said Hench. ‘And every time they are killed by the Gun Club.’
She eyed him. ‘The “Gun Club”?’
‘NASA,’ Hench growled. ‘Bureaucrat lifers with turf to defend. And the space lobby in the USASF, which anyhow has always been overruled by the fighter pilots who run that service –’
She turned back to Malenfant. ‘And the permissions we’ll need? The legal obstacles, the safety rules? Have you thought about any of that stuff? Malenfant, this is such a leap in the dark. Not even NASA are launching space ships right now.’
Hench cackled. ‘But that’s the beauty of it. The excitement. Ms Stoney, we are historically a capitalistic frontier people. We’ve known space is the new frontier since 1950. Now’s the time to wriggle out from under the Gun Club federal guys and do it the way we always should have.’
Malenfant shrugged. ‘Emma, I’ve got the business plans lined up if you want to see them, and potential investors coming out of my ass – bankers, investment brokers, merchant bankers, financiers, venture capitalists from Citibank, Prudential Bache, Morgan Trust –’
‘All of which you’ve kept from me. For God’s sake, Malenfant. Forget your drinking buddies and after-dinner audiences. How the hell do we persuade real investors to risk real money?’
Hench said, ‘By building incrementally. By cutting tin fast. By building a little, flying a little, getting off the ground as fast as we can. That’s how we built the Thor …’ In the 1950s, with the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles already under development, the US defined a need for a smaller, simpler weapon for intermediate range missions, to be based in Britain and Turkey. The Thor, built from Atlas parts, would be the answer. ‘… You’d call it a Skunk Works operation today,’ Hench said. ‘We had that damn bird on the pad a year after the contract was signed. And we did it within budget, too. Not only that, McDonnell took it over and upgraded it to the Delta, and that baby is still flying and making money today. And that’s why I’m confident I’m going to be able to deliver …’
Hench’s eyes were a washed-out, watery brown, and flecked by damaged blood vessels. Malenfant was listening, rapt, to this old man’s reminiscences.
Emma realized that, of course, his decision was already made, the new program under this man implemented and running, a done deal; Malenfant would implicitly trust Hench, his personal Wernher von Braun, to deliver as he promised, and he would take a personal interest again only when there was hardware ready to fly on some launch pad.
But even if the technology worked, even if the costs worked out as Malenfant seemed to believe, there was the Gun Club and all the other opposing forces which had killed earlier turf-threatening new initiatives – forces which had pushed Malenfant himself into this covert scheme, obviously concocted over years, in absolute secrecy even from her.
But now it’s out in the open, what, she thought uneasily, is to stop the bad guys from killing us too? And if they do, where will that leave Malenfant? Where, in fact, will it leave me?
For she knew, of course, that she was already involved: that she would follow Malenfant wherever his latest dream took him, for better or worse. What a schmuck I am, she thought. She resolved to make more time for her e-therapists.
Hench talked on, urgently, meaninglessly, about rockets and engineering projects. For some reason she thought of Cornelius Taine, his cold eyes, his bleak, crazy warnings of the future.
‘… Malenfant.’
‘Yeah?’
‘What are you doing at Key Largo?’
Spaiz Kadette:
> Copy this and pass it on.
> The news is just incredible. After all that coverage over the weekend there can’t be a soul on the planet who isn’t aware of Reid Malenfant and what he’s trying to do out in the Mojave.
> Naturally the usual nay-sayers are hovering, moaning that Colonel Malenfant is acting outside the law, or is screwing up the environment, or is in some other way irresponsible.
> And there is the usual stench of hypocrisy and decay from the bloated corpse that is NASA, our space agency, the agency that should have done all this for us decades ago anyhow.
> Here’s the pitch.
> Following a hastily-convened gathering in Hollywood, CA, a new society tentatively called the Flying Mountain Society has been formed. If you want to join, it will cost 500 dollars US or equivalent.
> For that investment you won’t get any information or brochures or member services. We will not print glossy magazines or feed a giant staff. In fact we will have no full-time employees. As we are not another NASA booster club you won’t get glossy pictures of spacecraft that will never be built. All you will get is a guarantee that we won’t waste your money.
> FMS isn’t the only space organization, but it does exist solely to get us into space.
> Here’s the catch. Don’t join unless you are a hardworking person. Don’t join unless you support Colonel Malenfant’s goal of developing a space industry in our lifetimes, and are prepared to work for it.
> In fact we’d prefer you didn’t join at all. We’d prefer you started up your own local chapter, affiliated to the Society, which we hope will evolve into a global umbrella organization of pressure groups and activists.
> You can start with a bake sale. You can start by bombarding the schools with images of asteroids. You can start by hiking out to the Mojave, rolling up your sleeves and helping Colonel Malenfant any way he can use you.
> There is incidentally no truth in the rumours propagated in some sections of the press that the Flying Mountain Society is in any way affiliated with or funded by Bootstrap Inc. or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates as, quote, ‘a propaganda exercise’. This is in fact counterfactual malice spread by Colonel Malenfant’s turf-warrior enemies.
> If you want to get involved, reply to this mail. Better yet just get to work …
Maura Della:
Open journal. September 3 2010.
It was soon after my visit to Malenfant’s experimental site in the Mojave that the news broke about Bootstrap’s true purpose – that is, to assemble a private heavy-lift vehicle with Space Shuttle technology, to send some kind of mining mission to an asteroid.
I don’t know if Cornelius Taine had anything to do with that. Presumably yes, if it served his shadowy organization’s purposes. But it wasn’t impossible the leak had come from elsewhere; Bootstrap is surely as porous as any large organization.
Anyhow, I find myself being sucked into the project.
