would be downgrading from a suite to an efficiency apartment, and from a B level ration card to a C that didn’t let you in the better sit-down restaurants. That still let her take some of her allotment as cash, which a D card would have killed. Still, she wasn’t going to be buying any Hermes scarves or fine leather boots from what you could skim off a C card as cash, and use in the dark markets.
* * *
Dr. Holbrook had a hard suit for them to put on. He’d researched so it was a bit of a snug fit on Jeff and big on April, but fit all three of them, Heather best of all.
Jeff went through the full checklist and ritual of having April check him putting the suit on. Holbrook looked impatient but wasn’t stupid enough to suggest he abbreviate the process. One spent years training to not kill yourself in vacuum, and deliberately breaking that training would be a very stupid thing to do.
Holbrook brought along a hand transceiver for suit and ship frequencies in case they didn’t have one. He verified everything appeared normal and then suggested Jeff turn off his radio and see what he heard.
“OK, I’m turning it off for a minute,” Jeff said. “If I have any problem, I will lift my right hand and you guys should crack me open.”
“Roger that,” Heather agreed. Holbrook belatedly held his finger to his lips to indicate the rest of them should stay quiet.
The visor was set clear and they saw Jeff get a puzzled look that turned to wonder.
“What do you think?” Holbrook asked after the minute was up.
“Let the ladies try it without me prejudicing their reaction,” Jeff said.
April seemed unimpressed, but Heather visibly scowled.
“Your impressions?” Holbrook asked again.
“It’s kind of creepy,” Heather said. “I’ve never been in a sensory deprivation tank, but it has to be pretty close. I think I heard my heart beating.”
“All I could hear was my stomach rumbling,” April said with a shrug.
“It’s the quietest suit I’ve ever been in,” Jeff said. “The last one I had built for me has active noise cancellation upstream from the fans, that kicks in when they are at more than idle. The best they can reduce it is a bit less than forty decibels on high, like when you are in direct sunlight. This was so quiet I found myself holding my breath trying to hear something. That’s with it still maintaining a good flow. I could feel it on my face.”
“I’ve got safety concerns,” Heather said. “If my fans fail, even on a low setting, I still am very aware of it now. If I’m concentrating on something and this fails, I’m going to lose valuable time unaware I have a problem. It needs either a four or five-decibel background hum or a triply redundant alarm with both audible and visible alerts.”
“A good point,” Holbrook agreed, “but this air circulator is all solid-state. With no moving parts, it is much less likely to fail. The reduced stress and fatigue from less noise are well worth adding the warning systems.”
“It should be valuable for residential systems too,” Jeff said. “How were you able to reproduce it? I’m impressed it’s within our ability after reading your last report.”
“Believe it or not, this is just a first-generation device. The original alien device is somewhat quieter at less than a decibel. We’ll improve on it, but we haven’t been able to match the transfer of flow from the wall to the center of the bore yet. We went to four smaller tubes to get the same flow. It’s almost two decibels but we’ve shifted the frequency to the lower edge of human hearing. To boost flow across the full bore, we had to place some small airfoils sticking out of the wall. Like anything, I’m sure we’ll make incremental improvements until we’ve matched or surpassed the original.”
“It’s a viable commercial product right now if you can just get the costs down. It’s not the sort of a product for which we could keep the process secret, so I’ll have a patent attorney work with you to get as much protection as is to be had in Earth law. We won’t file until you have a handle on cost. And you and everybody on the team for this device will get the bonuses written in your contracts,” Jeff promised.
“Excellent, I’ll report again when I’ve made more progress,” Holbrook said. He took Jeff’s words as his dismissal and started packing up his suit and equipment.
When he was gone Heather told her partners, “Just be sure Dr. Holbrook doesn’t list himself as sole author. I know several other people made contributions.”
“I’ll have the attorney report to me on that,” Jeff promised.
* * *
The Assembly of Home met in regular session, both in the old cafeteria and online. They disposed of several questions, approved a budget and Mr. Muños asked for any other business that the electorate wished to consider.
“Mr. Persico,” Muños acknowledged. Eddie was in the cafeteria and stood.
“As most of you are aware. We have continued construction of Beta, orbiting the same point as Home. We are near putting the sections built under pressure while the first ring will be extended to a full circle. We’ll be putting a partial spin on it as soon as we have the structural components of the full ring in place.
“Once we get to that point, we will start actual occupancy. I’m going to own cubic on Beta and I’m speaking for several other owners today. We’d like to get ahead of the question that will arise and ask to be annexed into the same political entity as Home. We are so close physically and in terms of communications lag that we would prefer to operate under the same Assembly and vote.
“It would be inefficient to try to duplicate all the services of Home for a low occupancy level on Beta. There are major benefits to all staying under one umbrella. You know by starting together, there is much less opportunity to diverge in our interests and grow apart as separate communities. If such a thing happens in time, the residents of Beta can petition to separate in the distant future. We will have greater safety and stature with the Earth powers by having more than one location while speaking with one voice. Even though we are safer here than in LEO, it is better to have multiple points a hostile power would have to attack simultaneously to be assured of victory without expecting a harsh retribution in return.
“We benefit from not creating any barrier to trade and free movement. Businesses will have an expanding market instead of a static one. If we are a single entity then there is no uncertainty in how the Earth nations will decide to recognize Beta or decline to do so. Being all new construction, Beta won’t require any increase in maintenance expenses for a very long time. By the time it is equivalent to Home it will have a population sufficient to support it, so the old need not subsidize the new in any way.
“I’d like Mr. Muños to ask if the Assembly wants to have the question considered at this time. If you don’t think you know enough to answer you can put off considering it for now. If you want to decide today, then I ask it to be put to a vote. That will use up my two proposals for this asse
mbly and if anyone doesn’t think those two proposals cover the question sufficiently, they will have to redefine them.” He sat back down.
“How do you people say?” Muños asked “All in favor of considering the question of annexing the hab known as Beta into the political entity of Home vote yea or nay, please.
The vote got ahead a thousand yea to three hundred nays very quickly. As often happened once an issue demonstrated that strong of a trend, people stopped voting. It was obvious which way it would end up and people didn’t feel strongly enough about it to vote just to make a public statement.
When the vote locked from timing out without further input Muños spoke again.
“On the question of annexing the Beta hab on request as a political extension of Home, how do you people say?” Muños intoned by the traditional formula.
The vote was slower this time and didn’t have a clear lead until three thousand votes were in. Eddie let out a big sigh of relief when it passed.
Chapter 13
April got up before Heather or Jeff and told the house to make coffee. It was so early Heather’s housekeeper, Amy, wasn’t in yet. She’d thrown on shorts and a t-shirt to be decent. She wasn’t sure when the woman would show up. She didn’t know Heather would have guests. She’d arrive soon, April hoped. She was hungry and didn’t want to cook. The woman was always happy when Heather had guests. Heather would be content to have oatmeal every day for years if it was just her at home. Guests let her exercise some skills beyond oatmeal additives.
She disposed of most of her messages by just reading the subject line and deleting them. Once again, she considered hiring a secretary or assistant just like Heather had Dakota. The problem was she didn’t always think Dakota was a good influence on Heather. It seemed dangerous to allow anyone to have a say in who you should hear. Look at all the times they had trouble with the Earthies, simply because the people in command surrounded themselves with layers of people who made talking to them directly, and quickly, impossible.
A12 Who Can Own the Stars? Page 19
