
\thispagestyle{empty}
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{			 for Bruce, who knows
{		      we learn from failure more
{			  than from success

\vspace*{\fill}


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\thispagestyle{empty}
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{{ I'll keep this novel about real people }}
{{ I'll not get lost in ivory towers }}
{{ I'll remember those who do the hard work }}
{{ I'll thank them for being so kind to me }}
{{ God I pray inspire this work }}
{{ Man I warn of its errors }}
{{ These are not real people }}
{{ This is a work of fiction }}

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	    Requirements for The Great anti-American Novel



T - 691 days    crime must pay

It was a brilliant hack.  It topped the one
in college, when the net-news server was
configured to refuse the student lab.
They'd recompiled the server, altered so
that after printing ACCESS 5 DENIED
the program would accept posts anyway,
went in as "root", dropped the raw binary
straight to the drive, and used it daily for
six months until the system staff updated
the whole install.  But then they were just kids.

Burns parked in the employee lot, behind
the water fountain's dancing white froth display
and meter-high "Chesapeake," the k's
back cast like a sailboat's mast, and its whole visage that
of whitecaps breaking on the bay.
Chesapeake Computer Corporation:
world's largest router manufacturer,
A-list stock darling of the dot-com-ers,
high priesthood of the Internet who built
sleek metal semaphores humming away
on backroom metal racks of ISPs
around the world, that same one-word logo
emblazoned on the case of every one.

He strolled into the lobby like a favorite son
into his father's restaurant, breezed
past the rock garden and the potted palms,
blew off the break room, its Phillie cream cheese
bagels and stocked 'fridge, jogged right at the conference rooms
and entered a two-story cave
partitioned by a hundred cubicles ---
his life, ten hours a day the last six months.
These steel and fabric walls held Chesapeake's
true wealth, the coddled technocrats who built
the company's flagship products from caffeine
and white-board markers.  Wisely management
consigned itself across the street.

The key card was real; Burns was totally
legit.  A roaring economic boom
kept restaurants, book stores, golf courses and concert halls
jam packed with twenty-somethings who
had never flown economy in their
lives.  Every other car on College Avenue
was a Mercedes, or a BMW,
or a Land Rover.  Chic
restaurateurs provided their patrons colored Crayons and
blank paper place-mats to
brainstorm slick new proprietary server architectures while
waiting for twenty dollar lunches.  Programmers
were hot, and Burns' qualifications made
him a genuine find.
A white board talk was his job interview;
the background check, his resume.
He quickly got the run of Chesapeake,
concerned far more with the next million-dollar order than
deploying any real security against an inside hack.

Today, the cubicles were largely deserted.  As
he slipped into his, an attractive femme
in 'business casual' race-walked past.
A product specialist skilled in trade show acronyms,
Samantha Pride was always ready to
remind `her' programmers of the obvious.
When Burns had quit this job, he would not miss
_Big_talk_today,_Burns_, or
_Cable's_loose,_Burns_, or

"System goes down today, Burns!"

Burns: "Wouldn't miss it for judgement day,"
he muttered back without turning around,
propelled his chair against the terminal stand,
bit back his anxiety and logged in.
The main development computer, scheduled for
a hardware upgrade, would be shut down in less than an hour.
His e-mails, mostly notes from various employees turning the
day's outage into an excuse for a holiday weekend, offered
no reason to change plans.
He logged out, shouldered his laptop case
and headed for the server room.

Back in the nineteen seventies, those halcyon
days when spam came in cans and porn
sites were on Gay Street, Brian Kernighan,
inventor of the UNIX system, demonstrated that a compiler ---
the program which converts source code into
the bits and bytes that actually run the machine ---
could covertly alter the programs it compiled.
What's more, if the compiler is itself compiled
(and who would write a compiler from scratch?),
a virus is born, propagating from one
compiler version to the next,
altering programs at will
and effectively disappearing into the billions of
bits on a hard drive.  A Kerninghan virus is particularly
effective on closed, heavily customized systems, like those of
a router manufacture wanting custom, proprietary software to take
advantage of custom, proprietary hardware.

Burns slid his key card through the slotted box.  A light turned
green; a bolt clicked back; a line printer rattled.  Above an elevated
floor that covered a halon fire extinguisher system were
floor-to-ceiling arrays loaded with switch hubs, firewalls, RAID
arrays, and, in the corner, a massive air conditioner plant to
dissipate the heat.  A brand new multi-processor system sat, unpowered
and silent, while several workers chatted leisurely amonst themselves,
including one sporting a shock of red hair.

"Hey, Burns, what's up?"

'Red' Rimdew specialized in diving into stalled projects and finishing
them by pounding out code.  Burns, really more a designer than a
programmer, respected Red for his staying power with the boring tedium
that the finicky machines imposed on their masters.  Yet today no
deadlines loomed...

"Want to hit the bay?"

An afternoon of sailing on Red's thirty-six-foot Catalan
was an enticing idea.
So were the weeks
spent designing and writing his laptop's "screensaver";
the hours spent drilling 
dozens of varients on a thirty-second procedure; the flowcharted contingency
plans on an encrypted hard drive; his roommate waiting at the
apartment with a network link and two phone lines.

Burns: "No, thanks," Burns replied without a hint of deceit.  "I gotta
get this done."

He crossed to the other side of the room, where he was working on a
tricky install in one of the test machines.  Somehow, he just couldn't
seem to get the settings right.  Once up, he emailed his roommate,
_How_about_lunch_? _Sounds_fine,_ came Mercuriou's reply.

Forty five minutes later, with the main system shut down and two of
the three techs out of the room, Burns sent another email,
_Let's_try_Bogart's_.  Back in the apartment, Mercuriou skimmed down a
list of local restaurants and the names they translated into, then
picked up the phone.  A minute later, the third tech was called out to
answer a phone call.  Burns had contemplated taking a shot of
J.D. that morning to steal himself for this moment, but decided that
he had to be absolutely sober in case _anything_ went wrong.

He dashed across the room as the door closed.  It was one of the
scenarios he had drilled for.  He connected two cables, hit a
three-key sequence on the laptop, and ventured a glance at the door.
Nobody.  The laptop beeped.  He disconnected both cables and dashed
back across the room.  It would become one of the world's most
infamous hacks.  It had taken less than 15 seconds.

_Forget_Bogart's;_let's_hit_Vacarro's_! he emailed Mercuriou, who
read the message with a wry smile that soon broke into a broad grin as
he began spinning in his chair and cackling like a demon.

Buoyed by adrenaline, Burns floated back out to the parking lot,
tossed the laptop in the back seat, fired up a sneak-a-toke designed
to look like a cigarette, cranked the tunes and floored the rag-top
all the way home.


T - 370 days    drugs must be promoted

Mercuriou: "The routers run the network; hell the routers _are_ the
network.  You control the routers, you control the network.  You're
God.  I'm telling you, this thing's like super-hack."

A silence fell, sharp and sudden, split by a single word from the
kitchen.

Vic: "Burns."

From his perch on the couch, Mercuriou nodded in assent.  In his early
thirties and an inch under six feet, he was indifferently clad.  What
differentiated him more was his refusal to allow a television into the
apartment; an hour each day, timed on a stopwatch, devoted to reading
Latin; a framed letter of rejection from the University of Chicago.
Vic, waiting for the teakettle to boil, was nearly ten years older,
heavy set with a bristling mustache that often covered a mischevious
smile.

Vic: "So what's the point?  Why?"

Mercuriou: "We're going to Mars."

Antonov furled his brows and looked at him like he had just claimed to
have discovered extraterrestrial life.  Mercuriou stared back
impassively, his heart racing.  No, he was serious.  Walking into the
living room, Vic had to return to the kitchen for teabags, as the mugs
contained nothing but hot water.  Meanwhile, Mercuriou had launched
into a prepared speech.

Mercuriou: "Burns' got a plan, and I think it'll work.  Spaceflight is
perfectly doable; that's been demonstrated over and over for fifty
years.  The problem is money; the problem is always money!  You can't
fly without money, you can't ride without money; no money means no
electricity, no house, no food; they sell bottled water now for a
dollar a pop and half the planet can't drink the crap that comes out
of the tap; next thing'll be bottled air, you won't be able to breath
without money!"

Mercuriou: "Well, now we've got money," he concluded his cynical
tirade, produced a pack of fifty-dollar bills and fanned them on the
table, a deck of power.  Vic stood in the doorway holding something
forgotten.

Mercuriou: "Let's just say that there are some Keno systems out there
that are no longer completely random."

Vic: "Marc, this isn't like you, you're not a thief."

Mercuriou: "Well, maybe I've changed."

Vic looked straight into his eyes.  He had changed, as all men do.
Yet now he switched his tone of voice to that of a teenager stammering
to explain a 2 A.M. party to his parents.

Mercuriou: "I'm going to Mars, Vic!  I need the money!"

Vic sighed, handed one of the mugs to his young friend and sat down.

Mercuriou: "They're gonna catch me, Vic.  It's just a matter of time.
I'm into too much money.  I gotta be gone... like _really_ gone!"

Vic: "Mars, huh... Did you steal the money to go or are you going
because you stole the money?"

Mercuriou didn't answer.  Couldn't answer.

Vic: "Why are you doing this, Marc?  What's it all about... really?"

Finally, they went for a walk, out into the high summer of the New
Mexico mountains, hot and dry, a day that made the Latin scholar wish
for a convertible, a surf board, and the PCH before Southern
California had turned into a giant game of Sim City.  They were at the
end of a long driveway that wound between a fifty-foot cliff rising to
the left and a dry riverbed on the right.  He paused and inhaled
deeply, saving the aroma of desert flora.

\vskip 12pt
{{     Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air }}

Vic lead him around the back of the trailer, down a dirt path through
the scrub to the door of a second trailer some distance away.  It
looked much like the first one, except that all of the window curtains
were drawn.  Closer inspection revealed that white drywall backed the
curtains, making it impossible to see in or out.  Vic unlocked a
padlock and led the way in.

An overwealming smell hit Mercuriou -- skunk.  Inside, the trailer had
been stripped of its original furniture and fixtures.  The main room,
some thirty feet long, was lined on both sides with plastic tubs
raised about a foot off the floor.  Inside the tubs were perhaps a
hundred potted canibis (marijuana) plants, each sporting a bushy top
of their distinctively branching five-part leaves.  Two rows of grow
lights hung down from the ceiling on chain links that could be
adjusted in length as the plants grew upward.  A child's toy pool half
full of liquid fertilizer ran off the same timer as the lights and
also caught the runoff as the liquid percolated back down from the
plants.  An air conditioner hummed in the window, and a dehumidifier
discharged into the pool the water it condensed from the air.

Another hour of small talk found them back out in front of the cars,
intoxicated with a full-body high that they were just beginning to
experience.

Mercuriou: "I'll play their money game... I'll get out there and 'hustle', I'll
'compete', I'll rip and claw my way to the top, and when I get there,
I'll turn around and ram their global capitalist system right back
down their throats." [CA]

Vic bowed his head and struggled with conflicting emotions.

Vic: "How often do you pray, Marc?"

Mercuriou: "Right now, my only prayer is that Burns can get us into
orbit somehow!"

Vic: "I'll need some time to think about this," Vic concluded after
several minutes.

Mercuriou nodded his assent and left.  Vic stood standing in the
shade, watching the driveway down which Mercuriou's car had
disappeared.  The dust settled, and nothing disturbed the scene except
the buzzing of insects.

Vic: "This will require a vision quest."


T - 355 days    religion must look like a waste of time

The entire eastern sky was lit a brilliant red hue, as if a pane of
clear red glass had been slipped in behind the mountains and lit from
below.  Eyes closed, wrapped in a light Indian blanket, Vic awaited
the dawn.  A bright yellow light pierced out from a gap in the
mountains and began to widen into the orb of the sun.  Though
conscious of the light, Vic put off opening his eyes.

One of his favorite prayer spots, the desert canyon looked like a
giant had slashed through the brown hills with a knife and the desert
had bleed a river.  Pristine granite boulders blanketed the slopes
fifty feet on either side of the water.  Cactus and scrub brush
covered the surrounding land.  Amid patches of sandy beach, swirling
pools and murmuring cascades were two-foot diameter logs wedged
between boulders twenty feet above the water line, mute witnesses to
the tropical cyclones that, two or three times a century, settled over
the canyon and filled the arroyo with the raging waters that had
carved it out over the ages.  The water was drinkable, and a gentle
breeze often discouraged insects.  There were flat rocks to lie out on
in the sun, and shady crevices to evade the heat during the peak of
the day, not to mention ample bathing spots in the cool river.

Vic had put this off for weeks, inventing one excuse after another why
he couldn't do it just yet.  He had to let his clients know he'd be
gone for several days.  He had to find someone to take care of the
cat.  There was something on TV he wanted to see.  The moon wasn't the
right phase.  He wanted to finish the book he was reading.  It was
already too late today.  It was still pretty early, he could putter
around for another hour or so before leaving.

The truth was, though Vic had decided to undertake a vision quest, and
knew intellectually that this was the course he wanted to follow,
neither was he looking forward to spending days in silence and
solitude.  He had done this before, and knew what he was getting into.

He opened his eyes, turned around and looked east.  The sun was the
distance of a man's fist over the horizon.  The doctor rearranged his
blanket so he could contemplate its orb, then spread his arms apart
and closed his eyes again, basking in the gentle warmth of a new born
day. _Another_day_among_days_. _Uncountable_as_our_breaths_of_air_

_Marc_Mercuriou_wants_to_fly_to_Mars_.  Vic turned the thought over in
his mind for the hundredth-odd time.  He drifted back over the years,
the college parties, the mathematical discussions and philosophical
debates, the night Burns drove home on three hits of acid, the
program, the lawsuit, the expulsion.  His head snapped back up.  Had
he been sleeping?  He wasn't sure.  The sun hadn't moved, or had it?
Perhaps it was infinitesimally higher in the sky.

_Marc_Mercuriou's_flying_to_Mars_.  Vic laughed out loud, softly.
What really were the chances?  Yet Burns was involved, so who could
say?  A pair to draw to, those two were.
And they say they've got some kind of super-hack, no, that he could
believe.  If Burns wrote it, they probably did control half
the Internet.

Burns had always led the mathematical discussions, and rarely cared
about the philosophical debates.

The sun crept higher and the desert began to heat.  Vic unfurled
himself from his blanket and spread it out as a ground cloth.  He
thought of all the stuff he could be _accomplishing_ right now.  He
needed to transplant those seedlings, and take more cuttings.  The
fence along the riverbed still needed to be repaired after the storm.
He could be making lasanga for lunch, ahhh, lasanga, he could go back
now and at least have it for dinner.  Drive into town for the noodles,
tomatoes from the garden, cheese, he had Ricota but needed Parmasean.

Vic physically shook himself.  _What_are_your_priorities_? Is it the
perfect baked lasanga or discerning the will of God, or the Great
Spirit, as Vic prefered to call him?
_Some_people_go_through_life_for_the_lasanga_.

Had the sun moved?  He wasn't sure.  _We_waste_so_much_time_, he
almost cried.  Of course, after a while, you know that you'd be
filling the hours with all the _distractions_ - television, food,
drugs, games, books, sex, talking, walking, driving, cleaning.  Out
here, alone, you realize that this is what you waste seven times a
week.

_And_then_we_throw_it_all_away_and_die_.

Vic stood up and stretched.  The strict Indian vision quest required
not only fasting and sleep deprivation, but was also done naked and
confined to an area no bigger than a patio.  Of course, the strict
Benedictine monk arose at three in the morning [CHECK] to pray, and
the strict Buddhist drank no water after sunset.  Vic fasted and
prayed, but was clothed and allowed himself a somewhat wider leash.
He climbed down to the water, hopping from boulder to boulder, then
striped naked and bathed.  The stream was still cool, and the morning
breeze imparted a definite chill that turned it downright cold, but in
this place, the rushing arroyo was a luxury Vic indulged.  He plunged
his head under a ten-foot waterfall and whooped out loud, then
stretched out and floated on his back in the pool at the waterfall's
base.  Emerging from the stream after a time, he laid naked on one of
the boulders, waiting for his skin to dry.

_If_you_go_, _you_might_never_come_back_, his own voice practically
spoke in his head.  _Well_, _no_, he answered,
_one_day_I_won't_come_back_.  One day he might be driving down the
highway, or walking to the store, and in the next moment meet the
Great Spirit.  Maybe he would pick the day and time himself, Lord knew
he had contemplated it enough.  Or perhaps he would go like some of
his patients, linguring, faltering, fighting death every step of the
way.  _Just_not_like_my_father_, please God, _not_like_my_father_, not
witless and lost in his own home, surrounded by the family he couldn't
tell from strangers.

_We're_all_going_to_die_. _It's_how_we_live_that_defines_us_.

The sun was now halfway to its zenith.  Slowly, Vic dressed, then
returned to his blanket.  Perhaps later he would indulge in another
bath.  Hunger was present, but by the third day it manifested itself
more as fantasy than as any physical need.  A pi\~na colada.  That's
what he wanted -- a pi\~na colada, made fresh from coconuts and
pineapples, pureed in a blender with only a flavoring of rum.

_Mars!__He_can't_be_serious_.  Yet he was.  Vic had known Mercuriou
too long to suppose that he was joking, too well to suspect that he
was incompetent, and too dear to imagine that he was insane.

Or not.  Their encounter had been shocking.  How much he had changed!
They were like children who had grown up in a nursery, with cartoon
wallpaper and colorful mobiles, and only occasional flickers of a
distant fire glimpsed through the window.
_Men_with_guns_on_a_cruise_ship_.
_An_angry_speech_in_a_foreign_tongue_.
_Soldiers_patrolling_a_street_.  _Protest_marchers_burning_a_flag_.

Then they emerged from the nursery to find the house engulfed in
flames, and no way out.  Many gave themselves to the fire, toyed with
the fire, learned to play with the fire; many assumed that houses were
meant to burn, as they were made of wood.  Some had cowered in the
basement, or taken refuge in the game room.  Some tried to fight the
fire.  Some jumped.

_Where'd_you_hide,_Vic_? _The_smoking_parlor_?
_While_your_best_friends_became_thieves?_

Without moving, Vic looked to where an iguana had just scampered
across one of the boulders and darted into a crevace.  Life!  The
great mystery!  All around him, the plants, the animals, the birds
in the sky, the algae on
the rocks along the riverbed, all alive!  All part of some greater
consciousness!  What would an iguana know of Mars?  Yet both were
here, the iguana and the red planet, somewhere there in the sky.
_We_know_as_much_about_life_as_the_iguana_knows_about_Mars_.

Was it noon yet?  He wasn't sure.  He certainly hadn't brought
a watch.  No, the morning sun still falted the zenith.

_What_else_am_I_going_to_do_?
_Take_my_stolen_millions_and_retire_on_a_beach_?

It was hopeless to talk him out of it.  Maybe before, maybe when Vic
hadn't been there...

_What_else_am_I_going_to_do_?
_Live_in_a_trailer_and_grow_pot_in_the_mountains_?

Vic sighed.  His own life certainly hadn't turned out the way he had
expected it.

_I_wanted_to_be_a_doctor!_ The thought burst upon him with a flash of
anger that was gone as fast as it had come.

_Did_the_fish_want_to_live_in_water_?
_Did_the_cow_want_to_be_a_steak_?

Once in his life he
had been in a slaugherhouse.  Hundreds of cattle passing
through a shoot to be stunned and butchered.  An assembly-line
of death.  _We_don't_always_get_to_be_what_we_want._

What did he want?  Did it come down to that?  Maybe it wasn't about
the Great Spirit after all, maybe it was about Victor Antonov...

_Herasy!__Herasy!_ the voice shouted in his head. _We_don't_choice_for_ourselves;_we_must_DO_THE_WILL_OF_GOD!_

He awoke with a start.  The sun was visibly into the western sky.  How
long had he slept?  At first he felt rage at himself for sleeping,
then disappointment, then resignation.
_I'm_sorry,_father,_ he prayed, _I'm_not_a_kid_anymore._
He lay back down on the blanket and slept.

The sun was deep in the sky when he awoke.  He sat and watched it slip down
behind the mountains, until shade came to the arroyo, then watched the
light retreat up the slopes until only the summits were in direct sun.

_If_I_was_up_there_, _I_could_still_see_the_sun._

Finally the sunlight was gone, leaving
only a blue sky that deepened into purple, then black.  Crickets and
frogs trumpeted the arrival of night.  A rattlesnake slithered silently across
the still warm sand.  Here, away from the city lights, stars began to
emerge, first a dozen, then uncountable thousands.

_The_stars!_ Could there be life out there, too?  How could there not
be, in such vast reaches?  Was the Great Spirit only for this world?
Was there a different Great Spirit for every world, every sun?  And
the Greatest Spirit that transcended all?

_Who_knows?__This_is_dogma._

Dogma.  The bastard son of religion raped by logic.  The
psuedo-science of devising laws that govern a game we do not
understand.  For all the paucity of science, at least the physicists
demanded that their equations predict something real.

_Space._ Vic gazed up at the sky.  Blackness filled with light.
Thousands of ragging fires, tiny lights in their various
shapes and patterns, subtly hued and interspersed with dim
nebulas.  Orion loomed overhead.  Nor was the sky still.  Not only did
the stars shift through the night, but the lights of airplanes high
above passed slowly through the constellations and the occasional
unannounced meteor would flash past in a fraction of a second.  A
satellite transited overhead, still illuminated by
the sun.

_So_what_now?_ Vic didn't expect a booming voice from the heavens, or
a dramatic vision, though such things had been known to happen to others.  At
best, these quests ended in a quiet determination, a clarification of
purpose, a sense of a direction forward.  At worst, a torrent of
tears, disillusionment, and doubt that only time and prayer could
peer through.

_It's_how_we_live_that_defines_us_.  How was he going to live?
Growing pot in the mountains?  Twenty years in the big house with
Mercuriou?  Blown to bits in some goof-ball launch attempt?

_What_if_it_works?_ It was almost impossible.  How could something
this _crazy_ actually _work_?  _Crazy._ Yes, _crazy_.  Maybe he was
ready for something crazy!  He grinned, closed his eyes and tried to
empty his mind, tried to open himself to the Great Spirit.

_I'm_sick_of_being_sane!_ Vic practically lept to his feet at the
thought.  Why be sane?  Why not do something _crazy_?  What's the
worst that could happen - death?  No, jail would be a fate worse than
death.  Death he could handle.  Death meant meeting God.

Vic chuckled, this time aloud.  _Look_at_yourself_.  A trailer full
of marijuana plants and you're worried about _jail_?  Well, yes,
acutally, he was.  _Ahh,_to_hell_with_it._

If he went with Mercuriou, it might be a long, long time before he
returned to this place.  _Or_ever_.  He looked around - the rushing
water in the arroyo could now be heard but no longer seen.  Dim outlines of
rocks and scrub bush surrounded him.  This land was beautiful.  Did he
really want to part with it?  Locked in an airconditioned tube for who
knows how long? _Some_people_go_through_life_for_the_lasanga._

Orion had crept into the western sky.  To the south, a jet airplane
crossed to the east.  Vic cast his mind to it.  Most of the passengers
would be asleep, or trying to catch what sleep they could
in the jet-lag abbreviated night.  In a dimly lit cockpit, the
pilots guided the plane along a jetway, marked by radio
beacons and GPS coordinates, colorful radar displays
to show what was in front of them.  Would they peer down into
the darkness below?  To wonder if anyone was looking back up?

Once, long ago, a monk had prayed for guidance.  An angel appeared in
a vision to say that God's will was to serve men and in serving them,
to reconcile them to him.  Serve men?  The monk was incredulous.
Three times the angle repeated the command, then disappeared.

He was a trial judge.  The murder defendant had been convicted by the
jury, but Vic wasn't convinced.  He wrestled with his conscience.
Dare he overturn the verdict?  Dare he let an innocent man die?  In
the courtroom, spectators laughed, ate, talked on their cell phones.
Angry, Vic called for order, pounded on his gavel.  Didn't they
understand that the issue was life or death?  He struggled to deliver
the verdict, started, stammered, started again, and then the
prosecutor spoke.  There was new evidence.  The defendant was
innocent.  The charges were dropped.

Vic awoke.  Was there light?  Yes, the eastern sky was beginning to
brighten and he could just make out the ridge line of the mountains.
What did the dream mean?  That he was off the hook?  That he had made
the right decision?.  Do they mean anything?  He lay on the cool
earth, wrapped in his blanket, watching the stars fade out above.
_Sometimes_the_searching_can_get_in_the_way_of_the_finding._

Another day had past, another had come.  He would not fear death; he
would not fear jail.  Nor would he keep living in a house trailer,
puttering back and forth to his hydroponic garden.  He stood up and
stretched, then sat still until it was light enough to see, though not
yet dawn.  Slowly he rolled his blanket, then started down the trail
as the sun peaked over a ridgeline.  Halfway to the car, he looked
back toward the arroyo, regretting that he hadn't returned to bathe.


T - 239 days    curiosity must kill

In 1998, John Pople became the first man in history to win a Nobel
Prize for writing a computer program.  It was called _Gaussian_, and
it numerically simulated Schr\"odinger's equation, the crucial formula
for explaining the complex interactions that formed atoms and
molecules.  _Gaussian_, and programs like it, made it possible to
analyze atomic structures in much the same way as numerical
simulations of Newton's equations made possible the analysis of
planetary movement in solar systems.  For hundreds of years,
scientists had sought the master formulae of a purely mathematical
Theory Of Everything.  Like two teams drilling a tunnel from opposite
directions, physicists and chemists had pursued a crucial thread of
this common quest, the physicists digging deep into the mysteries of
the atom while the chemists measured and categorized the myriad array
of substances.  Then, in the early decades of the twentieth century,
the physicists broke through the tunnel.  Quantum mechanics, the most
spectacularly successful physics theory of all time, came with one
slight/minor caveat - nobody knew how to solve its equations.

\vskip 12pt
{{	Everybody says this'll lead you to doom }}

Stereo cranked, the windows reverberated with the hard rock beat
as the guitar lick arched to its climax.

\vskip 12pt
{{     But that don't help you in the... }}

Alister: "Bed-roooom!"  Alister bobbed his head and sang the refrain
out loud.

The office was actually the living room of a large plantation house
that Mercuriou and Burns had converted into an office for a team of a
half-dozen young programmers.  The parquet floors and picture windows
overlooked a sandstone cliff dropping to an expansive ocean beach
fringed by coral.  Waves crashed against a nearby point, surfboards
were stacked lazily [IMPROVE] near the beach trail, and broad overhead
fans circulated the sea breeze.  In a pair of curtain-side semis
hummed a parallel-processing system of more than a thousand
processors.

They were looking for a new type of rocket fuel, liquid at room
temperature and with better performance than the solids.  The bosses
were out of town and the other guys had taken off, so Alister had the
place to himself.  Twenty years old, with matted blond hair, he had
left South Africa to study abroad, finished a double major in
chemistry and physics, then stayed after graduating.  TenTech was his
first job [after college].

Yet Alister fancied himself a hacker, and Burns had carelessly allowed
the young chemist to watch him login to 'genie'.  Alister now used
that password to enter the system and look around.  Its accounting
records showed one program used more than any other, so he ran it.

A new window appeared on his screen.  On it, brightly colored graphics
portrayed a cue stick deflecting billard balls into a neat square.
Each ball contained a number - sixteen, then thirty-five, then four.
Alister recognized it immediately.  It was a Keno game of the
type you might find in a casino.
_What's_all_this_secrecy_about_a_game_, the young man wondered.  Then
the bottom of the screen caught his eye, where the machine displayed
the current date and time.  _Bloody_hell!?!_


T - 237 days    youth must be corrupted

Mercuriou: "What did he see?"

Mercuriou asked the question without emotion.  Behind him, the ocean
frothed and seethed gray-green under a steady rain, reflecting the
chaotic smear of light patterns that radar engineers dubbed "sea
scatter", then morphed into an indistinct horizon where rain met cloud
met ocean.

Burns: "He ran the program."

Mercuriou: "Did he understand what he saw?"

Burns: "Probably.  He's pretty sharp."

Mercuriou: "So he knows we're thieves."

Mercuriou folded his hands in front on him on the desk.  He sniffed,
then chuckled, then finally broke out in a loud guffaw.

Vic: "You think this is funny?"

Mercuriou: "I think it's hilarious!  Our whole operation is made
possible by Burns' super-hack, and now along comes this
twenty-year-old kid who hacks _your_ system!  How's the project
going?"

Burns: "The older engines work with the new fuel.  We've got a synthesis
pathway, but it can be improved.  We still need an airplane,
spacesuits, launch towers, tanks and just about everything that goes
in them.  And, of course, we don't have enough fuel."

Mercuriou: "Plus we need another big hack."

Burns: "I'm swamped."

Mercuriou: "But we've found a hacker!"

Burns screwed his eyebrows and thought for a moment.

Burns: "He's sharp, real sharp.  One of the best kids I've got, and it
looks like he can hack.  I guess... will he hack... for _us_?"

Mercuriou raised a finger in the air and rose out of his chair, an
adrenaline rush surging within him, like he was asking a stranger out
on a date.

Mercuriou: "Let me take care of that.  Go get Alister."

As soon as Burns was out the door, Mercuriou lept to action, erasing
the whiteboard then rearrangeing the chairs.  By the time Burns
returned with Alister, Mercuriou was back in his own chair, had swung
it around, and was leaning back against the desk, watching the rain
pelt against the executive suite's plate glass windows.  Vic directed
Alister to sit in front of the desk, and Burns closed the door.  The
pelting rain and the breaking surf were the only sounds as Mercuriou
watched the streaks of water sliding down the glass and gazed on
toward the reef break beyond.

Mercuriou: "There was an unauthorized connection to 'genie' from your
workstation Saturday night at 9:43 PM.  It was encrypted, of course,
but it lasted about an hour, and, of course, there are accounting
records."

He turned as he spoke and Alister's face flushed red.  There seemed
little point in denying the obvious, but it was curiosity that had
driven him; Alister was neither a natural liar nor thief.

Alister: "I saw Burns type that password."

Burns: "You've seen me type the password?"

Alister: "I read it over your shoulder."

Mecuriou almost snickered again, then covered his mouth with his hand,
recovered, and pressed on.

Mercuriou: "...and what did you see?"

Alister shrugged.  An awkward silence followed, then he answered.

Alister: "It's tomorrow's lottery numbers today."

Mercuriou now got up out of his chair and walked to the window.  A
deep calm overcame him.  He visualized himself as an ace closer
walking to the mound in the bottom of the ninth, digging in on the
rubber, then turning to deal.

Mercuriou: "OK, you figured that out, but it's a lot bigger than that.
This is a _heist_."

Alister: "You're robbing a bank?"

Mercuriou: "We've already cleaned out one, and we're thinking about
taking down another.  We've got to get away, though; we've stolen too
much already.  That's why we need a new rocket fuel."

Alister: "So, you're going... into space?"

Mercuriou: "Mars."

Alister looked around.  He had entered the room expecting to be fired.

Alister: "Yeah, and I'm Nelson Mandela."

Mercuriou: "This is no joke."

Alister: "What I saw on that computer screen was no space shuttle."

Mercuriou: "There will be!  Not exactly like NASA's; we've got a
different design.  But I'm no petty thief!  We've stolen because we
_need_ the money, need it to do something that'll make a difference
for the whole world.  We've got push space technology forward!"

Mercuriou: "Is the future here on Earth, Alister?  What do our leaders
want?  To drive technology forward?  Really?  Promote innovation?
Promote freedom? Is that why they've outlawed on-line libraries?  Is
that why they want a wall across our southern border?  Liberty?  Is
that what they call the drug war?"

% Mercuriou began to pace in front of the window.

Mercuriou: "They want to sell you gasoline, or video games, or stadium
tickets at prices people will grumble about and then pay while they
eat out every night and take their vacations on Maui.  We could have
video-on-demand, right now, I'm telling you!  We could take every
T.V. show aired in the last week and have it right there at the push
of a button!  We could take every book in the Library of Congress and
put it online for anyone in the world; we've _got_ that technology!
And people in Cambodia could be building their own computers, but we
keep the designs secret while they sew us shirts.  The only innovation
our leaders want is innovation that they can control!"

Mercuriou: "So we need a revolution, and it's not going to happen in
this world; the establishment is too strong.  But out there..."

Mercuriou: "Think about it, Alister!  Grow your own food!  Make your
own power!  The asteroids are practically pre-mined!  If we find
something like a pure vein of gold or paladium, everyone will be
copying this design to build their own spaceships and race after us.
If not, we can still mine the minerals we need to build more ships.
Silicon chip production should actually be easier in a vacuum!"

Mercuriou: "Six billion people on this people!  Think about it!
_Six_billion_ of us!  How many of them make a difference, really?  How
many of them get out of their easy chairs and change the world?  If
the human race is going into space, it won't happen seven colonels at
a time in a space shuttle!  We've got jump start it and show that
ordinary people can do it, not just a bunch of prima donas.  And
_to_hell_ with what our great leaders here on Earth think about it!"

Mercuriou walked to the window, folded his hands behind his back, and
gazed out over the ocean.

Mercuriou: "...but it all sounds so wild... too wild to be true!"

He turned and looked Alister straight in the eye.

Mercuriou: "I think you're intrigued, Alister!  So check out our
launch complex, and _then_ tell me what you think!"


%T - 112 days    the rich must persecute the poor
T - 112 days    friendship must be given away

Kyle: "So what'd you think?"

The car zoomed down Interstate 45 toward the Johnson Spaceflight
Center.  The morning rush hour had passed, and an electronic sign over
the roadway advised, `NASA Road 1 - 5 minutes'.

Andrea: "When I heard the learn'd astronomer..."

Kyle: "Oh, come on, Andrea!  They're publishing the whole sythesis
pathway!  ...and disclaiming all the patent rights!  I thought you'd
love it!"

She thought over yesterday's press conference.  Some new rocket fuel,
no _revolutionary_ new rocket fuel, truly revolutionary.  What were
they calling the company?  TenTech?

Andrea: "Kyle, I just get sick of all these guys who act real cool,
and wear blue jeans to work, and call everybody 'dude', and deep down
inside they're a bunch of bastards.  Just you wait - I'll bet you
they've got some kind of angle on this.  The engineer seemed to really
know his stuff, but the CEO was a con artist."

Kyle: "Well, 1033's no con, Andrea!  TenTech's ramping up to full
production!  Terry and Steve are working on a new design; they're
talking single stage to lunar orbit!  Maybe a shuttle without SRBs!  I
thought you'd be excited about this, I mean, this could really mean
people living in space!"

Andrea: "Kyle, we've got airplanes flying between all of our major cities
every day, and for most of the six billion people on this planet, they
might as well _be_ space shuttles.  Our problems are here on Earth."

Kyle: "Well, I thought you'd be excited about this."

Andrea: "I didn't mean it like that.  I mean, if you want to do it...
I just know that _my_ problems are here on Earth.  I'm not going back
into space again."

Kyle: "OK, well... OK."

Andrea: "Thanks for inviting me down, though; it's been too long since we've
seen each other."

Kyle: "Next time take a plane, I'll pay for it; you give me such a
fright hitchhiking!"

Andrea: "You put your faith in God, Kyle...  and you tie your hair up
under a cap and and lose the miniskirt!"

Kyle: "A space suit, yes; a mini-skirt, never!"

They laughed as Kyle pulled off the Interstate and stopped at a city
bus stop.  Andrea got out and pulled her bag out of the trunk.

Kyle: "Sweatheart, you sure you don't want a plane?"  She shook her
head as he pulled out five twenty-dollar bills and handed them to
her.  "Just this once take the Greyhound!"

Andrea: "Thanks, Kyle," Andrea said, giving him a hug.  "I love you."

Kyle: Kyle nodded and got back in the car before quietly answering, "I
love you too, girl," and then cried out "Call me when you get home!"
as he drove away.

It was ten o'clock in the morning.  Andrea climbed on a half empty
downtown local and gazed out the window as the controlled access
highway gave way to mid-market chain restaurants, landscaped malls,
downtown streets and finally the transfer station.
_What's_wrong_with_me_, she wondered.  Wasn't Kyle right?  Wasn't it
good of these men to disclaim the patent rights on their invention
instead of trying to monopolize it?  _Give_to_all_who_beg_of_you._
Wasn't it the Christian thing to do?  _Maybe_I'm_just_being_cynical_.

At the transfer station, instead of walking the three blocks to the
Greyhound station, she spent five minutes decyphering a wall of posted
bus schedules, then climbed onto another local headed into one of the
older sections of town, walking the last quarter mile to a
hundred-year-old Catholic church that occupied an entire city block.
Built of stone, glass, and metal bars, it could have been mistaken for
a prison except for the broad entrance stairs and the cross mounted on
its steeple.  Walking around back, she found a rear entrance sporting
a colorful sign that read, `The Franciscan Fryer'.

Entering, she found herself in a white tiled dining room set with
white plastic tables and metal chairs.  Three men were preparing for
lunch.  Hanging against the far wall was a rood icon cross, painted in
Byzantine style, with a red background and a bevy of saints behind the
figure of the crucified Messiah.  Andrea recognized it immediately ---
the San Damiano Cross, replica of the crucifix which, eight hundred
years earlier, had spoken in a vision to the young man who knelt
before it in prayer.

Bible: "Now go hence, Francis, and build up my house, for it is nearly
falling down!"

Francis of Assisi had looked about him at the crumbling chapel he
knelt in and set out to do as the vision commanded.  Returning to his
father's shop, he took several rolls of fine cloth (without
permission), rode to a nearby market town, sold both cloth and horse,
and returned to the chapel, where he tried to press the money into the
hands of the reluctant priest.  Andrea had always felt that it was a
typical message from God: simple, powerful, and very easy to
misunderstand.

"We don't serve until eleven."

Andrea: "I'm looking for Brother Dunstan."

"Oh, he's probably in the kitchen."

She walked to the rear of the room, seperated from the kitchen by a
long serving counter.  A pot-bellied man in his late forties, with
balding hair and a worn apron covering the brown habit of the
Franciscan order, muttered to himself as he stirred a steaming kettle
on the commercial stove that dominated the rear of the kitchen. [FIX]

"Andrea!"

Andrea: "Hello, Dunstan!"

"Oh, Andrea!  What a joy it is to see you!"

Andrea: "Thanks, hey this place looks great!"

"Well, you know, I had somewhat different expectations for it.  I'd
wanted something more like a restaurant, you know, that would also
serve as a soup kitchen if people couldn't pay, but Andrea, we just
couldn't pay the rent downtown!"

Andrea: "That was the place on Travis Street?"

"Right!  I mean, a lot of people did pay, but usually only just enough
for their own food, you know, and then with those who didn't pay or
couldn't pay, well, we just couldn't afford to stay there.  It was a
nice location, but we just had to leave.  I prayed a lot, well I
worried a lot, and then this place turned up!  The rector here said we
could use the church's kitchen for free, and Andrea, you know, it's
been a real blessing, because I try to keep the place open seven days
a week, you know, and on Sundays now so many people stay after church
for lunch that it's really helped the congregation, you know, their
social life, and I get regular donations now from them, and well, I
just don't know what I would have done without it!"

Andrea sat down as the workers finished setting up the room, and
Dunstan put the finishing touches on lunch, which they shared just as
the first customers, mostly homeless, came in.  The food, especially
considering its meager pretensions, was excellent.  There was fresh
baked bread, coffee and orange Tang ("the drink of astronauts!",
Dunstan toasted), a thick lentil soup with just enough tomatoes and
onions to give it depth, and tuna salad, replete with chopped Granny
Smith apples and stuffed into the fresh bread, one of Dunstan's
signature dishes.

"Can you stay until Sunday, I'm making stuffed peppers, you know, I
always like to do a nice lunch for the congregation?"

Andrea: "No, thanks, I'm heading back to my mom's place in Iowa today.
I just came down to visit Kyle Lankier, he has a new project, some
people have developed a new rocket fuel."

"You know, I heard about that!  They say it's quite revolutionary, is
that true?"

Andrea:  "Yes, it seems to be.  I know Kyle's quite excited about it."

"Well maybe we'll have one of our oblates flying back into space,
ehh?"

Andrea shook her head vigorously.

Andrea:  "No way, not a chance; I've made my last shuttle landing."

As she was leaving, she quietly took one of the envelopes from the
holders on each table.  It was blank, except for a quote from the
Gospel of Matthew: 

Bible: {{ "When I was hungry, you fed me."

She fished the transfer slip out of her pocket and inspected it
closely.  It was still valid.  She put the rest of her money into the
envelope, sealed it, and slipped it into the drop box on her way out
the door.  Using the transfer to take a city bus to the northern
extremities of Houston, she walked another quarter mile to the
Interstate, sat down her duffle bag beside the ramp, and began
thumbing for a ride.

More than a hundred cars passed in about an hour before a cab stopped.
Andrea had almost not bothered to raise her thumb when she had seen
the distinctive yellow car. _Judge_not_by_appearances..._

"I'm only going about twenty miles to pick up a fare."

Those miles conveniently ended at an exit with a truck stop. She
didn't want to go into the restaurant, because she didn't want to
harass the truckers for a ride while they were eating, nor did she
want trouble with the management.  Instead, she fashioned a cardboard
sign reading "Iowa" and sat down with it between the parking area and
the on-ramp, making sure she could be seen from both.  Trucking
companies didn't like truckers giving out rides, but one of drivers
gave her a lift anyway.  He was going right through her state.

They talked through the afternoon as the miles drifted away.  He was
an aspiring writer who wanted to hear everything she could tell him
about NASA.  He was also a convicted hacker and was wearing a
monitoring bracelet on his ankle.  As dinner time approached, Andrea
explained a bit more about her religious order.

Andrea: "I appreciate the ride, and don't expect you to feed me just
because I gave all my money away.  I can fast until I get home.
Seriously."

"But you get everything by begging, right?"

Darren bought dinner at a diner in Oklahoma, during which Andrea
showed him a small plywood replica she kept of the San Daimano cross
and told him the story of St. Francis.

"So why did he give everything away?"

Andrea: "He was inspired by a Gospel quotation during mass: Do not
possess gold, nor silver, nor money in your purses.  This was two
years after the vision."

"How on earth did he live?"

Andrea: "Well, when he was rebuilding the church, he actually sang in
the marketplace and then asked his audience to donate stones.  The old
priest there would feed him dinner every night, but Francis didn't
want to impose on him, so he started taking a bowl and begging
door-to-door at dinner time.  By the time he ended his circuit through
Assisi, his bowl would be full, and that would be his dinner."

"So you go around the dining room with a bowl!?"

Andrea: "No, I'm not as good a Francisan as Francis.  Nobody is.
What's happened to me is that I've found good friends and family to be
my surest supporters.  I don't travel as much as I should.  Maybe I'm
becoming a Benedictine."

...and then they talked on about that as they drove on into the night.
Darren began squawking into his C.B. radio as they approached the
Nebraska line.

"Got a rider here looking for a ride to Iowa Springs...  Any drivers
out there heading towards Iowa Springs?..."

After nearly an hour of intermittent radio calls, driving closer to
Iowa all the time, he finally raised a truck delivering a load only
twenty miles from her mom's farm.  Andrea helped that trucker navigate
the back roads, called her mom for a ride, and was home in bed by
three o'clock in the morning.



T - 100 days    the media must expose themselves

NEW YORK (AP) - Keystone Securities (NYSE: KEY) declared bankruptcy
today in the wake of a computer malfunction that triggered an
automated series of losing trades.

Keystone, a leading global investment, securities trading, and banking
firm, relied heavily on automated trading programs to manage a
multi-billion dollar portfolio that was then sold off at fire sale
prices by the same programs.

According to published company reports, Keystone's market
capitalization was over $50 billion.  The trades triggered losses that
exceeded the firm's available trading capital by nearly $20 billion.
Auditors declared the firm insolvent over the weekend.

"What's surprising isn't that there was a bug in some trading
program," says Abruce Scowl, a consultant with Toro and Oso, "but
rather that there weren't sufficient controls and safeguards in place
to prevent a disastrous loss."

Both the SEC and the FDIC have launched investigations into the
incident.  

"Keystone does not have the capital resources it needs to be a viable
competitor," the company's president, Art Tocsin, said in a statement.
Keystone "should emerge from bankruptcy a stronger and more
competitive company".

Although no criminal charges have been filed, legal experts have
speculated that Keystone could become a test case for corporate
liability in the face of a major computer malfunction.


T - 93 days    it must be sly

Mercuriou: "Any suggestions?"

Burns: "_Technical_Sketch_Four_?"

Mercuriou put his hands on his hips and stared at Burns.

Burns: "Well, that's how I think of it..."

They stood at the base of a 767, its engines replaced with rockets,
its doors welded shut, a hydraulic mating adapter on its nose.  It sat
in a hanger adjacent to their private runway, on a cliff overlooking
the ocean.

Alister: "_The_Royal_Way_?"

Vic: "But this isn't the Royal Way, Marc, it's all stolen!"

Mercuriou's stare was cold, but there seemed a strange smile behind it.

Burns: "_Manifesto_of_the_Secessionist_Party_?"

Mercuriou rolled his eyes.

Alister: "_Baccala's_Manifesto_?" and they _all_ looked at Alister
like he had just ruined the punchline to a great joke.
"...or maybe just _Manifesto_?"

Vic: "How about
_On_The_Evil_of_Capitalism_and_The_Danger_of_Democracy_?"

Mercuriou: Mercuriou now shook. "You want me to put
_that_... _there_!" and waved toward the ship's cockpit.  Vic studied
the spot thoughtfully.

Vic: "Perhaps something shorter would be better."

Burns: "_The_Great_Hawaiian_..."

Alister: "_Icarus'_Wing_!"

Mercuriou:      "What?"

Alister:          "You heard me."

Mercuriou stared at the Afrikaner in disbelief.

Mercuriou: "You know who Icarus was?"

Alister:     "Yeah."

Mercuriou: "Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it
_Xplorer_One_!"


T - 7 days    friendship must be paid for

"I'm inclined to say the thing looks like a front operation, but that
doesn't make any sense, either."

Sitting in the shade of her mother's porch, with a pitcher of iced
limeade on the table and two glasses half consumed, Andrea read
in silence.

"You were right about Mercuriou, too.  I don't believe a word that
comes out of the man's mouth.  I just can't figure out his angle."

Andrea: "There's no question that this stuff works."

"None!  That's what doesn't make sense!  They're always having
production problems; they need more time."

Andrea: "No way.  Not with the quantities of nitric acid they're
consuming.  They've already been shipped enough to fuel about three
conventional shuttle launches."

"Why are they doing all this in Hawaii... why?"

Andrea: Andrea pushed the papers away.  "Sounds like you need a
detective, Kyle."

"I need somebody who can't get blown off by a bunch of techno-babble!"

Andrea: Andrea laughed anxiously.  "What are you getting me roped into?"

He looked deflated.  Andrea sighed.
_Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_...  especially your best friend!

Andrea: "All right," she visibly collapsed. "I'll go."

"Great!  Listen, I've got everything set up; I'll pay for the plane
ticket and advance you a thousand dollars.  Their main facility is at
a place called South Point..."


T - 2 days    hitchhikers must be crazed

Twenty thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, the inter-island jet
darted across 'Alenuih\=ah\=a Channel, swept down Hawaii's leeward
coast, grazed Keahole Point at two thousand feet and touched down at
Kona International Airport amid a broken jumble of blackened lava
flows.  Unlike Honolulu's congested and dilapidated air hub, Kona was
more a collection of stone huts than anything bearing the grandiose
title ``International Airport''.  As the ground crew pushed a ramp up
to the plane (there was no jetway), the passenger in window seat 8A
stared morosely at an ATM card.

Kyle: _What_am_I_supposed_to_do_with_this_thing?_
"Just stick it in the machine and don't worry
about it." _...in_no_manner_are_they_to_receive_coins_or_money_..._

She cut it in half and threw it in the trash almost as soon as she got
off the plane.  _It_has_to_be_done_The_Royal_Way_.

Andrea: "Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to South Point?"

"You can catch the Hele-On there in front of the space center."

The space center?  Indeed.  After the Challenger disaster, Hawaii had
built the Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Space Center to commemorate the
life and loss of one of her most prominent citizens.  The small white
building was closed when Andrea walked up to it, so she merely peered
through its windows and set down her backpack to wait for the bus.
Experience told her that bus drivers would sometimes give free rides
to the destitute, and that other passengers might assist when drivers
were unwilling.

No such finagling was necessary.  The Hele-On was a free service
operated by Hawaii county, so Andrea took a seat, cracked open a
window, and enjoyed the ride as the bus meandered through shopping
malls, past more broken lava, seaside villages, beach parks, a high
school campus, a elevated tennis court and over every rise and around
every corner, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean.  The empty bus soon
filled with an assortment of locals heading home, and the driver even
waited for one passenger to mount a bicycle on a rack before boarding.
An intermittent drizzle began to fall as Kona's rich volcanic soil
gave way to the rolling forested hills on Mauna Loa's southern flank.

Dusk was falling two hours later when Andrea disembarked at the road
leading to South Point.  Few riders were left on the departing bus;
most had gotten off at a park-and-ride a few miles back.  There was
little to remark upon except a road sign and an abandoned building,
which Andrea immediately seized upon as a Godsend.  A quick
investigation of its contents revealed a detachable bench seat that
would serve as a small but usable bed, and several scraps of carpet
that could be passably used as blankets.  Weeds were growing up
through the floorboards, while liquor bottles and graffiti bore mute
witness to the transients that, like her, occasionally livened the
old building for a few hours.

Yet was this The Royal Way?  It hardly seemed fit for a queen, but
then neither had Christ's crown, nor had his throne.  Andrea took one
of the carpets, walked back across the road, wrapped it around her,
and sat down to see if anyone would take pity.  Several cars passed,
but none stopped.  After half an hour, the rain began to fall again,
so Andrea returned to the old building and settled in for the night.

Perhaps here, in this world, this _was_ The Royal Way.


T - 1 day    hitchhikers must be dangerous

It had rained off and on throughout the night, but the old building's
roof was solid and the carpets had cut enough of the chill to allow at
least a few hours of sleep.  Now, shortly after dawn, she packed her
bag, straightened up the ramshackle furniture, and walked out to the
road, where a young couple was waiting for the bus.

"Do you know what time it is?"

She fished her cellphone out of her pack long enough to check.

"Seven-thirty."

They reacted with disappointment.  The Hele-On was a free service, but
ran only once or twice a day, and they were waiting for a 7 AM bus.
Andrea wished them luck and set off on the last leg of her journey.

Edged by low stone walls on either side, the lonely asphalt road
meandered south though a forest interspersed with orchards and citrus
farms.  After an hour of walking, fatigue and doubt began to conspire
against her.

_This_is_stupid;_I_can't_function_in_this_society._
_How_long_is_this_road?_
_What_do_I_tell_Kyle?__How_much_money_have_I_lost?__Just_the_airfare._
_If_I_go_back_now,_he_can_turn_the_card_off,_not_too_much_damage_done._
_He_might_have_to_come_out_to_Hawaii_to_get_me,_maybe_he_can_hold_my_
_hand_through_this_...

_You_need_him_to_hold_your_hand?_

Andrea: As the tears rolled down her face, she turned her face skyward
and implored God, "Why have you done this me?"  No answer came back
from the heavens, only the midmorning sun blazing down from the sky.
The silence encouraged her to speak loadly and openly to the diety,
something she rarely did in the crowded city.  "Wasn't I supposed to
be blessed?  Weren't you going to take care of us like the birds in
the field?  All these people want is money!"

Physically and emotionally exhausted, she sat down in the middle of
the roadway, cried steadily for several minutes, then took stock of
her situation.  Her jeans were ripped from where they had snagged on a
nail, her right side was covered in dirt from the carpets, her hair
was matted with dried sweat, and she had slept in her clothes.

_This_is_stupid_.  _I_am_NOT_OK_.  _I'm_filthy_and_exhausted_,
_and_I_can't_show_up_looking_like_this_.
_No_dumb_fuel_problem_is_worth_this_.

She was so tired.  If she could just sleep...

She was awake before the car stopped.

Two men were seated in the car, both dressed for the endless Hawaiian
summer in shorts, T-shirts, and sunglasses.  The man in the passenger
seat was talking on a cellphone and completely ignored her.  The
driver, a friendly fellow in his early twenties, asked her if she
needed help, and she mumbled something about heading back into town.
He offered her a ride, and she climbed into the back seat as he
started driving again.  The driver spoke with a distinct foreign
accent that she couldn't quite place.  Australian, perhaps?  He
started talking to her, but the passenger waved him quiet, as he was
obviously having problems hearing the phone conversation over the
engine noise.  Andrea lapsed into silence as they continued back
towards the highway.

Mercuriou: "No, no, no, we've got plenty of 1033.  We've got tanks and
tanks full of it.  You can come see that for yourself.  We just have
to get the export paperwork taken care of.  It's a delay."

Mercuriou: "Of course it works!  You have the samples, don't you?"

Mercuriou: "Well, then make it yourself!  We can pay for the
spacesuits in cash."

Mercuriou: "I'll need time to find another buyer."

Mercuriou: "You said we could pay in fuel..."

Mercuriou: "Just let me handle it.  I know how my own government works."

\selectlanguage{russian}
Mercuriou: "Cpacebo.  Cpacebo.  Do cbidaniy."
\selectlanguage{english}

The passenger clicked the cellphone off, then punched some more
buttons on it.  While Andrea slowly digested what she had heard, he
made another call.

Mercuriou: "Yeah, what's up?"

Mercuriou: "Well, if he doesn't show, he doesn't show."

Mercuriou: "A woman?"

Without disconnecting or even lowering the cell phone, he slowly
turned around in his seat, looking at her almost as if seeing her now
for the first time.

Mercuriou: "I'm sorry, ummm, we weren't really introduced..."

Andrea: "Andrea Yeats," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone.  "I'm
with NASA."

At various times, Andrea had seen people red-faced with excitement,
hysteria, and embarrassment, but now, for the first time in her life,
she actually watched someone's face as it turned red.  The flush began
just above Mercuriou's cheekbones, then, in a split second, spread to
his cheeks, his forehead, and then ran across his entire face.  He
clenched his teath and turned back around in his chair.

Mercuriou: "I'll get back to you," he told Vic in a clipped voice,
severed the connection without waiting for an answer, took the
earpiece out of his ear, wound its cord around the telephone and put
in down on the dashboard.  For a moment they drove on in silence.

Mercuriou: "Turn around," Mercuriou quietly told Alister.

Andrea: "Look, I'm heading into town, I can just walk back..."

Mercuriou: "You're not going anywhere," Mercuriou interrupted as he
unclipped his seatbelt, turned fully around in his chair, and revealed
the handgun he had covertly retrieved from its holster under his seat.

Alister brought the car to a stop, then looked back and forth between
his two passengers with a pained expression on his face.  Meanwhile,
it slowly dawned on Andrea that she was being kidnapped.

Mercuriou: "Turn around," Mercuriou repeated, "Go back."

Within sight of the highway, Alister executed a three-point turn and
they headed back down the road again.  Past the stone walls, past the
orchards and farms, past her break-down spot, they drove on as the
forest gave way to broad meadows framed on three sides by hundred foot
cliffs and the Pacific Ocean beyond.  They passed through an automatic
gate, crossed a runway that streched fully from one side of the point
to the other, and drove into a complex of hangers and low buildings.

They walked into a large room whose walls were lined with whiteboards
hung over cluttered office tables amid a jumble of cardboard boxes and
packing material.  Andrea walked willingly, partly out of curiosity,
partly because there was simply no other place else to go.  She never
thought of running.  Burns was there, sporting a black T-shirt that
read simply "CAPITALISM SUCKS", as was Vic, who looked up from a
notepad as they came in.

Vic: "The man who called was named Kyle Lankier..."

His voice drifted off and an awkward pause ensued.  Mercuriou turned
around.

Mercuriou: "Doctor Yeats," he began slowly, pausing and measuring his
words, "during the ride here... I was trying to decide,
umm... exactly..."

Andrea: "What you're going to do with me?" she speculatively completed
his sentence.

Mercuriou: "Precisely."

Vic: "What's going on?  What happened?" Vic asked, the second question
addressed to Alister as if expecting an explanation from him.

The young man opened his mouth as if to speak, but couldn't quite
explain how he had picked up a woman seated in the middle of the road,
or how Mercuriou had continued his imprudent cellphone conversation,
or how they had discovered the true identity of their passenger.
Finally, after a second or two, he just shrugged his shoulders and
closed his mouth without saying a word.

Andrea: "I believe the colloquial expression is that I 'know too
much'."

Mercuriou: "Um-hum," Mecuriou responded, nodding in agreement before
turning towards Burns.

Mercuriou: "The old server room, can you rig the door so it can't be
opened from the inside without a card key?"

The engineer leaned back in his chair and nodded slowly.

Vic: "What are you thinking, Marc?" Vic asked with concern in his
voice.  The only reply was a raised palm.

Burns: "Yeah," Burns began slowly, "the locking mechanism is in the
wall, so I could weld the door handle in place, along with the bolt.
You couldn't open it at all from the inside..."

Mercuriou: "Fine. Do it."

Vic: "Now, wait a minute, Marc, you're talking about kidnapping now."

Mercuriou: "Vic, we will have this discussion later."

Vic: "No, we won't have it later..."

Mercuriou: "Vic!  We will have this discussion later!  We will have
this discussion _when_Dr._Yeats_is_not_in_this_room_.  OK?  Now,
_please_, let's just get all the loose stuff out of that room while I
stay here with the doctor."

The other three men looked slowly at one another.  None of them liked
what they were being asked, no, told to do, but Burns got up and lead
Alister down a hallway, leaving Andrea, Marc and Vic to eye each other
in silence, she sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, the
captain perched on a tabletop with his pistol in his belt, and Vic
still seated in his chair.  Twenty minutes later, the concierge
returned to announce that the room was ready.  Mercuriou escorted the
NASA engineer down a hallway and around a corner to a windowless
forty-by-one-hundred-foot room populated solely by a rectangular grid
of floor-to-ceiling black steel frames.  Upon entering, Andrea turned
back to face Mercuriou.

Andrea: "Isn't this where I get some fancy explanation of what you're
up to?"

Mercuriou: "No," he answered, then closed the door behind him, insured
that it was locked, and began to walk away.

Andrea: "Mr. Mercuriou," she called through the wall, "I'm sure we can
discuss..."

The card key flashed through the lock with such a swoosh that Andrea
took an involuntary step back from the door, then another as it was
pushed open.

Mercuriou: "Captain Mercuriou, it's _Captain_ Mercuriou!"

...and he was gone.


Launch Day    it must be funny

Vic: "No, Marc, no, absolutely NO!"

Mercuriou: "Three days, Vic, that's all we need -- three days!  Burns
wants a week, but I'm compromising on three days!"

Vic: "You're not compromising on a damn thing, Marc!  You're talking
about holding someone prisoner -- an innocent person -- for days!
You've already held her captive for a night!"

Mercuriou: "It has to done, Vic!  It just has to be done, and we're
not arguing about it!  Alister!"

Vic: "Yes, we are arguing about it, Marc!"

Mercuriou: "Alister!  Get an MRE and a bottle of water and give it to
Dr. Yates!  Dammit, Vic, don't fight me on this!"

Vic: "Marc, you can't do this, you just can't!"

Andrea had woken early in the darkened room.  She had no watch, and
there were no windows, but it had _felt_ like morning.  At least she
seemed rested.  She sat up against the wall and began to pray,
starting with the Lord's Prayer.  Softly, just barely audibly, she
repeated it three times, each more slowly than the last, contemplating
the words more deeply each time.

_Thy_will_be_done._ _Am_I_here_for_a_reason,_Lord?_  _For_your_reason?_

_...as_we_forgive_those_who_trespass_against_us..._
_I_forgive_these_people_here_, Lord, _they're_almost_comical_

As she did so often, she returned to Christ's prayer in the garden,
"not my will, Father, but thine."  _Not_my_will,_Lord_,
_if_you_have_some_ _reason_for_me_to_be_here, _and_you_must_,
_thy_will_be_done_, Lord, _thy_will_, _not_mine_, _thine_.

She sat still, practicing a Buddhist exercise that she had learned at
a class and adopted for Christian use.  She focused on her breath, in
and out through her nostrils.  She tried to clear her mind of her own
thought and cast it upward, trying to enter a calm state where she
could, just maybe, like Elisha in the cave, hear the still, quiet
voice of God.  When she got caught up in her own imagination, she
re-focused on her breath and tried to calm her mind again.

She didn't do a very good job.  In fact, she never did a very good job.
Meditation was the hardest thing she had ever attempted, far
more difficult than executing some suited procedure that she
had practiced a hundred times in a water tank on the ground.
Her mind kept racing back to her present situation, all the
craziness of the last two days, _why_didn't_she_run_?,
_what_do_they_want_with_spacesuits_?, _breath_in_,
_breath_out_, _breath_in_, _breath_out_.

At least she resolved upon a plan, if you could call it that.  She
waited quietly until the electronic lock clicked and the door was
cautiously pushed open.  It was the blond-haired youth with the
foreign accent.

Alister: "Sorry... I brought you some breakfast!" he announced as
cheerily as he could muster, putting a bottle of water and a military
ration down on the floor next to the door.

Andrea: "Do you think I could use the bathroom?" Andrea asked,
standing up and pushing her hair back.  He seemed indecisive, and
didn't answer at first.

Andrea: "Look, I'm covered in dirt; I haven't bathed in... two days;
I've slept in my clothes for two nights; I'd like to at least splash
some water on my face and go to the toilet."

There was no need to lie.  It was all true.

Alister: "OK... uh, sure, it's right down the hall," he answered,
before leading the way about a hundred feet to a restroom.

Alister: "I'll wait here," he mumbled.

She turned on the water facuet, and immediately started searching for
a way out.  The room had no windows but was covered with a ceiling of
drop panels.  Climbing onto the back of a toilet, she could reach the
ceiling and push one of the ceiling panels aside.  She started to
scramble up, but saw that the wall continued straight up to another
ceiling several feet above the panels.

"Shoots!" she muttered to herself, then climbed down and went to the
other side of the room.  The sinks might be strong enough to support
her weight.  Returning to the toilet, she realized that she could just
reach a large, circular pipe above the panel ceiling.  Climbing up
again and grabbing it, she pulled herself up to it and found herself
crouched in a dark, dusty space between the two ceilings.  In the dim
light, she could make out the course of the wall down to where it met
the hallway.  In the other direction, the crawl space seemed to extend
beyond the bathroom, so she clambered along the pipe in that
direction.  Once past the bathroom, she opened one of the ceiling
panels below, swung her legs down into it, and dropped down into the
sunlit room below, slipping, grabbing the ceiling, and bringing part
of it crashing down with her.

There were chairs, a desk, books, a drafting table covered with
papers.  She picked up the telephone handset on the desk, then stopped
to look at the books on celestrial mechanics, materials science and
rocket propulsion.  She put down the phone and walked over to the
drafting table.  _Spain_never_designed_a_rocket_engine_.
_They_aren't_selling_fuel; _they're_hoarding_it_.
_They_need_spacesuits_,_too._

Mercuriou: "Vic, we are not arguing about this!  This is a command decision!"

Vic: "I will not accept this.  I will not accept this."

Mercuriou: "I am in command of this mission!  I am giving an order!"

Vic: "Give your order, Marc, I'll go to police right now!  I'll pick
up that phone myself!  I mean it!"

Mercuriou: "Vic, if you pick up that phone,
I'll... I'll... I'll... What!!!?"

Alister: "It's Dr. Yates, she's still in the bathroom..."

Mercuriou marched down the hallway and announced his presence.

Mercuriou: "Coming in, professor, pull up your pants!"

Broken from her reverie, Andrea snatched up the phone once more and
dialed Kyle, listening to the noises in the next room as it rang.

Andrea: "Kyle, it's Andrea!"

Kyle: "My God, girl, where are you?"

Andrea: "I'm at TenTech; they're holding me prisoner here!"

Kyle: "What?!"

Andrea: "Look, they've got a launch on!"

Kyle: "What kind of launch?"

Andrea: "Manned.  They have spacesuits... and forget three shuttle launchs;
they've got enough fuel here for three hundred!"

The door's electronic lock clicked and Andrea dropped the phone, threw
the chair through the window as Mercuriou dashed in and jumped out.
Running up the road, she began to calm down as she reached the runway.
_What_if_they_have_guns?_ She slowed down as she reached the first
horse farm.  _What_if_they_do?_ Finally she stopped completely and
looked around.  _Where_are_they?_

They were glued to a webcam of the highway junction, which showed
police squad cars peeling off to the south in response to a
kidnapping report.

Mercuriou: "OK, our launch clock is at zero...  Let's get to the ship!"

They dashed up the road to the hanger, where they found Yeats.

Andrea: "This is quite a rocketship you've got here."

Mercuriou motioned his crew towards the access platform.

Andrea: "You have some kind of launch planned?"

Mercuriou: "You could say that."

Mercuriou climbed the metal staircase while Andrea followed him
silently.  _A_private_manned_launch_.  For the first time since Kyle
had talked her into this, she actually wanted to laugh.
_THIS_I_have_GOT_to_see_.

Mercuriou: Mercuriou had reached the hatch, climbed inside, and turned
around.  "Well, Doctor, you can go now.  Sorry for your detention, but
it was necessary at the time..."  he began, but never finished,
because Andrea grabbed the rim of the hatch, swung her feet up, and
kicked him squarely on his shoulders.

Andrea: "Captain Mercuriou!  _Captain_ Mercuriou!"  she hollered,
clambering in behind.

Vic: "What's going on?" Vic called from the cabin.

Andrea: "It's Captain Mercuriou!  He fell!"

Mercuriou flew to his feet, so enraged that he half-hallucinated four
men with red shirts and black pants, already moving to seize the
intruder and awaiting only his order to throw her out.  He blinked and
they were gone.

Andrea: "Do you want the hatch closed now?  Is that your next order... _sir_?"

Mercuriou: "You don't what you getting into, lady."

Andrea: "Then clue me in."

Mercuriou: They locked eyes for a moment, then Mercuriou pressed his
face within six inches of hers and hissed "Mars!"

She broke into a wide grin.

Andrea: "That's great; I've always wanted to go to Mars!  Now, you
might need an experienced astronaut; I've had three weeks on orbit.
You've got suits; I hope you've got motion sickness drugs..."

He tried to interrupt, but she shushed him.

Andrea: "...but first, you've got to _get_ into orbit, and that I've
_got_ to see!"

Alister: "Here come the coppers!"

Mercuriou: "Burns, start the engines!" Mercuriou yelled, then turned
back to Andrea.  "OK, this is it, this is it, I'm not kidnapping you
-- Vic you are my witness! -- I'm not forcing you, but you get out
now, I'm telling you we're not coming back for a long long time, I say
get out right now, or you're in this for good, and I mean FOR GOOD!"

Andrea felt like she had when she picked up Dunstan in the rain, when
she wrote 'math class' on the auction form, when she decided to quit
NASA.  She nodded her head.

Mercuriou: "Fine."

_Xplorer_One_ sped down the runway as police cars swarmed the complex.
Some of the policemen watched with their months agape, deafened by the
roaring rocket engines and stunned by the sight of a jumbo jet
belching rocket exhaust as it lurched off South Point, dipped
perilously close to the ocean a hundred feet below the cliff, then
climbed to ten thousand.

Burns: "Launch cargo!"

Alister keyed a command sequence on his computer.  From camouflaged
lauchers in the forest below, first one rocket thundered aloft, then
another, and another.

Alister: "Three all-green; four launching!" Alister called out from
his computer monitor, while Vic and Mercuriou were arguing again.

Mercuriou: "She doesn't really need a spacesuit," Mercuriou tried.

Vic: "She most certainly does need a spacesuit, Marc.  We have spares
in cargo, but what if we lose cabin pressure before then?"

Mercuriou was silent for a moment.  Only Alister's voice was heard.

Alister: "Seventeen's up; sixteen just went inertial; eighteen launching!"

A panic seized the nearby towns as missile after missile streaked
skyward; many thought the nation had gone to war with Libya.

Vic: "We have to abort the mission."

Mercuriou: "We are not aborting this mission!"

Andrea: "I'm fine; I'll take the chance."

Vic: "No, you are not fine!  I'm the ship's doctor, and telling you,
Marc, we have to abort this mission because _she_could_get_killed_ if
we lose cabin pressure."

Alister: "Nine just acquired LEO; thirty-four launching."

Mercuriou: "Then let her take mine."

Vic: "No, she can't take yours, because then _you_ won't have a spacesuit."

Mercuriou: "OK, so then I'll die and you'll be rid of me and you can
do whatever you want!  Look, Vic, we can't go back!  If we go back, we
go to jail!  I'll take my chances with death!"

Vic relented.  Death over jail, that he understood.  Andrea got the
spacesuit.

Mercuriou: "How do we look, Burns?"

Burns: "We've got clean launches on the first fifty-one
rockets... make that fifty-two; everything's fine."

As soon as Andrea was suited and seated, Burns put the plane into a
near vertical climb.  It wasn't the most optimal launch profile, but
the aircraft wasn't designed for supersonic flight, so Burns made sure
that he climbed above the atmosphere before beginning a true orbital
insertion.  As they passed fifty miles in altitude, he nudged forward
on the joystick, the engines pivoted, and the giant blue ball of the
Pacific Ocean swung up below them.  They were now above most of the
atmosphere, and Burns began their insertion burn proper, firing the
engines continuously for nearly ten minutes, then cutting them off and
letting the ship coast.  Finally, he fired the engines again for
several minutes to stabilize their orbit.

On Earth, confusion reigned.  CNN reported the last several launches
live, and speculation was rampant that the missiles contained some
kind of chemical or biological agent.  Around the world, TV networks
began interrupting their regular programming to cover the event,
showing graphical ground tracks of the orbiting cargo modules and
warning people as they drifted above.  The U.S. State Department was
fielding a barrage of queries from foreign embassies anxious to know
what was happening.  The President abandoned a trip to Europe and
turned Air Force One back towards the capital.  Once there, he held a
hurried meeting of his national security team, finally blowing up in
frustration at their inability to provide any concrete answers,
throwing a briefing folder and sending Top Secret papers flying.

"Why the hell do I have find out from CNN when 170 missiles get fired
off in Naale-Naale-...whatever-the-hell!"

That evening, the President addressed a rapt but unshaken nation,
refining the news that the networks had been reporting for hours.  A
renegade group of entrepreneurs, under investigation for wire fraud
and kidnapping, had somehow managed to execute the first private
manned space launch.  After reassuring the public that the government
was carefully tracking the situation, the President correctly
identified the four principle suspects, then took three questions.
When asked if he was pursuing a diplomatic solution to the crisis, the
President replied only that attempts were being made to contact the
perpetrators.  When asked if a military response was being considered,
the President replied that the military always stood ready to defend
the nation, but it was not yet clear if an attack was imminent.  When
asked if the U.S. military was capable of striking a target in orbit,
the President had no comment on U.S. military capabilities.

In Houston, Kyle Lankier watched the press conference alone and in
silence.

Andrea Yeats was never mentioned.


T + 1 day    long political rants must be interspersed throughout

Andrea: "Excuse me?  What are you doing?"

Mercuriou had hollered since launch to get lined up with the cargo
modules.  They assembled them together by matching orbits, docking
their nose, then re-positioning them into a higher orbit, connecting
them together as they went.  They collected first Module A-1 Captain's
Quarters and then attached Module A-1-1 Captain's Storage.  Mercuriou
then halted the entire operation to dock with A-1 Captain's Quarters,
equalize pressure, and disappear.

Mercuriou: "I'm working on my speech for this evening, Dr. Yates.  It must be
delivered live in American prime time.  I wish I had longer to
prepare, but your stunt disrupted my timing.  Now please leave me
alone."

Andrea mumbled a reply into the closing hatch.

Andrea: "You know, there's really a lot of work to be done with the cargo
modules..."

The hatch flew back open.

Mercuriou: "Dr. Yeats, my speeches are the most important cargo this vessel
carries!"

He shushed her out the door and didn't appear again for another hour.

The news of the rocket launch had galvanized the world, or at least
everyone in the world, or at least everyone in the Most Important
Country In The World.  Now came live pictures of a man floating
in zero-gee, in a manner quite unprecedented.

Red banners festooned A-1's rear wall, and hid the access hatch to
A-1-1 behind them.  Two vertical Roman lances impaled with globes of
Mars rose on either side of a desk, behind which Mercuriou now
appeared seated with a tablet computer in front on him, dressed in a
crisp white uniform as might be worn by a cruise ship captain.  The
rest of the crew watched from behind the camera.

Mercuriou: "Good evening.  My name is Marcelius Mercuriou, and I am
the captain of the spaceship _Xplorer_One_.  Most people call me Marc.
Some people call me Sir."

Mercuriou: "I and my compatriots have today launched a bold new
venture.  We intend nothing less than to begin the colonization of our
Solar System.  We do this not so much because we wish to, but because
we must!  We can not wait around and let our planet be destroyed while
some cynical bunch of global manipulators push everyone to 'compete'!
We much protect our freedom; we must safeguard our independence!  Like
the pioneers who set out across America's wilderness 400 years ago, we
know that the path forward into uncharted lands is fraught with danger
and discomfort, yet it is the only way forward."

Mercuriou: "Furthermore, I have been told repeatedly to Love It or
Leave It, and I have decided to Get The Hell Out.  Why not?  We know
what kind of leadership America has.  It's not going to change.  Why
would it?  It's what The People want.  It's just not what _I_ want."

Mercuriou: "So I am declaring tonight the Republic of Mars.  I shall
inculcate many of its principles over the coming days, but for now I
wish to focus on only one -- freedom of speech.  Unlike capitalists,
who, like communists, see information as something to be locked down
and controlled, we are determined to construct on-line public
libraries, available free of charge to everyone on this planet.  I
raise this issue now because I will begin transmitting the books in
this library to anyone with a satellite dish.  We do this both as a
moral duty to provide mankind with this knowledge, and also as a legal
right, because as a sovereign nation the Republic of Mars can operate
these transmitters, much like the United States operates the Voice of
America."

Mercuriou: "In the coming days, I will explain my views more fully,
and perhaps you will join us.  Not literally, at least not yet, but
perhaps spiritually?  We have a website, when it is not blocked by the
government.  We have our own satellite equipment, when it is not
jammed.  What skills can you offer?  Let us know!  Write a biography
of yourself!  Upload it to our website!  Join our movement and help
build a new tomorrow!  Onward Martians!  Onward to Mars!"

Mercuriou had agreed to be interviewed after his speech, but had
rejected the major networks and instead reserved the right to choose
an obscure small market anchor.

"Captain," the interview started on schedule.  "There have been
serious questions asked in the last 24 hours about your financial
status.  May I ask how you funded your space launch?"

Mercuriou: "We stole it!" he replied, right on script.  "Every dollar
of it, and we needed billions!"

"Are you saying that you stole a billion dollars?"

Mercuriou laughed.

Mercuriou: "We stole more money that Bernie Madolf every saw!"

"I don't understand; couldn't you have gotten venture capital funding?"

Mercuriou: "Venture capital funding -- how do you get it?  I'll tell
you how.  You sell your soul to these capitalists.  You convince them,
and I mean really convince them, that you're one of them, that you
believe in their nightmare philosophy of greed, you bring them on your
management team, you sign off on some 'business plan' that tells how
you're going to patent and control this technology once it's
developed, because their whole philosophy is to stand behind a counter
and do nothing for anyone unless they're getting something out of it
for themselves, and then you fight like hell just to keep 51 percent.
Or you toil away in your garage for ten years of nights and weekends
while working some stupid job just to pay for the stupid garage, and
I'm not much of garage guy.  So we developed, let's just say, an
original source of financing."

"Did you rob a bank?"

Mercuriou starting laughing again.

Mercuriou: "Something like that.  Ever hear of Keystone Securities?"

The news anchor paused for effect and then continued.

"Why not just steal the money and retire on a beach in Aruba?"

Mercuriou: "Well, that's a good question.  I guess, basically, I'm 33
years old and not ready to lounge on a beach just yet.  Spaceflight
has always facinated me."

Mercuriou: "Now in a capitalist society the only way to get anything
done is to have some kind of money-making scheme, some kind of
'business plan', like I was saying, and we've got no business plan of
any kind for how you recoup this many billions of dollars.  So the
only way to do it was to either be rich, or steal it, or be the
government and do both.  We stole it.  Spaceflight _can_ be done, but
we live in a society hell-bent on forcing people to work for a System,
and telling them constantly that they have freedom."

"You don't think we have freedom?"

Mercuriou: "Why don't you ask all those 'people'?  Ask them if they'd
rather be flying into space or doing whatever mindless job they've got
now, and see what they say?  And be sure to point out to them that our
great capitalist leaders could be mass producing spacecraft by the
thousands.  Ask yourselves, 'if they needed them for a war...'?"

"And the investors in Keystone Securities?"

Mercuriou: "People with money to burn, dumping cash into a high-risk
mutual fund.  I'll bet not one of them would buy a bum a hamburger at
McDonalds.  Let's apply their own rational.  I'm 'helping them
compete'.  If some of them go out of business, so what?  Throw it into
a chapter!  It's nothing personal; businesses fail every day.  I'm
developing technology to fly to Mars, so the whole society benefits.
I made a great deal; I just needed to restructure my debt!"

"I think people would say that we play according to the rules, and
that you've broken those rules."

Mercuriou: "Yeah, who makes the rules?"

"Well, the rules are made through a democratic process."

Mercuriou: "In other words, the majority makes the rules, right?"

"That's right... the majority."

Mercuriou: "Well, I'm not part of the majority."

He started to chew a piece of gum.

Mercuriou: "I'm not part of the majority... I'm a druggie!  I'm a
socialist!  I'm an anarchist!  I'm farther left than Jane Fonda!  I'm
more anti-American than Eagle Six!  I'm against everything 'the
people' believe in, and they're against everything I'm for!  I'm not
part of the majority, and I don't like democracy."

"But if it's what the people want..."

Mercuriou: "'The People'.  You make it sound like it's what _all_ the
people want.  Then why do people blow up federal buildings; why do
they bomb our embassies, why do they burn the country's flag?
Obviously, there's a lot of people who don't agree with these rules,
and I'm one of them.  The majority makes up these rules, and then
expects everyone else to obey them just because they're made 'through
a democractic process'.  People obey the rules because they're afraid
of what will happen to them if don't.  The only thing that's different
about democracy is that it's a different group of people making the
rules.  In Russia it was the proletariat; in Germany it was the Arian
race; here it's the majority.  It's always the same.  Some big bunch
of people that think that because they're more advanced, or because
they're the workers, or because there's more of them than anybody
else, that they have the right to rule and build some big prison
system for those who just won't do what they're told."

Mercuriou: "Now I feel as bad about ripping off capitalists as I would
about ripping off communists or fascists, because to me they're the
same.  Just another bunch of men with some nightmare system to be
jammed down everyone's throats."

"But aren't capitalism and democracy the best we've got?"

Mercuriou: "No, there are alternatives!  Not many left on Earth, mind
you.  Earth is civilized, which means it's been conquered, colonized,
and commercialized.  No matter where you go, there's some established
government, be it democracy or dictatorship, and you're just a little
cog that better turn when its supposed to and not need too much oil.
Out here, though, an entire solar system is waiting to be tamed!"

Mercuriou: "The first thing we're going to do is land on Mars, and
plant our flag there, because that is where our capital will be!  Then
we'll explore the asteroid belts.  If we find almost anything
valuable, gold or silver, platinum or pure silcon, it'll be 1849 all
over again!  And when you think that there's a whole planet out there,
all broken up into pieces already..."

Mercuriou: "Then we'll have something Earth wants!  Then we'll trade
with them on equal terms!  Then we'll have freedom!"

He looked at his watch.

Mercuriou: "Listen, we've got a lot of work to do with the cargo
modules.  I'll contact you...  I'll be in touch."

...and he was gone.


T + 5 days    America must be run by fools

ECKS1

WYE1

ZEE1


T + 10 days    sanity must (briefly) appear

Andrea: "Look, there are certainly plenty of people who would love to
quit their jobs, throw off their leaders and fly away into space, but
how are they supposed to get up here?  The simple fact is that you had
to steal billions of dollars just to lauch five people into orbit, and
that's fairly consistent with NASA's cost budget.  What you're
suggesting is completely impractical."

Mercuriou: "OK, I'll concede that they're not going to make it up here
exactly the way we did, but what's the alternative?  There's nothing
left on Earth.  It's a failed planet turning into one big global
hegemony."

Andrea: "You can't rationalize a decision just by saying that the
alternatives are unacceptable."

Mercuriou: "Why not?"

Andrea: "Because the solution to missing the school bus is not to
invent a time machine!  Sometimes _all_ of your options are
unacceptable.  Then it becomes very easy to pick the most attractive
one and gloss over its manifest defects.  That's why we have planning
meetings and project cost estimates, Gantt charts and Capability
Maturity Models.  If _none_ of your options are capable of hitting
your target, then you need to know that _before_ you push the little
red button in the launch tower!"

Mercuriou paused and studied her.

Mercuriou: "Andrea, I have studied these options.  The one I've chosen
certainly has a lot of defects, but I really am convinced that it
might work.  Mars, I admit, is a bit of a publicity stunt, but after
we've landed there we've got to take a close look at the asteroid
belt.  There are probably more minable mineral resources there than on
the entire Earth.  With the automation we've got, if we can set up a
manufacturing plant there, we can build more ships like this one.
We've already built one, so we know how to do it.  We can set up
hydroponics to grow food, establish a colony there and send ships back
to Earth to bring more people."

Vic: "We're not going to need the hydroponics, Marc."

All eyes turned to the hatch.  Though the crew, gathered together in
the 767, had not specifically excluded Vic, they had grown used to his
absence.  His first appearance outside his quarters in a week now
stunned everyone.  While Mercuriou silently assimilated his statement,
Andrea was the first to respond.

Andrea: "So how was the meditation, Vic?"

Vic: "Andrea, the meditation was... great.  I've always struggled to
achieve really deep meditation; my mind's always going a million
different places at once.  It's the hardest thing I've ever done, but
up here... floating... weightless... up here it was _easy_!  But I
suppose you already knew that!"

Andrea: "Actually, I've never been much into meditation."

Vic: "Oh, come on.  Prayer, meditation, listening to God... call it
what you will.  Don't tell me you've never sat for an hour in silence
in some quiet chapel somewhere."

Slowly, Andrea nodded.

Vic: "Have you never tried it up here?"

Andrea: "I can... well, no, truthfully one of the most profound
spiritual experiences of my life came during a spacewalk.  But usually
my time on orbit is so stressed out and hectic, not to mention cramped
and noisy, that, no, I don't really see space as a time for prayer and
contemplation.  Maybe I should."

Mercuriou: "What did you mean... that we don't need the hydroponics?"

Vic: "I'm not sure, Marc.  It's just real clear to me now that you're
not going to need a doctor, and you're not going to need the
hydroponics."

Mercuriou: "So...what?  We're just going to give up after a year and
go home?"

Vic: "Maybe.  I don't know."

Mercuriou: "What then?  You're saying we're going to die up here?"

Vic: "No, I didn't say that, either.  I can't really explain it, Marc,
except to tell you that I wrestled mightily trying to decide whether
to come along with you on this.  I know now that it was totally worth
it, I'm thrilled to be here, I don't question it now for a minute, but
I also know that... I've gotten _centered_, Marc, I don't know how
else to explain it, I've gotten centered, and I understand now that my
presence here is totally superfluous.  You don't need me... as a
friend, yes, as a spirtual adviser too, but not for anything else."

Mercuriou: "And what happens... when our food runs out?"

Vic: "I don't know."

Mercuriou: "You've just got... one of your 'feelings'?"

Vic: "More like a certainty."

There was another long pause.

Alister: "Can I say something?"

Mercuriou: "Sure, say whatever you want."

Alister: "Well, if we move out of orbit, I mean, that's what we're
taking about, right?  That puts us out of range of the space
shuttle!?"

Andrea: "That's a real good point, Alister.  Look, you've made your
point.  Now we've got to test this craft.  Let's start looking at
re-entry scenarios..."

Mercuriou: "We're going to Mars, Dr. Yeats, that's not going to
change."

Andrea: "Fine, you can go to Mars, but first you've got to test this
spacecraft in a controlled environment where there are rescue options
both in orbit and on the ground."

Again there was silence, a longer one.

Burns: "She's got a good point, Marc."

Merceriou guffawled.

Mercuriou: "First Vic, now you going turn traitor on me too, Burns?"

Burns answered with a laugh of his own.

Burns: "Hey, I'm just saying what she says makes a lot of sense!"

Mercuriou: "Burns, the minute, nay, the second these wheels touch the
ground, we're just five little nobodies at the mercy of those
governments."

Andrea: "We could contact a neutral country...  Switzerland might let
us land."

Mercuriou: "Sorry, Doc.  Burns, take us out of orbit."

Over the next several days, the crew focused their energies on the
ship.  After assembling the rest of the cargo modules into a long
chain, they mated the 767 to the rear and drove the entire assembly
into interplanetary orbit.  Meanwhile, almost imperceptibly, they
passed from Breaking News to Established Fact, and promptly vanished
from the media news coverage.



T + 54 days    nobody must have to work

Alister: "Whoo-hoo!"

Alister barrelled down the module at the speed of a racehorse, his
arms flailing wildly.  He pulled them in to his sides and made his
body rigid as he sailed through a mating node into the next module.
Now he waved his arms in front of his face.

Alister: "Ahhhhh!"

Again he pulled his arms in to his sides, passed another mating node
and began gyrating wildly.

Alister: "waHHHH!"

He tucked, grabbed a handlebar as he flew into the 767, and spun
around into a pullup that he released with just enough backward
momentum to let him glide into the cabin.  Droplets of sweat from his
forehead kept going, spraying out over the rest of the crew.

Alister: "What's that smell?"

Vic: "Soy beans...
Andrea: from the garden!"

Alister: "Soy beans?"

Alister imagined the pressed
blocks of tofu he passed by in the supermarket.

Vic: "I rather like them steamed."

Alister: "I don't know about this... I'll eat them, though!"

Vic: "Ever been to a sushi restaurant?"

Alister: "Sure, I love sushi!  Where's the tuna hand roll?"

Vic: "Ever had those green beans they serve as appetizers?"

Alister raised an eyebrow and the doctor nodded affirmatively as the
microwave beeped.  Removing the steamer, Vic opened it and let some of
the cooked soy beans float out, along with an ample quantity of steam.
The aroma of fresh vegatables permeated the air.

Mercuriou: "What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated up
with Burns from the rear of the aircraft.

Burns: "Are these from the garden?  Great!"

Mercuriou: "Did you see this?"

The latest news updates from Earth had brought word of an explosion in
Nigeria that had killed hundreds scavenging gasoline from an illegally
tapped pipeline.

Mercuriou was grinning.

Mercuriou: "Lycurgus would have approved."

Andrea: "You can't be serious."

Mercuriou: "Why not?  The African capitalists want to pump oil and ship it to
America while their own people starve.  What's wrong with a little
'competition'?"

Alister: "Who was Lycurgus?" Alister asked as Andrea shook her head in
disgust.

Mercuriou: "He was the founder of Sparta, maybe the greatest socialist
success story ever."

Alister: "Were they Communists?"

Mercuriou: "Not exactly.  Or maybe they were, depending on how
you look at it.  The parents didn't raise their children, for example,
the children were raised by the state.  And their 'education', if you
can call it that, consisted of leaving them to starve unless they
could steal food to eat."

Alister: "That's insane!" the youth replied.  "Why on Earth wouldn't
they feed their own children?"

Mercuriou: "Lycurgus wanted a nation of warriors... and he got it.
We want a nation of bastards, and we've got that!"

Andrea: "Mankind's determination to train children to evil _is_ amazing."

Vic: "Well, maybe you can be our twentieth-first-century Lycurgus,
Doctor," Vic speculated with a mischevious grin.  "Maybe you can
prescribe a set of rules for us to raise our children to be Christians
instead of warriors."

Andrea: "I think Jesus already gave us those rules far better than I could."

Vic: "The problem is that people don't live by those rules.  Just
because the teachings are transmitted, doesn't mean they're
understood.  Just because they're understood, doesn't mean they're
practiced.  They're talked about all the time, but mostly it's just
talk."

Mercuriou: "I don't know about that, Vic; it's not just talk.  Edward
Gibbon thought that Christianity was a major factor in the destruction
of the Roman Empire.  At first the Romans were Pagans, they gloried in
the martial arts, taught their children the virtues of war, worshiped
gods like Mars and Jupiter.  Then came along the Christians, everybody
started turning the other cheek and forgiving their enemies, before
long, no more Roman Empire."

Mercuriou: "A large part of medieval Christianity was about propping
up the Roman Empire, and then the Popes, and all the monarchs who got
their scepters from the Popes.  Christianity certainly got bastardized
in the process.  What amazes me about Western civilization is how
pervasive is this notion that the individual somehow owes something to
the state, or at least to the society.  In ancient times it was
obedience to the King, now it's obedience to democracy.  And of course
people are obligated to work, too.  That's all gotten embedded into
the religion.  It's all part of propping up a society."

Alister: "But people have to work to live, right?  I mean, people have
always had to eat!"

Vic: "Yes and no.  It's true that people have always had to work to
eat, but this notion that people have to work _for_the_society_ is
what Marc's talking about.  Take the Native Americans, for example.
If anything, they believed that society had a responsibility to the
individual to raise him to be independent.  They taught their children
from a young age to build fires by rubbing sticks together, to
recognize wild plants as edible or poisonous, to build a shelter or a
bow and arrow just from the natural materials you'd find lying about
in a forest.  The net result was that by the time they were fifteen
years old, they could literally walk out into the forest and take care
of themselves.  Their society was more voluntary.  If anyone didn't
want to be there, they could just get up and leave.  Murders,
robberies, the violent crimes that we're so familiar with, were almost
unknown.  I think it was because they raised their children to be
truly independent, while Western society for generations has raised
people to be dependant.  Most people wouldn't have the slightest idea
how to feed themselves if they couldn't walk into the supermarket with
a twenty dollar bill in their hands."

Alister: "So we should give up our technology and go back to living
like Indians?"

Vic: "It might not be a bad idea.  The human race might be too
primitive for all this technology.  You'd definitely be healthier
living in the woods; maybe happier, too.  What I'm trying to say is
that industrialization had radically transformed human society, and
the shock waves are still being felt.  In the last hundred years,
well, two or three hundred years in Europe, but a hundred years in the
U.S. and the rest of the civilized world, we've gone from a primarily
agraian society to a primarily industrial one; we've gone from people
living on farms to people living in cities.  That means people are
dependent on each other to an extent never seen before, not in all of
human history, and that exasperates the problems.  Most human
societies are based on coersion, on greed, on the domination of man
over man, of the strong over the weak.  The more industrialized
society becomes, the more dependent people are on it and each other,
and the more oppressive society can become.  There's just no way
around this, unless millions of people are going to decide to change
their human nature, to abandon greed for generosity, force for
persuasion, and rights for responsibilities."

Mercuriou: "So the philosophers have turned to politics to try and
find their freedom there.  Their latest dopey idea is democracy; they
keep trying to convince us that freedom is to be found in that dumb
vote, and don't you dare try to tell these people otherwise.  They'll
scream you down as a Communist until the work bell rings.  Go to
church on Sunday to hear how you need to work hard so you can give
more when they pass the collection plate around."

Andrea: "Marc, do you still need me to distinguish true Christianity
from bastardized Christianity?  Jesus didn't teach us to work to eat,
in fact, just the opposite.  He taught us not to worry about food, or
clothing, or housing.  He said to put your faith in God for those
things.  He pointed out that the birds in the air don't sow the field,
or reap the harvest, yet God provides them with all the seed they need
to survive.  Jesus taught us to put God first, love and generosity
second, and let your faith take care of the rest."

Mercuriou: "That sounds good, Andrea, but faith in God didn't get any
of us here.  None of the companies that sold us this equipment did it
for love or generosity.  They did it because they thought they would
get something out of it for themselves.  We got here because we were
willing to take it."

Andrea: "That's funny, Marc, because I don't remember taking anything
from anyone.  Faith in God got _me_ here."


T + 107 days    there must be a sex scene

The club was packed.  Colored beams of light flirted with the
twenty-something revelers on the dance floor as strobes pumped with
the beat and lasers scanned above the fog that filled the room.  By
the bar and in the alcoves, older men flirted with the youth.  The
crowd, high on liquor and pot, sweat and sex, moved and vibed with the
latest rock/rap hit.

\vskip 12pt
{{	games are addictive }}
{{	games are insane }}

Alister weaved and bobbed with a twenty-year-old brunette wearing a
tight white top and blue slacks.  She brushed against him as they
twirled and then pressed her head against his chest.  Breathing deep,
he inhaled her fragrance and squeezed her tight.

\vskip 12pt
{{	games waste your time }}
{{	games waste your brain }}

"You know what?" she whispered in his ear, "I want to see you in your
underwear!"  They kissed, hard, lost in the crowd, the beat pounding.

\vskip 12pt
{{	books are the ticket }}
{{	books are the tool }}

Alister: "Let's take a shower!" he yelled over the music.  She shot
him a coy look.  "You want to have sex?" she asked.  "No, no, I mean,
maybe, I don't know, I just mean, probably, but I just want to take a
shower with you, I think it'd just be fun!"

\vskip 12pt
{{	books ain't for nerds }}
{{	books ain't for fools }}

Mercuriou: "What the hell are you doing!?" Mercuriou shouted, "You're
supposed to be looking for Andrea Yeats!"

Alister: "Wha... what?" Alister blubbered as he jolted awake.

He was alone in his darkened compartment, wearing a pair of headphones
connected to the laptop floating nearby.  Yanking them off, his heart
pounding, he listened intently for the captain's voice, but heard
nothing other than the constant hum of the air conditioner and the
tinny noise squeaking out from the headphones.  He unplugged them from
the laptop.  Silence.

Calming, he stretched and exhaled.  Grabbing hold of a pillow floating
nearby and squeezing it in a tight embrace, he dozed back to sleep.
_Man,_she_was_HOT._


T + 124 days    madness must prevail

Mercuriou: "We _have_ to land."

Andrea: "Why?  Why do you have to land?  Why
can't you just go back to Earth?  You've already accomplished more
than any other space mission to date.  _Xplorer_One_ will go down along
with with Vostok 1 and Apollo 7.  So what that we didn't land..."

Mercuriou: "We have to land!  People don't
remember Apollo 7; they remember Apollo 11!  If we don't land, they'll
say we failed.  Then they'll come back a few years from now and make
the first landing on Mars; hell, they'll use our technology to do it,
and everyone will remember Captain so-and-so or Major such-and-such
saluting the first American flag on Mars!"

He now swung his face close to Andrea's and lowered his voice.

Mercuriou: "But they'll be too late!  _I_'m planting the first
American flag on Mars --- face-down in the Martian dirt!"

More than a hundred million people were watching the crew conference
on television.  Now settled into Mars orbit, and with a landing
attempt only days away, most terrestrial cable TV systems devoted
a channel full-time to the _Xplorer_One_ video feed, which now featured
the main cabin of the 767.  During the crew's sleep cycle, a scrolling
orbital panorama of the red planet's surface had become a standard
fixture on many a TV screen, highlighted by a small colored box
labeled "LIVE -- Mars Orbit".

Andrea: "So let them!  Why do you have to risk everything just to win
your private little war?  Or do you seriously think you can survive
down there?"

Mercuriou: "Well, maybe you find this hard to understand from your
cushy NASA perch, but there's a lot of people back home rooting for us
to show the world that you don't have to become one of these ruthless
bums to get something done in life."

Andrea: "Oh, please!  Don't you?  Haven't you?  How many billions did
_you_ steal, Marc?  How many toes did you step on?  Don't tell me you
haven't become ruthless!"

They locked eyes.  Mercuriou fell into his slow-and-firm,
no-sensense tone of "command".

Mercuriou: "We are landing on Mars.  That has been a
primary mission objective since day one.  We take the risks as they
come.  If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave
you for another man."


T + 150 days    somebody must die

"We're getting a lot of vibration," Burns reported.

He was seated next to Vic in the 767's cockpit, descending backwards
through the Martian atmosphere with the plane's nose aimed at the sky.
Light engine thrust was being used as a brake.  This was just a
reconnaissance flight; the rest of the crew was in the cargo modules.

"Is that unexpected?" Vic asked.

"It didn't happen on Earth; I'm slowing down more."

Burns pushed the throttles forward.  They were still more than ten
kilometers high, and he expected the vibration to ease as the rockets
slowed the vehicle.

"Burns, you, uh, you've got a lot of atmospheric turbulence developing
around you," Mercuriou reported from orbit.

"What's going on here?" the engineer wondered.  "This should be dampening
as we slow down; instead, it's getting worse."

The ship was definitely beginning to vibrate.  The vibration somehow
spread outward from the ship and coupled into the atmosphere, which
responded by swirling around and buffeting the ship with wind.

"I'm aborting," Burns declared as he pushed the throttles forward,
and the entire ship began to shake like a washing machine.

The 767 was now in a full-fledged Martian cyclone, with itself at the
center.  The engines strained at full throttle.  The ship slowed,
stopped, and then began to climb.  In the cockpit, the two men heard a
loud pop as the rudder tore away from the fuselage and went careening
away towards the red planet below.

Vic: "What was that?"

A wailing alarm and a dozen red lights on the instrument panel
answered his question.  The spaceplane lost its equilibrium, pitched
back and began to yaw, overwealmed by the aerodynamic forces of the
maelstrom, a raging hurricane with no eye.  The left wing snapped off
the fuselage, and slammed into the battered tail.

In the cockpit, Vic watched the mad swirl of the artificial horizon
like a exposed tank commander watching an armor piercing round headed
straight for his turret.  He glanced over at Burns, fighting madly
against the controls, and a calm peace enveloped his soul.

% as he exploded into light.

_Now_I_get_the_answer_key._

% "Death! Death!  Let me taste death!" the mad child gleefully cried.

Mercuriou: Mercuriou looked at him closely.  "Is that a clich\'e?"

Vic:  "What?"

Mercuriou:    "nevermind"

Vic: "I saw an angel, mommy!"

Mercuriou: "Burns?  Burns?"


T + 151 days    everything must seem hopeless

"This is what Alister recorded on the high-speed film."

Kyle's face disappeared and the video transmission changed into a high
definition image of the doomed 767, seen from almost directly above,
buffeted in slow motion by hurricane wind gusts.

"We've been able to enhance it to clearly show the eddies."

Indead, the monitor now showed strong vortices coming off the running
engines, enlarging and growing, twisting and coalescing into a massive
storm.  Then Kyle was sitting in his usual place in the control room.

Andrea squirmed.  She wanted to see the final breakup in slow motion,
wanted to track what had happened to the cockpit, wanted to see the
storm that had then disappeared like a phantom conjured by a voodoo
priestess. More than anything else, she wanted to ask a question, but
the radio time lag prevented it.

"We just don't know what happened.  It looks the engines created some
kind of storm, but nothing in any of our Martian models predicts it.
I'm genuinely sorry for your loss of your crewmates, Andrea.  I don't
know what else to say.  Houston out."

The transmission ended and was replaced by the usual screen cluster on
the projector.

The Captain was silent.  Then he left.


T + 162 days    suicide must be contemplated

The Captain stopped working.  Alister and Andrea did all the work, or
more precisely all the work on the spaceship, because Kyle's 'mission
control' facility in Houston was now constantly on one of the
monitors.  Sometimes Andrea would just stop and watch it for several
minutes, unable to directly participate because of the nearly
hour-long round-trip radio time lag.  [CHECK] They arranged an
elaborate system of communications, transmitting each other a summary
of their progress every hour, then pausing an hour later to listen to
the other's summary, which had been transmitted half an hour earlier,
and then transmitting another.  They also arranged for an audible
alarm to sound if they wanted to interrupt the other's proceedings.

"Oh, and thought you might want to see this," Kyle announced towards
the end of his 0800 transmission, the first of the morning.

He held a popular American newsstand tabloid to the camera.  A
photograph of their spaceship was overlaid with a drawing of a
wild-eyed seer with deep, penetrating eyes staring directly out at the
reader.

"Apparently some of Nostradomes's quatrains refered to the _Xplorer_One_
--- something about 'the great bird crippled in the sky' --- looks
like the death of your chief engineer is only the first of many woes
to befall you guys, let's see, the first death was by fire, the last
will be by ice, and, oh yeah --- none of you will ever make it back to
Earth alive!"

Andrea: "Thanks a lot, Kyle," Andrea told the video screen as his
voice droned on.  "When I get home, remind me to read you _your_
obituary over coffee in the morning!"

After finishing her coffee, she knocked on Mercuriou's hatch, entered
without waiting, and closed it behind her.  He turned away from the
tiny portal window and faced his first officer as she read from a
tablet.

Andrea: "We've got OMS-27 coming up.  It's a 37.42 mega-newton burn at
374 by 1 solar starting at 13:42 on T + 698.  It has a tappered entry
and step cut-off, is 3 hours, 17 minutes and 13 seconds in duration,
and put us on course for Earth."

Mercuriou: "A three hour OMS burn?"

Secretly, Andrea was glad to see this reaction, much more so than
quiet resignation, but this she tried not to show.

Andrea: "We don't have the 767 anymore, Marc.  We've taken a spare
engine out of storage just to get any propulsion at all.  It's going
to take forever just to get out of Mars orbit.  And our transfer orbit
will be a year and half long." [CHECK THIS]

Mercuriou: Mercuriou nodded assent, then announced "I'm going to
sickbay."

Sickbay had not been opened since Vic's death.  The captain keyed the
lock, opened the hatch and pulled himself through.  Andrea followed
behind, then stopped and looked around while Mercuriou retrieved his
pills.

The room was immaculate.  Everything had been either cleanly stowed or
repacked into its original box and stowed.  Even Vic's laptop,
normally floating free at the end of its tether, was neatly packaged
away.

Andrea: "What are you thinking?"

Mercuriou: "You don't want to know what I'm thinking."

Andrea: "Yes, I do.  I really want to know what you're thinking."

He looked back down at the capsules in his hand, dry swallowed two and
shoved a third back into the container before stowing it.  Then he
floated still and was silent for a while.  Encompassing sickbay with a
wave of his arm, he answered.

Mercuriou: "I knew this thing was dangerous.  I guess I just always
figured if somebody was going to die, it was going to be me, so... so
what, right?  I didn't think it would be my best friends."

Andrea: "We all knew it was dangerous..."

Mercuriou: "No.  You were right.  I've cut so many corners on this
thing, I might as well have reached out and killed them myself.
I... I just don't...  I should never have done all of this."

Mercuriou deflated visibly with this last admission, the first time he
had verbalized any such sentiment.

Mercuriou: "Why even bother to go on... What's the point?"

Andrea lowered her voice, moved closer, and took him by the arm.

Andrea: "Look, let me tell you something.  I've been on two space
shuttle launches, and watched two dozen more.  And every time, I mean
_every_time_ they say 'Go at throttle up'..."

Her voice drifted off and she choked back tears.

Andrea: "You know why we lost _Challenger_?  The engineers knew it was
too cold to launch, but the managers thought, well, maybe we can let
it slide a bit this time, it's always worked before, no big deal."

Mercuriou: "Look, I don't what you're trying to tell me..."

Andrea: "People cut corners driving their cars --- 'oh, I'm not that
tired, I'll be OK to drive' --- people cut corners at work --- 'fix it
later, we just need to get it out by the deadline' --- people cut
corners at home --- 'Johny'll have another ball game next week'.
People cut corners all the time; it's a fact of life."

Andrea: "So they died because you cut corners; because you weren't
perfect!  Your plan wasn't perfect, your ship wasn't perfect, and you
weren't perfect.  But _I_ knew your plan wasn't perfect, and I came
anyway.  And _they_ knew it wasn't perfect, and they still followed
you.  It's over.  It may take you a long time to forgive yourself;
actually, you'll _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  You made a
mistake and people died, but now it's time to go on.  It's a bit
easier since we've only got one place to go."


T + 189 days    suicide must occur

With cork puller still attached, the cork went flying unheaded across
the cabin as the Captain grabed for the plastic cover and slapped it
over the top of the wine bottle.  Even so, several gobs of the red
alcohol went floating into the air, the liquid's surface tension
forming them into perfectly round spheres.  Andrea laughed, but
Mercuriou remained morose and somber.  The picnic had not been his
idea.

Andrea: "You'd think that after half a year in space, you'd have
learned how to open a wine bottle without spilling it everywhere!"

Mercuriou: "What I've learned," Mercuriou answered, as he spun across
the compartment and swallowed one of the larger floating drops, "is
that wine's a lot easier to clean up here!"

Andrea: "Alister, the picnic's starting!"

Alister: "I'll be there in a minute," came the reply from the next module.

Mercurio spilt only a few more drops as he 'poured' the wine into two
wine glasses, each one quickly covered with a flat plastic square.
Drinking from straws was much easier, but an hour earlier, after
Andrea suggested a picnic lunch, Marc had dug into the ship's stores
and produced the glasses alongside the bottle, and they had stood on
tradition, at least for the moment.

Mercuriou: "Cheers!"

They clinked glasses and both laughed as Mercuriou spilled wine all
over his face trying to drink it.  Andrea grabbed a towel.

Alister: "You guys should come in here!" Alister yelled, then got up
and propelled himself through the hatchway.

Alister: "Well, m-maybe you want to come in here," he stammered as he
watched Andrea trying to clean Mercuriou's face.

Mercuriou: "What's up?" the grinning Captain asked.

Alister: "An airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center!"

Andrea: "Well, hopefully, nobody was hurt."

Mercuriou:  "I'm sure the pilot didn't make it!"

Andrea: "We'll keep him in our prayers."

They gathered around the picnic basket to pray.  Andrea was about to
bless the pilot, but at the last minute reconsidered and blessed the
_people_ in the plane.  Soon Alister was back at the console.

Alister:  "Another one!  Another one!"

Burns once told Mercuriou that there are no great men, only great
ideas, and that genius is the ability to retrieve those rare gems,
that energy and mass are the same thing, related by the square of the
speed of light.  Why the speed of light?  Why it's _square_?  That was
the fine-cut diamond Albert Einstein pulled from the rough.  Tom
Clancy was such a genius.  Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was another.  Both
men had discovered the same fiery sapphire, that unbenonst to the
masses of mortal men, a passenger jet can be used as a
_guided_missile_.  One genius buried his discovery in the pages of a
novel.  The other held its blazing red light up for the world to see
one terrible September morning.

Mercuriou: "Another Timothy McVeigh or something," Mercuriou was
saying.  "The country is so hated; hell, you can say a lot about me,
Andrea, but I never did anything like this."

The picnic was forgotten.  At 1431 GMT, September 11, 2001, after
first the event on Earth and then a radio lag of 3 minutes 17 seconds,
the silent _Xplorer_One_ crew watched the second tower collapse.  In the
days ahead, it would be revealed that Islamic terrorists had hijacked
four American airlines.  Two had slammed, full throttle, into the twin
towers of World Trade Center, at one time the tallest buildings in the
world, and headquarters to dozens of major companies; a third hit the
Pentagon; the fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.  Burns would have
suggested imagining the pictures you've seen of jet crash scenes, then
trying to project it 100 stories above you onto a skyscraper in lower
Manhattan.  Later, Burns would have made a quick calculation based on
the published mass and height of the skyscrapers to estimate the
energy released by their collapse - ten kilotons of TNT - the size of
a small atomic bomb.  Bankers, mail men, fire fighters, brokers, CEOs,
bus boys - all lost their lives on 9/11.  A pair of glasses, a morning
cold, an early meeting - these became the difference between stumbling
away covered in the white dirt of pulverized concrete or having your
picture appear on a wall of sorrows over the caption - "97th floor,
One World Trade, any information please call..."

Within hours, the nation mobilized.  Medical teams sprung into action,
fire fighters dove into the wreckage alongside men who walked up on
the street and volunteered, desperate to find anything or anyone still
alive in the tons of rubble.  Yet the medics remained largely idle,
and the anticipated stream of causalities into trama wards only
materialized near the Pentagon.

Within days, the world reacted.  NATO invoked its mutual-defense
clause; a French newspaper declared "Today, we are all Americans"; the
British prime minister flew to America.

Within weeks, President Bush fingured Al-Qaeda as the culprit,
declared "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists",
then bombed and soon invaded Afghanistan.

In America, a dissident's dream had prophesied disaster for the United
States and war in the Middle East.  In Afghanistan, an Islamic
militant dreamed that his nation defeated the United States in a
soccer match and all of their players were dressed as pilots.  In
Afghanistan, in Pakistan, or perhaps in Khartoum, Osama bin Laden was
smiling.


T + 233 days    pacifism must be encouraged

% NOT THE BEST TIME
% WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU WILL ACHIEVE?  DON'T THEY KNOW THAT ALREADY?
% TOOK ADVANTAGE OF FREEDOM becomes TOOK ADVANTAGE OF CAPITALISM
% ATTACK WHOM?  THE PEOPLE!
%   IT DOESN'T MATTER - YOU FORGIVE YOUR ENEMIES
% LOOK OF YOUNG MEN DYING; WWI
% WE INSTALL OUR GOV THEN CIVIL WAR


Andrea: "Maybe you shouldn't go on TV right now."

Mercuriou said nothing.  He was busy preparing the video equipment for
a transmission to Earth.  He had already begun objecting to the
government's behavior, stating that an orderly extradition procedure
should be followed rather than an invasion.  The radio time lag
prevented a debate, so he had to settle for making a speech.

Andrea: "Maybe it's not the best time."

Mercuriou: "Why?  Because the country's been hurt too bad to hear the
truth?"

Andrea: "What truth?  That these jihadists took advantage of our
freedom..."

Mercuriou: "Took advantage of freedom!?  You make it sound like
anybody can just walk up to one of these training companies, 'hey, I'd
like to learn to fly a 767'... 'sure, no problem'.  You've got to have
_money_ to fly!  How many people would love to fly but it's too
_expensive_... They took advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one
thing that will make people say 'yes' in a society that says 'no',
'No', 'NO'!  They took advantage of the fact that Osama bin Laden is a
_multimillionare_!"

Andrea: "...and attacked a civilian target!"

Mercuriou: "Well, who you gonna attack?  The political leaders, the
President?  They'll just elect a new one and keep going, all hot to
avenge him!  Who really is responsible?  Isn't it The People,
themselves?  Isn't that what they keep screaming, that it's The People
that run the government?  The majority that elects these guys?  Since
it's _The_People_ who run democracy, shouldn't we hold _The_People_
responsible?  And who was in the World Trade Center?  Those
people were the true beleivers!  They were the _capitalists_!"

Andrea: "I'm sure there were window washers there, too."

Mercuriou: "OK, fine.  A lot of innocent people died, and a lot of
firefighters trying to save lives.  But _the_majority_ of the people
in those towers were _The_Majority_, and they didn't come to work that
morning to help make the world a better place, they were
_in_it_for_themselves_ because that's what runs democracy.
Why attack the thing, anyway?  It's a _symbol_ of capitalism,
just like the Pentagon is a symbol of _militarism_!"

Andrea: "It doesn't matter."

Mercuriou: "And on God's earth, why, woman, why?"

Andrea: "Because you _forgive_your_enemies_, as we're told in about a
hundred parables!  You don't steal `more money than Bernie Madolf ever
saw' because they won't let you fly to Mars, you don't smash airplanes
into their skyscrapers because they imposed some global capitalist
system on you and you don't invade foreign countries because they
won't obey your dictats!"

Mercuriou: "Exactly!  After we steamroll Afghanistan with the
military, then we'll impose The Greatest System of Government Ever.
The majority will support it, at least at first, but the losers won't
just roll over and play dead like back home, if only because they've
been invaded and conquered, not to mention their religion of jihad!
No, they'll fight, and you'll get a civil war.  It's the inevitable
result of any foreign attempt to impose a government there!"

Andrea: "I just think you should wait a while longer."

Mercuriou: "Andrea, it's like claxons going off in a cockpit!
Brrrmpf!  Brrrmpf!  Brrrmpf! Whoop, whoop, pull up!  And if the
co-pilot just stays meek and silent, then the plane's going to crash!
You said it yourself, Andrea.  The Word!  The Word!  It has to be
heard!"

Andrea: "You act like people have never heard this criticism.  Don't
you think it's been heard over and over, and rejected, time and again?
They're all off on the warpath now; they're not going to listen to
anything you have to say; you may as well just save it until we get
home."


T + 499 days    communism must be preached
[Make sure this is a Sunday!]

Bible: Andrea had by now received a special dispensation to celebrate
Mass without a priest, and her televised Sunday services, often
highlighted by direct dialog with her congregation of two, had earned
her an unlikely reputation as a space-bourne televangelist.  Today's
Gospel lesson featured Matthew 7:21: "Not every one that said to me,
Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that does
the will of my Father which is in heaven."

Andrea: "This is one of my favorite parts of the Gospel,
because it affects one of the deepest rifts in Christianity -
the split between Catholics and Protestants.  Five hundred years ago,
the Catholic church had gotten into the practice of selling
indulgences; essentially telling people that through charitable
donations to the church they could buy their way into heaven.  We have
since repudiated that practice.  Before that occurred, however, Martin
Luther spoke out decisively against indulgences, among other things,
and when he would not retract his statements was expelled from the
Catholic church.  He initiated the Protestant Reformation, founded the
Lutheran Church, and adopted the doctrine of Justification by Faith,
which teaches that salvation is achieved solely through accepting
Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.  In one form or
another, this doctrine is accepted by most Protestant churches."

Andrea: "Matthew 7:21, however, shows that Justification by Faith, at least in
its most extreme form, is itself seriously flawed.  Merely mouthing
the name 'Jesus', no matter how piously done, is not a substitute for
actually doing what God wants.  Christ told us the same thing, a
little bit differently, in a parable.  Let's look at Matthew 21:28:"

Bible: "What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and
said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.'  And he answered, 'I
will not'; but afterward he repented and went.  And he went to the
second and said the same; and he answered, 'I go, sir,' but did not
go.  Which of the two did the will of his father?"

Alister: "Actions speak louder than words."

Andrea: "Precisely.  There is another passage, not from the Gospel this time,
but from James's letter, that reiterates this point:"

Bible: "What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has
not works?  Can his faith save him?  If a brother or sister is
ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go
in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed
for the body, what does it profit?  So faith by itself, if it has no
works, is dead."

Andrea: "So when Christ says that not all who call him 'Lord, Lord'
will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of
his Father in heaven, not only is it an amazing suggestion, that God
actually has a will for each and every one of us, all six billion of
us, but it provides a simple statement of what our goal should be in
life - to do the will of God."

Andrea: "This, of course, is much easier said than done, to the point where
_discernment_ - discerning the will of God - has become a buzzword in
religious communities.  Some advocate meditation, St. Ignatius
developed a lesson plan, Vic's technique was the vision quest.
Solitude, silence, prayer and fasting are common features shared by
almost all.  Another approach is based on the parable of the talents:"

Bible: "Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called
his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five
talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent,
each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man
who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to
work and gained five more. So also, the one with the two talents
gained two more. But the man who had received the one talent went off,
dug a hole in the ground and hid his money."

Bible: "After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled
accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents brought
the other five.  'Master,' he said, 'you entrusted me with five
talents. See, I have gained five more.'"

Bible: "His master said 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been
faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many
things. Come and share your master's happiness!'"

Bible: "The man with the two talents also come.  'Master,' he said, 'you
entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.'"

Bible: "His master said 'Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been
faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many
things. Come and share your master's happiness!'"

Bible: "Then the man who had received the one talent came. 'Master', he said,
'I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown
and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and
went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs
to you.'"

Bible: "His master said, 'You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest
where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed?
Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers,
so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.'"

Bible: "'Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten
talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an
abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from
him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness,
where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'"

Andrea: "In this passage, we find more autonomy - we are given talents
and it's up to us how to invest them, rather than asking God to send
us a portfolio.  Rick Warren developed this approach in
_The_Purpose_Driven_Life_.  He encourages his readers to look at their
own skills, their own interests, their own limitations - in short,
their own gifts, and achieve discernment by asking how best to invest
them.  Whatever the method, the attitude is that of a servant, and the
goal remains the same - to do the will of God."

Mercuriou: "I haven't done the will of God."

Andrea paused.

Andrea: "I don't know about that.  You've made your mistakes, but
you've also said things that needed to be said, and found a platform
from which they were heard.  Now, did you need to steal a billion
dollars to do that?  I doubt it.  I think you could have found another
way.  This is why I don't buy the Christians who say you have to fight
violently against evil.  First off, it's un-Biblical -
_resist_not_he_who_is_evil_.  Second, if there was ever a time when
you could have justified a revolution, it was two thousand years ago
when slavery was as commonplace as money, paganism was the religion of
the masses, and Rome was the terror of the Mediterranean.  Yet Christ
didn't condone any revolution; didn't lead a protest march on the
governor's residence; didn't stage a sit-in at the slave auction.
Didn't do a thing to oppose his own murderers, and didn't let his
disciples oppose them either.  What he _did_ do was teach; and in the
beginning of John is this beautiful passage about the Word.  'In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God.'  Why the Word?  Because the Word is the weapon of the Christian,
and the pen is mighter than the sword / books are the light of the
world / free speech is greatest weapon in the world."

Alister: "But if you don't believe in Jesus?  Who's going to listen
then?"

Andrea: "Well, people used to believe the Earth is flat.  You can
believe whatever you want; the fact is that the Earth is round.  Now I
believe that Jesus [of Nazarath] returned to life after three days in
the grave.  Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but it's like the Earth
being flat or round.  People can debate it one way or another, but
it's a factual question, and ultimately either true or false.  I think
it's true - the resurrection was God's ultimate stamp of approval; it
was his way of telling us that we need to take Jesus seriously."

Alister had been seriously reading the Bible for the first time.
Along with the rest of the crew, he had been receiving plenty of email
from fundamentalists.  Most of the _Xplorer_One_ crew deleted it along with
the rest of their junk mail.  Apparently Alister did not.

Alister: "Do you think we're living in the End Times?"

Andrea: "Well, first of all, I don't pretend to understand the book of
Revelation.  Beasts with seven heads, strange numerology...  People
attach all kinds of meanings to it.  But I'll tell you this.  Even a
cursory reading of Revelation shows that it's not about the end of the
world."

Alister: "It isn't?"

Andrea: "What happens at the end of the book?"

Alister: "There's like a thousand years of peace, right?"

Andrea: "So at the very least, we can say that it's about a period in
human history torn by war, oppression, deceit and disaster, that ends
with the triumph of good.  So I don't even think about the End Times;
I know people call it that, but I think about Revelation as more like
the Transition Times."

Alister: "But aren't people going to be judged then?  What do you have
to do to be saved?  Everybody says something different."

Andrea: "Well, that's the nice part.  Revelation doesn't tell us how
to live; the Gospels do that, and in fairly plain language, at least
compared to Revelation.  That's why I don't pay too much attention to
Revelation.  Maybe I should, but when I read the Bible, it's usually
the Gospels, because that's where Jesus tells us how to live.  And the
basic rules are pretty simple: Love God - unconditionally, and love
your fellow man - unconditionally.  And maybe everyone says something
different because even though that sounds easy, it can be really tough
to figure it out in practice.  Just like our Gospel reading today -
easier said than done."


T + 700 days    everyone must be let off the hook

Andrea: "Worry about your relationship with God; get that straight
first, and the rest will follow."

Mercuriou: "Relationship with God?  I've stolen who knows how many
billions of dollars, gotten my two best friends killed, and am going
to be sitting in a jail cell for the rest of my life, and you're still
taking about my relationship with God?  I don't think there's much
hope left in this life for Marc Mercuriou."

Andrea: "You're looking at the past and the future, and you're looking
at it from a mortal perspective.  Start with the present."

Mercuriou waved his hands, gesturing around him.

Mercuriou: "We're floating in an air-conditioned tube with nothing to
do and no way out.  That's my _present_."

Andrea: "An excellent opportunity for prayer and meditation."

Mercuriou: "I don't know what to pray about."

Andrea: "You just gave me a nice little list!  Forgiveness for the
past; guidance for the future -- two of the most important things for
anybody to pray for."

Mercuriou sneered.

Mercuriou: "Forgiveness?"

Andrea: "Marc, one of the central tenets of my religion is the
_total_forgiveness_of_all_your_sins_."

For a moment, Mercuriou stared at her silently.

Andrea: "To obtain that forgiveness, we are to commit our lives to God."

Mercuriou: "So a murderer, a rapist..."

Andrea: "If the commitment to God is sincere and persistent, yes."

Mercuriou: The two astronauts floated in silence for several minutes.
Finally, slowly, Mercuriou nodded his head in assent.  "What have I
got to lose, right?"  Awkwardly, he clasped his arms around a hand
strap, kneeled against the bulkhead, and was silent.

Andrea: "Do you want me to leave?" Andrea whispered.

Mercuriou: "No." He sighed, bowed his head, paused again.  Finally, in
a low voice, he spoke.

Mercuriou: "Dear Lord, forgive me my sins."


T + 725 days    fear must strike the hearts of men

Kyle Lankier fell into the morning rush heading into Building 39 and
found himself beside a veteran astronaut prepping for an upcoming
shuttle mission.

"How's your thing going?"

Kyle shrugged.  He struggled with his emotions before answering.

Kyle: "I don't know... everything looks OK... I've got a bad feeling,
though."

David grabbed his arm and stopped him.

"That's mine!  Everything looks OK... but it's not!"

A chill ran up Kyle's spine.

Kyle: "What do you mean?"

"I've had dreams... nightmares!  We're burning up in space!  I'm all
suited up, and I'm burning alive!"

The two astronauts stared at each other.  Kyle ran over his thoughts.
Had he had nightmares?  He racked his memory.  _Had_he?_ He looked up
at David, his face ashen.

David: "This thing's a disaster.  I'm not coming back from this mission."

Kyle: "That's mine.  That's mine, exactly."



T + 756 days    some anti-government plot must be hatched


Andrea: "Two thousand years ago we were told
_Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_, but half of us still don't believe
that it was God speaking and the other half still don't believe that
he meant it.  Amen."

By the end of the sermon, Alister had concluded that humanity was too
primitive to be flying to Mars, too primitive to have nuclear power,
too primitive to have global data networks, too primitive to have
hyperdermic needles, or air travel, or oil wells or cars, and was
genuinely wondering about the printing press.  Mercuriou's thoughts
went in a more predictable direction, which he shared with Andrea in
private.

Mercuriou: "I cooked up some delusional scheme to achieve an
impossible goal.  I stole ruthlessly from strangers, got my two best
friends killed, and will spend the rest of my life in prison.
Obviously, I'm a total failure."

Andrea: "Don't be so sure.  You've accomplished a lot, and the least
of that is that you've shown that man can fly to Mars and that a
private space launch is plausible.  You've made people question their
basic convictions.  But you're stubborn and opinionated.  As for Burns
and Vic, you put us all in danger, but we went along with it, each for
our various different reasons.  You still need to set aside your
material goals and put the Lord first in your life.  You'll still be
stubborn and opinionated, but we can work on that.  First get your
course set straight, then we can trim the sails."

In the next months, he cast himself into writing the words that would
define him.  For he would not be remembered for his flight to Mars nor
his disaster there, not for his rants against capitalism nor his
diatribes against democracy, but for the simple vision that he would
now put into effect.  And, for the first time in his life, Marc
Mercuriou relied on God.


T + 681 days    the ending must seem predictable

Alister: "Five."

Alister: "Four."

Alister: "Three."

Alister: "Two."

Alister: "One."

Alister's voice clipped off the final seconds, then the computer
began the insertion burn.  The slight force from the engine
pushed the crew gently backwards into their seats.  The
computer screen next to the engineer showed their current
tragectory, in blue, an open hyperbola that skittered out
off the screen, and their target tragectory, a neat red
circle centered on a green disk that represented Earth.
As the engines fired, the blue line began curving more
strongly back towards the direction they were coming from,
as another clock ticked down more seconds.

Alister: "Orbital interface in five, four, three, two, one, Earth orbit."

The blue line flicked neatly into a broad ellipse.  Alister breathed a
sigh of relief.  Almost nothing, short of something absurdly
catostraphic, like crashing into the atmosphere, could stop them from
getting back to Earth now.  Even if the engine failed now, they would
be in some crazy orbit that the OTV's could get them down from almost
no matter what.  Now he just relaxed and watched the rest of the
countdown.

Alister: "ECO in five; four; three; two; one; Engine Cutoff."

The thrust stopped, just as the blue and red lines had merged into a
single yellow circle.  They were siting in a circular, six-hour
parking orbit above the heart of the African continent, clearly
visible through the OTV's portholes.

Alister: "Perfect burn," Alister declared, letting out a whoop.  "I
almost expected a disaster, didn't you?!"

Andrea: "Sometimes you make it back alive, Alister!  I've done it
twice already!"

Alister: "There's South Africa!  There's South Africa!"

Any reaction this would have prompted was interrupted by Andrea's mobile.

"Good news, girl!" Kyle squawked on the radio.  "We're bringing you
home on _Columbus_!"


T + 688 days    some dastardly blow must strike America

SPEECH2


T + 690 days    it must be rabidly anti-democracy

ECKS2

WYE2

ZEE2

CALLERS


T + 694 days    it must be racist and anti-Semitic

ALT-ENDING


T + 695 days    some sick "freedom" must win in the end

Mercuriou: Mercuriou looked at the GPS.  "If something's going to
happen, it'll be any time now.  We're crossing the California coast."

They rode on in silence for a few minutes.

Mercuriou: "You know, I think I'd rather be dead anyway.  Otherwise,
I'll just sit in prison the rest of my life.  Who cares if they kill
me now?"

Andrea: After a moment, Andrea shrugged.  "Every foot you set out from
your house could be your last.  I pray that God keep me alive until
I've done his work, and then I'd just as soon he send me on to the
next thing.  I know that sounds harsh, but I haven't lived a life of
luxary, and it's how I feel."

Alister: "I want to live!" Alister said.  He looked back and forth
between the other two.  "What?"

In the cockpit, the flight crew was studying a tire pressure warning.

"Does it look like instrumentation?" al-Nass asked, leaning forward
from the one of the rear seats.

"Nope," 'Slick' answered after pushing buttons for a moment.  "It's
solid.  Our left rear tires are blown."

Reginard: "Now the left gear is showing a barber pole...  We're getting
a lot of aileron trim, too."

Heavy with the interference of reentry, the radio crackled to life.

"_Columbus_, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did
not copy your last."

Reginard ignored the radio, instead pointing to the small yellow lights
that indicated RCS thruster activity.  The right yaw light was lit
solid.

"How long's that been on?"  "What?"  "That!"

Back in the Spacehab, Mercuriou was quietly explaining how to overthrow
the government.

Mercuriou: "Anybody can secede, well, almost anybody, I mean.  You
need to form a political party.  You should hold a convention, too,
but, finally, you have to convince your people to go somewhere on
Election Day and just _demand_ to be heard."

Mercuriou: He paused, then continued.  "It doesn't matter if I'm in
jail.  Or dead.  Change; don't change.  They don't need me.  They
really don't."

A warbling tone from the computers accompanied a sickening lurch, as
the orbiter spun out of control and the force pushing them against
their chairs dropped from three gees to a third.

Andrea: "That's a Master Alarm!" Andrea announced, reading from the
display next to her.  "We've lost hydraulics!"  The orbiter swayed and
rolled as it careened through the air, uncontrolled by man or machine.

Mercuriou: "Tight up!"  Mercuriou ordered.

Mercuriou and Andrea needed only to snap their visors shut to get
"tight", but Alister's gloves were off.  As he started to don his left
glove, he looked up and caught Vic's eye.  He was floating leisurely
in the middle of the SpaceHab, dressed in slacks and a T-shirt.

Vic: "Don't bother."

Alister's jaw went slack.

Mercuriou: "Vic?!  W-what are you doing here?  You're..."

Vic: "So are you, Marc."

The orbiter was now swaying wildly, exposing the top of the fuselage
to the direct heat of re-entry once every few seconds.  They heard a
loud crash and felt something break loose from the tail.

Vic: "There was a piece of frozen foam insulation that broke off the ET
during launch... smashed a pretty good hole in the leading edge of the
wing, right through all that protective heat shielding."

Mercuriou: "Was it sabotage?"

His question was punctuated by a ear-splitting crack, as if someone
had taken a pound of linguini and snapped it in half in front of a
microphone.  The cabin pitched to the side as the SpaceHab access
tunnel ripped away from the crew module.  In fact, the entire cargo
bay broke away from the forebody, with only a strip of aluminum skin
connecting _Columbus_ together on the left.  Then that, too, tore
free, and the orbiter had split in two.

The lights went out, but they were not long in darkness.  The forward
bulkhead began to glow red.

Vic: "This is a good way to go, Marc.  Quick and painless."

The bulkhead blazed white, then morphed into a sheet of flame that
spilled over them, a crushing, foaming ten foot wall of raging red
surf that buried them under an ocean of fire.  They were burning,
Burning, BURNING!! and then their suits burnt off into ashes which
blew away with the flames and left them hanging in an azure haze.

_Columbus_ was gone, replaced with a thousand blazing brushes painting
fire on sky.  Below them swept America, above them spanned space, and
above space blazed a stupendous light.

Alister: "Wh-what!?"

Mercuriou turned to him as the earth, the sun, the galaxy fell away
beneath them.

Mercuriou: "There is no beginning; there is no end.  This is the Great
Conversation."


Epilog

EPILOG

\vfill

\copyright\ 2011.  No rights reserved.  You may freely copy, print,
modify or redistribute this book.  Please respect the intellectual
integrity of the work.
