Worlds in Chaos (6 page)

In the main, Earth’s policymakers had rejected the Kronian urgings in preference for the orthodox view. With the military no longer able to press as compelling a case as in the days of superpower rivalry, and other lobbies jostling for a share of largesse at the federal trough, expansion of the space sciences and industries had not been a high government priority. For the private sector, ventures much beyond the Moon were too massively demanding in outlay and too risky to interest the major institutional investors, who looked to areas of secure returns such as launch systems for satellites and limited scientific payloads—which conventional technologies served adequately. Comfort and security had become the world’s foremost concerns. Only fringe outfits like Amspace, and a few visionaries who were prepared to back them, had continued pushing for a general commitment to broadening what the Kronians had pioneered, and were calling for the enterprise that advanced, long-range, spacegoing capability would open up:
colonization
. Hence, organizations like Amspace had found themselves natural allies of the Kronians, communicating and cooperating for the same end: the Kronians to impart a cultural imperative; the Keenes of the world—and the Joyces, spending weeks on end in a cramped, orbiting boiler room; the Wallys, hoping to create a better world for their grandchildren—pursuing lifelong dreams.

Then Athena happened—and surely, they had all believed, that would change everything. But astoundingly, it had changed things hardly at all. Of course, the early months had seen a media orgy of sensational pictures of the planetoid and a deformed Jupiter gradually regaining its shape; hurried explanations by scientists; and endless lurid articles and documentaries that the public eventually grew weary of. Sales of amateur telescopes, astronomy books, and videos soared; related college classes reported record enrollments; catastrophism saw a dramatic revival. And yes, the scientific community conceded, with some hemming and hawing and smoothing of ruffled plumage, that their theories needed revising—and then clamored for more funding to support the new research that needed to be done. But the kind of research they had in mind involved bigger and more lavishly equipped departments, computers that even the particle physicists would envy, more chairmanships and committees, and appointments to oversee unmanned missions to various parts of the Solar System. The mainline contractors got in their bids where they saw opportunity, but practically without exception the equipment and techniques envisaged were all safe, proven, and more of the same. Nothing they talked about anticipated any meaningful move toward getting
people
in significant numbers
out there
anytime soon. Finally, in desperation, the Kronians dispatched a political-scientific delegation to present their case firsthand in an attempt to shake Earth out of its complacency.

There was a tap on the door, and Celia stuck her face in. “We’re off now,” she said to Keene and Vicki. “Have a good weekend.”

“ ’Bye,” Karen’s voice called from the outer office beyond.

“Take care with those cowboys out there,” Keene called back. One of the ongoing news topics of the office was Karen’s latest boyfriend. He nodded a goodnight to Celia. She disappeared, closing the door. Keene looked back at Vicki. “We’ll just have to wait and see what the next few weeks bring,” he told her.

As he saw things, it was the last chance. If this didn’t bring about a change in Earth’s outlook and policies, nothing would. Then he and Vicki might well end up applying for jobs at the Bandana instead of just stopping by for happy-hour drinks.

5

Thirty years earlier, the world had scoffed and said it was impossible when two extraordinary personalities got together and announced an intention to establish a human settlement among the moons of Saturn. After the parade of mediocrity that had marked the closing decades of the twentieth century, it seemed that leader figures with the charisma to inspire followings had conceded the stage to rock stars and sports idols. Then, one day, a disenchanted California trial attorney with the unremarkable name of Thomas Mondel gave up a promising career to denounce the world’s economic system with the contention that humans were made—created, evolved, or “just there”; whatever one chose to believe—for better things. There was something wrong with a society that spent millions trying to make computers and robots imitate humans while at the same time raising humans to behave like robots. California had seen more than a smattering of fads and cults before, of course. But this was different in several ways that mattered. Mondel was not another beard with sandals and beads, reaching out to lost sheep and adolescents of all ages desperate to find escape from the hopeless corners of life that they had painted themselves into. He was professional, articulate, wise to the ways of the world, and he knew how to get attention. His appeal was to the slowly atrophying cost accountant stuck in traffic twice a day, two-hundred-fifty days every year, with the IRS waiting to mop up whatever of his year’s income survived Christmas; to the marketing wage slave sitting out a four-hour layover at O’Hare, looking forward to a microwaved TV meal in a solitary apartment and wondering what happened to the glamorous, high-powered executive that she’d created out of movie images in the years she was at college; to the frustrated who had worked to be scientists or teachers or ministers or healers, but found themselves turned into full-time form-fillers and fundraisers instead. In short, to all those people to whom it didn’t make sense to have to labor year-in, year-out in dismally unfulfilling ways in order to be allowed a modest share of the produce in a world whose biggest preoccupation seemed to be with moving overproduced merchandise that nobody really needed. And it was amazing how many people like that there turned out to be.

It was hardly the first time that somebody had denounced money value as the sole measure of worth of all things. In the past, Mondel claimed, some such indicator to keep track of who owed what to whom had always been necessitated by scarcity. But knowledge and the limitless capacity that it equated to in today’s world made that no longer true. In terms of ability, humanity’s material problems were solved. What hadn’t been solved was finding the right incentive to induce people to realize that ability. Trying to mesh twenty-first-century technology with nineteenth-century notions of economics produced the constant clashing of gears that the world had been hearing. When the wants of those with the means to pay determined the demand that was supplied, and not what the rest of the people needed, eventually the ones with the needs would resort to force to satisfy them, which was why war, unrest, and rebellion refused to go away.

“Mondelism” caught the mood of the times and spread, attracting followers from all stations in life committed to creating a mutual support network based on principles of obligation and trust, service and duty, instead of buying and selling. But it also attracted a lot of free riders too, as the skeptics had said it would, giving rise to hostility within and ridicule without, and in general the movement wasn’t a success. But neither was Mondel a quitter. The problems didn’t reflect on the soundness of the idea, he insisted, but resulted from its having to be sown in fields already choked by weeds. The followers continued to believe, and sustained by a core of tireless disciples and some quite influential backers, tottered on through intermittent triumphs and crises for several years. And then Tom Mondel met a geneticist-entrepreneur by the name of Clement Waltz.

Waltz had started a biological engineering company called Genenco that hit on a method for detecting and correcting a number of common genetic birth defects. Health-care systems worldwide rushed to license the process, since the cost of screening was significantly lower than that of the treatment programs avoided later. The result was that Waltz became a multibillionaire before he was thirty, upon which he grew bored with it all and cast around for something more meaningful to occupy himself with than continuing to make money, which he had come to despise. Some scientific and business colleagues introduced him to Mondel, and Waltz was immediately captivated. Mondel, by this time, had reached the conclusion that what his system needed was a clean start in an untainted environment removed from Earth. Accepting the irony that in a money-dominated world, money was necessary to gain freedom from the contamination of money, Waltz assembled sufficient assets from his own resources and sympathetic backers to solicit the Guatemalan government’s cooperation in constructing an assembly and launch center at a place called Tapapeque. He imported scientists from Japan, manufacturing know-how from China, disgruntled rocketry experts from NASA and the former Soviet military, and announced that he was going to establish a Mondelist colony elsewhere. The world chortled and jeered—until test shots from Tapapeque circled the Earth, and three months later a four-man lander touched down fifty miles from the UN experimental base at Tycho in a single-stage jump from an Earth-orbiting platform. Here was an illustration of what dedication and human creativity untrammeled by power-lust and greed could achieve, Mondel and Waltz told the astonished world. In the isolated Central American microcommunity, Mondelism worked. They then announced that the promised extraterrestrial colony would be founded not on Mars, as most commentators had assumed, and where a tiny international scientific reconnaissance group lived a hardy life with visitations twice a year; not among the Asteroids, which would be bypassed and exploited later; not even above Jupiter, whose high-radiation environment posed uncertainties; but all the way out at the remoteness of Saturn. This time the world didn’t jeer, although there was no disguising that its credulity was strained. . . . And, by God, they made it!

Thereafter, despite the distance and the infrequency of return voyages by the first ship, and—later—more departures by others, the colony grew at a surprising rate. The stories that came back of science free to function as an instrument of pure inquiry, unconstrained by establishment dogmas or the political agendas of funding agencies, attracted a particular kind of mind—not just physicists and engineers but builders, inventors, philosophers, explorers: the curious, the restless, the innovators of every kind. They were drawn by the accounts they heard of a society-in-miniature that seemed to function without budgets or accounting, where value was reflected in what an individual contributed to the common enterprise. Some gave the closest description they could find for the social order there as “monastic.” The measure of worth—“wealth”—was knowledge and competence. It couldn’t be stolen, hoarded, taxed, or counterfeited. If left to lie unused it effectively didn’t exist.

Invariably, there were those who couldn’t fit in and came back. And the vast majority on Earth, even if they ever thought about such matters and could relate to them, were unable to comprehend how anyone would choose living amid ice deserts and breathing machine-dispensed air to taking in a movie after a day’s shopping at the mall, lying on the beach, or harvesting corn in Iowa in October. But just a few here and a couple there from places scattered the world over proved sufficient to fill the transports lifting out from orbit and establish further bases on Tethys, Rhea, Titan, and Iapetus in a time period that confounded all the experts. Nevertheless, it was still widely regarded as a crazy venture destined eventually to peter out or come to an abrupt end. Earth’s commercial and political institutions made no rush to follow, since for them there was nothing to be gained. It was only in the surreal system of economics that Mondelism had created, where a huge infusion from altruistic benefactors had put up the stake money and some of the best talent that Earth had produced was prepared literally to work for nothing, that any significant investment in operations over such a distance could be contemplated.

There had been times when Keene too had thought about going in one of those ships—not during the early days, for he had been too young, but later, when he would have had something to offer out there. The period following the breakdown of his marriage had been one such time. Others were when he despaired that no Earth-based initiative would ever follow to build on the unique combination of circumstances that had founded Kronia—at least not while he was still a young man. But he had stayed, knowing those moods would pass—and they always had.