head	1.379;
access;
symbols;
locks; strict;
comment	@# @;


1.379
date	2011.06.04.06.59.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.378
date	2011.06.03.23.44.42;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.377
date	2011.05.30.21.52.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.376
date	2011.05.30.02.22.09;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.375
date	2011.04.26.01.24.40;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.374
date	2011.04.22.08.22.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.373
date	2011.04.21.20.08.55;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.372
date	2011.04.20.20.27.34;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.371
date	2011.04.20.19.38.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.370
date	2011.04.20.17.33.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.369
date	2011.04.03.19.36.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.368
date	2011.04.02.11.13.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.367
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branches;
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1.366
date	2011.04.02.07.17.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.365
date	2011.03.28.23.05.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.364
date	2011.03.28.21.45.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.363
date	2011.03.28.21.34.06;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.362
date	2011.03.25.00.03.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.361
date	2011.03.24.02.40.55;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.360
date	2011.03.24.02.12.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.359
date	2011.03.24.02.10.13;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.358
date	2011.03.24.02.08.26;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.357
date	2011.03.23.00.22.47;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.356
date	2011.03.22.21.28.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.355
date	2011.03.22.20.03.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.354
date	2011.03.19.21.52.49;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.353
date	2011.03.19.01.21.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.352
date	2011.03.18.23.03.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.351
date	2011.03.16.22.22.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.350
date	2011.03.16.00.28.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.349
date	2011.03.15.01.36.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.348
date	2011.03.12.22.40.06;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.347
date	2011.02.23.22.52.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.346
date	2011.02.23.22.38.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.345
date	2011.02.22.22.08.00;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.344
date	2011.02.22.21.29.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.343
date	2011.02.19.21.19.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.342
date	2011.02.19.20.16.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.341
date	2011.02.19.01.28.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.340
date	2011.02.18.23.14.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.339
date	2011.02.18.22.21.55;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.338
date	2011.02.17.21.07.32;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.337
date	2011.02.16.22.37.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.336
date	2011.02.16.21.34.09;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.335
date	2011.02.16.21.11.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.334
date	2011.02.15.20.30.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.333
date	2011.02.15.02.19.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.332
date	2011.02.13.00.36.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.331
date	2011.02.12.20.23.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.330
date	2011.02.08.01.15.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.329
date	2011.02.07.23.06.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.328
date	2011.02.07.21.27.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.327
date	2011.02.07.20.40.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.326
date	2011.02.07.20.25.32;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.325
date	2011.02.06.00.08.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.324
date	2011.02.05.21.45.13;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.323
date	2011.02.03.21.15.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.322
date	2011.02.02.20.51.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.321
date	2011.01.25.23.25.52;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.320
date	2011.01.25.22.02.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.319
date	2011.01.25.21.49.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.318
date	2011.01.25.20.39.31;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.317
date	2011.01.25.20.28.03;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.316
date	2011.01.24.06.39.28;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.315
date	2011.01.23.00.38.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.314
date	2011.01.22.23.01.41;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.313
date	2011.01.22.22.56.55;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.312
date	2011.01.21.23.09.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.311
date	2011.01.21.02.13.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.310
date	2011.01.19.00.48.47;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.309
date	2011.01.14.08.43.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.308
date	2011.01.05.06.08.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.307
date	2011.01.04.08.59.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.306
date	2011.01.03.21.47.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.305
date	2011.01.03.21.45.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.304
date	2011.01.03.21.45.41;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.303
date	2011.01.03.08.45.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.302
date	2011.01.03.08.42.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.301
date	2011.01.02.08.15.03;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.300
date	2011.01.02.06.09.07;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.299
date	2011.01.01.08.44.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.298
date	2011.01.01.08.17.11;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.297
date	2010.12.31.23.37.11;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.296
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1.295
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1.294
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1.293
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1.292
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1.291
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1.290
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1.289
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1.288
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1.287
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1.286
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1.285
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1.284
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1.283
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1.282
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1.281
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1.280
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1.279
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1.278
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1.277
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1.276
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1.275
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1.274
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1.273
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1.272
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1.271
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1.270
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1.269
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1.268
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1.267
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1.266
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1.265
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1.264
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1.263
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1.262
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1.261
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1.260
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1.259
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1.258
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1.257
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1.256
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1.255
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1.254
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1.253
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1.252
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1.251
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1.250
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1.249
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1.248
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1.247
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1.246
date	2010.01.10.07.13.11;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.245
date	2010.01.08.06.46.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.244
date	2010.01.07.05.45.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.243
date	2009.12.27.17.56.13;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.242
date	2009.12.21.02.15.59;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.241
date	2009.12.06.19.36.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.240
date	2009.12.04.03.40.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.239
date	2009.12.01.01.56.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.238
date	2009.11.30.23.43.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.237
date	2009.11.30.23.34.37;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.236
date	2009.11.30.23.14.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.235
date	2009.11.30.22.30.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.234
date	2009.11.30.06.40.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.233
date	2009.11.28.06.56.05;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.232
date	2009.11.28.06.18.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.231
date	2009.11.27.23.27.51;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.230
date	2009.11.22.02.22.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.229
date	2009.11.21.22.09.27;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.228
date	2009.11.21.05.05.47;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.227
date	2009.11.18.06.26.14;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.226
date	2009.11.18.02.04.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.225
date	2009.11.17.22.52.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.224
date	2009.11.17.22.23.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.223
date	2009.11.17.22.13.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.222
date	2009.11.17.21.42.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.221
date	2009.11.17.21.41.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.220
date	2009.09.16.03.37.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.219
date	2009.09.15.05.53.49;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.218
date	2009.09.12.23.47.47;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.217
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1.216
date	2009.08.26.17.49.49;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.215
date	2009.08.11.03.18.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.214
date	2009.08.10.04.03.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.213
date	2009.07.10.05.10.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.212
date	2009.07.08.18.30.52;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.211
date	2009.07.07.05.49.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.210
date	2009.07.01.04.53.40;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.209
date	2009.06.30.05.17.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.208
date	2009.06.17.05.10.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.207
date	2009.06.08.03.11.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.206
date	2009.05.30.06.53.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.205
date	2009.05.07.06.05.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.204
date	2009.04.06.06.46.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.203
date	2009.03.22.06.36.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.202
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1.201
date	2009.03.14.05.40.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.200
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1.199
date	2009.03.14.05.14.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.198
date	2008.07.08.06.09.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.197
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1.196
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1.195
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1.194
date	2008.03.31.07.51.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.193;

1.193
date	2008.03.29.05.43.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.192;

1.192
date	2008.03.28.06.32.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.191;

1.191
date	2008.03.28.05.48.28;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.190;

1.190
date	2008.03.28.00.49.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.189;

1.189
date	2008.03.28.00.47.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.188;

1.188
date	2008.03.28.00.44.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.187;

1.187
date	2008.03.28.00.43.23;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.186;

1.186
date	2008.03.27.08.30.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.185;

1.185
date	2008.03.27.07.59.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.184;

1.184
date	2008.03.25.06.18.11;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.183;

1.183
date	2008.03.24.09.28.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.182;

1.182
date	2008.03.24.09.25.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.181;

1.181
date	2008.03.24.09.23.41;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.180;

1.180
date	2008.03.24.08.27.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.179;

1.179
date	2008.03.23.04.46.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.178;

1.178
date	2008.03.23.03.57.28;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.177;

1.177
date	2008.03.23.01.04.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.176;

1.176
date	2008.03.21.08.37.32;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.175;

1.175
date	2008.03.20.06.34.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.174;

1.174
date	2008.03.19.08.14.51;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.173;

1.173
date	2008.03.18.07.23.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.172;

1.172
date	2008.03.15.04.36.28;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.171;

1.171
date	2007.07.02.06.46.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.170;

1.170
date	2007.07.02.05.30.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.169;

1.169
date	2007.06.13.07.37.51;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.168;

1.168
date	2007.06.13.07.20.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.167;

1.167
date	2006.07.13.06.45.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.166;

1.166
date	2006.05.09.18.40.14;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.165;

1.165
date	2006.05.09.18.30.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.164;

1.164
date	2005.07.11.05.04.37;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.163;

1.163
date	2005.07.10.22.19.26;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.162;

1.162
date	2005.07.09.04.21.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.161;

1.161
date	2005.07.09.04.12.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.160;

1.160
date	2005.07.07.23.51.50;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.159;

1.159
date	2005.07.07.02.28.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.158;

1.158
date	2005.07.06.23.28.59;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.157;

1.157
date	2005.06.28.16.35.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.156;

1.156
date	2005.06.26.07.42.22;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.155;

1.155
date	2005.06.19.06.37.31;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.154;

1.154
date	2005.06.13.18.14.16;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.153;

1.153
date	2005.06.13.17.58.14;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.152;

1.152
date	2005.06.10.00.07.05;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.151;

1.151
date	2005.06.07.07.36.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.150;

1.150
date	2005.05.17.16.59.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.149;

1.149
date	2005.05.16.00.12.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.148;

1.148
date	2005.05.10.13.42.57;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.147;

1.147
date	2005.05.10.12.33.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.146;

1.146
date	2005.05.08.02.49.35;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.145;

1.145
date	2005.05.07.20.14.32;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.144;

1.144
date	2005.05.07.14.47.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.143;

1.143
date	2005.05.07.14.45.51;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.142;

1.142
date	2005.05.07.14.37.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.141;

1.141
date	2005.05.07.14.36.04;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.140;

1.140
date	2005.05.07.03.25.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.139;

1.139
date	2005.05.06.16.11.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.138;

1.138
date	2005.05.06.15.34.26;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.137;

1.137
date	2005.05.06.15.18.31;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.136;

1.136
date	2005.05.05.02.13.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.135;

1.135
date	2005.05.04.22.06.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.134;

1.134
date	2005.05.04.02.42.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.133;

1.133
date	2005.05.04.02.26.52;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.132;

1.132
date	2005.05.04.02.26.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.131;

1.131
date	2005.05.03.21.49.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.130;

1.130
date	2005.05.03.03.27.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.129;

1.129
date	2005.05.01.16.59.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.128;

1.128
date	2005.05.01.16.59.07;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.127;

1.127
date	2005.03.27.01.54.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.126;

1.126
date	2004.11.03.08.07.05;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.125;

1.125
date	2004.09.29.00.31.50;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.124;

1.124
date	2004.09.28.20.28.36;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.123;

1.123
date	2004.09.03.21.26.55;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.122;

1.122
date	2004.08.31.16.58.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.121;

1.121
date	2004.08.30.21.45.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.120;

1.120
date	2004.08.28.21.56.01;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.119;

1.119
date	2004.08.18.19.35.04;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.118;

1.118
date	2004.08.17.23.00.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.117;

1.117
date	2004.08.17.03.35.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.116;

1.116
date	2004.08.14.01.40.59;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.115;

1.115
date	2004.08.13.00.02.41;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.114;

1.114
date	2004.08.03.19.45.42;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.113;

1.113
date	2004.08.03.19.31.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.112;

1.112
date	2004.07.29.01.41.03;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.111;

1.111
date	2004.07.29.00.24.34;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.110;

1.110
date	2004.07.25.19.58.41;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.109;

1.109
date	2004.05.31.20.12.22;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.108;

1.108
date	2004.05.15.21.58.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.107;

1.107
date	2004.05.15.21.14.34;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.106;

1.106
date	2004.05.14.14.54.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.105;

1.105
date	2004.05.13.22.27.07;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.104;

1.104
date	2004.05.13.21.33.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.103;

1.103
date	2004.05.13.20.53.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.102;

1.102
date	2004.05.13.20.29.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.101;

1.101
date	2004.05.13.20.04.35;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.100;

1.100
date	2004.05.13.13.16.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.99;

1.99
date	2004.05.13.03.02.05;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.98;

1.98
date	2004.05.13.02.47.42;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.97;

1.97
date	2004.05.13.02.40.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.96;

1.96
date	2004.05.12.16.06.52;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.95;

1.95
date	2004.05.12.02.34.42;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.94;

1.94
date	2004.05.12.01.04.07;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.93;

1.93
date	2004.05.12.00.42.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.92;

1.92
date	2004.05.12.00.28.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.91;

1.91
date	2004.05.11.23.12.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.90;

1.90
date	2004.05.11.23.11.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.89;

1.89
date	2004.05.11.23.08.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.88;

1.88
date	2004.05.11.19.13.16;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.87;

1.87
date	2004.05.11.18.41.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.86;

1.86
date	2004.05.10.17.08.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.85;

1.85
date	2004.05.10.01.14.02;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.84;

1.84
date	2004.05.09.23.49.14;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.83;

1.83
date	2004.05.09.22.41.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.82;

1.82
date	2004.05.09.21.44.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.81;

1.81
date	2004.05.09.21.43.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.80;

1.80
date	2004.05.09.16.15.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.79;

1.79
date	2004.05.09.00.47.31;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.78;

1.78
date	2004.05.08.22.53.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.77;

1.77
date	2004.05.08.17.06.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.76;

1.76
date	2004.05.08.14.53.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.75;

1.75
date	2004.05.06.22.52.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.74;

1.74
date	2004.05.06.22.52.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.73;

1.73
date	2004.05.06.22.45.57;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.72;

1.72
date	2004.05.06.17.40.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.71;

1.71
date	2004.05.06.15.56.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.70;

1.70
date	2004.05.05.15.20.06;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.69;

1.69
date	2004.05.05.15.15.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.68;

1.68
date	2004.05.04.23.38.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.67;

1.67
date	2004.05.04.23.16.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.66;

1.66
date	2004.05.04.23.15.05;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.65;

1.65
date	2004.05.04.23.05.43;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.64;

1.64
date	2004.05.04.22.31.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.63;

1.63
date	2004.05.04.21.06.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.62;

1.62
date	2004.05.02.23.12.24;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.61;

1.61
date	2004.05.02.18.34.48;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.60;

1.60
date	2004.05.02.03.35.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.59;

1.59
date	2004.05.02.03.27.59;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.58;

1.58
date	2004.05.02.03.23.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.57;

1.57
date	2004.05.02.03.23.14;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.56;

1.56
date	2004.05.01.01.20.23;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.55;

1.55
date	2004.04.28.03.37.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.54;

1.54
date	2004.04.27.21.21.27;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.53;

1.53
date	2004.04.23.20.27.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.52;

1.52
date	2004.04.19.19.48.49;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.51;

1.51
date	2004.04.19.19.47.06;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.50;

1.50
date	2004.04.17.22.22.59;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.49;

1.49
date	2004.04.15.17.12.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.48;

1.48
date	2004.04.15.04.14.22;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.47;

1.47
date	2004.04.15.03.05.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.46;

1.46
date	2004.04.13.17.58.38;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.45;

1.45
date	2004.02.18.04.06.56;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.44;

1.44
date	2004.02.17.16.30.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.43;

1.43
date	2004.02.17.15.50.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.42;

1.42
date	2004.02.17.13.23.08;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.41;

1.41
date	2004.02.17.12.27.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.40;

1.40
date	2004.02.17.06.52.21;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.39;

1.39
date	2004.02.16.21.39.11;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.38;

1.38
date	2004.02.16.10.23.10;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.37;

1.37
date	2004.02.16.09.00.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.36;

1.36
date	2004.02.15.23.13.06;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.35;

1.35
date	2004.02.15.20.49.50;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.34;

1.34
date	2004.02.15.19.57.37;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.33;

1.33
date	2004.02.15.07.17.51;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.32;

1.32
date	2004.02.15.07.16.44;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.31;

1.31
date	2004.02.15.06.31.58;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.30;

1.30
date	2003.12.27.06.42.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.29
date	2003.12.27.04.44.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
next	1.28;

1.28
date	2003.12.24.16.54.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.27
date	2003.12.23.20.51.03;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.26
date	2003.12.04.05.05.15;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.25
date	2003.12.01.04.10.27;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.24
date	2003.11.26.12.48.53;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.23
date	2003.01.18.22.02.34;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.22
date	2003.01.18.09.56.20;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.21
date	2003.01.08.06.17.47;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.20
date	2002.12.15.04.16.45;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.19
date	2002.11.15.06.07.33;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.18
date	2002.09.25.06.06.25;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.17
date	2002.09.04.06.05.34;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.16
date	2002.08.27.06.03.52;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.15
date	2002.08.06.06.02.57;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.14
date	2002.08.01.06.01.09;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.13
date	2002.07.22.05.59.46;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.12
date	2002.07.20.22.24.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.11
date	2002.07.18.21.16.17;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.10
date	2002.07.18.19.47.40;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.9
date	2002.07.18.11.52.54;	author baccala;	state Exp;
branches;
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1.8
date	2002.07.18.09.18.39;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.7
date	2002.07.18.09.13.19;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.6
date	2002.07.05.23.21.49;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.5
date	2002.07.01.11.02.03;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.4
date	2002.06.20.06.19.12;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.3
date	2002.06.19.06.08.29;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.2
date	2002.06.16.06.56.18;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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1.1
date	2002.06.15.19.29.16;	author baccala;	state Exp;
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@*** empty log message ***
@
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@
\thispagestyle{empty}
\vspace*{\fill}
{			 for Bruce, who knows
{		      we learn from failure more
{			  than from success

\vspace*{\fill}


\vfill\eject
\thispagestyle{empty}
\vspace*{\fill}

{{ 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 }}

\vspace*{\fill}
\vfill\eject


	    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.
@


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@
text
@d2521 1
a2521 1
labeled "LIVE - Mars Orbit".
d2551 2
a2552 3
Light engine thrust was being used as a brake.  The rest of the crew
had stayed with the cargo modules; this was just a reconnaissance
flight.
d2569 2
a2570 2
spread outward from the ship into the atmosphere, which responded by
swirling around, building into a cyclone, and buffeting the ship.
d2575 1
a2575 1
The 767 was now in a full-fledged Martian storm, with itself at the
d2578 1
a2578 1
load pop as the rudder tore away from the fuselage and went careening
d2581 1
a2581 1
"What was that?" Vic wondered aloud.
d2583 5
a2587 5
A dozen red alarm lights on the instrument panel answered the most
important part of 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.
d2590 3
a2592 3
like a 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.
d2633 2
a2634 2
I'm genuinely sorry for your loss of your friends, Andrea.
Houston out."
d2695 2
a2696 2
Mercuriou: Mercuriou nodded assent, then announced "I'm getting some
ibuprofin."
d2758 1
a2758 6
you."

Mercuriou: "Look, I guess you can forgive me... I just don't know if I
can forgive myself.  I mean..."

Andrea: "It's over.  It may take you a long time to forgive yourself;
d2781 1
a2781 1
Alister: "Alister, the picnic's starting!"
d2914 1
a2914 1
Andrea: "...and used it to attack a civilian target!"
d3217 1
a3217 1
Kyle Lankier fell into the morning rush heading into building 39 and
d3280 6
a3285 6
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, he
relied on God.
d3385 1
a3385 1
"Does it look like instrumentation?" al-Nass asked , leaning forward
d3413 3
a3415 2
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."
d3421 3
a3423 3
Andrea: "Hold on, we've lost hydraulics!" Andrea announced, reading
from the display next to her.  The orbiter swayed and rolled as it careened
through the air, uncontrolled by man or machine.
d3466 1
a3466 1
Burning, BURNING!!, and then their suits burnt off into ashes which
@


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@
text
@d3489 1
a3489 133
The day after Thanksgiving 2010, I got on a plane to Los Angeles, and
the next day took a plane to Hawaii.  I came here to overthrow the
government.  I came here to find freedom.

I lived for years in my mom's basement studying math.  I won't go
back.  I was just wasting my life away.  I should be in some big R\&D
shop figuring how to make computers speak English, or how to automate
our automobiles, or how to pump oil out of a volcano.  But I won't do
it for capitalists.  I won't hand them my intellectual property
for a paycheck.

After two nights in a Waikiki youth hostel, I sought out the
Benedictine monastery on Mt. Kaala and stayed there for a week.  I met
one of their regular church-goers who had a room to rent in Haleiwa
and that's where I spent the winter.  I bought a surfboard for the
first time in fifteen years -- hell, it was a five minute walk to
Ali'i Beach, the first leg in the Triple Crown!  How could I not get
a board?

There were jobs I'd do.  I applied to teach in the public schools, but
they don't want me because I never finished a college degree.  John
Benedetto tried his utmost to push me into it, and it almost worked.
He arranged for a government contract to actually pay me to do math
and I spent $5,000 on classes that I never attended because I already
knew the material.  Why?  _Why?_ Why would anyone spend a penny on
"tuition" to "learn" what they already know?  This is your school
system.  I'd never accept the degree now if it was offered.  So I
can't teach.  Go to hell.  And you say I wouldn't work.  To hell with
you all.

I went to church.  Not at the monastery; I went to an old
Congregationalist church a block away from my house.  The
second-oldest Christian church on Oahu, Liliuokalani Protestant Church
was founded by New England missionaries and patronized 125 years ago
by the queen whose name it now bears.  When I received the last
paycheck from the contract, I computed a ten percent tithe and split
it equally between the monastery and the church.

I didn't quite finish the novel.  I could have.  Could have worked
harder; I only wrote for three hours a day or so.  Smoked a lot of
weed; was in the ocean almost every day; spent a whole month working a
math problem that I found interesting.  After all, I knew that it
might be the last winter of my life, and it was truly the best!

Haleiwa had a Christmas parade; the highlights (for me) were Santa
driving a convertible and Surfing The Nations.  STN is a Christian
mission manned by young surfers.  They have an office in Wahiawa and
three-story apartment complex behind it.  They have a major drive to
feed the homeless and you see them all over the place helping with
outdoor church services and the like.

Around the end of April my money ran out.  It always does.  I gave my
landlady an extra $1,200 because she asked.  One of Haleiwa's cronic
homeless asked me for money to buy a plate lunch; I gave him ten
dollars.  Someone else asked me for five dollars -- all I had was two
ones and a twenty; I gave him the twenty.  I filled up my roommate's
gas tank; I bought my landlady a washing machine and made no attempt
to deduct it from the rent.  And, of course, I no longer had a paying
job.

I went to church on the first of May and asked around for a place to
stay.  Someone was flying to the mainland for a month; she offered me
her room until she got back.  Once we got there, she then wanted $200
of my last $300 for a room she couldn't possibly rent because it had
all of her stuff in it.  I agreed, and also informed her that I was a
legally registered medical marijuana patient in the state of Hawaii;
she raised no objection.

The next day this story changed.  One of her other tenants was
applying for a job that required a security clearance; I got a door
slammed at me the first time we met and then had my money returned to
me and was put out on the street.  After a few days in a youth hostel,
I was completely broke and turned to the minister.

He drives a car, probably lives in a house, never invited me to
dinner, never offered me a place to stay, and instead pushed me off
onto social services and their homeless shelter with no shower, no
electricity, just a mat and a pillow in a gymnasium and you're back
out on the street at 7:30 in the morning.

The monastery was no better; I asked to stay there and was told that
they "weren't set up for that".  Surfing The Nations turned me down
cold with a bunch of bullshit about how they had an application
procedure and needed references to keep out thieves.  Mind you, I had
applied to a hostel in Honolulu that also needed references --
references that they checked and then accepted me the next day.  Did I
mention that STN's interns pay to go on their mission?

I blew.  I went into the church a week later, walked up to the pulpit
at the end of the service and lambasted them with Amos 3:1-2 at full
volume!  A cynical capitalist bitch trying to squeeze some of my last
money from me and an utterly indifferent minister that does nothing
but talk -- that's their brand of "Christianity".  Did I mention that
they got a half tithe and then some -- every time that collection
plate went around I put in a ten or a twenty.  The money itself isn't
important; the point is that when they asked for my help, they got it,
but once my money ran out and I needed theirs...

I've now realized that their religion is not mine; they're Christians1
and I'm a Christian2.  I didn't understand this, not really; that's
why I got so angry.  For me, "give to all those who beg of you" isn't
an option; it's a commandment, same as "thou shall not steal" and
"thou shall not kill".  I saw a begger on the streets of Honolulu and
he asked for a twenty; I gave it to him.  If I pass a hitchhiker and I
have room in the car, I stop.  There's hardly any choice; it's a
commandment, and Christians2 are persecuted under capitalism as surely
as Christians1 were persecuted under communism.  The rest of you
"can't live that way" because you're enslaved under capitalism.

So I've been living on the street, sleeping on the beach, carrying
bags around everywhere because I had no place to store them, no place
to stay, no place to work, no place to write.  I decided to kill
myself, or at least to throw myself to the ocean and to the Lord,
paddling out on my board and then just paddling and paddling and
paddling.  Did I mention that I'd taken up surfing again?

I'm inspired!  Inspired, I say, inspired!  For the first time since
I've been homeless, I can write!  I'm writing on the beach, now; I
could soldier on.  I have mosquitos flitting all over me; the laptop's
battery will be dead again tomorrow; it's starting to rain, but I
could soldier on.

I won't do it.  I won't work under these conditions.  I will not stand
behind a counter and refuse to feed a man if he can't pay, and I won't
sleep on the beach and write in the Coffee Gallery.  How can I make
this point more forcibly than with my own life?

So, there's only one way you'll get this half-ass, unfinished novel,
and that's the way you're getting it now.  I know where I'll be by
midnight.

This is your sick "freedom".

@


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@
text
@d3513 1
a3513 1
knew the material.  Why?  _Why?_  Why would anyone spend a penny on
d3516 2
a3517 1
can't teach.  Fuck you all.  Don't say I wouldn't work.  Fuck you all.
@


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@d638 1
a638 1
{{	_Everybody_says_this'll_lead_you_to_doom_ }}
d640 1
a640 1
Stereo cranked, the windows reverberated with the beat
d644 1
a644 1
{{	_But_that_don't_help_you_in_the_... }}
d650 4
a653 4
where [THEY LIVE IN OUTRIGGERS] Burns lived with a team of a
half-dozen young programmers.  The house's tile floors and stucco
walls overlooked a sandstone cliff dropping to an expansive beach and
the Pacific Ocean.  Waves crashed against a nearby point, surfboards
d1300 4
a1303 3
roof was solid and the carpets had cut enough of the chill to allow
her at least a few hours of sleep.  Now, just after dawn, she began
the last leg of her journey.
d1311 3
a1313 3
The young couple reacted with disappointment.  The Hele-On was a free
service, but it only ran once or twice a day, and they were waiting
for a 7 AM bus.  Andrea wished them luck and set off.
d1320 6
a1325 6
_This_is_stupid._  I can't function in this society.

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...
a1328 2
_How_long_is_this_road?__How_many_miles?_

d1335 1
a1335 1
the field?"
d1339 3
a1341 5
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.
d2560 2
a2561 2
kilometers high, and he expected the vibration to ease as the rocket
exhaust slowed the vehicle.
d2569 3
a2571 1
[TAKE A LITTLE LONGER BEFORE WE ABORT]
d2573 2
a2574 2
"I'm aborting," he declared as he pushed the throttles forward.  The
entire ship began to shake like a washing machine.
d2577 4
a2580 3
center.  In the cockpit, the two men heard a load pop as the rudder
tore away from the fuselage and went careening away towards the red
planet below.
d2584 4
a2587 7
A half-dozen alarms on the instrument panel answered his question.
The rudder's hydraulic system had lost pressure and its feedback
sensors had gone offline.  Meanwhile, the 767 was engulfed in the
center of a hurricane with no eye.

The spaceplane lost its equilibrium, pitched back and began to yaw,
overwealmed by the aerodynamic forces of the maelstrom.  The left wing
d2601 1
a2601 1
Mercuriou: Mercuriou looked at him closely.  "Is that a cliche?"
d2634 1
a2634 1
And I'm genuinely sorry for your loss of your friends, Andrea.
d2640 1
a2640 1
The Captain was silent.  After a moment, he left.
d2645 11
a2655 12
The Captain stopped participating in staff meetings.  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 sumary 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.
d2676 4
a2679 6
After finishing her coffee, she knocked on Mercuriou's door, entered
without waiting, and closed it behind her.

Mercuriou turned away from the tiny
portal window and confronted his first officer as she read
from a tablet.
d2696 2
a2697 4
Mercuriou nodded assent, then went to the sickbay hatch.  Nobody had
opened it since Vic's death.

Mercuriou: "I'm getting some ibuprofin."
d2699 3
a2701 2
He keyed the lock, opened the hatch and pulled himself through.
Andrea followed behind, then stopped while Mercuriou retrieved his
d2744 1
a2744 1
too cold to launch.  But the managers thought, well, maybe we can let
d2751 3
a2753 3
later, we 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."
d2755 2
a2756 2
Andrea: "They died because you cut corners; because you weren't
perfect.  Your plan wasn't perfect, your ship wasn't perfect, and you
d2758 2
a2759 1
anyway.  And _they_ knew it wasn't perfect, and they still followed you."
d2765 3
a2767 5
heck, you'll _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  How do think we
felt after _Challenger_?  You made a mistake and people died, but now
it's time to go on."

Andrea: "And it's a bit easier now since we've only one place to go."
d2770 1
a2770 2

T + 229 days    suicide must occur
d2776 3
a2778 2
forming them into perfectly round spheres.  Andrea shook her head, but
Mercuriou laughed, a rare occurrence since the accident.
d2780 2
a2781 3
Andrea: "You'd think that after two and a half years in space, you'd
have learned how to open a wine bottle without spilling it
everywhere."
d2785 1
a2785 2
that if you spill wine in space, it's a lot easier to clean up than on
Earth!"
d2795 2
a2796 2
and produced the glasses alongside the bottle, and Andrea had stood on
tradition.
d2800 2
a2801 2
They clinked glasses and laughed again as Mercuriou spilled wine all
over his face as he tried to drink it.  Andrea grabbed a towel.
d2807 1
a2807 1
watched Andrea trying to clean the wine from Mercuriou's face.
d2821 1
a2821 1
_people_ in that plane.  Soon Alister was back at the console.
d2884 1
a2884 1
T + 733 days    pacifism must be encouraged
d2975 1
a2975 1
T + 699 days    communism must be preached
d3221 34
d3294 1
a3294 1
T + 1253 days    the ending must seem predictable
d3348 1
a3348 1
T + 799 days    some dastardly blow must strike America
d3353 1
a3353 1
T + 1220 days    it must be rabidly anti-democracy
d3364 1
a3364 1
T + 1236 days    it must be racist and anti-Semitic
d3369 1
a3369 1
T + 1237 days    some sick "freedom" must win in the end
d3459 3
a3461 3
bay broke from the forebody as _Columbus_ split in two, with only a
strip of aluminum skin connecting her together on the left.  Then
that, too, broke free.
d3485 142
@


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@d638 1
a638 1
{{ _Everybody_says_this'll_lead_you_to_doom_ }}
d644 1
a644 1
{{ _But_that_don't_help_you_in_the_... }}
d845 2
a846 1
T - 112 days    the rich must persecute the poor
d1102 1
a1102 5
T - 100 days    the government must seem oppressive

[ON THE BEACH, WATCHING THE MOON SET]

Mercuriou: "Did you see this?"
d1111 1
a1111 1
prices by the same computer programs.
d1119 1
a1119 1
program," says Abruce Scowl, a consultant with Oso and Toro, "but
d1123 7
a1129 2
Both the SEC and the FDIC, which insures Keystone, have launched
investigations into the incident.
a1134 10
...

Burns: "This could be serious."

Mercuriou: "Oh, it _is_ serious.  There's a countdown clock running on
this launch, just like with NASA's, T minus whatever-the-hell, only we
don't know what time it is.  We might have five minutes warning when
the cops come through that gate.  When that clock goes to zero, we
better be ready to launch."  [IMPROVE]

d1253 1
a1253 1
"You can catch a bus there in front of the space center."
d1267 7
a1273 4
malls, seaside villages, a high school campus and, over every rise and
around every corner, the ocean, the ocean, the ocean.  An intermittent
drizzle began to fall as Kona's rich volcanic soil gave way to the
rolling forested hills of Mauna Loa's southern flank.
d1276 10
a1285 8
leading south to the point.  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 lifeless building for a few hours.
d1299 19
a1317 8
Andrea looked down the lonely road leading off to the south and began
walking.  It had rained off and on throughout the night, but the old
building's roof was still solid and the carpets had cut enough of the
chill to allow her at least a few hours of sleep.  Now, just after
dawn, she began the last leg of her journey.  The two-lane asphalt
road, edged by low stone walls on either side, meandered south though
a forest interspersed with orchards and citrus farms.  After an hour
of walking, fatigue and doubt began to conspire against her.
a1470 2
Andrea broke the silence.

d1491 1
a1491 2
Vic: "Now, wait a minute, Marc," Vic objected, "you're talking about
kidnapping now."
d1592 3
a1594 3
Alister: "Sorry," he began.  "I brought you some breakfast!" he added
as cheerily as he could muster, putting a bottle of water and a
military ration down on the floor next to the door.
d1600 2
a1601 2
Andrea: "Look, I've covered in dirt; I haven't bathed in... two days;
I've slept in my clothes on the floor; I'd like to at least splash
d1618 1
a1618 1
"Damn," she muttered to herself, then climbed down and went to the
d1622 1
a1622 1
againd and grabbing it, she pulled herself up to it and found herself
d1687 1
a1687 3
Mercuriou: "OK, our launch clock is at zero...
Alister: but [FIX]
Mercuriou: ...It doesn't mater!  Let's get to the ship!"
d1693 1
a1693 2
Mercuriou motioned his crew toward the access platform after they
had opened the hanger doors.
d1708 1
a1708 1
kicked him squarely on his shoulders
d1759 3
a1761 2
belching rocket exhaust.  Burns climed to 10,000 feet, then put the
ship on auto-pilot.
d1816 2
a1817 2
insertion.  As they passed fifty miles in height, he nudged forward on
the joystick, the engines pivoted downwards and giant blue ball of the
d1835 1
a1835 2
throwing a briefing folder across the room and sending top secret
papers flying everywhere.
d1863 1
a1863 5
Andrea: "Excuse me?"

Mercuriou: "Yes?"

Andrea: "What are you doing?"
d1870 2
a1871 2
then halted the entire operation to dock with A-1, equalize pressure,
and disappear.
d1878 1
a1878 1
Andrea mumbled a reply into the closing hatch door.
d1898 3
a1900 3
appeared seated, 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.
d1944 1
a1944 1
his interviewer, selecting an obscure small market anchor.
d1946 3
a1948 3
"Captain," the anchor 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?"
d1961 1
a1961 1
Mercuriou: "Venture capital funding - how do you get it?  I'll tell
d1994 3
a1996 6
government and do both."

Mercuriou: "It shows how little opportunity we really have to pursue
our dreams.  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."
d2004 1
a2004 1
thousands.  Ask yourselves, 'if they needed them for a war...'"
d2011 4
a2014 4
compete'.  If some of them go out of business, so what?  Businesses
fail every day.  I'm developing technology to fly to Mars, so the
whole society benefits.  We rip and claw at each other throats, and
that drives civilization forward, right?"
d2016 2
a2017 2
"I think some people would say that we play according to the rules,
and you've broken those rules."
d2053 1
a2053 1
system for those who won't do what they're told."
d2055 1
a2055 1
Mercuriou: "I feel as bad about ripping off capitalists as I would
d2057 4
a2060 3
same.  Just another bunch of men with some nightmare system based on
the most viscious traits of mankind to be jammed down everyone's
throats."
d2062 1
a2062 1
Mercuriou: "Yet there are alternatives!  Not many left on Earth, mind
d2067 1
a2067 1
Out here, though, is an entire solar system waiting to be tamed!"
d2087 1
a2087 1
T + 5 days    America must look like it's run by fools
d2096 1
a2096 1
T + 10 days    sanity must make a perfunctory appearance
d2303 3
a2305 3
The latest news updates from Earth had brought word of a pipeline
explosion in Nigeria that had killed hundreds scavenging gasoline from
an illegally tapped pipeline.
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1674 3
a1676 3
_What_if_they_have_guns?_ _What_if_they_do?_ [IMPROVE WITH
DESCRIPTION] Finally she stopped completely and looked around.
_Where_are_they?_
d1698 2
a1699 2
silently.  _A_private_manned_launch_.  For the first time since she
had agreed to this, she actually wanted to laugh.
d1708 2
a1709 2
Andrea: "Captain Mercuriou!  _Captain_ Mercuriou!"  she hollered as she
clammered in behind him.
d1762 6
a1767 7
Alister keyed a command sequence on his computer.  From underground
silos [camouflaged lauchers] on the mesa below, first one rocket
thundered aloft, then another, and another.

Alister: "Three all-green; four launching!" Alister was calling out as
he read from his computer monitor.  Behind them, Vic and Mercuriou
argued over the lack of a spacesuit for Andrea.
d1781 1
a1781 1
Vic: "We have to abort the mission," Vic flatly stated.
d1783 1
a1783 1
Mercuriou: "We are not aborting this mission!" Mercuriou shouted.
d1785 1
a1785 1
Andrea: "I'm fine," Andrea interjected, "I'll take the chance."
d1793 1
a1793 1
Mercuriou: "Then let her take mine," Mercuriou finally decided.
d1812 8
a1819 17
he climbed above the atmosphere before beginning a true orbital
insertion.  As they passed 100,000 feet, the conventional control
surfaces become unusable due to the rarified atmosphere.  Now Burns
switched from the control yoke to a joystick that swiveled the rocket
engines at his command.  As they passed 500,000 feet, he nudged
forward on the joystick, the engines pivoted downwards and giant blue
ball of the Pacific Ocean swung up below them.

Burns switched his primary display from the almost useless airplane
indicators to an precomputed orbital injection profile based on
continually updated GPS coordinates.  At fifty miles in altitude, they
were now above most of the atmosphere, and the blue line flattened
out.  Burns followed it, firing the engines continuously for nearly
ten minutes, then cutting them off and let the ship coast.  Now well
over two hundred miles in altitude, the ship continued to climb.
Finally, Burns fired the engines again for several minutes to
stabilize their orbit.
d1836 1
a1836 1
off in Wahi-wahi-...whatever-the-hell!"
d1921 1
a1921 1
would it?  It's what people want.  It's just not what _I_ want."
d1925 1
a1925 1
wish to focus on only one - freedom of speech.  Unlike capitalists,
d1942 1
a1942 3
build a new tomorrow!"


@


1.372
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1206 2
a1207 2
limeade on the table and two glasses half consumed, Andrea continued
to read the sheaf of papers in silence.
d1214 1
a1214 2
"None!  We've tested 1033 extensively; it's everything it's cracked up
to be.  That's what doesn't make sense!  They're always having
d1243 8
a1250 7
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 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, the
passenger in window seat 8A stared morosely at an ATM card.
d1267 1
a1267 1
through its windows and set her backpack down to wait for the bus.
d1269 2
a1270 2
to the destitute, and that other passengers would sometimes assist
when drivers were unwilling to.
d1286 3
d1292 4
a1295 4
of the carpets, walked back across the road and sat down to see if
anyone would take pity on her.  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.
d1405 1
a1405 1
then severed the connection without waiting for an answer, took the
d1413 3
a1415 2
Mercuriou: "You're not going anywhere," Mercuriou interrupted her as
he unclipped his seatbelt and turned fully around in his chair.
d1424 14
a1437 16
headed back down the road along which they had come.  Past the stone
walls, past where Andrea had broken down while praying, past the
orchards and farms, they drove on as the forest gave way to broad
meadows framed on three sides by hundred foot cliffs and the Pacific
Ocean.  They passed through an automatic gate, crossed a runway that
streched fully from one side of the point across to the other, and
drove into a complex of hangers and low buildings, all the way in
silence.

They parked, entered a building, and 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
followed the other two, 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.
d1439 1
a1439 2
Vic: "The man who called was named Kyle Lankier.  Apparently this
engineer, Dr. Yeats..."
d1441 2
a1442 2
His voice drifted off as he glanced up at Andrea entering behind the
other two.  An awkward pause ensued.  Mercuriou turned around.
d1490 1
a1490 1
Vic: "No we won't have it later..."
d1501 7
a1507 6
captain perched on a tabletop, and Vic still seated in his chair.
Twenty minutes later, the South African returned to announce that the
room was ready.  Mercuriou escorted the NASA engineer down a hallway
and around a corner to a windowless twenty-by-forty-foot room
populated solely by a rectangular grid of floor-to-ceiling black steel
frames.  Upon entering, Andrea turned back to face Mercuriou.
@


1.371
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1371 3
a1373 1
Mercuriou: "Cpacebo.  Cpacebo.  Dostvidanya."
@


1.370
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1182 1
a1182 1
Burns: "_The_Great_anti-American_..."
d1241 1
a1241 1
T - 1 day    hitchhikers must be crazed and dangerous
d1243 8
a1250 7
[Hilo?  Kona.]

Ten thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, the inter-island jet swept
down Hawaii's leeward coast under the towering gaze of Mauna Kea,
grazed Keahole Point at a hundred feet and touched down at Kona
International Airport.  As the plane taxied and rolled to a halt at
the gate, the passenger in seat 15A stared at an ATM card.
d1259 1
a1259 10
She traveled lite, foregoing a suitcase in favor of a backpack.

Exiting the terminal, a city bus stood in front of her...

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

"Used to be an airstrip down there after the war, but it's been gone
for years.  I don't think there's anything down there!"


d1261 1
a1261 4
Andrea looked down the lonely road leading off to the south.


Is this the address?  Down there?
d1263 44
a1316 1

a1317 1
_They'll_be_closed_by_the_time_I_get_there._
d1319 15
d1335 2
a1336 20
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 a cloudless
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?"

Emotionally exhausted, she fell down on her knees in the middle of the
roadway and cried steadily for several minutes.  It slowly dawned on
her that the situation could be a lot worse.  Sitting cross-legged,
she drank the rest of her water and took stock of her situation.

Her jeans and shirt were ripped from where they had snagged on the
barbed wire, her right side was covered in dirt from when she had
fallen, her hair was matted with dried sweat, and she had slept in her
clothes.

_This_is_stupid_, she thought.  _I_am_NOT_OK_.
_I'm_filthy_and_exhausted_, _and_I_can't_show_up_looking_like_this_.
d1339 1
a1339 2
Andrea plopped down in the middle of the road.  She was so tired.  If
she could just sleep...
d1343 21
a1363 20
Two men were seated in the car, both dressed for the desert 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 her car being stolen and that she was
heading to the police station in 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 Kona.

"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."

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

"Well, then make it yourself!  We can pay for the spacesuits in cash."
d1365 1
a1365 1
"I'll need time to find another buyer."
d1367 1
a1367 1
"You said we could pay in fuel..."
d1369 1
a1369 1
"Just let me handle it.  I know how my own government works."
d1371 1
a1371 1
"Cpacebo.  Cpacebo.  Dostvidanya."
d1377 1
a1377 1
"Yeah, what's up?"
d1379 1
a1379 1
"Well, if he doesn't show, he doesn't show."
d1381 1
a1381 1
"A woman?"
d1387 1
a1387 1
"I'm sorry, ummm, we weren't really introduced..."
d1389 2
a1390 2
"Andrea Yeats," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone.  "I'm with
NASA."
d1399 4
a1402 4
"I'll get back to you," he told Vic in a clipped voice, then 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.
d1404 1
a1404 1
"Turn around," Mercuriou quietly told Alister.
d1406 1
a1406 1
"Look, I'm heading into town, I can just walk back..."
d1408 2
a1409 2
"You're not going anywhere," Mercuriou interrupted her as he unclipped
his seatbelt and turned fully around in his chair.
d1413 3
a1415 2
it slowly dawned on Andrea that, for the second time in two days, she
was being kidnapped.
d1417 17
a1433 1
"Turn around," Mercuriou repeated, "Go back."
d1435 2
a1436 25
Within sight of the Interstate, the South African executed a
three-point turn on the broad roadway and headed back the road along
which they had come.  Past the rocky crag, past where Andrea had
broken down while praying, across a desert mesa, past an automatic
gate that opened for them of its own accord, over a small bridge, up
to a warehouse where they parked, all the way in silence.

The dirt road had turned to asphalt as soon as they crossed the
bridge, and the parking lot was heavily scarred with the tire prints
of heavy vehicles, although the Toyota was one of only three cars
there at the moment.  Andrea followed the other two, partly out of
curiosity, partly because there was simply no place else to go.  This
time, she never thought of running.

They walked into a large room whose walls were lined with whiteboards
hung over cluttered office tables and whose center was a jumble of
cardboard boxes and packing material.  Burns was there, sporting a
baseball-and-marijuana-themed T-shirt captioned "I HIT better than I
PITCH", as was Vic, who looked up from a notepad as they came in.

[ sporting a black T-shirt that read simply "CAPITALISM SUCKS" ]

"The man who called was named Kyle Lankier.  Apparently this engineer,
Dr. Yeats, had a reservation at the Hampton Inns in town, but the
hotel says she never checked in..."
d1441 3
a1443 2
"Doctor Yeats," he began slowly, pausing and measuring his words,
"during the ride here... I was trying to decide... exactly..."
d1445 2
a1446 2
"What you're going to do with me?" she speculatively completed his
sentence.
d1448 1
a1448 1
"Precisely."
d1450 1
a1450 1
"What's going on?  What happened?" Vic asked, the second question
d1462 2
a1463 1
"I believe the colloquial expression is that I 'know too much'."
d1465 2
a1466 2
"Um-hum," Mecuriou responded, nodding in agreement before turning
towards Burns.
d1468 2
a1469 2
"The old server room, can you rig the door so it can't be opened from
the inside without a card key?"
d1473 2
a1474 2
"What are you thinking, Marc?" Vic asked with concern in his voice.
The only reply was a raised palm.
d1476 3
a1478 3
"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..."
d1480 1
a1480 1
"Fine.  Let's do it."
d1482 1
a1482 1
"Now, wait a minute, Marc," Vic objected, "you're talking about
d1485 1
a1485 1
"Vic, we will have this discussion later."
d1487 1
a1487 1
"No we won't have it later..."
d1489 4
a1492 5
"Vic!"  The exchange was becoming heated.  "We will have this
discussion later!  We will have this discussion", he raced on,
"_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."
d1498 6
a1503 6
captain perched on a tabletop, and the doctor in a chair.  Twenty
minutes later, the South African returned to announce that the room
was ready.  Mercuriou escorted the NASA engineer down a hallway and
around a corner to a windowless twenty-by-forty-foot room populated
solely by a rectangular grid of floor-to-ceiling black steel frames.
Upon entering, Andrea turned back to face Mercuriou.
d1505 2
a1506 1
"Isn't this where I get some fancy explanation of what you're up to?"
d1508 2
a1509 2
"No," he answered, then closed the door behind him, insured that
it was locked, and began to walk away.
d1511 2
a1512 1
"Mr. Mercuriou," she called through the wall, "I'm sure we can discuss..."
d1518 1
a1518 1
"Captain Mercuriou, it's _Captain_ Mercuriou!"
@


1.369
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d106 1
a106 1
he muttered without turning around,
d117 1
a117 1
Back in the early 70s, those halcyon
d123 1
a123 1
could alter covertly the programs it compiled.
d129 1
a129 1
and effectively disappearing in the billions of
d136 1
a136 1
green, a bolt clicked back, a line printer rattled.  Above an elevated
d146 1
a146 1
'Red' Widmer specialized in diving into stalled projects and finishing
d163 2
a164 2
Burns: "No, thanks," Burns replied without a hint of deceit in his
voice.  "I gotta get this done."
d168 1
a168 1
seem to get the settings right.  Once set up, he emailed his roommate,
d231 1
a231 1
fly without money, you can't ride without money, no money means no
d282 2
a283 2
curtains, making it impossible to see in or out.  Vic used a key to
take a padlock off the door and led the way in.
d285 1
a285 1
An overwealming smell hit Mercuriou - skunk.  Inside, the trailer had
d292 5
a296 6
adjusted in length as the plants grew upward.  They ran off a timer,
which also periodically turned on a pump that flooded the tubs with
liquid fertilizer from a child's toy pool, that 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.
d302 1
a302 1
"I'll play their money game... I'll get out there and 'hustle', I'll
d309 1
a309 1
"How often do you pray, Marc?"
d311 2
a312 1
Mercuriou guffawed.
d314 2
a315 5
"Right now, my only prayer is that Burns can figure how to get this
thing into orbit... literally!"

"I'll need some time to think about this," Vic concluded after several
minutes.
d318 3
a320 3
shade, watching the driveway Mercuriou's car had disappeared down.
The dust had settled, and nothing disturbed the scene now except the
buzzing of insects. [what kinds of insects?]
d437 5
a441 6
returned to his blanket.  Perhaps later he would indulge himself in
another bath.  Hunger was present, but by now, his third day, it
manifested itself more as fantasy than as any physical need.  Pia
colada.  That's what he wanted - a pia colada, made fresh from
coconuts and pineapples, pureed in a blender with only a flavoring of
rum.
d444 2
a445 1
too long to suppose he was joking, too well to imagine he was insane.
d447 7
a453 7
Or not.  His encounter with Mercuriou 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_.
d456 5
a460 5
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, that's why 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.
d463 1
a463 2

While his best friends became thieves.
d617 1
a617 1
T - 239 days    youth must be corrupted
d637 2
a638 1
_Everybody_says_this'll_lead_you_to_doom_
d643 2
a644 1
_But_that_don't_help_you_in_the_...
d682 1
a682 1
T - 237 days    politicians must lie and steal
d740 1
a740 3
toward the reef break.  His mind flashed back to college, to one of
his most energetic professors scrawling `RHETORIC' across the
blackbord in foot-high block letters.
d743 1
a743 1
workstation Saturday night at 9:43 PM.  It was encrypted of course,
d749 1
a749 1
driven him; Alister was neither a natural thief nor liar.
d769 1
a769 1
rubber, then turned to deal.
d771 2
a772 2
Mercuriou: "OK, you figured that out, but it's a lot bigger than the
California lottery.  This is a _heist_."
d803 1
a803 1
Mercuriou began to pace in front of the window.
d841 2
a842 2
Mercuriou: "I think you're intrigued, Alister!  So look at our launch
facility, and _then_ tell me what you think!"
d1004 1
a1004 1
I just came down to visit Kyle Becker, he has a new project, some
d1163 1
a1163 1
Mercuriou's stare at Vic was cold, but there seemed a strange smile behind it.
d1196 2
a1197 1
Mercuriou: "Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it _Xplorer_One_!"
d1412 1
a1412 1
"The man who called was named Kyle Becker.  Apparently this engineer,
d1467 3
a1469 3
gesticulating with his finger, "_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."
d1495 1
a1495 1
And he was gone.
d1502 1
a1502 1
Mercuriou: "Three days, Vic, that's all we need - three days!  Burns
d1506 1
a1506 1
about holding someone prisoner - an innocent person - for days!
a1530 2
_...deliver_us_from_evil..._

d1551 1
a1551 1
_breath_out, _breath_in_, _breath_out.
d1682 1
a1682 1
Vic: "What's going on?", Vic called from the cabin.
d1702 2
a1703 2
Andrea: "That's great; I've always wanted to go to Mars!  Anyway,
you'll need an experienced astronaut; I've had three weeks on orbit.
d1708 1
a1708 1
Andrea: "..but first, you've got to _get_ into orbit, and that I've
d1713 9
a1721 9
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!"

It felt like the time she picked up Dunstan in the rain, like the time
she wrote 'math class' on the auction form, like the time she decided
to quit NASA.  It just felt _right_.  She nodded her head.
d1725 1
a1725 1
_Xplorer_1_ sped down the runway as police cars swarmed the complex.
d1810 5
a1814 19
turned Air Force One back towards Washington, D.C.  Somehow, amid all
the ballyho, the 767 had been lost completely and effectively
disappeared into high Earth orbit.

Two hours after _Xplorer_1's_ launch, Burns fired the rocket
engine of the first cargo module and put it into a transfer orbit.
NORAD detected the course change and reported it to the Pentagon
within minutes, who immediately passed this information on to an
emergency session of the National Security Council.  By the time the
third cargo module had been put into its transfer orbit, the Air Force
was convinced that the engine burns were lifting the modules into
higher orbits, not deorbiting them for some kind of attack.  They
computed the rendezvous point, aimed their imaging telescopes at it,
and found themselves looking at a 767.

In Washington, the President 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 across the
room and sending top secret papers flying everywhere.
d1834 1
a1834 1
In Houston, Kyle Becker watched the press conference alone and in
d1886 2
a1887 1
the captain of the spaceship _Xplorer_I_.  Most people call me Marc."
d1899 4
a1902 3
Mercuriou: "Furthermore, I have been told repeatedly by people to Love
It or Leave It, and I wish to tell them now that I have decided to Get
The Hell Out."
d1904 1
a1904 1
Mercuriou: "I am declaring tonight the Republic of Mars.  I shall
d1917 7
a1923 2


d1928 2
a1929 2
rejected any one network and instead reserved the right to choose his
interviewer, selecting an obscure small market anchor.
d1936 1
a1936 1
of it, and we needed billions."
a1945 2
% Mercuriou sneered.

d1966 1
a1966 2
Everyone had heard of Keystone.  The news anchor paused for effect and
then continued.
d2020 4
a2023 4
socialist!  I'm an anarchist!  I'm more anti-American than Jane Fonda!
I've 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."
d2028 13
a2040 14
people want.  If that's the case, then why do people blow up federal
buildings, why do people bomb our embassies, why do people 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 millions and millions 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 everyone else's lives and build some big prison
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and he was gone.
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than any other space mission to date.  _Xplorer_1_ will go down along
d2507 1
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a channel full-time to the _Xplorer_1_ video feed, which now featured
d2656 1
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"Apparently some of Nostradomes's quatrains refered to the _Xplorer_1_
d2840 1
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the silent _Xplorer_I_ crew watched the second tower collapse.  In the
d3125 1
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from fundamentalists.  Most of the _Xplorer_1_ crew deleted it along with
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@d229 7
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perfectly doable, that's been demonstrated over and over for almost
fifty years, The problem is money, hell, 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, hell, 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!"
d275 2
a276 1
_Warm_smell_of_colitas,_rising_up_through_the_air_
a298 24
Vic selected one of the mature buds, broke it off by its stem and
passed it to Mercuriou.  It was top-quality marijuana, never packaged
or pressed, covered with tiny white crystals of the psychoreactive
drug tetrahydrocannabinol.  The guest nodded his head in appreciation,
not really sure what to say, then finally mumbled some kind of
complement on his friend's carefully maintained operation.  Vic
selected another, similar bud, popped it in his mouth, and motioned
for his guest to do the same.

"I told you," the doctor wryly noted, "You should quit smoking...
It's bad for your health!"

Mercuriou grinned.

"So you eat it, like brownies?"

"Sure.  But why fool around with brownies?  It's better fresh, just
the way the Great Spirit made it.  I've got some AIDS and cancer
patients I take care of for free, and then there's the guys who pay
that keep this place running."

Mercuriou chewed and swallowed.  The sticky, psychoactive residue that
covered the plant stuck in his teeth.  Vic handed him a glass of water.

d487 2
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_What_else_am_I_going_to_do_?,
_live_in_a_trailer_and_grow_pot_in_the_mountains_?
d669 4
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Yet Alister fancied himself a hacker, and had trained himself to read
keystrokes over people's shoulders.  Burns had carelessly allowed the
young chemist to watch him login to 'genie', and now Alister 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.
d709 1
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twenty-year-old kid who hacks _your_ system!  Now, how's the project
d717 1
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Mercuriou: "And we need another big hack.  Or two."
d725 2
a726 3
Burns: "He's sharp, real sharp.  One of the best we've got, and it
looks like he can hack, too.  I guess the real question is, will he?
For us?"
d728 3
a730 2
Mercuriou raised a finger in the air, an adrenaline rush surging
within him, like he was about to ask a stranger out on a date.
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As soon as Burns was out the door, Mercuriou lept to his feet, erased
the whiteboard then rearranged 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, 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 as his
mind flashed back to college, back to one of his most energetic
professors, scrawling `RHETORIC' across the blackbord in foot-high
block letters.
d751 3
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Alister's face flushed red.  There seemed little point in denying the
obvious, but it was curiosity that had driven Alister; he wasn't a
natural thief or liar.
d761 2
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Mecuriou turned around to face him, almost snickered again, then
covered his mouth with his hand, recovered, and pressed on.
d764 1
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Mercuriou: "And what did you see?"
a783 2
Mercuriou sat back down.

d807 1
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Mercuriou stood up again and began to pace in front of the window.
d838 2
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Mercuriou let his voice trail off, walked to the window, and folded
his hands behind his back.
d841 1
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Mercuriou: "OK, so it all sounds too wild to be true.  Fine."
d845 2
a846 1
Mercuriou: "Look at our launch facility.  Then tell me I'm full of shit."
d859 3
a861 2
Kyle: "Oh, come on, Andrea!  They're publishing the whole sythesis pathway!
And disclaiming all the patent rights!  I thought you'd love it!"
d885 3
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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.  That's what I meant.  I'm
not going back into space again."
d1161 1
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the Pacific Ocean.
d1167 1
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Mercuriou's stare was cold, but there was a strange smile behind it.
d1217 1
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"None.  We've tested 1033 extensively; it's everything it's cracked up
d1225 1
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"And why are they doing all this in Hawaii... why?"
d1248 1
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A few thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, the inter-island jet swept
d1413 2
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hotel says she never checked in, and..."
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@d1176 1
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Burns: "_Technical_Sketch_7_?"
d1197 3
a1199 6
Alister: "_Baccala's_Manifesto_?"

Now they _all_ looked at Alister like he had
just ruined the punchline to a great joke.

Alister: "...or maybe just _Manifesto_?"
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a1778 1
skyward; many thought the nation had gone to war.
d1871 1
a1871 1
the nation, but it was not yet clear if we were under attack.  When
d1881 1
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T + 1 day    long political rants must be interspersed throughout the text
d2360 1
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We want a nation of bastards, and we've got that, too."
d2418 1
a2418 1
like Indians?" Alister asked incredulously.
d2435 3
a2437 4
around this, unless a hundred million people are going to wake up one
day and suddenly decide to change their human nature, to abandon greed
for generosity, force for persuasion, and that's just not going to
happen."
d2695 1
a2695 1
--- something about 'the great bird crippled in the night' --- looks
d2699 1
a2699 1
Earth alive."
d2709 2
a2710 1
portal window and confronted his first officer.
d2779 1
a2779 2
Mercuriou: Mercuriou was shaking his head, "Look, I don't what you're
trying to tell me..."
d2804 1
a2804 1
T + 229 days    terrorism must occur
a2910 4
Within months, all of the old divisions had flared up again.  The
President was gearing up for another war, this one against Iraq, and
foreign opinion again swung against America.

d2934 1
a2934 1
President's behavior, stating that an orderly extradition procedure
d2950 4
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_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  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_!"
d2972 3
a2974 1
_in_it_for_themselves_ because that's what runs democracy."
d3006 1
a3006 1
anything you have to say; you might as well just save it until we get
d3210 1
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hope left for Marc Mercuriou."
d3287 1
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In the next months, Mercuriou cast himself into writing the words that
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@
text
@d169 1
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_How_about_lunch_? _Sounds_fine,_ came the reply.
d173 4
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_Let's_try_Bogart's_.  Back in the apartment, Marc 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
d203 1
a203 1
A silence fell, sharp and sudden, shattered by a single word from the
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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.  Victor Antonov, waiting for a teakettle to
boil, was nearly ten years older, heavy set with a bristling mustache
that often covered a mischevious smile.
d261 1
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because you stole the money?..."
d269 5
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for a convertible, a surf board, and the P.C.H, before Southern
California had turned into a 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.
d648 1
a648 1
it numerically simulated Schroedinger's equation, the crucial formula
d724 1
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Mercuriou: "So he knows we're stealing something; but he doesn't know what,"
d792 1
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Alister: "It's like tomorrow's lottery numbers today."
d800 1
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California lottery, let me assure you.  This is a _heist_."
d816 1
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Alister: "Yeah, right, and I'm Mother Theresa."
d820 1
a820 1
Alister: "What I saw on that computer was no space shuttle."
d860 3
a862 4
a time in a space shuttle, that's for sure.  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!"
d885 1
a885 1
And disclaiming all the patent right!  I thought you'd love it!"
d918 1
a918 1
Kyle: "Well next time take a plane, I'll pay for it; you give me such a
d921 1
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Andrea: "You put your faith in God, Kyle.  And you tie your hair up
d930 2
a931 2
head as his he pulled out five twenty-dollar bills and handed them to
her.  "Just humor me this once and at least take the Greyhound!"
a1066 2
Andrea: "That's fine.  Thanks."

d1077 1
a1077 1
an aspiring writer who wanted to hear everything she could tell me
d1195 1
a1195 1
Mercuriou rolled his eyes... 
d1197 1
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Alister: "_Baccala's_Manifesto_?  or maybe just _Manifesto_?"
d1202 2
d1633 2
a1634 2
_They_aren't_selling_fuel; _they're_hoarding_it.
_They_need_spacesuits,_too._
d1638 1
a1638 3
Alister: "Um, excuse me..."

Vic: "I will not accept this.  I will not."
d1645 2
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Mercuriou: "Vic, if you pick up that phone, I'll... I'll... I'll..."

Alister: "Um..."

Mercuriou: "What!!!?"
d1650 1
a1650 2
Mercuriou marched down the hallway and announced his presence as he
pushed open the bathroom door.
d1672 4
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The door's electronic lock clicked open and Mercuriou dashed in.
Andrea dropped the phone, threw the chair through a window and jumped
out.  Running up the road, she began to calm down as she reached the
runway.  _What_if_they_have_guns?_ _What_if_they_do?_ [IMPROVE WITH
@


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@d951 1
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bus schedules, then climbed on another local headed into one of the
d959 8
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Entering, she found herself in a white tiled dining room populated by
collapable white plastic tables and cushioned metal chairs which 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.
d971 3
a973 3
Francis of Assisi had looked around at the crumbling chapel he knelt
in and set out immediately to do as the vision commanded.  Returning
to his father's shop, he took several rolls of fine cloth (without
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"We don't start serving until eleven," said one of the man unfolding
chairs.
d984 1
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"Oh, well, he's probably in the kitchen, then."
d1046 1
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Andrea:  "No way, not a chance, I've made my last shuttle landing."
d1052 1
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Bible: "When I was hungry, you fed me."
d1077 1
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gave her a lift anyway.  He was going right through Iowa.
d1079 5
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They talked through the afternoon as the miles fell away.  He was an
aspiring writer who wanted to hear everything she could tell me about
NASA.  He had also been busted for computer crime, was wearing a
monitoring bracelet on his ankle, and had now returned to his former
profession.  As dinner time approached, Andrea explained a bit more
about her religious order.
d1086 2
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because I gave all my money away.  I can fast.  Seriously."
d1091 1
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Darryl bought dinner at a diner in Oklahoma, during which Andrea
d1117 2
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...and then they talked on about that.  They drove into the night.
Darryl began squawking into his C.B. radio as they approached the
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twenty miles from her mom's farm.  She was able to help him navigate
the back roads leading there, called her mom to come meet her, and was
home in bed by three o'clock in the morning.
d1212 3
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Vic: "Perhaps something shorter would be better.  Perhaps _The_Great_Hawaiian_..."
d1231 1
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T - 7 days    friendship must be repaid
d1241 3
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comes out of the man's mouth now.  I just can't figure out his angle."
d1245 3
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"There's no question that this stuff works."
d1249 3
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"None.  We've tested ten-thirty-three extensively; it's everything
it's cracked up to be.  That's what doesn't make sense!  They're
always having production problems; they need more time."

"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."

[ Kyle nodded.  He knew this as well, but only because he had first
[ calculated the quantity of nitric acid required to produce a kilogram
[ of nitroglycerine, looked up the energy released by a kilogram of
[ nitroglycerine and compared that to the energy consumed by a shuttle
[ launch.
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Andrea pushed the papers away.

"Sounds like you need a detective, Kyle."
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Andrea laughed anxiously.
d1262 2
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"What are you getting me roped into?"
d1265 1
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He looked deflated.  Andrea sighed deeply.
[ _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_...  especially your best friend!
d1267 2
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"All right," she visibly collapsed. "I'll go."

"Great!  Listen, I've got everything set up; their main facility is at
d1282 1
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_What_am_I_supposed_to_do_with_this_thing?_
d1284 1
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about it." (Kyle) _...in_no_manner_are_they_to_receive_coins_or_money_
d1286 2
a1287 2
She threw it in the trash almost as soon as she got off the plane.
_It_has_to_be_done_The_Royal_Way_.
d1356 3
a1358 3
waved him quiet, as he was obviously having problems hearing the
phone conversation over the engine noise, and Andrea lapsed into
silence as they continued towards the Interstate.
d1361 4
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of it.  You can come see for yourself.  We just have to get the export
paperwork taken care of.  It's a delay, that's all," the passenger
told his listener, then fell silent for a moment.
d1366 1
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Andrea now began to listen intently to the half of the conversation
she could hear.
d1368 1
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"Of course it works!  You have the samples don't you?"
d1370 1
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"Well, then make it yourself!  We can pay for the spacesuits in cash,
you know."
d1378 1
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was making another call.
d1674 1
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Kyle: "What's the payload?"
d1687 1
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police squad cars peeling off to the south in response to the
d1707 1
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had agreed to work again, she actually wanted to laugh.
d1728 1
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Andrea: "Do you want the hatch closed now?  Is that your next order... sir?"

[ All eyes turned to Mercuriou.
d1741 1
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You've got suits; I hope you've got motion sickness pills..."
d1745 1
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Andrea: "But first, you've got to _get_ into orbit, and that I've
d1867 2
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"What the hell do I have you guys for if I've got to find out from CNN
when 170 missiles get fired off in Wahi-wahi-...whatever-the-hell?"
d2301 4
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He tucked, grabbed a handlebar as he flew into another module, and
spun around into a pullup that he released with just enough backward
momentum to keep him from floating free.  Droplets of sweat from his
forehead kept going, spraying out over the rest of the module.
d2331 2
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Mercuriou: "What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated in
with Burns.
d2352 7
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Andrea: "Speaking of competition, how did you get to be captain?  Why
not Burns?"
d2360 106
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Burns, furthest from the door and enveloped in a haze of marijuana
smoke began to guffaw loudly.  He was wearing one of his favorite
T-shirts, solid black except for a single word across the front, in
neon-green [BETTER COLOR] letters formed from a series of wide
horizontal lines, like you might see on a TV screen: MUTE.

Burns: "Because most bosses just want to suck as much work out of you
as they can.  Marc asks me what I need from him, and tells me what he
needs from me.  As big as this thing is, it's a lot easier than most
of my jobs when I didn't get what I wanted or needed.  Who wants to
write another stupid routing protocol, anyway?  I just don't give a
shit anymore what 'the customer' wants!"

Vic: "What are you, a reporter now?  You trying to draw everybody's
life story out of them like this is some kind of drama?"

Andrea: "I'm no reporter, but I usually have the opportunity to get to
know a crew before we're blasted into space together.  Take you;
sounds to me like until this gig came along, you were just siting up
in the hills growing pot."

Vic: "Well, I'm pretty good at growing pot, and the best part is I
don't have to deal with HMO's!"

Andrea: "And you!  What's Mars?  the biggest platform you could think
of to broadcast your ideas?"

[TRANSITION.  GET RID OF ROME]

Mercuriou: "William Gibson 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."

Andrea: "Well, I'm sure the incompetence of their emperors, none of
whom had any intention of turning the other cheek, had a lot to do
with that.  Yet Christianity isn't a religion of the here and now.
It's a religion of the future, not only of a life beyond death but
also of a world beyond this one."
d2936 10
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"Maybe you shouldn't go on TV right now."
d2949 27
a2975 50
President's behavior, stating publicly that an orderly extradition
procedure should be followed rather than an invasion.
[ His first
[ officer had further rankled feathers by suggesting that Islam was a
[ religion of war and that the Middle East needed to accept Christ, not
[ democracy.

"Maybe it's not the best time."

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

"I just think maybe you should wait a little while longer."

Mercuriou stopped himself and thought about this carefully.

"Look, 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!"

"No.  You said it yourself, Andrea.  The Word.  It has to be heard.
Turn on the camera, Alister.  Turn it on."

All of his opponents were on the program, arranged on the TV screen in
a montage of boxed heads.  In one corner, Ecks was speechless, unable
to decide if Mercuriou was defending the terrorists or attacking the
capitalists.  Across from him, Wye, red-faced with rage, sputtered
nonsense.  Only Zee remained stony and impassive, and it was he who
answered the space captain now.

"Took advantage of freedom!?"  Mercuriou practically spit the words
out.  "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 listening to this program would love to learn
to fly but _it's_too_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  They
took advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one thing that will make
people say 'yes' in a society that says 'no', 'No', 'NO' - money!
They took advantage of the fact that Osama bin Laden is a
_multimillionare_!"

"Yes, captain, they took advantage of capitalism, they took advantage
of democracy, they took advantage of freedom.  They came here, lived
in this country, supped the abundent fruits of our liberty, then
turned on her like a cur lashing out at the hand that feeds her. [CA]
They took our freedom and used it to murder three thousand people!"

"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,
too.  I mean, who really is responsible?  Isn't it the people,
themselves?  Isn't that what they keep screaming, that it's the people
d2977 44
a3020 42
it's _the_people_ who run democracy, shouldn't we hold _the_people_
responsible?  And isn't that who was in the World Trade Center?"

A new voice joined the debate.

"Certainly not all of them.  The attack was completely
indiscriminate."

"Completely indiscriminate!  Completely indiscriminate!  The attack
was directly focused on the biggest symbol of capitalism on this
planet!  I mean, those people in there were _the_true_beleivers_!
They were the _capitalists_!"

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

"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 twin
towers represented the majority of the people of the United States.  I
mean, this kind of crap!" he gestured to the television monitor.  "All
we keep hearing about is this is what the majority wants, this is the
voice of the majority, the majority, the majority, like they're the
only ones that count!  Well, _the_majority_ of the people in those
towers was _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."

"It doesn't make a difference."

"It doesn't make a difference!?!  And on God's earth, why, woman, why?"

Earth-bound television viewers were witnessing a bizarre display.
Ecks, Wye and Zee had fallen silent, while Merceriou carried on an
animated discussion with the unseen Andrea Yeats.  Only her voice
could be heard from off screen.

"Because you _forgive_your_enemies_, as I've only tried to tell you
about a thousand times [CA]," Andrea was becoming irate.  "You don't
smash airplanes into their skyscrapers because they imposed some
global capitalist system on you, you don't steal a billion dollars to
get what you want, and you don't go off invading foreign countries
because they don't turn terrorist leaders over to you when you bark
out your dictats."
a3021 67
"Maybe they're just incompetent," Alister interjected.

"Incompotent?" Mercuriou answered.  Yeats, too, raised a puzzled eye.

"No, really, maybe people just don't know the difference between right
and wrong.  Maybe they can't choose good leaders because they don't
know how."

Mercuriou said nothing, but the expression that ran across his face
told him to be in accord with the young man's words.  Andrea broke
the silence.

"It's very hard to tell the difference between right and wrong,
Alister.  That's why Christianity is so important.  It gives us just
about the only guideposts we've got to find that difference and make
those decisions."

Zee: The people of this country, the majority - the _moral_ majority -
they can tell the difference!

Andrea: Remember, governor, the path to salvation is narrow...

Wye: You're a tyrant, Yates, a tyrant!  You're a self-righteous
hypocrite who thinks you and you alone are moral enough to dictate to
the rest of us!

Andrea: Senator, I'm not moral enough at all.  None of us, myself
included, should dictate to anyone.  We all have to look to God to
find these answers.  I'm just pointing out that Christ seemed to take
a dim view of most people's ability to do that.


Mercuriou was silent for a moment.

"There's a lot of young men dying in that country right now because
they're going to do what they've been told all their life, that their
country is under attack, and it's their duty to defend it, and
everything our boys have been told and believe!  And this guy, this
president, he doesn't declare war, he doesn't attempt some extridition
process, he doesn't try to get a security council resolution, he just
declares, 'if you're not with us, you're against us', and just barks
out this order to hand over bin Laden!  I mean, the same stupid thing
that started World War I!  And where was all the screaming then, that
Austria had been attacked by _terrorists_, _TERRORISTS_ I tell you,
and their allies - Russia, France, English, and THE UNITED STATES were
supporting _TERRORISM_!!!"

"My God!" he exclaimed.  "Can they really not figure it out?!  Can
they really not see that capitalism is one of the most depraved
/ utterly immoral
philosphies that has even been proposed for men to live?!  Can they
really believe all their own propaganda and think this thing is some
kind of utopia?  I mean, which is worse: fascism, based on just
conquering your neighbors; communism, based on overthrowing your
government in some revolution; or capitalism, based on just doing for
yourself and letting some _invisible_hand_ take care of the rest?"



"Yeah, like me trying to fly this spaceship.  Incompetent."

The crew broke out in laughter as his self-defacing humor.  Encouraged,
he went on.

----

----
d3256 4
a3259 4
The two astronauts floated in silence for several minutes.  Finally,
slowly, Mercuriou nodded his head in assent.  Awkwardly, he clasped
his arms around a hand strap, kneeled against the bulkhead, and was
silent.
d3263 2
a3264 2
Mercuriou: "No," came the immediate answer.  He sighed, bowed his
head, paused again.  Finally, in a low voice, he spoke.
d3310 1
a3310 1
"Five."
d3312 1
a3312 1
"Four."
d3314 1
a3314 1
"Three."
d3316 1
a3316 1
"Two."
d3318 1
a3318 1
"One."
d3331 1
a3331 1
"Orbital interface in five, four, three, two, one, Earth orbit."
d3341 1
a3341 1
"ECO in five; four; three; two; one; Engine Cutoff."
d3348 2
a3349 2
Alister: "Perfect burn," Alister declared, as he broke out into a wide
grin and let out a whoop.  "I almost expected a disaster!"
d3351 2
a3352 2
Andrea: "Sometimes you make it back alive, Alister!" Andrea declared
as she unbuckled.  "I've done it twice already!"
d3354 1
a3354 2
Alister: "There's South Africa!" the young man whooped, pointing out
the window.  "There's South Africa!"
d3486 1
a3486 3
blew away with the flames.

_Columbus_ was gone.
d3488 3
a3490 2
In a azure haze, they hung above Texas, below space, and above space
blazed a stupendous light.
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d203 1
a203 1
A silence fell, sharp and sudden, punctuated by a single word from the
d868 1
a868 1
"OK, so it all sounds too wild to be true.  Fine."
d872 1
a872 1
"Look at our launch facility.  Then tell me I'm full of shit."
d1959 3
a1961 3
Mercuriou: "I have been told repeatedly by people to Love It or Leave
It, and I wish to tell them now that I have decided to Get The Hell
Out."
d2090 1
a2090 1
they're make 'through a democractic process'.  People obey the rules
d2129 1
a2129 1
And he was gone.
d2286 2
a2287 2

weeks.  After assembling the rest of the cargo modules into a long
d2289 3
a2291 3
into interplanetary orbit.  Meanwhile, they passed from Breaking News
to Established Fact, and vanished just as quickly from the media
radar.
d2649 2
a2650 2
death will be by ice, and, oh yeah --- none of you will ever make it
back to Earth alive."
d2662 4
a2665 6
Andrea: "We've got OMS-27 coming up.  OMS-27 is 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, and is 3 hours, 17 minutes and 13
seconds in duration."

Expressionless, Mercuriou stared at her.
d2683 2
a2684 1
Andrea followed behind, then stopped.
d2698 3
a2700 3
shoved a third back into the container.  Then he floated still and
was silent for a while.  Encompassing sickbay with a wave of his arm,
he answered.
d2709 2
a2710 2
thing, this mission, I might as well have reached out and killed them
myself.  I... I just don't...  I should never have done all of this."
d2719 3
a2721 4
Andrea: "Look, let me tell you something I've never really told
anyone.  I've been on two space shuttle launches, and watched a dozen
more from Mission Control.  And every time, I mean _every_time_ they
say 'Go at throttle up'..."
d2738 1
a2738 1
Andrea: "So they died because you cut corners; because you weren't
d2741 1
a2741 3
anyway.  And they knew it wasn't perfect, and they still followed you.
And we both know _you_'re not perfect... but you're here for a reason,
Marc."
a3404 53
"Andrea!" Brown called in a low voice.  "I need to talk to you."

Andrea: "What's wrong, David?"  He was clearly agitated.

"This mission is dangerous.  _Real_ dangerous.  Do yourselves a favor
and get back on your OTV while you still can."

Andrea: "Why?" Andrea wanted to know.  Brown lowered his voice further.

"I had a dream.  More than one.  All the same.  Burning up in space."

He paused while she considered this.

"It was real.  I know it was."

Andrea nodded slowly and signaled for Mercuriou and Alister.  Once
they were together she told them,

Andrea: "David has very good reason to be concerned about the safety of our
re-entry."

Mercuriou: "What reason?" Mercuriou wanted to know.  He shook his
head, 'you'd think I'm crazy', but Andrea encouraged him to speak up.

"I've had dreams, premonitions, about the fate of this mission.
We will die on re-entry.  We will burn up in space."

Mercuriou: Now Mercuriou paused.  "I have a good - had a good friend
of mine who would take you completely seriously.  More than one,
actually.  I don't think you're crazy.  Do you think the ship's been
sabotaged?"

"I don't know.  Get back on your OTV.  Get out of here."

Mercuriou: Mercuriou laughed. "and go home how?  The Russians?  I'd
just sit up here forever... No, I'm going home."

Alister: "Me too," Alister piped up.

Andrea: Andrea looked at them both and nodded.  "Yes, I also want to
go home now.  I'll take my chances with _Columbus_," she told Brown.

He looked at the other two and, more slowly, nodded.

Mercuriou: "Thank you for warning us."

...

"You'll be fine back here.  It's got its own air conditioning
system and it always works fine all the way down."

...

d3421 1
a3421 1
between the other two.  "What?  What?"
d3428 1
a3428 1
"Nope," McGee answered after pushing buttons for a moment.  "It's
d3434 1
a3434 2
Heavy with the interference of reentry [what's it called?], the radio
crackled to life.
d3443 1
a3443 1
"How long's that been on?" he asked 'Slick'.  "What?"  "That!"
d3479 3
a3481 4
The orbiter was now swaying wildly and, once every few seconds,
exposed the top of the fuselage to the direct heat of re-entry as it
swung back around.  They heard a loud crash and felt something break
loose from the tail.
d3493 1
a3493 1
bay broke from the forebody as _Columbia_ split in two, with only a
@


1.363
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d3577 2
a3578 17
Mercuriou: "This is not the end.  This is the Great Conversation."


% Bible: "Bible"

% Burns: "Burns"

% Mercuriou: "Mercuriou"

% Vic: "Vic"

% Alister: "Alister"

% Andrea: "Andrea"



@


1.362
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a757 2
RHETORIC IS A PERFORMANCE ART.

d767 1
a767 1
professors, scrawling "RHETORIC" across the blackbord in foot-high
d802 1
a802 3
"PAUSE FOR EFFECT," said the blackboard.

"You're robbing a bank?"
d804 3
a806 3
"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."
d808 1
a808 1
Mercuriou sat back down.  PAUSE FOR UNDERSTANDING.
d810 1
a810 1
"So, you're going... into space?"
d812 1
a812 1
"Mars."
d816 1
a816 3
"Yeah, right, and I'm Mother Theresa."

"This is no joke."
d818 1
a818 1
"What I saw on that computer was no space shuttle."
d820 1
a820 1
BE READY TO SELL.
a867 2
MAKE IT SEEM LIKELY!

d877 1
a877 1
"So what'd you think?"
d881 1
a881 1
the roadway advised, "NASA Road 1 - 5 minutes".
d883 1
a883 1
"When I heard the learn'd astronomer..."
d885 1
a885 1
"Oh, come on, Andrea!  They're publishing the whole sythesis pathway!
d892 5
a896 5
"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."
d898 1
a898 1
"Well, 1033's no con, Andrea!  TenTech's ramping up to full
d904 1
a904 1
"Kyle, we've got airplanes flying between all of our major cities
d908 1
a908 1
"Well, I thought you'd be excited about this."
d910 1
a910 1
"I didn't mean it like that.  I mean, if you want to do it...  I just
d914 1
a914 1
"OK, well... OK."
d916 1
a916 1
"Thanks for inviting me down, though; it's been too long since we've
d919 1
a919 1
"Well next time take a plane, I'll pay for it; you give me such a
d922 2
a923 2
"You put your faith in God, Kyle.  And you tie your hair up under a
cap and and lose the miniskirt!"
d925 1
a925 1
"A space suit, yes; a mini-skirt, never!"
d930 9
a938 9
"Sweatheart, you sure you don't want a plane?"  She shook her head as
his he pulled out five twenty-dollar bills and handed them to her.
"Just humor me this once and at least take the Greyhound!"

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

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.
d952 6
a957 6
older sections of town, exiting [IMPROVE VERB] at a hundred-year-old
Catholic church that occupied almost 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, bearing a
colorful sign that read, "The Franciscan Fryer".
d960 7
a966 7
collapable white tables and cushioned metal chairs which two 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.
d968 1
a968 1
"Now go hence, Francis, and build up my house, for it is nearly
d972 7
a978 7
in and set out immediately to do as the vision commanded.  He [HAD]
returned to his father's cloth shop, 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 a reluctant priest.  Andrea had always felt
that it was a typical message from God: simple, powerful, and very
easy to misunderstand.
d980 1
a980 1
"We don't start serving until eleven," said the black man unfolding
d983 1
a983 1
"I'm looking for Brother Dunstan."
d995 1
a995 1
"Hello, Dunstan!"
d999 1
a999 1
"Thanks, hey this place looks great!"
d1006 1
a1006 1
"That was the place on Travis Street?"
d1033 3
a1035 3
"No, thanks, I'm heading back to my mom's place in Iowa today.  I just
came down to visit Kyle Becker, he has a new project, some people have
developed a new rocket fuel."
d1040 1
a1040 1
"Yes, it seems to be.  I know Kyle's quite excited about it."
d1047 1
a1047 1
"No way, not a chance, I've made my last shuttle landing."
d1052 1
a1062 2
[INSERT HER HITCH HIKING EXPERIENCE]

d1069 1
a1069 1
"That's fine.  Thanks."
d1087 2
a1088 2
"I appreciate the ride, and don't expect you to feed me just because I
gave all my money away.  I can fast.  Seriously."
d1092 3
a1094 3
Darryl bought dinner at a diner in Oklahoma, [IMPROVE] during which
Andrea showed him a small plywood replica she kept of the San Daimano
cross and told him the story of St. Francis.
d1098 3
a1100 3
"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."
d1104 2
a1105 2
"Well, when he was rebuilding the church, he actually sang in the
marketplace and then asked his audience to donate stones.  The old
d1111 1
a1111 1
"So you should go around the dining room with a bowl!?"
d1113 3
a1115 3
"Yes, 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
d1118 3
a1120 2
They drove into the night.  Darryl began squawking into his C.B.
radio as they approached the Nebraska line.
d1154 3
a1156 3
program," says Abruce Scowl [Oscar Cluweb], a consultant with Bull,
Bull and Bear, "but rather that there weren't sufficient controls and
safeguards in place to prevent a disastrous loss."
d1197 1
a1197 1
Alister: "_Manifesto_of_the_Secessionist_Party_?"
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d760 11
a770 10
As soon as Burns was out the door, Mercuriou lept to his feet, erasing
the whiteboard then rearranging 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 suite's plate glass windows.  Vic directed Alister to
sit, 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 as his mind
flashed back to college, back to one of his most energetic professors,
scrawling "RHETORIC" across the blackbord in foot-high block letters.
d787 2
a788 2
Mecuriou almost snickered again, then covered his mouth with his hand,
recovered, and pressed on.
d797 3
a799 3
deep calm overcame him.  He felt like an ace closer walking to the
mound in the bottom of the ninth, dug in on the rubber, and turned to
pitch.  [COULD BE MORE POETIC]
d848 3
a850 2
The only innovation our leaders want is innovation that they can
control!"
d862 8
a869 7
Mercuriou: "Six billion people on this people!  How many of them make
a difference, really?  How many of them change the world?  If the
human race is going into space, it won't happen seven colonels at a
time in a space shuttle, that's for sure.  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!"
a873 2
[FINISH THIS]

d876 1
a876 2
"OK," he concluded in a low voice, "so it all sounds too wild to be
true.  Fine."
@


1.360
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d65 1
a65 1
partitioned by a hundred cubicles -
d98 1
a98 1
remind ``her'' programmers the obvious.
a99 1
_Top_of_the_morning,_Burns_, or
d101 1
a101 1
_Got_a_cable_loose,_there,_Burns_, or
d106 1
a106 1
he muttered back without turning around,
d120 1
a120 1
inventor of the UNIX system, demonstrated that a compiler,
d122 1
a122 1
the bits and bytes that actually run the machine,
d146 1
a146 1
'Red' Rimdew specialized in diving into stalled projects and finishing
d180 2
a181 2
He race-walked [DUP] across the room as the door closed.  It was one
of the scenarios he had drilled for.  He connected two cables, hit a
d2724 2
d2739 3
d3279 1
a3279 1
Mercuriou stared at her in silence.
d3281 1
a3281 1
Andrea: "To obtain that forgiveness, we need only ask God in prayer."
d3285 1
a3285 1
Andrea: "If the prayer is sincere and persistent, yes."
d3297 1
a3297 1
Mercuriou: "Dear God, forgive me my sins."
@


1.359
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d2763 1
a2763 1
T + 229 days    terrorism must be involved
@


1.358
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d2730 3
a2732 2
say 'Go at throttle up'..."  Her voice drifted off and she choked back
tears."
@


1.357
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d2194 1
a2194 1
A-core, had not specifically excluded Vic, they had grown used to his
d2581 3
a2583 2
controls, and a calm peace enveloped his soul as he exploded into
light.
d2587 1
a2587 1
"Death! Death!  Let me taste death!" the mad child gleefully cried.
d2600 1
a2600 1
T + 651 days    the "good guys" must seem heroic
d2620 3
a2622 8
"We 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 don't think the crash was survivable, so I really have to advise
against your resupply plan.  I know you want to do it, but you
might need those supplies to get home."

"And I'm genuinely sorry for your loss of your friends, Andrea.
d2628 1
a2628 37
The Captain was silent.  After a moment, he left for his cabin





"The rescue module?" Andrea asked Alister.  A cargo module had been
attached to a fuel module and an engine, then docked to A-core.

"It's got everything on our primary checklist, and a couple of things
from our secondary, too."

"Let's see."

She knew everything on both lists, having composed them herself, and
skipped the primary checklist, since Alister said that it was loaded.
That meant they had oxygen, water, first aid equipment, radio
equipment, rescue balls, both large - a good-sized, circular tent when
inflated, and small - two men in spacesuits could just fit into one,
and a small quanity of the remaining military rations.  It was the
secondary checklist she was more concerned with, and not all of it,
but only the part that contained things more valuable, irreplacible.
They had begun to form in her mind a third checklist even.  None of
them were packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Xplorer_1_
would then be left with only two.

"Remove the spacesuits from the rescue module, then launch it."

The rescue module was launched under computer control.  Its engine
fired a de-orbit burn and it began dropping into the Martian
atmosphere.  Twenty kilometers up the engine re-ignited to brake its
decent.  Another, smaller maelstrom quickly developed around it.
Radio contact was lost, it disintegrated in the storm, and another
cloud of debris rained down to the red planet's soil.


T + 652 days    suicide must be contemplated
a2629 1
There was another staff meeting.  The Captain was not there.
d2631 1
a2631 4
"We can't assemble the cargo modules without the 767," Alister interjected.
"At least, we can't yet.  I need to run some simulations.  We've got
the cargo modules from the asteroid belt that we rigged to push things
around, but I've got to figure how to get them lined up in a row."
d2633 6
a2638 31
"How do we do that?" Andrea asked.

"I don't know."

The room fell silent.

"I guess I've got to think about it for a while."

"Well, we've got NASA monitoring all of this.  Kyle," she asked the
video camera, "could you give us some help putting the cargo modules
together?  We'll send you copies of the simulation software, and I
think you've already got the manifests."

"We've also got to have some kind of memorial service."

Turning back to Alister, she tried reassure him.  "Don't worry, we've
got a lot of people back home who will help us, and I've got more
hours of spaceflight logged than anyone else here."

Alister furrowed his eyebrows.  It was the first time he had thought
about it, but Dr. Andrea Yeats would for many years hold the record
for most lifetime hours of spaceflight.


The Captain stopped participating in staff meetings.  He respected
Andrea's 'suicide watch' by remaining in the room, but Alister and the
women from NASA 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.
d2654 10
a2663 10
"Apparently some of Nostradomes's quatrains refered to the
_Xplorer_1_ - something about "the great bird crippled in the
night" - 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 caused
by fire, the last death will be caused by ice, and, oh yeah - none of
you will ever make it back to Earth alive."

"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!"
d2668 7
a2674 1
"I'm placing you under a suicide watch."
d2676 3
a2678 1
"You're doing what?"
a2679 1
Mercuriou turned away from the window and confronted his first officer.
d2683 17
a2699 8
"You heard me."

The Captain emitted a "Humph", "So what's this suicide watch supposed
to be?  You've got a police guard in mind?"

"Me.  I'm the police guard.  I'm not leaving you out of my sight."

Merceriou took this in slowly.
d2701 1
a2701 1
"OK," he shrugged at last and turned back to the window.
d2703 1
a2703 1
"I've been trying to think of some kind of memorial service for Burns."
d2705 1
a2705 36
After a pause, he nodded.

"I've thought of sending something down to Mars, like burning up a capsule
in the atmosphere, but I don't know if we want to use the fuel."

"Why not?"  Mercuriou said.  "We've got plenty of it."

"Yes, we do." Andrea replied.



Alister begins maneuvering the cargo modules.  He can get them home,
but the trip's going to take a lot longer than anyone had planned on.

Without the 767,  all they could do was line up all the modules
in more or a less a row, with one rocket engine in the very rear,
and spend days under light thrust to make a burn.


T + 690 days

Mercuriou paused at the sickbay hatch.  Nobody had opened it since
Vic's death.  He keyed the lock, opened the hatch and pulled himself
through.  Yeats followed behind as the captain began looking for the
ibuprofin tablets.

"So what are you thinking?" she said after a moment.

He answered with a snort as he retrieved the bottle.  "You don't want
to know what I'm thinking."

"Yes, I do."

He looked up at her.  "This part of your suicide watch?"

"No, I really want to know what you're thinking."
d2708 1
a2708 1
shoved the rest back into the container.  Then he floated still and
d2712 45
a2756 78
"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."

"We all knew it was dangerous..." she started to answer.

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

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

"Look, let me tell you something I've never really told anyone.  I've
been on two space shuttle launches, and watched a dozen more from
Mission Control.  And every time, I mean _every_time_ they say 'Go at
throttle up'..."  Her voice drifted off and she choked back tears.

"You know why Challenger blew up?  The engineers knew it was too cold
to launch.  But the managers thought, well, maybe we can let it slid a
bit this time, it's always worked before, no big deal."

"Everyone cuts corners," she continued.  "People cut corners driving
their cars - 'oh, I'm not that tired, I'll be OK to drive' - people
cut corners at work - 'it'll be OK, we need to get it out by the
deadline' - people cut corners at home - 'Johny'll have another ball
game next week, I'll make that one'.  People cut corners all the time
- it's a fact of life," she emphasized as he shook his head and pulled
away.

"Not when people's lives are at stake," he answered.

"So you're a perfectionist," she stated in a matter-of-fact tone.

"You're damn right I'm a perfectionist," he shot back.

"And they died because you weren't perfect.  Your plan wasn't perfect,
your ship wasn't perfect, and you weren't perfect."  He looked her
right in the eye.  "But _I_ knew your plan wasn't perfect, and I came
anyway.  And they knew it wasn't perfect, and they still followed
you."  Now he looked down and away.  "And we both know _you_'re not
perfect... but you're here for a reason, Marc.  Just remember that."

"Look, I guess you can forgive me... I just don't know if I can forgive
myself.  I mean..." his voice drifted off.

"It's over.  It may take you a long time to forgive yourself; heck,
you'll _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  How do think we felt
after _Challenger_?  You made a mistake and people died, but now it's
time to go on."

"And it's a bit easier since we've only one place to go."


T + 695 days

"OK, we've got OMS-17 now," Alister announced.  He, along with the
Andrea and Mercuriou, were suited up and strapped in.  Alister was
operating the computer that controlled the big-screen display.  The
others had their own computers, and Andrea was glancing back and forth
between the big screen and the checklist on own.  Mercuriou was
watching Alister on the display as he checked the computer settings.

"OMS-17 is a 37.42 mega-newton burn at 374 by 1 solar at 13:42 on T +
695.  Today _is_ T + 695.  Current time is 13:37 Universal.  Ship's
inertial attitute is 371 by 3 solar, but that... will rotate into 374
by 1 solar, check.  Ship's solar attitude is also 371 by 3 solar.
OMS-17 has a tappered entry and step cut-off, check.  It is 17 minutes
and 13 seconds in duration, check.  And it will put us on a course
back to Earth..."

He looked back at Mercuriou, who nodded.  As they waited for the
engines to fire, Mercuriou gazed out the window at Mars.

"'He was never to return to the city of his triumphs and defeats',"
he muttered aloud.

"What's that?" Andrea asked.
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"Oh, nothing, just something from a book I read."  He motioned to the
sands of the red planet.
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"Yeah," she said, discerning his thoughts.
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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 shook her head.

"You'd think that after two and a half years in space, you'd have learned
how to open a wine bottle without spilling it everywhere."

"What I've learned," the Captain answered, as he spun across the
compartment and swallowed one of the larger floating drops, "is that
if you spill wine in space, it's a lot easier to clean up than on
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"Alister, the picnic's starting!"  Andrea called out.
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"I'll be there in a minute," came the reply from the next module.
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Mercurio spilt only a few more drops as he "poured" the wine into two
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"Cheers."
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They clinked glasses and laughed together as the Captain spilled wine
all over his face as he tried to drink it.  Andrea grabbed a towel.
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Andrea, that I'm a thief and all that, but I never did anything like
this."
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From his home in Houston, Kyle Becker watched the press conference
alone and in silence.
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[ He shushed her out the door and didn't appear again for another hour. ]
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He had prepared an elaborate set.  [HOW WOULD ASTRONAUTS LAY OUT AN
IDEAL WORK SPACE?  WOULD LIKE TO GET THIS RIGHT IN ONLY 1 DAY] He
could easily appear either strapped in to a chair by a belt, or
floating in mid cabin.  Red banners festooned the cockpit wall across
from the camera.  Two vertical Roman lances impaled with globes of
Mars rose on either side.  Mercuriou himself was dressed in a crisp
white uniform and floated leisurely behind a podium, at whose rear was
a computer screen visible only to the speaker.

Mercuriou: "Good evening.  My name is Marcelius Mercuriou.  Most people
call me Marc.  I am the captain of the spaceship _Xplorer_I_."

[MORE HERE]

Mercuriou: "I am declaring tonight the Republic of Mars.  It shall be based on
the following principles.  First, freedom of speech.  There shall be
no prohibition of on-line public libraries.  Second, freedom of body.
The individual, not the government, shall decide what goes into that
individual's body."

Mercuriou: "We have no weapons to launch against you, and we seek only to go on
our way in peace.  I have been told repeatedly by people to Love It or
Leave It, and I wish to tell them that I have decided to Get The Hell
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interviewer, selecting an obscure small network anchor.
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"Are you saying you stole a billion dollars?"
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Mercuriou sneered.
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Mercuriou: "Venture capital funding - How do you get it?  I'll tell
you how.  You sell your soul to these people.  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
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for themselves, and then you fight like hell just to keep 51%.  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."
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socialist!  I'm an anarchist!  I'm the most anti-American American
since Jane Fonda!  I'm not part of the majority, and I don't like
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Mercuriou: "The communist philosophy was based on brutal, cut-throat class
competition; the fascist philosophy was based on brutal, cut-throat
racial competition; the capitalist philosophy is based on brutal,
cut-throat economic competition.  It's basically the same thing,
slightly editted for a new generation, but with the same kind of
garbage in charge of society.  'Conflict and competition drive human
progress forward...'  I feel as bad about ripping off capitalists as I
would about ripping off communists or fascists, because to me they're
all basically the same.  Just another bunch of men with some nightmare
system based on the most viscious traits of mankind to be jammed down
everyone's throats."
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we will explore the asteroid belts.  If we find almost anything
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Mercuriou: "Fine," he replied in a clipped voice, and told Burns to
take off.
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_Xplorer_1_ sped down the runway as policeman swarmed the complex.

[MAYBE] The rocket plane took the entire runway and then some...

Burns eased back on the control yoke, and the rocket plane soared
upwards into the sky.  Some of the policemen on the ground watched
with their months agape, deafened by the roaring rocket engines and
stunned by the sight of a jumbo jet belching rocket exhaust.  Burns
climed to 10,000 feet, then put the ship on auto-pilot.
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"Three all-green; four launching!" Alister was calling out as he read
from his computer monitor.  Behind them, Vic and Mercuriou argued over
the lack of a spacesuit for Andrea.
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"She doesn't really need a spacesuit," Mercuriou tried.
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"She most certainly does need a spacesuit, Marc.  We have spares in
cargo, but what if we lose cabin pressure before then?"
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"Seventeen's up; sixteen just went inertial; eighteen launching!"
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"We have to abort the mission," Vic flatly stated.
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"We are not aborting this mission!" Mercuriou shouted.
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"I'm fine," Andrea interjected, "I'll take the chance."
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"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."
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"Nine just acquired LEO; thirty-four launching."
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"Then let her take mine," Mercuriou finally decided.
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"No, she can't take yours, because then _you_ won't have a spacesuit."
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"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!"
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"How do we look, Burns?"
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"We've got clean launches on the first fifty-one rockets... make that
fifty-two; everything's going fine.  We're ready to take her up."
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As soon as Andrea was suited, 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 he climbed
above the atmosphere before beginning a true orbital insertion.  As
they passed 100,000 feet, the conventional control surfaces become
unusable due to the rarified atmosphere.  Burns took his left hand off
the control yoke and placed it on a joystick.

"Release engine gimbles," he instructed.

"Engine gimbles released," Alister acknowledged, after pressing a
button and watching several indicators change color.

The rocket engines, in hydraulical mountings, now swiveled at Burns'
command.  As they passed 200,000 feet, he nudged forward on the
joystick, the engines pivoted downwards and the aircraft turned
towards the horizontal and increased thrust.  The sky was completely
black.  As the aircraft turned towards horizontal, the
giant blue ball of the Pacific Ocean swung up below them.
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continually updated GPS coordinates.  The display showed the projected
course in blue, from both side and top perspectives, along with the
plane's actual course in red.  The aircraft was slightly below the
profile, so Burns eased back on the joystick to raise the plane's
attitude slightly and guided the red line back towards the blue one.
He didn't believe in autopilots, and hadn't taken the time to program
one for the spaceflight phase.

At fifty miles in altitude, they were now above most of the
atmosphere, and the blue line flattened out.  Burns guided the
rocketship along it.  Most of the engine force was now directed
towards increasing the craft's speed to orbital velocity.  Ten minutes
later, the 767 was eighty miles high and the GPS indicator showed
their speed at 10 km/s.  Burns continued firing the engines until
nearly two thirds of the ship's fuel had been exhausted.  He then cut
off the engines and let the ship coast.  Now well over two hundred
miles in altitude, the ship continued to climb.  Finally, Burns fired
the engines again for several minutes to stabilize the orbit.

The cargo modules, launched two minutes apart over the course of an
hour, were now spread out all over Low Earth Orbit, while the 767 with
the crew onboard was in a six-hour orbit hundreds of miles above.
This was deliberate.  Since the cargo modules were themselves hundreds
of miles apart, rendezvousing with each of them in LEO would have
required many complex engine burns.  Instead, considering that their
ultimate goal was Mars, Burns had elected to put the 767 into a higher
orbit, then wait for each cargo module to come into a favorable
alignment, fire its rocket engine remotely, and put it into a transfer
orbit that would bring it to them.  This enabled the crew to bring
each cargo module to them, roughly one per hour, over the course of
the next several days.
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engine of the first cargo module and put it into its transfer orbit.
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and were shocked to find themselves looking at a 767.
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informing them of basically what their news 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.  Aside from reassuring
them that the U.S. government was carefully tracking the situation,
the only new information he provided was the identities of the three
principle officers of TenTech.  From his home in Houston, Kyle Becker
watched the press conference alone and in silence.
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Ecks: I've got some people here on the phone to talk to you.  They're
Hawaiians, and not all of them seem very keen on your plans.  Let's
start with Beth in Mililani, Beth, you're on the air!

Beth: Yes, I'm a small business owner; I own a dry cleaner and I'd
like Mercuriou to know that I can't afford to give away my services
for free.  I'm not some rich capitalist; I have employees that count
on me for a paycheck, and there are some months when they get paid and
I don't.  He's up there in a space capsule, down here on Earth people
just can't afford his dreamy ideas!

Mercuriou: Well, it's about making sacrifices for what's important to
you.  If it's important to live in harmony with God, to treat others
as we're taught by Christ...

Beth: Look, I'm a Christian, but that doesn't mean I have give away my
livelihood so I can live like a bum on the street!

Mercuriou: Why is it, that when so many people say that they're a
Christian, the next word out of their mouth is "but"?

James: "I also run a small business.  I can hardly feed my own staff
because of taxes!"

Mercuriou: "If it's up to me, I'll abolish taxes!  Will you feed the
hungry then?  We'll see!"

Jill: "I don't care what your stupid economic ideas are; what I like
is this political stuff!  You want to turn back the clock 100 years!"

Mercuriou: "That depends on your goal!  Are you trying to put one
group in power or do you truly want a balanced and representative
government?"

Jill: "We have a balanced government!  You want to go back to some
kind of religious oligarchy!"

Mercuriou: "I do not!  The executive is one branch of government, that
is all!  Do you think the majority is entitled to rule over every
branch of government, or do you want balance?"

Jill: "I want... I want elections!"

Mercuriou: "Well, you'll get them for the legislature, that's it!"

Jill: "This is what I'm talking about... you want us to go back 100
years!"

Mercuriou: "I want us to go forward!  I want us to lose this crazy
notion that everything had to be governed by elections and that the
majority, somehow this one group of people are entitled to rule the
world!"
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Andrea had woke early in the darkened room.  She had no watch, and
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T + 699 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_1_ 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 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_."

Mercuriou stared at her in silence.

Andrea: "To obtain that forgiveness, we need only ask God in prayer."

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

Andrea: "If the prayer is sincere and persistent, yes."

The two astronauts floated in silence for several minutes.  Finally,
slowly, Mercuriou nodded his head in assent.  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," came the immediate answer.  He sighed, bowed his
head, paused again.  Finally, in a low voice, he spoke.

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


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[this is where he elaborates his plan, culminating in...  "We are
_Xplorer_1!"]
a2158 47


than any of us and we needed any reminder of that, we got it
yesterday."

The captain paused briefly and looked over his crew.

"Andrea, if you're willing to take the job, I'd like to make you first
officer."

Vic spoke first.  "I think that's a very good idea."

Now it was Andrea's turn to look over the crew.  She spoke first to
the captain.

"There's a lot of things I think we're not going to agree on..."

"I can handle dissent.  In fact, I encourage it."

"...starting with your basic mission plan.  NASA has looked carefully
at a manned mission to Mars.  We'd prefer to send three separate
vehicles.  Unlike a moon shot, a free-return trajectory isn't an
option for a Mars mission.  It's just too far away to coast home after
an Apollo 13-type failure.  A single vehicle, no matter how well
equipped, lacks a level of redundancy that only multiple vehicles can
offer.  Also, any new vehicle needs to be extensively tested before
and after launch."

There was another pause.  The only sounds were motor noise from the
air conditioners and computers.

"We're not going do things the way NASA does them.  Dissent is
welcome, but I'm still the captain.  I get the final say."

Andrea looked him directly in the eye.

"OK.  I accept."  [NEED MORE HERE]

"Thank you."

"You actually did most of the right things yesterday.  Secure the air
tight doors and come after me with a spacesuit in case I get into
trouble.  Just one thing - next time, bring two suits, or at least a
rescue ball.  It would have sucked if we had got stuck out there with
only one suit between us."


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"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
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"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."

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

"Why not?"

"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.  That's why we use Gantt charts and Capability
Maturity Models.  It's not just bureaucratic bean counting. [CA] 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!"
d2198 6
a2203 6
"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 I want 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
d2209 1
a2209 1
"We're not going to need the hydroponics, Marc."
d2217 1
a2217 1
"So how was the meditation, Vic?"
d2219 1
a2219 1
"Andrea, the meditation was... great.  I've always struggled to
d2225 1
a2225 1
"Actually, I've never been much into meditation."
d2227 3
a2229 3
"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."
d2233 1
a2233 1
"Hae you never tried it up here?"
d2235 4
a2238 4
"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
d2241 1
a2241 2
"What did you mean," Mercuriou now slowly asked, "that we don't need
the hydroponics?"
d2243 3
a2245 2
"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."
d2247 2
a2248 1
"So...what?  We're just going to give up after a year and go home?"
d2250 1
a2250 1
"Maybe.  I don't know."
d2252 1
a2252 1
"What then?  You're saying we're going to die up here?"
d2254 1
a2254 1
"No, I didn't say that, either.  I can't really explain it, Marc,
d2261 1
a2261 1
friend, yes, but not for anything else."
d2263 1
a2263 1
"And what happens," Mercuriou slowly asked, "when our food runs out?"
d2265 1
a2265 1
"I don't know."
d2267 1
a2267 1
"You've just got... a 'feeling'?"
d2269 1
a2269 1
"More like a certainty."
d2275 1
a2275 1
"Sure, say whatever you want."
d2277 3
a2279 2
"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!?"
d2281 3
a2283 4
"That's a real good point, Alister," Andrea said gravely, then spoke
directly to Mercuriou.  "Look, you've made your point.  Now we've got
to test this craft.  Let's start looking at re-entry scenarios..."
but the Captain was ephastically shaking his head, no, No, NO!
d2285 2
a2286 1
"We're going to Mars, Dr. Yeats, that's not going to change."
d2288 3
a2290 4
"Fine, you can go to Mars," Merceriou started to interrupt but-Yeats-
would-not-let-him, "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."
d2292 1
a2292 1
Again there was silence, but a deeper, tenser one.
d2294 1
a2294 1
"She's got a good point, Marc," Burns concluded.
d2298 3
a2300 2
"First Vic, now you going turn traitor on me too, Burns?" he asked
with a snicker in his voice.
d2302 1
a2302 1
Burns answered with a laugh in his.
d2304 3
a2306 1
"Hey, I'm just saying what she says makes a lot of sense!"
d2308 2
a2309 2
"Burns, the minute, nay, the second these wheels touch the ground,
we're just five little nobodies at the mercy of those governments."
d2311 1
a2311 2
"We could contact a neutral country," Andrea continued to argue,
knowing she had lost.  "Switzerland might let us land."
a2312 2
"Sorry, Doc," Mercuriou said.  To Burns he added, "Take us out of
orbit."
a2313 1
The _Xplorer_I_ crew dove into a flurry of activity over the next two
d2364 3
a2366 4
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.
d2373 5
a2377 4
Mercuriou: "Did you see this?" Mercuriou asked as he munched, handing
a tablet to his first officer.  The latest news updates from Earth had
brought word of a pipeline explosion in Nigeria that had killed
hundreds scavenging gasoline from an illegally tapped pipeline.
d3181 2
a3182 5
"You guys should come in here!" Alister yelled, then got up and
propelled himself through the hatchway.

"Well, m-maybe you want to come in here," he stammered as he watched
Andrea trying to clean the wine from Mercuriou's face.
d3184 2
a3185 1
"What's up?" the grinning Captain asked.
d3187 1
a3187 1
"An airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center!"
d3189 1
a3189 1
Andrea: Well, hopefully, nobody was hurt.
d3191 1
a3191 1
Mercuriou:  I'm sure the pilot didn't make it!
d3193 1
a3193 1
Andrea: We'll keep him in our prayers with our lunch.
d3195 1
a3195 1
Well, let's keep him in our prayers.
d3201 1
a3201 1
Alister:  Another one!  Another one!
d3215 4
a3218 3
[ "Another Timothy McVeigh or something," Mercuriou was saying.  "The
[ country is so hated; hell, you can say a lot about me, Andrea, that
[ I'm a thief and all that, but I never did anything like this."
@


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modules.  I'll contact you...  I'll let you know the next time I'll be
in touch."
@


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@d275 2
a276 1
_Warm_smell_of_colitas,_rising_up_through_the_air_...
d1944 1
a1944 3
Mercuriou opened the door a crack.

"Yes?"
d1946 1
a1946 1
"What are you doing?"
d1956 1
a1956 1
"I'm working on my speech for this evening, Dr. Yates.  It must be
d1961 1
a1961 1
Andrea mumbled a reply into the closing door.
d1963 1
a1963 1
"You know, there's really a lot of work to be done with the cargo
d1966 1
a1966 1
The door flew back open.
d1968 1
a1968 1
"Dr. Yeats, my speeches are the most important cargo this vessel
d1987 2
a1988 2
"Good evening.  My name is Captain Marcelius Mercuriou.  Most people
call me Marc."
d1992 1
a1992 1
"I am declaring tonight the Republic of Mars.  It shall be based on
d1998 1
a1998 1
"We have no weapons to launch against you, and we seek only to go on
d2011 2
a2012 2
"We stole it!" he replied, right on script.  "Every dollar of it, and
we needed billions."
d2018 1
a2018 1
"We stole more money that Bernie Madolf every saw!"
d2024 13
a2036 12
"Venture capital funding - How do you get it?  I'll tell you how.  You
sell your soul to these people.  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%.  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."
d2042 1
a2042 1
"Something like that.  Ever hear of Keystone Securities?"
d2049 15
a2063 14
"Well, that's a good question.  I guess, basically, I'm 31 years old
and not ready to lounge on a beach just yet.  Spaceflight has always
facinated me."

"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."

"It shows how little opportunity we really have to pursue our dreams.
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."
d2067 4
a2070 4
"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
d2075 7
a2081 7
"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?  Businesses fail every day.  I'm
developing technology to fly to Mars, so the whole society benefits.
We rip and claw at each other throats, and that drives civilization
forward, right?"
d2086 1
a2086 1
"Yeah, who makes the rules?"
d2090 1
a2090 1
"In other words, the majority makes the rules, right?"
d2094 1
a2094 1
"Well, I'm not part of the majority."
d2098 4
a2101 3
"I'm not part of the majority... I'm a druggie!  I'm a socialist!  I'm
an anarchist!  I'm the most anti-American American since Jane Fonda!
I'm not part of the majority, and I don't like democracy."
d2105 2
a2106 2
"'The People'.  You make it sound like it's what _all_ the people
want.  If that's the case, then why do people blow up federal
d2122 1
a2122 1
"The communist philosophy was based on brutal, cut-throat class
d2134 3
a2136 3
"Yet 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
d2146 3
a2148 2
"Listen, we've got a lot of work to do with the cargo modules.  I'll
contact you...  I'll let you know the next time I'll be in touch."
d2382 1
a2382 1
forehead kept going, spraying out over the rest of the crew.
d2389 3
a2391 1
Alister: "Soy beans?"  Alister questioned, imagining the pressed
d2394 1
a2394 2
Vic: "I rather like them steamed," Vic replied, as the microwave oven
beeped.
d2404 4
a2407 3
Alister raised an eyebrow and the doctor nodded affirmatively as he
opened the steamer and let some of the cooked soy beans float out,
along with an ample quantity of steam.  The aroma of freshly steamed
d2413 1
a2413 1
Mercuriou: "Are these from the garden?  Great!"
d2947 7
a2953 7
Andrea had by now received a special dispensation to receive Mass on
Sundays, and her televised 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."
d2955 2
a2956 2
"This is one of my favorite parts of the Gospel", she began her
sermon, "because it affects one of the deepest rifts in Christianity -
d2970 1
a2970 1
"Matthew 7:21, however, shows that Justification by Faith, at least in
d2976 5
a2980 5
  "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?"
d2982 1
a2982 1
"Actions speak louder than words," Alister commented.
d2984 1
a2984 1
"Precisely.  There is another passage, not from the Gospel this time,
d2987 13
a2999 13
   "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."

"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."
d3001 1
a3001 1
"This, of course, is much easier said than done, to the point where
d3008 45
a3052 45
   "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."

   "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.'"

   "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!'"

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

   "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!'"

   "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.'"

   "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.'"

   "'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.'"

"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
d3059 1
a3059 1
"I haven't done the will of God," Mercuriou stated in a flat tone.
d3063 6
a3068 6
"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 -
d3083 2
a3084 2
"But if you don't believe in Jesus?"  Alister asked.  "Who's going to
listen then?"
d3086 8
a3093 8
"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."
d3100 1
a3100 1
"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked.
d3102 1
a3102 1
"Well, first of all, I don't pretend to understand the book of
d3108 1
a3108 1
"It isn't?"
d3110 1
a3110 1
"What happens at the end of the book?"
d3112 1
a3112 1
"There's like a thousand years of peace, right?"
d3114 4
a3117 4
"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
d3120 2
a3121 2
"But aren't people going to be judged then?  What do you have to do to
be saved?  Everybody says something different."
d3123 3
a3125 3
"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
d3137 2
a3138 2
"Worry about your relationship with God; get that straight first, and
the rest will follow."
d3140 4
a3143 3
"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.  I don't think there's much
d3146 2
a3147 4
They're just reclining in zero-gee, talking quietly.

"You're looking at the past and the future, and you're looking at it
from a mortal perspective.  Start with the present."
d3151 2
a3152 2
"We're floating in an air-conditioned tube with nothing to do and no
way out.  That's my _present_."
d3154 1
a3154 1
"An excellent opportunity for prayer and meditation."
d3156 1
a3156 1
"I don't know what to pray about."
d3158 2
a3159 2
"You just gave me a nice little list!  Forgiveness for the past;
guidance for the future -- two of the most important things for
d3162 3
a3164 1
"Forgiveness?  For me?  I don't know about that."
d3166 1
a3166 1
"Marc, one of the central tenets of my religion is the
d3171 1
a3171 1
"To obtain that forgiveness, we need only ask God in prayer."
d3173 1
a3173 1
"So a murderer, a rapist..."
d3175 1
a3175 1
"If the prayer is sincere and persistent, yes."
d3182 1
a3182 1
"Do you want me to leave?"
d3184 2
a3185 2
"No," came the immediate answer.  He sighed, bowed his head, paused
again.  Finally, in a low voice, he spoke.
d3187 1
a3187 1
"Dear God, forgive me my sins."
d3717 1
a3717 1
"Does it look like instrumentation?" al-XX asked , leaning forward
d3723 1
a3723 1
Husband: "Now the left gear is showing a barber pole...  We're getting
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Vic: "Perhaps something shorter would be better.  Perhaps _The_Great_anti_-_American_..."
d2539 1
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Andrea: "Why?  Why do you have to land?"  Andrea interjected.  "Why
d2544 1
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Mercuriou: "We have to land!" the captain shouted.  "People don't
d2558 1
a2558 1
attempt only days away, most terrestrial cable TV systems now devoted
d2565 3
a2567 3
Andrea: "So let them!" Andrea shot back, drawing only a snort in
reply.  "Why do you have to risk everything just to win your private
little war?  Or do you seriously think you can survive down there?"
d2570 7
a2576 8
cushy NASA perch," Mercuriou continued, his voice dripping with
sarcasm, "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?" she challenged him.
"How many billions did _you_ steal, Marc?  How many toes did you step
on?  Don't tell me you haven't become ruthless!"
d2578 2
a2579 1
They locked eyes.
d2581 1
a2581 2
Mercuriou: "We are landing on Mars," Mercurio stated slowly and
firmly, in a no-nonsense command tone of voice.  "That has been a
d2653 1
a2653 1
T + 651 days
d2722 1
a2722 1
T + 652 days
d2724 1
a2724 34
"I'm placing you under a suicide watch."

"You're doing what?"

Mercuriou turned away from the window and confronted his first officer.
Secretly, Andrea was glad to see this reaction, much more so than
quiet resignation, but this she tried not to show.

"You heard me."

The Captain emitted a "Humph", "So what's this suicide watch supposed
to be?  You've got a police guard in mind?"

"Me.  I'm the police guard.  I'm not leaving you out of my sight."

Merceriou took this in slowly.

"OK," he shrugged at last and turned back to the window.

"I've been trying to think of some kind of memorial service for Burns."

After a pause, he nodded.

"I've thought of sending something down to Mars, like burning up a capsule
in the atmosphere, but I don't know if we want to use the fuel."

"Why not?"  Mercuriou said.  "We've got plenty of it."

"Yes, we do." Andrea replied.


T + 653 days

The is another staff meeting.  The Captain was present, but silent.
a2754 2
T + 654 days

d2788 2
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a2791 1
T + 657 days
d2793 1
a2793 1
Mercuriou spoke.  The others were silent.
d2795 3
a2797 4
"On Icarus' Wing they flew into the night,
 Dared the foreign shore, descended,
 and met the same fate as all
 When brave fools want their freedom.
d2799 1
a2799 1
 There was no problem; it was only a test flight.
d2801 2
a2802 5
 From below came a blow
 That disrupted their flow
 And blew that craft into debris
 Watched Earth far below and from orbit more near
 Watched amazed, scared, humbled, the last three.
d2804 1
a2804 3
 Now returning they flee
 Tails 'tween their knees
 Praying for a favorable wind.
d2806 1
a2806 4
 Now honor the two, now honor the few,
 the brave, the fool-hardy, or free.
 Who climb into the night, who walk into the light,
 We bid homage, we bid fairwell to thee.
d2808 12
a2819 3
 Watched the world here
 Watched the history books near
 Watched, challenged, and proded, the Diety."
a2821 1
T + 658 days
d2942 1
a2942 1
Andrea had by now received a special dispensation to say Mass on
d3130 1
a3130 1
T + 700 days
a3181 18


T + 701 days

"I think you should consider baptism."

"I've been baptized, Andrea.  I was baptized when I was a kid."

"No, I mean adult baptism, preferably by full immersion in a river or
a lake."

"But you're not a Baptist?!"

"I'm a Christian; I don't think of myself as a Catholic, or as a
Protestant, or as a Baptist.  Baptism is an important part of our
tradition.  Sprinkling an infant with water is a nice gesture, but
it's not real baptism, at least not in the historical sense."

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d3527 4
a3530 4
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, and was genuinely
wondering about air travel.
d3532 29
a3560 4
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."
d3622 1
a3622 1
T + 1220 days    it must be rabidly against democracy
a3681 121


T + 974 days

"Do you support the War on Terror?"

Andrea: "I don't support any war.  Christ taught us to forgive our enemies,
and that's exactly what we should do.  In one sense, it shouldn't
be that hard since the men who actually carried out the attacks
died along with everyone else.  It's time to bury the dead,
mourn over the victims, clean up the rubble, and really ask
ourselves why our country is so hated that people would do
this to us.  And that answer is pretty clear, I think."

"Dr. Yeats, what is the answer?  What do you think the U.S. should do
next?"

"I think we decide to really help the people of the world instead of
just talking constantly about (money and) politics.  Let's take all
this technology, publish everything we know about how it works, make
all that information freely available on the Internet, help third
world countries develop their own microchip manufacuring facilities,
their own chemical plants, their own robotic factories, etc.  Of
course, that means giving up our 'competitive advantage' that we hear
so much about.  It means helping people feed themselves, helping them
educate themselves, helping them build their own infrastructure,
instead of constantly talking about freedom while we pursue our own
selfish ends."

"What about the heroism of the hijackers?  What about the heroism of
the young men who were willing to give their lives because they
beleived that they were acting in their people's best interest?
There were probably the only people who got on those planes that
morning because they were trying to do the will of God."

"Why aren't they heros?  We hear constantly about the heros who are
bombing Afghanistan; why are they heros and these men aren't?  I mean,
they were willing to sacrifice their lives for some greater good;
isn't that heroism?  What difference does it make whether the evil
they were trying to fight was capitalism or terrorism, or whether it
really is evil, or if they just beleive it in their minds, or if
terrorism is really heroic, or if war on terrorism is really heoric?
Isn't heroism about giving of yourself for someone else, and even
if it's misguided, isn't it still worthy of our respect?"

Mercuriou: "I don't think we need all these security restrictions.
First of all, most of them wouldn't have stopped the terrorists
on 9-11.  They didn't have guns, or bombs, or chemicals of any kind.
And, frankly, a knife is so easy to conceal; I mean, you can take
a sharpened stone that won't trigger a single metal detector,
jam it into the sole of your shoe or something; it'd be so easy to
get knifes on board the airplanes.  I doubt you even need weapons
of any kind.  A half dozen men well trained in martial arts is
probably good enough."

"So how can we stop future attacks?"

"There aren't going to be any future attacks, not like this.  We saw
that in Pennsylanvia.  It took about an hour for the rules to change.
It used to be, if someone hijacked an airplane, you just put up your
hands and said, 'OK, where you want to go?  Claim your responsibility.
Make your demands.'  Now, that's all changed.  The passengers and crew
won't let hijackers take over a plane again.  They'll crash it first.
So there just aren't going to be any more attacks like this one.
That's why they used four planes; they knew it was a one-shot deal."

"So we should just do nothing and let the terrorists win?"

"First of all, a lot of what can be done has been done.  Like I said,
there aren't going to be any more 9-11 style attacks with airplanes.
Next, there isn't a whole lot you can do.  Especially if these anthrax
letters are the next in a series of attacks.  If each attack is
radically different from the last, if each one exploits a different
avenue of attack, really, what can you do?  Maybe hope your intelligence
people can penetrate the organization or at least figure out how
they coordinate and communiate, that's about it.  Everything else
is just reacting to the last attack."

"This notion that they exploited the freedom of our society is absurd.
They exploited capitalism, and they were able to exploit it because
they were backed by a multi-millionaire.  If they didn't have
thousands of dollars in funding, would the great 'free' society have
trained them on how to fly these jets?  Would the airlines have just
let them fly for nothing while they were scouting them out?  Would
they have even been let on the planes that morning if they hadn't
swipped through a credit card first?  Money is how capitalism controls
people, and if the terrorists hadn't had money, the 'free' society
would have slammed every door shut in their faces."

Mercurio cut him off.  "They would never have been let on those planes
without money.  They would never have been let on those planes.  They
didn't exploit freedom... they exploited capitalism!"


T + 1221 days

_Columbia_ launch.

T + 1231 days

"Hey, look what I found!"

The crew was preparing to depart the ship, moving all their personal
possesions, as well as anything they wanted to return with, into the
OTV.

Alister launched himself into A-core wearing a black T-shirt
emblazzened in front with a likeness of Albert Einstein, holding a
marijuana joint in one hand, its smoke forming the letters "E=mc2"
near his head.

"That's one of Burns', isn't it?" asked Mercuriou.

"Yeah, I found it in the electronics lab."

------

Emblazened across the top was the Generalized Stokes Theorem in its
most abstract form:  (int_dC w = int_C dw)

"You wouldn't understand," read the caption, "it's a MATH 462 thing."
@


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@d48 1
a48 1
back cast a sailboat's mast, and its whole visage that
d56 1
a56 1
on backroom metal racks of I S Ps
d80 1
a80 1
was a Mercedes, or a B M W,
d137 7
a143 11
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 a 10,000-BTU air conditioner to dissipate the heat.
A brand new multi-processor system sat, unpowered and silent,
while
several workers chatted leisurely amonst themselves,
d171 1
a171 2
"How about lunch?"  _I'm_in_the_server_room._ "Sounds fine," came the
reply.  _Everything's_go!_
d174 7
a180 7
the three techs out of the room, Burns sent another email, "Let's try
Bogart's."  Back in the apartment, Marc 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.
d189 3
a191 4
"Forget Bogart's; let's go for 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.
d211 1
a211 1
thirties and a shade under six feet tall [IMPROVE], he was
d269 8
a276 9
Finally, they went for a walk.

They walked 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 P.C.H, before Southern California had turned into
a 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.  _Warm_smell_of_colitas,_rising_up_through_the_air...
d320 3
d324 2
a325 1
well intoxicated.
d879 1
a879 1
He turned and looked Alister straight in the eye [CA].
a883 16

Mercuriou walked up, his facial features hidden behind a pair of dark
sunglasses, just as Alister was asking Burns about the workers.  The
captain answered the question himself.

"Compartmentalization, Alister, need to know.  The surfers don't ask
too many questions.  But there's some stuff we need done that can't be
compartmentalized.  So if you're in, you get a spacesuit and a ticket
to Mars."

Alister looked back and forth between them.  It all seemed like a
dream.

"So what's my job?"


d1187 1
a1187 1
Mercuriou: Any suggestions?
d1189 1
a1189 1
Burns: _Technical_Sketch_17_?
d1191 1
a1191 1
Mercuriou put his hands on his hips and stared at him.
d1193 1
a1193 1
Burns: Well, that's how I think of it...
d1197 2
a1198 1
in a hanger adjacent to their private runway.
d1200 1
a1200 1
Alister: _The_Royal_Way_?
d1202 1
a1202 1
Vic: But this isn't the Royal Way, Marc, it's all stolen!
d1206 5
a1210 1
Alister: _Baccala's_Manifesto_?
d1212 2
a1213 3
Mercuriou rolled his eyes... They _all_ looked at Alister like he had
just ruined the punchline to a great joke.  Then they looked at the
ship and...
d1218 3
a1220 2
Mercuriou now shook - "You want me to put _that_... _there_!"  - and
waved toward the ship's cockpit.  Vic studied the spot thoughtfully.
d1222 1
a1222 1
Vic: "Perhaps something shorter would be better."
d1224 1
a1224 1
Burns: "The Great Anti-American..."
d1226 1
a1226 1
Alister: _Icarus'_Wing_!
d1228 1
a1228 3
Mercuriou:      What?

          "You heard me."
d1232 1
a1232 1
"You know who Icarus was?"
d1234 1
a1234 1
     "Yeah."
d1236 1
a1236 1
"Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it _Xplorer_One_!"
d1546 1
a1546 4
"No, Marc, no, absolutely NO!"

"Three days, Vic, that's all we need - three days!  Burns wants
a week, but I'm compromising on three days!"
d1548 2
a1549 3
"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!"
d1551 3
a1553 2
"It has to done, Vic!  It just has to be done, and we're not arguing
about it!  Alister!"
d1555 2
a1556 1
"Yes, we are arguing about it, Marc!"
d1558 1
a1558 2
"Alister!  Get an MRE and a bottle of water and give it to Dr. Yates!
Dammit, Vic, don't fight me on this!"
d1560 2
a1561 1
"Marc, you can't do this, you just can't!"
d1563 1
a1563 1
[TRANSITION]
a1577 1
[ _deliver_us_from_HOWARD_
d1597 2
a1598 2
craziness of the last two days, _why_didn't_she_run_again?,
_what_do_they_want_with_spacesuits?_, then _breath_in_,
d1606 11
a1616 11
"Sorry," he began.  "I brought you some breakfast!" he added as
cheerily as he could muster, putting a bottle of water and a military
ration down on the floor next to the door.

"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.

"Look, I've covered in dirt; I haven't bathed in... three days; I've
slept in my clothes for the last two nights; I'd like to at least
splash some water on my face and go to the toilet."
d1620 2
a1621 2
"OK... uh, sure, it's right down the hall," he answered, before
leading the way about a hundred feet to a restroom.
d1623 1
a1623 1
"I'll wait here," he mumbled.
a1653 2
....

d1658 1
a1658 2
Vic: "Damn it, Marc, I'll go to police right now!  I'll pick up that phone
myself!  I mean it!"
d1660 6
a1665 1
Mercuriou: "Vic, if you pick up that phone, I'll... I'll..."
d1673 2
a1674 1
Mercuriou marched down the hallway.
d1699 2
a1700 1
runway.  _What_if_they_have_guns?_ _What_if_they_do?_
d1708 1
a1708 1
Alister: but
d1713 1
a1713 1
"This is quite a rocketship you've got here."
d1718 1
a1718 1
"You have some kind of launch planned?"
d1720 1
a1720 1
"You could say that."
d1727 5
a1731 5
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
d1733 1
a1733 1
"Captain Mercuriou!  _Captain_ Mercuriou!"  she hollered as she
d1736 1
a1736 1
"What's going on?", Vic called from the cabin.
d1738 1
a1738 1
"It's Captain Mercuriou!  He fell!"
d1745 1
a1745 1
"Do you want the hatch closed now?  Is that your next order... sir?"
d1749 1
a1749 1
"You don't what you getting into, lady."
d1751 1
a1751 1
"Clue me in."
d1753 2
a1754 2
They locked eyes for a moment, then Mercuriou pressed his face within
six inches of hers and almost whispered, "Mars!"
d1758 3
a1760 2
"That's great; I've always wanted to go to Mars!  Anyway, you'll need
an experienced astronaut; I've had three weeks on orbit."
d1764 2
a1765 2
"But first, you've got to _get_ into orbit, and that I've _got_ to
see!"
d1769 5
a1773 5
"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!"
d1779 2
a1780 1
"Fine," he replied in a clipped voice, and told Burns to take off.
d2640 3
a2642 1
Mercuriou looked at him closely.  "Is that a cliche?"
d2644 1
a2644 1
  "What?"
d2646 1
a2646 1
    "nevermind"
d2648 1
a2648 1
"I saw an angel, mommy!"
d2650 1
a2650 1
_Now_I_get_the_answer_key_...
d2652 1
a2652 1
"Burns?  Burns?"
d3525 1
a3525 1

d3539 1
a3539 1
T + 1253 days    victory must seem close
d3569 2
a3570 1
no matter what.
d3579 2
a3580 20
"Perfect burn," Alister declared, as he broke out into a wide grin and
let out a whoop.  "I almost expected a disaster."  (did you really?)

"Sometimes you make it back alive, Alister," Andrea declared as she
unbuckled.  "I've done it twice already."

[ "There's South Africa!" the young man whooped, pointing out the ]
[ window. ]

[ "There's South Africa!" ]

Later that day, Mercuriou gathered his crew for an announcement.

"I'm running for President."

After a moment of silence, Alister reacted first.

"Of the United States?"

Mercuriou nodded solemnly.  Andrea furled her brows.
d3582 2
a3583 1
"You don't expect to win, I don't think?"
d3585 2
a3586 2
"As a matter of fact I do!  I said that I'm running, but I'm not
running their way... I'm running my way!"
d3590 2
a3591 2
"Good news, girl!" it squawked.  "We're bringing you home on
_Columbia_!"
d3594 1
a3594 1
T + 799 days    some anti-government plot must be hatched
d3598 1
a3598 1
T + 1220 days    it must be rabidly anti-democracy
d3898 1
a3898 1
the display next to her.  The orbiter swayed and rolled as it careened
d3912 1
a3912 1
"Vic?!  W-what are you doing here?  You're..."
d3917 2
a3918 2
exposing the top of the fuselage to the direct heat of re-entry as it
swung back around.  They heard a loud crash and felt something brake
d3932 2
a3933 2
strip of aluminum skin connecting her on the left, then that, too,
broke free.
d3946 1
a3946 1
_Columbia_ was gone.
d3948 2
a3949 2
In a azure haze, they hung above Texas, above them space, and above
space a stupendous light.
d3956 1
a3956 1
Mercuriou: "There is no end.  This is the Great Conversation."
d3959 1
a3959 1
Bible: "Bible"
d3961 1
a3961 1
Burns: "Burns"
d3963 1
a3963 1
Mercuriou: "Mercuriou"
d3965 1
a3965 1
Vic: "Vic"
d3967 1
a3967 1
Alister: "Alister"
d3969 1
a3969 1
Andrea: "Andrea"
@


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"Whoo-hoo!"
d2383 1
a2383 1
"Ahhhhh!"
d2388 1
a2388 1
"waHHHH!"
d2419 2
a2420 1
"What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated in with Burns.
d2424 4
a2427 4
"Did you see this?" Mercuriou asked as he munched, handing a tablet to
his first officer.  The latest news updates from Earth had brought
word of a pipeline explosion in Nigeria that had killed hundreds
scavenging gasoline from an illegally tapped pipeline.
d2503 3
a2505 2
	games are addictive
	games are insane
d2512 3
a2514 2
	games waste your time
	games waste your brain
d2519 12
a2530 2
	books are the ticket
	books are the tool
d2532 2
a2533 4
"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!"
d2535 1
a2535 7
	books ain't for nerds
	books ain't for fools

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

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


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@d2 5
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a8 1
			     Icarus' Wing
a9 1
			   by Brent Baccala
d11 3
d15 8
d24 2
a25 3
			 for Bruce, who knows
		      we learn from failure more
			  than from success
d28 1
a28 17

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
[ THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
[ IT IS A WORK OF FICTION.
THESE ARE NOT REAL PEOPLE
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.




			   Requirements for
		    The Great Anti-American Novel
d99 1
a99 1
remind "her" programmers the obvious.
d101 3
a103 3
_Top_of_the_morning,_Burns, or
_Big_talk_today,_Burns, or
_Got_a_cable_loose,_there,_Burns, or
d1204 1
a1204 1
T - 93 days   it must be sly
d1953 1
a1953 1
T + 1 day   long political rants must be interspersed throughout the novel
d2981 2
a2982 1
T + 699 days    communism must be preached [Make sure this is a Sunday!]
d3363 1
a3363 1
T + 733 days    pacifism must be insidiously preached / promoted
a3620 1
T + 1220 days    the people must be heard
@


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@d3814 1
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"What's wrong, David?"  He was clearly agitated.
d3819 1
a3819 1
"Why?" Andrea wanted to know.  Brown lowered his voice further.
d3830 1
a3830 1
"David has very good reason to be concerned about the safety of our
d3833 2
a3834 2
"What reason?" Mercuriou wanted to know.  He shook his head, "you'd
think I'm crazy", but Andrea encouraged him to speak up.
d3839 4
a3842 4
Now Mercuriou paused.  "I have a good - had a good friend of mine who
would take you completely seriously.  More than one, actually," he
said, glancing at Andrea.  "I don't think you're crazy.  Do you think
the ship's been sabotaged?"
d3846 2
a3847 2
Mercuriou laughed... "and go home how?  The Russians?  I'd just sit up
here forever... No, I'm going home."
d3849 1
a3849 1
"Me too," Alister piped up.
d3851 2
a3852 2
Andrea looked at them both and nodded.  "Yes, I also want to go home
now.  I'll take my chances with _Columbia_," she told Brown.
d3856 1
a3856 1
"We'll take our chances.  Thank you for warning us."
d3865 2
a3866 2
Mercuriou looked at the GPS.  "If something's going to happen, it'll
be any time now.  We're crossing the California coast."
d3870 8
a3877 7
"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?"

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
d3880 2
a3881 2
"I want to live!" Alister said.  He looked back and forth between the
other two.  "What?  What?"
d3885 1
a3885 1
"Does it look like instrumentation?" Chawla asked, leaning forward
d3888 1
a3888 1
"Nope," McCool answered after pushing buttons for a moment.  "It's
d3897 1
a3897 1
"_Columbia_, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did
d3900 1
a3900 1
Husband ignored the radio, instead pointing to the small yellow lights
d3904 1
a3904 1
"How long's that been on?" he asked McCool.  "What?"  "That!"
d3909 4
a3912 4
"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."
d3917 7
a3923 4
"Hold on, we've lost hydraulics!" Husband announced over the intercom.

The orbiter began to sway and roll as it careened through the air,
uncontrolled by man or machine.
d3925 1
a3925 1
"Tight up!"  Mercuriou ordered.
d3932 1
a3932 1
"Don't bother."
d3938 1
a3938 1
"So are you, Marc."
d3945 1
a3945 1
"There was a piece of frozen foam insulation that broke off the ET
d3949 1
a3949 1
"Was it sabotage?"
d3962 1
a3962 1
"This is a good way to go, Marc.  Quick and painless."
d3980 1
a3980 1
"There is no end.  This is the Great Conversation."
@


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@d397 1
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day. _Another_day_among_days. _Uncountable_as_our_breaths_of_air_
d426 1
a426 1
Vic physically shook himself.  _What_are_your_priorities?_ Is it the
d459 6
a464 6
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.
d494 1
a494 1
_Where'd_you_hide,_Vic?___The_smoking_parlor?_
d510 2
a511 2
_What_else_am_I_going_to_do?__Take_my_stolen_millions_and_retire_on
_a_beach?_
d516 2
a517 2
_What_else_am_I_going_to_do?_,
_live_in_a_trailer_and_grow_pot_in_the_mountains?_
d525 2
a526 2
_Did_the_fish_want_to_live_in_water?_
_Did_the_cow_want_to_be_a_steak?_
d528 1
a528 1
Onece in his life he
d541 1
a541 1
_I'm_sorry,_father, he prayed, _I'm_not_a_kid_anymore._
@


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@d3979 1
a3979 1
Bible: Bible
@


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@d1350 4
@


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@d136 2
a137 2
router manufactures wanting custom software to take
advantage of custom hardware.  Chesapeake.
a146 4
A UPS on the roof could power everything for an hour.
"Caution!  Halon 1301!" read yellow-and-white placards
posted prominently around the room.  "When alarm
sounds or gas discharges, evacuate area."
d150 1
a150 1
awaiting the announced shutdown time.
d157 2
a158 1
that the finicky machines imposed on their masters.
d163 1
a163 1
was a tempting proposition.
d219 7
a225 8
thirties and a shade under six feet tall [IMPROVE], he was clad in a
light red T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes.  What
differentiated him?  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.
Victor Antonov, waiting for a teakettle to boil, was nearly ten years
older, heavy set with a bristling mustache that often covered a
mischevious smile.
d247 3
a249 3
Mercuriou: "Well, now we've got money," he concluded cynically,
producing a wad of fifty-dollar bills and fanning them on the table
like a power deck.  Vic stood in the doorway holding something
d414 2
a415 1
Burns had always led the mathematical discussions.
d635 4
a638 4
brighten and he could just make out ridgeline around the arroyo.  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.
d702 1
a702 1
showed one program used more than any other.  Alister ran it.
d1163 1
a1163 1
T - 100 days    the government must be oppressive
d1212 1
a1212 1
Mercuriou put his hands on his hips and stared at Burns.
d1217 2
a1218 1
its doors welded shut, a hydraulic mating adapter on its nose.
d1224 1
a1224 1
Mercuriou's stare was cold, but there was a smile behind it.
d1248 1
a1248 1
Mercuriou stared at Alister in disbelief.
d1310 5
a1314 5
A thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, the jet swept down Hawaii's
leeward coast under the towering gaze of Mauna Kea, grazed Keahole
Point at a hundred feet and touched down at Kona International
Airport.  As the plane taxied and rolled to a halt at the gate, the
passenger in seat 15A stared at an ATM card.
d1469 2
a1470 3
T-shirt that featured a marijuana pipe and a baseball, with the
caption "I HIT better than I PITCH", as was Vic, who looked up from a
notepad as they came in.
d1671 1
a1671 1
"Vic, we're not arguing about this!  This is a command decision!"
d1673 1
a1673 1
"Um, excuse me..."
d1675 3
a1677 1
"Damn it, Marc, I'll go to police right now!  I'll pick up that phone
d1680 3
a1682 1
"Um..."
d1684 1
a1684 1
"What!?"
d1686 1
a1686 1
"It's Dr. Yates, she's still in the bathroom..."
d1690 1
a1690 1
"Coming in, doctor, pull up your pants!"
d1692 2
a1693 2
Broken from her reverie, Andrea snatched up the telephone once more
and dialed Kyle, listening to the noises in the next room as it rang.
d1695 1
a1695 1
"Kyle, it's Andrea!"
d1697 1
a1697 1
"My God, girl, where are you?"
d1699 1
a1699 1
"I'm at TenTech; they're holding me prisoner here!"
d1701 1
a1701 1
"What?!"
d1703 1
a1703 1
"Look, they're planning a launch!"
d1705 1
a1705 1
"What's the payload?"
d1707 1
a1707 1
"Manned.  They have spacesuits... and forget three shuttle launchs;
d3480 1
a3480 1
Yates: Remember, governor, the path to salvation is narrow...
d3486 1
a3486 1
Yates: Senator, I'm not moral enough at all.  None of us, myself
d3723 1
a3723 1
Mercurio: "I don't think we need all these security restrictions.
d3973 16
@


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@
text
@d3652 26
@


1.338
log
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@
text
@d242 13
a254 16
"Burns' got a plan, and I think it'll work.
Spaceflight is perfectly doable, that's been
demonstrated over and over for almost fifty years, 
The problem is money, hell, 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,
hell, 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!"

"Well, now we've got money," he concluded cynically, producing a wad
of fifty-dollar bills and fanning them on the table like a power deck.
Vic stood in the doorway holding something forgotten.
d256 2
a257 2
"Let's just say that there are some Keno systems out there that are no
longer completely random."
d259 1
a259 1
"Marc, this isn't like you, you're not a thief."
d261 1
a261 1
"Well, maybe I've changed."
d267 1
a267 1
"I'm going to Mars, Vic!  I need the money!"
d271 2
a272 2
"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!"
d274 2
a275 2
"Mars, huh... Did you steal the money to go or are you going because
you stole the money?..."
d279 1
a279 1
"Why are you doing this, Marc?  What's it all about... really?"
d281 1
a281 1
[TRANSITION BETTER] "Let's go for a walk."
d358 1
a358 1
"This will require a vision quest."
a652 11


[we've cut so much out here - do we need 1033 at all? if so, introduce
it now (somehow).  or maybe what i've got is fine]

[how about - move Alister from T-139/137 to here, ditch the production
facility and T-131 completely and let Alister get cut in at this point
along with more of an explanation of what's going on.  Pople can go
back in too, i think!]


d680 2
a681 1
"Bed-roooom!"  Alister bobbed his head and sang the refrain out loud.
d719 1
a719 1
"What did he see?"
d727 1
a727 1
"He ran the program."
d729 1
a729 1
"Did he understand what he saw?"
d731 1
a731 1
"Probably.  He's pretty sharp."
d733 1
a733 1
"So he knows we're stealing something; but he doesn't know what,"
d738 1
a738 1
"You think this is funny?" Vic asked from the corner.
d740 4
a743 3
"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!  Now, how's the project going?"
d745 1
a745 1
"The older engines work with the new fuel.  We've got a synthesis
d750 1
a750 1
"And we need another big hack.  Or two."
d752 1
a752 1
"I'm swamped."
d754 1
a754 1
"But we've found a hacker!"
d758 3
a760 2
"He's sharp, real sharp.  One of the best we've got, and it looks like
he can hack, too.  I guess the real question is, will he?  For us?"
d765 1
a765 1
"Let me take care of that.  Go get Alister."
d809 2
a810 2
"OK, you figured that out, but it's a lot bigger than the California
lottery, let me assure you.  This is a _heist_."
@


1.337
log
@everything up to Mars Crash
combined double scene (sanity must keep struggling to be heard) into
(madness must prevail)
@
text
@a31 21
1. crime must pay

2. drugs must be promoted

3. youth must be corrupted

4. it must be rabidly anti-democracy

5. capitalists must look like bastards

6. long political rants must be interspersed throughout the text

7. some anti-government plot must be hatched

8. communism must be given favorable treatment

9. pacifism must be insidiously preached

10. some sick "freedom" must win in the end


d109 1
a109 1
"Wouldn't miss it for judgement day,"
d174 2
a175 2
"No, thanks," Burns replied without a hint of deceit in his voice.
"I gotta get this done."
d212 3
a214 3
"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."
d217 1
a217 2
man waiting in the kitchen for a teakettle to boil while slowly
shaking his head in admiration.
d219 1
a219 1
"Burns."
d227 3
a229 4
Victor Antonov, watching a teakettle in the kitchen, was nearly ten
years older, heavy set with a bristling mustache that often covered a
mischevious smile.  They had met in college.  The teakettle began to
boil.
d231 1
a231 1
"So what's the point?  Why?"
d233 1
a233 1
"We're going to Mars."
d730 1
a730 1
T - 237 days    some politician must tell a pack of lies
d734 2
a735 2
Mercuriou asked the question without emotion.  Behind him, Hanalei Bay
frothed and seethed gray-green under a steady rain, reflected the
d786 1
a786 1
surf were the only sounds.  Mercuriou watched the streaks of water
d791 4
a794 3
"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."
d800 1
a800 1
"I saw Burns type that password."
d802 1
a802 1
"You've seen me type the password?"
d804 1
a804 1
"I read it over your shoulder."
d806 1
a806 1
Mecuriou snickered again, then covered his mouth with his hand,
d809 1
a809 1
"And what did you see?"
d813 1
a813 1
"It's like tomorrow's lottery numbers today."
d817 2
a818 1
mound in the bottom of the ninth.  He turned to pitch.
d831 1
a831 1
PAUSE FOR UNDERSTANDING.
d845 1
a845 1
HAVE A PRODUCT READY TO SELL.
d847 16
a862 15
"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, because that's the
only way forward!"

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

"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
d870 2
a871 2
"So we need a revolution, and it's not going to happen in this world;
the establishment is too strong.  But out there..."
d873 14
a886 13
"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!"

"Six billion people on this people!  How many of them make a
difference, really?  How many of them change the world?  If the human
race is going into space, it won't happen seven people at a time in a
space shuttle, that's for sure.  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!"
d1095 10
a1104 7
Gospel of Matthew: "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 on ramp, and began thumbing for a ride.
d3251 1
a3251 1
T + 729 days    terrorism must be involved
d3370 1
a3370 1
T + 733 days    pacifism must be promoted
d3627 2
a3628 1
T + 800 days
d3632 3
a3634 1
T + 801 days
d3636 10
a3645 1
WYE2
d3647 3
a3649 1
T + 803 days
d3651 2
a3652 1
ZEE2
d3654 2
a3655 1
T + 904 days
d3657 2
a3658 2
"What's going to happen to the United States, Captain?" Alister asked.
"I mean, is it another Soviet Union, really?"
d3660 2
a3661 30
Mercurio was silent for a minute.  Only the hum of the air conditioner
could be heard.  The young chemist had blurt out the question that
millions of people had wondered at times, and much more recently since
September 11.

"Well, I don't for sure; I don't have a crystal ball or anything.  I
don't think it's going to change; the country seems absolutely
committed to capitalism, and it _is_ absolutely committed to
democracy."  He threw up his arms in an air of desperation, like a man
watching a ship full of drowning people helplessly from the shore.
"Hell, I hope I'm wrong.  I hope they can work out their problems."

"But you don't think they will."  Andrea's response was more a
statement than a question, but the captain shook his head in response.

"No," he answered softly, then took a deep breath and exhaled.
"They've got as serious a problem with capitalism as they once had
with slavery.  The entire society is based on it; it's absolutely
entrenched, and it corrupts everything that it touches.  They're not
going to just change."

"They've got another problem, too," Andrea added.  "They've rejected
Christianity in favor of democracy.  They've displaced morality by
freedom, and gone chasing after populism in lieu of God."

"My best guess is that its people'll just rip it apart from within.
It keeps getting more and more violent, and the only solution the
democrats have is to keep cracking down harder and getting tougher.
Eventually the violence of its own people will destroy it.  That's my
best guess."
a3753 72


T + 1094 days

Big government was in.  A national newsmagazine aired a segment
featuring an interview with a woman who said, "I just assumed if there
was a problem, there'd be a law in place to deal with it."

"Now why would you assume that?"  Mercuriou asked the TV screen
as he watched the program.  "Why would you assume that for _every_
problem we've got, the solution is another law?"

"I know people who don't wear their seatbelts," Andrea said.  Car
safety was the topic of the broadcast.  "They prefer to say a prayer
when they get in the car instead of putting on their seatbelts."

"Exactly!" Mercuriou exclaimed.  "Now who the hell is the great
_majority_ to tell someone that they can't do that; that they
can't decide for themselves to wear that seatbelt or not?"

"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _they've_got_no_other_solutions_.
The only way they know how to deal with _any_ problem they've got is
more laws, more rules, more regulations.  It's inconsivable to them to
find real solutions to their problems!  They choose absolute garbage
for their leaders, and then when they've got problems, and you better
beleive that a society run by capitalists, or communists, or fascists
is going to have problems, their 'solutions' are always the same - get
tough.  They can't figure out that they need to choose good leaders in
the first place, and that the answer to every problem isn't some new
law."

"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _democracy_defines_right_and_wrong_!
These people have no conception of how to behave except what is
defined by the government!  What's right is what's legal, what's wrong
is what's illegal, and there's nothing else!  There's no point at
which the majority can conceive that something that is wrong wouldn't
be prohibited by a law!  It's just completely beyond these people that
the force of government should be used to absolute minimum and that
people have to ask themselves what is right and wrong!  Democracy
makes all these decisions for you!"



T + 1220 days

Ecks: I've got some people here on the phone to talk to you.  They're
Hawaiians, and not all of them seem very keen on your plans.  Let's
start with Beth in Mililani, Beth, you're on the air!

Beth: Yes, I'm a small business owner; I own a dry cleaner and I'd
like Mercuriou to know that I can't afford to give away my services
for free.  I'm not some rich capitalist; I have employees that count
on me for a paycheck, and there are some months when they get paid and
I don't.  He's up there in a space capsule, down here on Earth people
just can't afford his dreamy ideas!

Mercuriou: Well, it's about making sacrifices for what's important to
you.  If it's important to live in harmony with God, to treat others
as we're taught by Christ...

Beth: Look, I'm a Christian, but that doesn't mean I have give away my
livelihood so I can live like a bum on the street!

Mercuriou: Why is it, that when so many people say that they're a
Christian, the next word out of their mouth is "but"?

@


1.336
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d2568 1
a2568 1
T + 124 days    sanity must keep struggling to be heard
d2570 1
a2570 1
"We _have_ to land."
d2572 39
a2610 26
"Why?  Why do you have to land?"  Andrea interjected.  "Why can't you
just go back to Earth?  You've already accomplished more than any
other space mission to date.  _Xplorer_1_ will go down along with
with Vostok 1 and Apollo 11.  So what that we didn't land..."

"We have to land!" the captain shouted.  "If we don't land, they'll
say we failed, and then the capitalists will just come back two years
from now and make the first landing on Mars; hell, they'll probably
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!  But they'll be too late!  _I_'m planting the first American
flag on Mars --- I'm planting it face-down in the Martian dirt!"

"So let them!" Andrea shot back, drawing only a snort in reply.  "Why
do you have to risk everything just to win your private little war?
Or do you seriously think you can survive down there?"

"Well, maybe you find this hard to understand from your cushy NASA
perch," Mercuriou continued, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "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."

"Don't you?  Haven't you?" she challenged him.  "How many billions did
_you_ steal, Marc?  How many toes did you step on?  Don't tell me you
haven't become ruthless!"
d2614 5
a2618 86
"We are landing on Mars," Mercurio stated slowly and firmly, in a
no-nonsense command tone of voice.  "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 + 137 days    madness must prevail

"We saw this with the _Challenger_ accident," Burns was saying.  More
than a hundred million people were watching the crew conference on
television, relayed to Earth through a pair of communications
satellites the crew had deployed into Mars-stationary orbit.  Now
settled into low Mars orbit, and with a landing attempt only days
away, most terrestrial cable TV systems now devoted a channel
full-time to the _Xplorer_1_ video feed, which now featured the
A-core bridge.  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".

"The first indications of the problem were visual, but nobody was
looking at those particular cameras during the launch.  And although
we've got cameras we can operate remotely, the fact remains that a
manned presence in orbit is still by far our best observation option.
There's also the question of reconnaissance.  We've already surveyed
the site from orbit, but a low pass will give us the chance to take
some close-up pictures, then analyze them carefully before committing
to land."

"Also, since we're landing an airplane, we need something like the
salt flats at Edwards.  We don't have a VTOL capability, so our
landing options are a lot more limited.  I really want to take a
careful look at this site _before_ we land, so we'll do like Apollo 10
and make a landing pass without actually landing."

_This_site_ was a flat area on the edge of Utopia Planetia, a few
hundred miles north of the Viking 2 landing site.

"Since I'm the only one here with experience piloting a 767, I figure
I have to go," Burns continued.  "Alister should stay.  I think it's
important for one of the engineers to remain in orbit, and he knows
more about the overall setup of the spaceship than anyone but me,
well, maybe Andrea, too, at this point."

"I'll go.  It's just a test run, right?" Vic asked.

"Yeah, it's a test run, but if something goes wrong..."

"And _anything_ could go wrong", Andrea interjected.  "We've never
even _attempted_ a reentry in this vehicle, and it certainly wasn't
designed for it.  We have absolutely no ground support _whatsoever_.
And we have no rescue option whatsoever."

"Andrea, what do you think?" Mercuriou asked.

The first officer sniffed.

"There was no rescue option on Apollo, either," the captain noted.
"When they had problems on Apollo 13, they just had to work it out,
and that's what we'll have to do if we have problems here."

"Apollo was risky.  Three astronauts had already died in Apollo 1;
they were in this crazed moon race with the Russians trying to prove
that communism wasn't some great advanced new society, a lot like this
crazy venture which is half about, heck, it's _all_ about trying to
prove that capitalism and democracy aren't all they're cracked up to
be, and _still_, Apollo was a better design."  Merceriou started to
shake his head, but Andrea wouldn't be stopped.  "The entire vehicle
was designed from the start with spaceflight in mind; they had tested
the command module on Apollos 7 and 8; they had tested the lunar
module on Apollos 9 and 10."

Mercuriou exploded.

"I can't believe that after two years in space you're still seriously
suggesting that we should just pack up and go home!"

Andrea could only shrug.

"We are not going home!  We are landing on Mars!  We did _not_ come
all this way to turn back!  Burns and Vic go.  The rest of us stay, at
least for the test."

[they decide on a recon flight, to film close up potential landing
sights]
a2622 11
Unlike the space shuttle, or in fact any manned space vehicle before
it, _Xplorer_1's_ 767 was not equipped with a protective heat
shield, nor was its airframe built to withstand the stresses of
supersonic, let alone hypersonic, flight.  Burns corrected for this
deficiency in a simple but effective way - by using the plane's rocket
engines to slow it from orbital speeds while still high above the
atmosphere.  Unlike previous designs, where weight was at an absolute
premium and rocket fuel was heavy and bulky, N-1033 allowed the 767 to
make a complete round trip - it could decelerate to zero and then
accelerate again to orbital velocity.

d2626 4
a2629 3
through the Martian atmosphere, with the plane's tail pointed downward
and its nose aimed at the sky.  Light engine thrust was being used to
slowly brake the plane.
d2637 1
a2637 2
exhaust slowed the vehicle.  From orbit, the rest of the crew watched
through a telescope fitted with several high definition cameras.
d2640 1
a2640 1
around you," Mercuriou reported.
d2648 1
a2648 1
entire ship began to shake like a washing machine's agitator.
d2658 3
a2660 6
The rudder's hydraulic system had lost pressure, its feedback sensors
had gone offline.

The 767 was engulfed at the center of a hurricane with no eye.

"Burns?" Mercurio asked a dead com link.  "Burns?"
@


1.335
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a3965 1
T + 1235 days
d3967 1
a3967 5
In the next few days, the crew had moved all their personal
belongings, along with anything they wanted to return with into OTV 2,
secured everything else they were leaving on the ship, and finally
fired the OTV's one rocket to drop towards a rendevous with the
partially completed International Space Station.
d3969 1
a3969 3
Mercuriou looked back towards his crew, grined, then opened the
pressure door.  For the first time in almost three and a half years,
they set eyes on someone else.  It wasn't who they expected.
@


1.334
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d2402 1
a2402 1
Alister barrelled down the capsule at the speed of a racehorse, his
d2404 2
a2405 2
body rigid as he sailed through a mating node.  Now he waved his arms
in front of his face.
d2409 2
a2410 2
Again he pulled his arms in to his sides, pass another mating node and
began gyrating wildly.
d2414 2
a2415 2
He tucked, grabbed a handlebar as he flew into the bridge, and spun
around into a pullup that he released with just enough backward
d2419 1
a2419 1
"We did it!" he yelled.  "Yeah!"
d2421 2
a2422 1
Mercuriou grinned.
d2424 2
a2425 1
"So what do we do now?"  Yeats asked.
d2427 1
a2427 268
Burns, furthest from the door and enveloped in a haze of marijuana
smoke began to guffaw loudly.

"What now?  I don't know about you, doctor, but I'm taking about a
month off!"




After almost two months in space, the TV interviews had died down, the
ship had assumed a stable configuration, and the crew had settled into
a routine.  Mercuriou had banned smoking in A-core, which had by now
been designated _Xplorer_1_' bridge, so Burns now spent several
hours a day in B-core with a laptop computer propped against his
crossed knee and a marijuana joint floating nearby.  Today, by the
time Andrea opened the pressure door and propelled herself in, the
joint had burnt out but the arid smell of marijuana smoke still hung
in the air, not yet cleared out by the charcoal filters humming in the
background.

"Burns," Andrea started to say, but the ship's chief engineer put a
finger to his lips.  He was wearing one of his favorite T-shirts,
solid black except for a single word across the front, in neon-green
letters formed from a series of wide horizontal lines, like you might
see on a TV screen: MUTE.

Andrea waited, irate.  She didn't support the War on Drugs,
considering it another perfect example of how violently un-Christian
her society was, but it disturbed her that Burns worked on critical
software while intoxicated.  Finally he saved what he was working on,
pushed the laptop away, and looked up.

"Dr. Andrea Yeats," declared he, reveling in the the drug-induced haze.

The laptop drifted away, collided with a cushion he had aimed it for,
and rebound gently before coming to a halt.

"You always work stoned?" she asked.

"Not always, but right now a lot."

"Try every day."

Burns shrugged.

"I don't work stoned, why do you need to work stoned?"

"Because I'm bored."

"Bored?"

"Yes, this work is boring!  When I'm bored, it's easier to work
stoned.  After a while, it catches up with you, and you can't get
anything done because you're just so sick of looking at it, sober _or_
stoned.  That's the problem with being smart.  The smarter you get,
the more you can do, and the fewer other people there are who can help
do it.  Eventually, you get so smart that you can do almost anything,
and nothing actually gets done."

Andrea paused for a minute to consider whether this was profound, or
merely drug-induced nonsense.

"What are you working on?" she finally asked.

"Nothing, really.  I'm running landing simulations for Mars, for about
the million-and-oneth time.  I'm going over the payload manifest
_again_, and trust me I've already gone over it sober several times,
too.  I'm looking at failure modes _again_ on a re-orbit attempt."

"Well, maybe I can help you out."

"Be my guest!" the one engineer exclaimed and motioned the other
towards the laptop.  Andrea didn't move.  Burns slowly started
laughing.

"Don't worry, doctor, I won't let you do all the work," he drawled
with the air of man who'd just maneuvered his way out of an unpleasant
task.  "You didn't come in here for that."

"Actaully, I wanted to ask you about the captain.  You've known him
a long time?"

Burns nodded.  "Since college," he replied.  "We'd roomed together
since our freshman year.  I met him looking for a place to live, and
both of us for the same reason.  We'd been admitted to the university
but didn't apply for housing until that deadline had passed.  We ended
up answering an ad from this medical student named Vic Antonov," he
laughed, thinking back to his receding youth.  "We had a lot of good
times."

"What was he like?"

"Marc?"  Burns was quiet for a minute.  "He's a lot different now than
he was in college.  Back then, all he wanted was a joint, a Coke and
some book in Latin and he was happy.  Now, he's a lot more...
driven," he concluded with a shrug.

"How did he get 'driven'?"

"I guess he did what he had to do to get by."

"He had to steal a billion dollars?"

"If he wanted to fly to Mars, he did," Burns replied quickly, then
slowed his speech.  "He learned to be tough, I guess."  Burns now
paused completely for a moment.  "The kid I knew in college wouldn't
have got us here... of course, the kid _I_ was in college wouldn't
have got here, either!"

Andrea was silent, then blurted out the question she had been
struggling to answer since almost their first day on orbit.

"Why aren't you captain?"

Burns thought for a minute.

"Well, it was his idea to fly to Mars, not mine.  But there's more to
it than that."

Patiently, Andrea waited in silence until Burns went on.

"Marc and I always got along well in college.  I could explain pretty
much all the math stuff and he, really, could understand it.  On the
other hand, he had some great ideas, and one of the best was his Greek
reading tool, and I helped him with all the technical details."

"Then every job I had after college, I was either overwealmed with
work, or bored out my mind.  Usually both at the same time.  Then I
thought back on the Greek reading project.  All I had to do was design
it.  Marc hired two comp-sci programmers with his own coin to program
it and I was just there to fill in the niches when needed.  I made a
better team with my college roommate than with any of those dot-coms,
and mainly because Marc only asked me to do a little.  Most bosses
just want to suck as much work as they can out of you."

"When Marc proposed this thing, it seemed ambitious as hell, but he
knows how to get things done.  He asked me what I needed from him, and
he told me what he needed from me.  I still can't beleive it.  Even
though this thing is so big, it's almost easy.  It's a lot easier than
most of my jobs when I just didn't get what I wanted or needed.  Who
wants to write another stupid routing protocol, anyway?  I just don't
give a shit anymore what 'the customer' wants!"

"'The customer' is God.  When managers lose sight of that, and start
thinking that the customer is the guy who walks through the door, they
get into trouble."

"Well, you should give some management seminars at Chesapeake!  All
they want to see is a line on the stock graph that looks like this..."

Burns held out his arm and angled it diagonally towards the ceiling.


T + 60 days

"What are you, some kind of reporter now?  You gonna go around this
ship trying to draw everybody's life history out of them?"

Vic was peering at a television camera relaying an image from one of
the hydroponic pods.  He was training a neural net to pick cherry
tomatoes with a robot hand.  Andrea thought for a moment before
answering his question.

"I'm no reporter, but I usually have the opportunity to get to know a
crew before we're blasted into orbit together.  I've already spent
more time in space with you guys than with anybody else, and I barely
know anything about you!  Take your medical degree, for example, I
mean why aren't you using it?  Sounds to me like until this gig came
along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot."

The doctor sighed and tried to run the recognizer program again, but
again it labeled half the leaves on the plant as tomatoes.  Vic threw
his hands up in exasperation and pushed away from the computer.

"To hell with this thing!"

"Let me take a look; what is it?"

"Some hot-shot program Alister stole from the Japanese..."

The program was an integrated video recognition and robot control
system designed for industrial automation, the type of environment
where a computer is used to orient computer chips on a circuit board
prior to baking them in a reflow soldering oven.  And it was indeed
powerful, capable of selecting tomatoes from a plant as easily as it
could select bolts from a conveyer belt.  Yet like much late-twentieth
century software, it was difficult to use and required a steep
learning curve before its operator could become proficient.

"Why don't you just go down there and pick your tomatoes by hand?"

"No, no, you don't want to do that, not in a hydroponic system.  You
want to keep each of the pods sealed up - one plant gets a fungus and
it'll run through your entire crop unless you've got isolation."

Andrea set to work learning the complicated feature extraction system
that labeled key spots on the video image, like where the leaves
attached to the stems.  Successfully labeling those points was the
linchpin to the software's operation, and it initially required
careful training by the human operator.  Meanwhile, Vic floated
a short distance away and watched her work.

"I went to medicial school because I wanted to help people; learn to
heal their injuries, ease their pain, that kind of thing.  Mainly what
you learn is how to look things up in a book, recommend expensive
procedures done by for-profit companies just across the street from
your for-profit hospital, scribble out prescriptions for pricy
medicines, and pay your medical school loans.  And you know what the
worst thing was?  I thought medical school would be full of idealistic
youth determined to learn an age-old and honorable profession.  You
know how many idealistic classmates I knew?  One.  The rest just
wanted to know what on the next test so they could pass their class,
get their degree, and move on to the next step towards their
million-dollar beach house."

"So you checked out."

"That's right, I did!"

"So did I.  After I left NASA I moved back to my parents' farm and
took up gardening.  At first I wanted to supply vegetables to a friend
of mine who was starting a restaurant, but he was too far away, it
just wasn't practical.  But there were plenty of needy people nearby
who were delighted to have fresh veggies for dinner."

"So we were both farmers before this 'gig' came along!"

"That's right!"

"Well, I don't know about your farm, Andrea, but as far as sitting up
in the hills growing pot, I'm pretty good at it, and the best part is
that I don't have to deal with any HMO's!"


T + 80 days    professor types must love it

"This is just the kind of thing I'm talking about."

Mercuriou was reading the latest news dispatches from Earth.  Two
giant oil companies had merged to form an even larger oil company.

"Energy crisis," Mercuriou sneered.  "There's no energy crisis.  The
only energy crisis that all the people who control the energy are
capitalists, so they're going to hold back on supply and jack up the
prices to make their record profits.  If they'd run their production
facilities at full capacity we'd have plenty of cheap energy.  By the
time the petroleum runs out in fifty years, we'd be able to develop
nuclear or solar energy, but nooo... that's not how you maximize your
profit.  Not where you want to be on your supply and demand curve, no
sir.  If your demand schedule is inelastic, you want to restrict your
supply schedule, _that_'s how your maximize your profit.  The profit
maximization point is _not_ the maximum supply point.  That's a
freshman mistake, fail you on your ECON 101 exam for that, right?
Well, am I right?"

Mercuriou stopped talking and looked around.  Nobody else was present;
he was alone in his quarters.


T + 302 days    communism must be preached

The first crops from the ship's hydroponic garden ripened, but
they weren't what one member of the crew expected.

"Soy beans?" Alister questioned, imagining the pressed blocks of
tofu he had habitually passed by in the supermarket.

"I rather like them steamed," Vic replied, as the microwave oven
d2430 1
a2430 6
"I don't know about this, mate," the younger man quibbled as he
inspected some of the freshly picked raw beans.  "I'll eat them,
though," he quickly added.

"Ever been to a sushi restaurant?" Vic asked, with a raised eyebrow
that indicated he thought he knew something his friend didn't.
d2432 1
a2432 1
"Sure, I love sushi!  Where's the tuna hand roll?"
d2434 1
a2434 1
"Ever had those green beans they serve as appetizers?"
d2436 1
a2436 2
"Yeah," Alister replied, glancing back down at the soy pods in his
hand.  "That's what these are?"
d2438 4
a2441 6
The doctor nodded affirmatively as he opened the steamer and let some
of the cooked soy beans, along with an ample quantity of steam, float
out into the air.  The aroma of freshly steamed vegatables permeated
the air and quickly brought work to a standstill on a spaceship where
plastic-wrapped spaghetti pouches and freeze dried peaches had been
the norm for months.
d2443 1
a2443 3
"What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated in with Burns
from one direction, almost simultaneously as Andrea entered from a
side module."
d2445 1
a2445 1
"Are these from the garden?" she asked.  "Great!"
d2454 1
a2454 1
"Lycurgus would have approved."
d2456 1
a2456 1
"You can't be serious," Andrea retorted.
d2458 1
a2458 1
"Why not?  The African capitalists want to pump oil and ship it to
d2462 2
a2463 1
"Who was Lycurgus?" Alister asked as Andrea shook her head in disgust.
d2465 47
a2511 4
"He was the founder of Sparta, maybe the greatest socialist success
story ever."

"Were they Communists?"
d2513 2
a2514 160
"Not exactly," Marc replied.  "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."

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

"Lycurgus wanted a nation of warriors... and he got it."

"And you think that's the solution to capitalism?  You _can't_ be
serious."

"Of course not, Doctor, but if competition is so great, isn't social
Darwinism the logical conclusion?  We should just abandon all these
laws against theft and let people compete.  Think how much more
innovation and progress we'd have if kids had to steal their
food... or their gasoline."

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

"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."

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

"The problem is that people don't live by those rules," Vic noted.
"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."

"I don't know about that," the Captain retorted.  "William Gibson
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."

"Gibson had some other explainations, too, you know," Andrea noted.
"Like the intolerance of the Catholic Church for all those Arians it
declared heritics.  And since so many of the barbarian tribes adhered
to the Arian beliefs, well..."

"A large part of Christianity was about propping up the Roman Empire,
and then the Popes, and all the monarchs who got their scepters from
the Popes," Vic continued.  "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."

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

"Yes and no," the doctor replied.  "Yes, people have always had to
work to eat, but this notion that people have to work
_for_the_society_ is what I'm 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, therefore, was
almost perfectly 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.

   "I think the American Indians were the best example of an alternative.
   They raised their children to recognize wild edibles, to make fire by
   rubbing sticks together, to build a bow and arrows from natural
   materials that you'd find lying around a forest.  By the time they
   were fifteen years old, they could literally walk out into the woods
   and take care of themselves.  So you couldn't have a government, at
   least not in form you know it.  Government is based on coersion.  How
   can you coerce people who can just walk out into the woods if they get
   ticked off?  This is why murder and other violent crimes were almost
   unknown in these 'primitive' societies.  This is why the federal
   government couldn't have been nearly so coercive two hundred years
   ago.  Anyone who didn't like it could just pack up and move west."

   "As I said, I think all government, all society, really, is coercive.
   The larger and more inter-dependent a society is, the more coercive it
   is.  I don't think the issue is so much democracy but
   industrialization, and I don't think you can design a system of
   government to fix a society that isolates people from nature, raises
   them so they don't have a clue how to feed themselves without a
   Safeway, teaches them all this science and mathematics, sends them
   running around in cars and airplanes but neglects to teach them how to
   live in harmony with nature, how to quiet their soul, how to look into
   the depths of their being and find out who they really are, and what our
   genuine vision of ourselves really is."

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

"It might not be a bad idea.  The human race is 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, and that exasperates the
problems of society.  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 society and each other, the more oppressive society becomes.
There's just no way around this, unless a hundred million people are
going to wake up one day and suddenly decide to change their human
nature, to abandon greed for generosity, force for persuasion, and
that's just not going to happen."

"And the philosophers keep talking about freedom," Marc added, "but
how can you have freedom in a world where everyone is raised to
be dependent on society?"

"Exactly."

"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 they don't have freedom,
they'll scream you down as a Communist until the bell rings and then
it's off to work.  Go to church on Sunday to hear how you need to work
hard and drop ten percent of your money in the collection plate as
they pass it around."

[ Don't have sex, don't do drugs, don't drink alcohol, and give ]
[ me ten percent of your money as the plate comes around. ]

"You still need me to distinguish true Christianity from, how did Vic
put it, 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."

"That sounds good, Andrea," Marc slowly replied, "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 from them."
a2515 2
"That's funny, Marc, because I don't remember taking anything from
anyone.  Faith in God got _me_ here."
d2517 1
a2517 2

T + 407 days    there must be a sex scene
d2568 1
a2568 3
====== the good must die young [CA] =====

T + 424 days
d2586 2
a2587 1
do you have to risk everything just to win your private little war?"
d2603 3
a2605 6
goal since day one.  We take the risks as they come."

"OK, if we're going to do that..." Burns started, then stopped as
Andrea flung herself through the hatchway, muttering something about
"just like NASA" as she zoomed away through the spacecraft.  Mercuriou
watched her go.
a2606 2
"If you learn to live with disappointment," he noted, "she'll never
leave you for another man."
d2608 1
a2608 2

T + 637 days
d2689 1
a2689 1
T + 650 days    somebody must die
d2751 2
a2752 10
controls, and a calm peace enveloped his soul.

_Well_, _now_I_get_the_answer_key._ Then he reached toward the window,
and exploded into light.

[OR HOW ABOUT...]

a calm peace enveloped his soul as the window exploded into light.

_Now_I_get_the_answer_key...
d2762 2
a2766 4
The storm then then disappeared like a phantom conjured by a voodoo
priestess.


d2782 4
a2785 3
wanted to track what had happened to the cockpit.  More than anything
else, she wanted to interject and ask a question, but the radio time
lag prevented it.
@


1.333
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1362 4
d1742 7
a1748 6
They were glued to the gatecam, which showed police squad cars
responding to the kidnapping report.

Mercuriou: "OK, our launch clock is at zero..."
Alister: "...but..."
Mercuriou: "It doesn't mater!  Let's get to the ship!"
d1750 1
a1750 1
They raced up the road to the hanger, where they found Yeats.
d1757 1
a1757 1
"You have some kind of launch planned?" she asked.
d1779 4
a1782 4
Mercuriou flew to his feet, so enraged 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.
d1786 1
a1786 1
All eyes turned to Mercuriou.
d1832 2
a1833 2
silos on the mesa below, first one rocket thundered aloft, then
another, and another.
@


1.332
log
@changing Andrea's first meeting with Mercuriou quite a bit
@
text
@d938 1
a938 1
T - 112 days    some long-haired fanatic must be the big hero
d1193 1
a1193 1
T - 100 days    the cops must be hot on their tails
d1229 5
a1233 4
Mercuriou: "Oh, it _is_ serious.  There's a countdown clock running on this
launch, just like with NASA's, T minus whatever-the-hell, only we
don't know what time it is.  At some point, that clock goes to zero,
and we better be ready to launch when it does."
d1331 2
a1333 1
T - 2 days    the rich must persecute the poor
d1335 1
a1335 1
[Hilo?]
d1337 1
a1337 1
The turboprop sputtered to a halt
d1339 5
a1343 3
Andrea stood in the terminal of the airport staring at the ATM card
Kyle had given her.  She had taken $100 out of it before she left, and
had about $60 left in change. [DO THIS]
d1352 1
d1354 1
a1354 1
T - 1 day    hitchhikers must be dangerous
d1356 7
a1362 1
Is this the address?  Up there?
d1367 4
a1370 3
What do I tell Kyle?  How much money have I lost?  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...
d1372 1
a1372 1
_You_need_him_to_hold_your_hand_for_you?_
d1687 1
a1687 1
of it crashing down with her.  There were voices in the hallway.
d1697 15
d1729 2
a1730 31
"Manned.  They have spacesuits... and forget three launchs, that's
just Hawaii.  They've got enough fuel someplace in Mexico to lauch
about three hundred!"

The door's electronic lock clicked open and Mercuriou dashed in,
sprinted across the room and slammed his hand down on the telephone to
sever the connection.

"What the hell are you up to?!" she demanded, but instead of
answering, Mercurio took her by the arm and half led, half dragged her
back down the hall to her improvised cell, put her back inside, then
closed and locked the door behind her without saying another word.




The phone was ringing as he returned to the main office.  It was Kyle
Becker, and he demanded to speak to Andrea Yeats.  After first
disclaiming any knowledge of her, Mercuriou finally just hung up the
phone and unplugged its wire.  His crew was gathered around him.

"His caller I.D. showed that the call came from here.  He said that he
had already called the police."

"So what do we do now?" Alister asked.

"Well, I think our launch clock is basically at zero.  Burns,
where do we stand?"

The engineer made a pained expression and shook his head as he
answered, "We're also short on fuel."
d1732 5
a1736 1
"How short?"
d1738 2
a1739 2
"Uhhh... probably only enough for two, maybe three full planetary
cycles."
d1741 3
a1743 1
"But we can make it to Mars, land, and re-orbit, right?"
d1745 1
a1745 3
Burns was quiet for a moment.  "Maybe.  We'd have to get lucky the
first time, though.  We don't have enough fuel to make any
reconnaissance trips without landing."
d1747 1
a1747 2
The room lapsed back into silence while the captain thought.  Finally,
he addressed the rest of the crew.
d1749 2
a1750 40
"Aside from the fuel situation, can anybody think of anything we need
to have, absolutely need to have for this mission that we're short?"

Nobody said anything for a moment.  An alarm went off indicating that
the front gate was being opened.  Alister pulled up a video feed on
his computer terminal that showed three police cars at the gate and
several policemen cutting the lock.

"Blow the bridge," Mercuriou said calmly.  Alister typed a command
that keyed a radio controlled detonator.  In the distance they could
hear the sound of explosives destroying the bridge over the ravine
between them and the gate.

"That won't stop them for long," Vic mused.

"No," Mercuriou agreed.  "Let's go."

Five minutes later, Mercuriou keyed the door to Andrea's cell and
pushed it open.

"Come on," he called out, then left her scrambling to catch the door
before it closed again as he headed down the hall.  He was carrying a
single typewritten sheet of paper, which he now signed and then taped
to the front door.  It read:

    From:  Marcelius Mercuriou, CEO, TenTech
    To:    Lawyers and Bankers
    cc:    Politicians

    Gentlemen,

       Your services are no longer required.


"Well, Doctor, you can go now," Mercurio announced as he walked back
down the hallway.  "Sorry for your detention, but it was necessary at
the time."

He exited the building and headed for an L-shaped access arm that
straddled the 767.  Andrea followed him at a short distance.
d1756 3
a1758 8
Mercuriou climbed the metal staircase that led up the side of the
access arm, while Andrea followed him silently, turning it all
over in her head.
_A_private_manned_launch_.
For the first time since Kyle Becker
had walked into her garden [two weeks] ago, it all clicked.
And for the first time since she
picked up a hitchhiker two days agos, actually wanted to laugh.
d1761 5
a1765 4
Mercuriou reached the hatch on top of the 767 and climbed down.  "This
is where we part..." he began, but never finished, because Andrea
simply jumped down on him, landing her feet on his shoulders and
knocking him down the ladder.
d1767 2
a1768 2
"Captain Mercuriou!  _Captain_ Mercuriou!"  she hollered as
she shimmied down the ladder behind him.
d1770 1
a1770 1
"What's going on?", Vic asked from his seat.
d1781 1
a1781 7
All eyes turned to Mercuriou.  Burns was in the pilot's seat; Alister
occupied the co-pilot's position beside him, and Vic was strapped into
a seat a short distance behind him.  A fourth seat, behind Burns,
waited vacant for Mercuriou.  All three were wearing pressure suits,
but hadn't donned their helments or gloves yet.  Andrea looked around
at the cramped quarters, then turned back to find Mercuriou still
glowering at her.
d1783 1
a1783 2
"If you're heading into space, you need an experienced astronaut.  I
have two shuttle missions under my belt."
d1785 1
a1785 3
"Dr. Yeats, let me assure you, we don't need your help.  NASA aren't
the only people capable of launching a manned mission, as they're
about to find out."
d1787 2
a1788 1
Andrea paused for a moment, looked around, and adjusted her approach.
d1790 1
a1790 1
"So, where are you going?"
d1792 2
a1793 2
Mercuriou stared straight at her for a moment, then pressed his face
within six inches of hers and almost whispered, "Mars!"
d1795 1
a1795 1
Yeats broke into a wide grin.
d1797 2
a1798 1
"That's great; I've always wanted to go to Mars!"
d1800 1
d1802 5
d1808 3
a1810 2
"We're not coming back here for a long time," Mercuriou tried, but was
interrupted by Alister's announcement, "Here come the coppers!"
d1812 1
a1812 1
"OK, that's it!" Mercuriou declared, "Get out, now!"
d1814 1
a1814 1
Andrea's response was to flop down in the only vacant seat.
d1816 1
a1816 4
"Burns, start the engines!" Mercuriou yelled, then kneeled down in
front of Andrea.  "OK, this is it, this is it, I'm not kidnapping you,
I'm not forcing you, but you get out now, I say right now, or you're
in this for good, and I mean FOR GOOD!"
d1818 5
a1822 5
Andrea realized the seriousness of the situation, but she also
realized something else.  This felt like the time she picked up
Dunstan in the rain, like the time she wrote 'math class' on the
auction form, like the time she decided to quit NASA.  It just felt
_right_.  She shook her head, no.
d1824 1
a1824 8
"Fine," he replied in a clipped voice, and told Burns to take off as
he returned aft to lock the hatch.  _Xplorer_1_ sped down the
runway as policeman swarmed the complex.  Burns eased back on the
control yoke, and the rocket plane soared upwards into the sky.  Some
of the policemen on the ground watched with their months agape,
deafened by the roaring rocket engines and stunned by the sight of a
jumbo jet belching rocket exhaust.  Burns climed to 10,000 feet, then
put the ship on auto-pilot.
d1826 3
a1828 3
"Launch cargo!" he instructed Alister, who keyed a command sequence on
his laptop.  From underground silos on the mesa below, a rocket
thundered aloft, then another, and another.
d1852 1
a1852 1
"No, you're not fine!  I'm the ship's doctor, and telling you, Marc,
d1866 2
a1867 4
Vic relented.  Death over jail, that he could understand.  Andrea
was given the spacesuit.

"Let me help you with that," Mercuriou offered.
d1869 1
a1869 4
"I think I remember.  I trained on one of these during an exchange
visit to Star City."

"How do we look with the cargo, Burns?"
d1891 2
a1892 4
black.  As the aircraft turned down towards the horizontal, the Earth
rose into the view of the pilots.  Its curvature was obvious.  An
entire range of the Rocky Mountains lay streched out beneath them, the
plains of the American Midwest stretching beyond.
a1970 9
-----

"How much time have you got in space?"

"Mars!?  First you have to get into orbit!"

-----


d1972 1
a1972 1
T + 1 day   long political rants must be interspersed throughout the text
d2393 1
a2393 1
T + 54 days
d2654 1
a2654 1
T + 80 days
d2679 1
a2679 1
T + 302 days
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1319 1
a1319 1
"I need somebody who can't get blow off by a bunch of techno-babble!"
d1321 3
a1323 1
Andrea laughed anxiously.  "What are you getting me roped into, Kyle?"
d1326 1
a1326 1
_Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_...  especially your best friend!
d1331 5
a1335 1
T - 2 days
d1337 3
a1339 1
_What_am_supposed_to_do_with_this_thing?_
d1341 3
a1343 3
Andrea stood in the terminal of Honolulu International Airport staring
at the ATM card Kyle had given her.  "Just stick it in the machine and
don't worry about it." (Kyle)
d1345 2
a1346 1
_in_no_manner_are_they_to_receive_coins_or_money_
d1348 2
a1349 1
the next day...
a1361 7
Andrea plopped down in the middle of the road.  She was so tired.  If
she could just sleep...




T - 2 days
d1363 7
a1369 159
"So what's your name?"

Andrea glanced over at the hitchhiker as the rental car cruised down
the Interstate.  She had picked him up at the last onramp after
stopping for gas.

"Howard," he replied, finally.

"Howard?"

"Yeah, Howard Stern."

Andrea forced a grin.  But something about the way he replied - the
tone of his voice, maybe - she didn't like.  She fired back with a
slight varient on one of her favorite jokes.

"You know, I used to listen to your show every morning... until my
roommate left for work."

She glanced over at her passenger.  Not even a smile.  A chill
ran down her spine.  _I_don't_like_this_guy._

"Say, you got anything to eat in here?" he abruptly inquired.

"No, not really," Andrea answered, nonplussed by what she thought was
a rude question.  Maybe he was really hungry.
_I'm_letting_this_guy_off_at_the_next_onramp_, she suddenly decided.
_I've_give_him_some_money_for_food._

"Why are we stopping?" he demanded to know as she pulled into the exit lane.

Andrea took a breath before responding.

"I'm letting you off here.  I'll give you a twenty; you can get some
food in one of these restaurants here."

'Howard' flushed red with anger.

"You said you were going to Provo!"

"First, I said I was going _almost_ to Provo, and second... I'm just
not comfortable with you, OK?  I'll give you some money for food,
though."

"I'll give you something for food, bitch!" he sneered as he lept
over on top of her, and seethed in her face.

"I'll give you this right here for food!" he mocked as he pressed his
erection against her torso.  Andrea struggled to free herself from the
seatbelt, and looked desperately around.  Though it was the middle of
the afternoon in a strip mall parking lot, nobody seemed to be in her
immediate vicinity.

'Howard' pushed her into the passenger seat and took the driver's seat
for himself.  As he shoved the car into gear and pulled away, Andrea
tried to open the car door and jump out.  It was locked, and there
seemed no way to unlock it.  By the time she realized that 'Howard' had
locked the door, then unscrewed the nib [?] and pocketed it, they were
back on the highway doing sixty.

While she was fooling with the door, 'Howard' had grabbed her handbag
from the back seat and shoved into the crack between the driver's side
door and car, rendering her cell phone hopelessly out of reach.

Hours past; two hundred miles slipped by underneath, largely in
silence.  The sun set.  Finally, as dusk settled in and the car's fuel
lamp came on, 'Howard' pulled off the freeway at a minor interchange.
The off-ramp descended to a T, with a dirt road to the right, and the
asphalt road passing under a highway bridge to the left.  'Howard'
gunned the engine, made the right turn without stopping, and drove
another half mile until they reached a cattle guard, where he stopped.
Andrea had rolled her window down in anticipation of this moment.
With one swift movement, she grabbed the roof trim, pulled herself out
of the car, and landed smartly on her feet.

_Run!_ came the thought.

She took off down the dirt road, then veered towards the barbed-wire
fence that ran alongside it.  'Howard' was out of the car and coming
after her.  She grabbed one of the fence's wooden posts and used it
for leverage as she clambered up and over the barbed wire.  She fell
to the ground on the other side, but made it over before 'Howard'
reached the fence.  He got over too and tried to chase her, but soon
discovered that he lacked the stamina to pursue the former astronaut,
gave up, and returned to claim the car.

Andrea sprinted for perhaps two minutes, then slowed to a jog and ran
for maybe five more.  Winded, she glanced behind her several times and
saw nobody, but it was now quite dark.  Finally, she stopped, dropped
to the ground, and lay like a soldier, belly-down, watching for any
sign of pursuit.  There was none.  She could see the moving lights of
the Interstate, and farther away, the stationary lights of houses on a
distant hilltop.  After twenty minutes or so, still watching intently
around her, she stood up, walked to a nearby tree, sat down at its
base, cried, calmed herself, prayed, and finally slept until dawn.


T - 1 day

Andrea started hitchhiking herself just after dawn.  She had briefly
considered going to the police, then thought better of it, reasoning
that you forgive your enemies, and that definately included thiefs
("If a man steals your clock, give him your cloak as well"), and even
would-be rapists.  She decided to head for her meeting at TenTech
instead.  The cars sped past her on the Interstate highway as she
waved her thumb by her side.  After all the rides she had given out,
wasn't somebody going to stop for her?

Finally, after almost half an hour of waiting, an elderly lady pulled
her aging Volvo onto the shoulder.  Andrea ran up to the passenger
door and climbed in.  

"Sweety, are you alright?"

"I'm fine, I just had a little bad luck, that's all."

"Well you look a sight; I normally don't pick up hitchhikers, but you
really looked like you were in trouble."

Andrea looked down at herself.  Her jeans and shirt were ripped from
where they had snagged on the barbed wire, her right side was covered
in dirt from when she had fallen, her hair was matted with dried
sweat, and she had slept in her clothes.

_Maybe_that's_why_nobody_picked_me_up, she thought.

The car was old but comfortable, with an Indian dream catcher hanging
from the rear view mirror, a feathered arrow sitting on the dashboard,
and an eccentric collection of cassette tapes in a compartment just
under the ashtray.  Elsie, her driver, was half-Indian herself and
returning home from a visit to her daughter in Albuquerque.  Andrea
rode with her from almost an hour, enjoying a tape of Caribbean island
music while chatting amicably, thinking little about her ordeal and
saying nothing.  Finally, she got out at the exit that led to the
TenTech facility, thanked her new friend, who pressed a liter of water
into her hands before saying goodbye, and watched her drive off.

The interchange was in the middle of the high desert, with a rocky
crag looming to one side and a dirt road winding around it before
leading off to the horizon.  As she remembered from the directions,
the site was another ten miles down this road.  It was just past nine
o'clock in the morning, and even if nobody came along to give her a
ride, she figured that she had water and could walk the distance by
noon.

Nobody came along.  Even though the road was heavily rutted,
not a single vehicle passed along it in either direction.  Andrea
was grateful for the solitude, and as she treked down the road
at a steady pace, she went over the events of the last twenty
hours in her head and started to weep openly.  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 a cloudless 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?"
d1375 6
d1383 6
a1388 17
_No_dumb_fuel_problem_is_worth_this_.  _Maybe_I_should_tell_the_
_police_.  _What_if_he_tries_to_rape_someone_else_?
_What_if_he_succeeds?_

Again she looked skyward and prayed to God.

"I'm trying real hard to forgive that man, but what if I can stop a
rape?  I guess I should turn him in..."

After another boat of tears, she decided to head back to the nearest town,
another exit further on the Interstate, and report the whole thing to
the police.  _I_can't_let_that_son_of_a_bitch_violate_someone_else_ A
sense of peace and calm overcame her, and she sat quietly for a while
longer.  Before she made herself get up and move, though, a dust cloud
appeared where the road met the horizon and grew steadily larger until
a Toyota Corolla appeared at its center, drove up to where she was sitting and
rolled to a stop as she got to her feet.
d1431 2
a1432 2
turned around in his seat, looking at the hitchhiker fixedly as if
seeing her now for the first time.
d1595 6
a1600 6
Andrea woke early in the darkened room.  She had no watch, and there
were no windows, but it _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.
d1605 1
a1605 3
_I'll_try_to_forgive_that_man_'Howard',_Lord_,_just_don't_let_him_attack_anyone_else,_please_.
_And_I_forgive_these_people_here_, too, _they're_almost_comical_compared
_to_'Howard'_
d1608 1
a1608 1
_deliver_us_from_HOWARD_
d1632 4
a1635 8
At least she resolved upon a plan, if you could call it that, because
it consisted in little more than trying to extract any possible
concession from her jailers which would let her get to a telephone.
Finally, she heard voices down the hallway and gave up on any further
meditation.  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.  He turned on the light.  Andrea blinked and
covered her eyes.
d1637 2
a1638 2
"Sorry," he began.  "I brought you some breakfast," he added as
cheerily as he could muster. He put a bottle of water and a military
d1652 1
a1652 1
leading the way about a hundred feet to a ladies' room.
d1654 1
a1654 2
"I'll wait here," he mumbled, looking down at his shoes while she
entered the door.
d1656 28
a1683 49
Getting to the restroom was something she had contemplated earlier,
and she had already thought about what to do.  First, she turned on
the water facuet, and immediately started searching for a way out.
The room had no windows, which she quickly ascertained, 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.  The wall continued straight up to another ceiling several feet
above the panels.

"Damn," she muttered to herself, then climbed down and went
immediately to the other side of the room.  The sinks might not have
been 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.  Grabbing it, she pulled herself up to its level
and straddled it.

She found herself crouched in a dark, dusty space that extended about
four feet above the drop ceiling to a higher concrete ceiling.
Plumbing pipes, electrical conduits, and some large air ducts
crisscrossed the space, some, including the drop ceiling itself,
suspended from wires, other bolted to it, including the pipe she had
pulled herself up with.  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 well beyond the bounds of
the bathroom.  She clambered along the pipe in that direction,
gingerly dodging the various obstacles and avoiding putting her weight
on anything suspended only by wires.  Once she thought she was past
the bathroom wall, she reached down pulled aside one of the ceiling
panels below.

In the sunlit room directly beneath her was a chair siting behind a
desk covered with books and papers.  Still holding onto the pipe, she
swung her legs over the opening in the ceiling, and dropped down.  She
slipped, instinctively grabbed the drop ceiling, and brought two of
its tiles crashing down with her.  There were voices in the hallway.

Andrea picked up the telephone handset on the desk, then stopped to
look at the contents of the desk.  Amid reference books on celestrial
mechanics, materials science and rocket propulsion were a set of
blueprints for a rocket engine.  Looking just at the cover page, she
knew it wasn't either an American or a European design.  The turbo
pump setup was completely novel, and all the text was in both English
and Spanish.  _Spain_never_designed_a_rocket_engine_, she thought, as
she absent-mindedly replaced the handset, now totally engrossed in the
papers before her.  She thought back to the conversation she'd
overheard yesterday.  _They_aren't_selling_fuel; _they're_hoarding_it.
_They_need_spacesuits_for_something._ And now the rocket design;
it only added up one way...  Her contemplation was cut short by
Mercuriou's loud voice from the hallway.
d1687 2
a1688 7
Broken from her reverie, Andrea snatched up the telephone once more,
punched nine and got a second dial tone.  Looking out the window, she
could see that the sun had been up for several hours.  Additionally,
Houston was an hour ahead of them, so she hoped Kyle was already at
work, or had at least turned on his cell phone.  She heard noises in
the room behind her as she dialed the number.  He answered on the
second ring.
d1692 1
a1692 2
"My God, girl, where are you?  The police are looking all over the
Rockies for you!"
d1696 3
a1698 1
"What?!"  He was incredulous.  "But they found your car near Denver!"
d1700 1
a1700 3
"Look, that's not important now..." she began as she continued to flip
through papers.  "What's important is that there planning a launch."
She was now looking at a blueprint for a chemical factory.
d1702 3
a1704 1
"What the payload?"
d1706 3
a1708 1
Andrea stopped looking and thought for a minute.
d1710 4
a1713 2
"Manned.  They have spacesuits."  She returned to the papers.  "And
forget three launchs..."
a1714 1
The door's electronic lock clicked open and Mercuriou dashed in.
a1715 3
"...they've got enough for three hundred some place in Mexico!" she
yelled as her irate captor sprinted across the room and slammed his
hand down on the telephone to sever the connection.
a1716 5
"What the hell are you up to... _captain_?" she demanded, but instead
of answering, Mercurio took her by the arm and half led, half dragged
her back down the hall to her improvised cell, put her back inside,
then closed and locked the door behind her without saying another
word.
@


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@
text
@d1241 1
a1241 1
Mercuriou put his hands on his hips and stared at him.
d1245 2
a1246 4
They were standing at the base of a modified 767, its engines replaced
with rockets, its doors welded shut, a hydraulic mating adapter
mounted on the nose of the aircraft and another, near the center,
opening directly upward.
d1256 3
a1258 3
Mercuriou rolled his eyes, and they all looked at Alister like he had
just ruined the punchline to a good joke.  Then they looked at the
ship and visualized...
d1263 2
a1264 3
Mercuriou now shook. "You seriously want me to put _that_... _there_!"
He motioned toward the skin of the ship near the cockpit.  Vic
studied the spot thoughtfully.
d1282 1
a1282 1
[ Mercuriou blew.
a1283 1
"Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it _Xplorer_1_!"
d1285 1
a1285 2

T - 7 days    loyality must receive its just reward
d1295 1
a1295 2
comes out of the man's mouth anymore.  He's a shyster.  I just can't
figure out his angle."
d1300 12
a1311 15
it's cracked up to be.  That's what doesn't make sense about it.
They're not trying to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  We've actually got
the goods in hand, hell, we've still got about a hundred liters of the
stuff over in Building 17.  But they always claim to be having
production problems, and that they need more time."

"Production problems... 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."

Kyle nodded.  He knew this as well, but only because he had first
calculated the quantity of nitric acid required to produce a kilogram
of nitroglycerine, looked up the energy released by a kilogram of
nitroglycerine and compared that to the energy consumed by a shuttle
launch.
d1319 8
a1326 13
"I don't need a detective, Andrea.  I need someone who understands how
this technology works and isn't going to be put off by a bunch of
techno-babble!"

Andrea sighed deeply.  _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_...
especially your best friend!

"All right," she relented, "I'll go."

"Great!  I've got everything set up.  I've got a NASA ID for you.  It
identifies you as an astronaut and a special consultant.  I'm
advancing you all your money up front, and I'll take care of the
paperwork.  Just fly out there and see what you can figure out."
d1339 18
d2039 2
d2220 9
d3341 1
a3341 1
T + 650 days
d3408 20
d3433 3
a3435 6
Kyle's face disappeared and the video transmission changed into a
crystal-clear and dramatic vision of the last seconds of the 767, seen
from almost directly above, being buffeted in slow motion by wind
gusts.  It had been almost a full day since the Icarus crew had
watched stunned as the aircraft had disappeared in the storm, which
then dissipated like a phantom conjured by a voodoo priestess.
d3439 3
a3441 9
The monitor still showed the 767, now overload with a grid of hundreds
of tiny pressure vectors.  They clearly showed very strong vortexs
coming off the running engines, enlarging and growing instead of
contracting, all turning counterclockwise and coalescing into a
massive counterclockwise disturbance that engulfed the aircraft.  Just
as it began to break up, NASA Houston cut back onto the monitor.  Kyle
was sitting in his accustomed place behind a long desk with computer
monitors strung out in front of it and white-shirted engineers both
standing and seated behind.
d3444 10
a3453 19
but she could get that later from Alister.  More than anything, she
wanted to interject and ask Kyle to show the rest of the film, but the
radio time lag prevented it.

"Andrea, we don't have any idea what happened other than it looks like
the engines triggered a massive atmospheric disturbance, and
absolutely nothing in any of our Martian atmospheric models predicts
anything like it.  There were a lot of things we were afraid could go
wrong with the vehicle but this wasn't one of them.  Incidently, our
spectroscopic analysis showed water vapor in the engine's wake, which
isn't produced by ten-thirty-three and isn't in the Martian
atmosphere, so we're wondering if something down there in the reaction
byproducts triggered additional reactions in the Martian atmosphere,
but this is all just educated guesswork."

"And we still don't think the crash was survivable, so I really have
to advise against your resupply plan.  I know you want to do it, and
so do I, but I'm looking at it from the angle of maybe needing those
supplies to get the three of you home."
d3455 2
a3456 1
"That's all for now."
d3459 6
a3464 2
the projector - a diagram of their orbit position, their coordinates
in three different reference frames, a clock in universal time.
a3465 1
The Captain was silent.
d4293 1
d4295 1
a4297 1
T + 770 days
a4298 1
"Do you beleive that we're too primitive for jet aircraft?"
a4299 1
There was no trace of sarcasm in Alister's voice.  He had already
d4305 1
a4305 38
Andrea took a deep breath before answering.

"I believe technology is neutral.  It's a tool; just a different kind
of tool, a knowledge-based tool.  Tools aren't good or evil; it's what
men choose to do with them that makes them good or evil.  No, that's
not quite right, the tool isn't made good or evil, it's the choice
itself that forms good and evil.  I agree with Vic to the extent that
we're really too primitive to even evaluate good and evil.  I mean, a
significant segment of mankind still beleives that God doesn't exist."

Alister frowned, puzzled.  "You think that makes us primitive?"

"Sure," Andrea replied.  "A lot of people once beleived that the Earth
was stationary and the Sun revolved around it.  Do you think that
people with that belief are too primitive for manned spaceflight?"

"Manned spaceflight would be basically impossible with that belief
set," Mercuriou answered.

"Don't be so sure," Andrea answered.  "Men sailed around the globe
without even accurate timepieces to measure longitude.  Planck
formulated the core of quantum mechanics based on the amount of light
given off by a block of metal as you heat it.  The first computers
were built with _vacuum_tubes_, not transistors.  Don't underestimate
human ingenuity, Captain.  Some even flew to Mars in a 767."

Merciriou was forced to grin, and Andrea continued.

"The point is that such a belief set is a severe handicap to manned
spaceflight, but doesn't exclude it completely.  Likewise, atheism is
a severe handicap to making moral value judgements, but doesn't
completely preclude figuring out that murder is wrong.  In other
cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting that they
_have_to_kill_ for the sake of their 'freedom'.  You'll find people
who _do_ believe in God clinging to the belief that when a homeless
man walks into their restaurant, they can turn him away with a sneer
and walk into the church the next day with their head held high.
That's how primitive we are.  Two thousand years ago we were told
d4307 1
a4307 1
that it was God speaking and the other half still can't understand
@


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@
text
@d758 4
a761 3
frothed and seethed gray-green, 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.
d787 1
a787 1
"I'm totally swamped."
d801 1
d804 9
a812 8
the whiteboard then rearranging the chairs, placing one directly in
front of his desk and the other behind it and to one side.  By the
time Burns returned with Alister, he had returned to his chair, swung
it around, and was watching the rain pelt against the executive
suite's plate glass windows.  Vic directed Alister to sit, and Burns
closed the door.  The pelting rain and the breaking surf were the only
sounds.  Mercuriou watched the streaks of water sliding down the glass
and gazed on toward the reef break.
d818 3
a820 3
Alister's face flushed red.  He had been avoiding his bosses all day,
but there now seemed little point in denying the obvious.  Anyway, it
was curiosity that had driven Alister; he wasn't a natural liar.
d822 1
a822 2
"Yeah, I saw Burns type that password once and I wanted to see what
was on that machine."
d826 1
a826 1
"Yeah, I read it over your shoulder."
d828 2
a829 3
Silently, Burns thought about when and how that could have happened.
Mecuriou snickered, then tried to cover his mouth with his hand, as he
wanted to appear tough.  He pressed on.
d837 3
a839 23
Mercuriou got up out of his chair and walked to the window.  He was
conscious that the success or failure of their entire plan hung on his
next words and actions.  A calm overcame him.  He felt like an ace
pitcher walking to the mound in the bottom of the ninth.  The game was
on the line, and he was the only one who could deliver.  Turning
around from the window, he faced the young chemist.

"OK, you know there's some kind of hack going on here.  Maybe you even
suspect that this is some kind of front operation.  But you haven't
figured out the truth, let me assure you."

Mercuriou paused for effect, as his mind flashed back to college, to
one of his most energetic professors, scrawling "RHETORIC" across the
blackbord in foot-high block letters.

"This is a manned mission to Mars," he stated calmly.  "I'm the
commander; Burns is chief engineer; Vic is the ship's doctor."

Alister looked around the room.  He could believe that he was about to
be fired.  What he couldn't imagine that the man backed by the picture
window was a space captain, or that the pot-smoking hacker reclining
on the coach was a chief engineer, or that the mischievous
cook/doctor/gardener was "Bones" McCoy.
d841 2
a842 1
"Yeah, right, and I'm Mother Theresa."
d844 1
a844 1
"This is no joke," Burns informed him.  They were absolutely serious.
d846 1
a846 1
"What I saw on that computer last night was no space shuttle."
d848 3
a850 4
"You saw the California state Keno lottery drawing,"
Mercuriou stated in a tone of voice Burns might have used to declare
that gravity manifested itself as curvature of a four-dimensional
space invarient under Lorentz transformations.
d852 1
a852 1
ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY, the blackboard had read.
d854 1
a854 4
"Of course, you could have walked into Rumors and seen the California state
Keno lottery drawing," Mercuriou continued, walking forward
and consciously dominating the space of the room, without approaching
close enough to impede on Alister's private space.
d856 1
a856 2
"Except that you saw _today's_ California state Keno lottery
drawing."
d858 1
a858 1
Alister looked from one man to the other.
d860 1
a860 1
"So, what, you've hacked the state lottery to pay for a Mars mission?"
d862 1
a862 3
"Not even close," Mercuriou answered.  "We could hack every state
lottery in the country and barely have the money to put a communications
satellite in orbit."
d864 3
a866 1
RHETORIC IS A PERFORMANCE ART.
d868 15
a882 45
Mercuriou slowly waved his arm in a sweeping gesture that including
the desk, the office, the computers, the house.  The truth slowly
started to dawn on Alister.

"You mean TenTech... all this... is stolen?  Hacked?"

"Stolen," Mercuriou answered.  "Every penny."

Only the rain could be heard.

MORALITY EXISTS IN A CONTEXT, read the blackboard.

"Now, we could have moved to Arruba and spent the next ten years sipping
pia coladas on the beach," Mercuriou continued.  "We could have
bought a restaurant, used it to launder the money, and then sat back
and let someone else run it.  We could have checked out of this great
society here and done whatever the hell we pleased."

"But I'm no petty thief!  We hacked that lottery because we _needed_
the money, needed it to do something that'll make a difference for
this whole world.  We going to push this space technology forward,
come up with a rocket fuel that works well, that will really let
people do what Robert Heinlein just dreamed about, quit piddling
around in Low Earth Orbit, and _fly_to_Mars_.  Grow your own food in
orbit!  Make your own power!  Mine the asteroid belt for the
minerals you need!  Design your own computer chips up there!"

"Think about it, Alister!  Six billion people on this people!  How
many of them make a difference, really?  How many of them change the
world?  If the human race is going into space, it won't happen seven
people at a time in a space shuttle, that's for sure.  It going to
take someone to jump start it; to show that ordinary people can make
it up there, not just a bunch of government prima donas.  And
_to_hell_ with what our great leaders here on Earth think with all
their millions of dollars."

"What do they want to do with those millions?  Drive technology
forward?  Really?  Promote innovation?  Is that why they've outlawed
on-line libraries?  Promote freedom?  Is that why they want a wall
across our southern border?  Liberty?  Is that what you call the drug
war?"

"All they want to do is sell you gasoline, or video games, or ballgame
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
d891 15
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the police and the military are too strong.  But out there..."
d910 2
a931 8
"After that, the asteroids.  They're 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
spaceships.  Some of it, like silicon chip production, will actually
be easier in a vacuum.  We've got plenty of food, but we'll also have
to figure out hydroponics for when it runs out.  That's Vic's job."

a937 2
[at least a year and a half required here]

d1153 3
a1155 3
Darryl bought dinner, during which Andrea showed him a small
plywood replica she kept of the San Daimano cross and told
him the story of St. Francis.
d1179 2
a1180 2
As they drove on after dinner, Darryl began squawking into his C.B.
radio as they approached the Iowa line.  [CHECK TIMES AND DISTANCES]
d1193 1
a1193 1
T - 100 days  [SHOULD BE A MONDAY; HAVE AN ACCOUNTANT CHECK THESE NUMBERS]
d1195 1
a1195 1
T - 100 days    the cops must be hot on their tails
d1296 2
a1297 2
limeade on the table and two glaces half consumed, Andrea continued to
read the sheaf of papers in silence.
d1733 11
a1743 2
"It has to done, Vic!  It just has to be done!  Alister!  Get an MRE
and a bottle of water and give it to Dr. Yates!"
d1961 2
a1962 3
    To:    Lawyers
           Bankers
           Politicians
a2214 3



d2228 4
a2231 5
them together as they went.  They had worked through the Greenwich
Mean "night" [CHECK THIS] into the morning, collecting first Module
A-1 Captain's Quarters and then attaching to it Module A-1-1 Captain's
Storage.  Mercuriou then halted the entire operation to dock with A-1,
equalize pressure, and disappear.
d2259 4
a2262 5
from the camera.  Two vertical Roman lances with globes of Mars
inpaled [SP] between them rose on either side.  Mercuriou himself was
dressed in a crisp white uniform and floated leisurely behind a
podium, at whose rear was a computer screen visible only to the
speaker.
@


1.328
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d689 1
d695 14
a708 25
for explaining the complex interactions between the electrons and
nuclei 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 gravitational 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 to explain the entire physical universe.
Like two teams drilling a tunnel from opposite directions, physicists
and chemists had pursued this common quest, the physicists cutting
deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the atom, the chemists
measuring and categorizing dozens of properties of the myriad array of
chemical substances.  In the early decades of the twentieth century,
men like Planck, Schroedinger, and Dirac developed the quantum theory
that could finally explain the layered construction of atoms and
molecules.  For the first time, physics was beginning to decode the
Rosetta Stone of matter.  Quantum mechanics, the most spectacularly
successful physics theory of all time, came with one slight caveat -
nobody knew how to solve its equations.


"Bloody hell!" exclaimed the young South African as he smacked the
side of the computer monitor.  The screen image
wavered and recovered as Burns walked over behind
him.  He was wearing a tee-shirt a student group had made in
college.
d718 18
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The "Big Three" were out of town somewhere, and most of the other guys
had taken the weekend off, so the young South African had the place to
himself.  Twenty years old, with matted blond hair, he had left his
home to study abroad, finished a double major in chemistry and
physics, then was able to stay in the United States after graduating.
TenTech was his first job after college.
d739 1
a739 1
young chemist to watch him login to 'genie', and now Alister used his
d757 4
a760 6
Mercuriou asked the question without turning around.  Instead, he
leaned back in his chair and watched the rain pelt against the
executive suite's plate glass windows.  The gray-green ocean frothed
and seethed, 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.
d762 1
a762 1
"He ran the program," Burns replied.
a765 4
Burns thought for a moment.  The pelting rain was the only sound in
the office.  Mercuriou watched the streaks of water sliding down the
glass.

d768 1
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"So Alister knows we're up to something; he just doesn't know what,"
Mercuriou concluded, turning around in his chair and folding his hands
in front on him on the desk.  Burns nodded.  Mercuriou sniffed, then
chuckled, then finally broke out in an awkward guffaw.
d770 2
a771 1
"You think this is funny?" Vic inquired from a corner seat.
d773 1
a773 4
"I think it's hilarious," Mercuriou replied, kicking back in his
chair.  "Our whole operation is made possible by Burns' super-hack,
and now along comes this twenty-year-old kid who hacks _your_ system!"
Now how do we look on our launch preparations?"
d775 3
a777 5
"We've almost got the engines finished," Burns replied.  "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
ten-thirty-three.  The bottom line," he concluded, "is that we still
don't have enough money."
d779 4
a782 2
"OK," Mercuriou continued, more thoughfully, "we need another
big hack.  Or two."
d784 1
a784 2
Vic shifted uncomfortably on his coach, but said nothing.  It was
Burns who objected.
d786 1
a786 1
"Well I certainly don't have the time; I'm swamped."
d788 1
a788 1
"Can Alister do that for you?"
d790 1
a790 3
Burns screwed his eyebrows and thought for a moment, begining to
follow Mercuriou's line of thought.  He had known Alister for almost
two years (check chronology) now.
d792 2
a793 3
"He's sharp, real sharp.  One of the best programmers I've got, and
yeah, it looks like he can hack, too.  I guess the real question is,
will he hack for us?"
d795 2
a796 2
Mercuriou raised a finger in the air, and felt an adrenaline rush
surge within him, like he was about to ask a stranger out on a date.
d800 10
a809 2
As soon as Burns returned with the young man, Mercuriou directed
him to close the door.
@


1.327
log
@alister back at the end, no 'beginning'
@
text
@d679 2
d689 1
a689 168
[at least a year and a half required here]

T - 312 days    some long-haired fanatic must be the big hero

"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".

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

"Oh, come on, Andrea!  They're publishing the whole sythesis pathway!
And disclaiming all the patent right!  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?

"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."

"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!"

"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."

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

"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.  That's what I meant.  I'm
not going back into space again."

"OK, well... OK."

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

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

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

"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.

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

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

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 on another local headed into one of the
older sections of town, exiting [IMPROVE VERB] at a hundred-year-old
Catholic church that occupied almost 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, bearing a
colorful sign that read, "The Franciscan Fryer".

Entering, she found herself in a white tiled dining room populated by
collapable white tables and cushioned metal chairs which two 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.

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

Francis of Assisi had looked around at the crumbling chapel he knelt
in and set out immediately to do as the vision commanded.  He [HAD]
returned to his father's cloth shop, 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 a reluctant priest.  Andrea had always felt
that it was a typical message from God: simple, powerful, and very
easy to misunderstand.

"We don't start serving until eleven," said the black man unfolding
chairs.

"I'm looking for Brother Dunstan."

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

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!"

"Hello, Dunstan!"

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

"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!"

"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?"

"No, thanks, I'm heading back to my mom's place in Iowa today.  I just
came down to visit Kyle Becker, 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?"

"Yes, it seems to be.  I know Kyle's quite excited about it."
d691 28
a718 89
"Well maybe we'll have one of our oblates flying back into space,
ehh?"

Andrea shook her head vigorously.

"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: "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 on ramp, and began thumbing for a ride.

[INSERT HER HITCH HIKING EXPERIENCE]

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."

"That's fine.  Thanks."

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 Iowa.

They talked through the afternoon as the miles fell away.  He was an
aspiring writer who wanted to hear everything she could tell me about
NASA.  He had also been busted for computer crime, was wearing a
monitoring bracelet on his ankle, and had now returned to his former
profession.  As dinner time approached, Andrea explained a bit more
about her religious order.

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

"But you get everything by begging, right?"

Darryl bought dinner, 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?"

"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?"

"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 should go around the dining room with a bowl!?"

"Yes, 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."

As they drove on after dinner, Darryl began squawking into his C.B.
radio as they approached the Iowa line.  [CHECK TIMES AND DISTANCES]

"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.  She was able to help him navigate
the back roads leading there, called her mom to come meet her, and was
home in bed by three o'clock in the morning.



T - 139 days    youth must be corrupted
d751 1
a751 1
T - 137 days    some politician must tell a pack of lies
d829 244
a1072 1
"Yeah, I read it over your shoulder."
d1074 8
a1081 3
Silently, Burns thought about when and how that could have happened.
Mecuriou snickered, then tried to cover his mouth with his hand, as he
wanted to appear tough.  He pressed on.
d1083 2
a1084 1
"And what did you see?"
d1086 8
a1093 1
Alister shrugged.  An awkward silence followed, then he answered.
d1095 2
a1096 1
"It's like tomorrow's lottery numbers today."
d1098 1
a1098 6
Mercuriou got up out of his chair and walked to the window.  He was
conscious that the success or failure of their entire plan hung on his
next words and actions.  A calm overcame him.  He felt like an ace
pitcher walking to the mound in the bottom of the ninth.  The game was
on the line, and he was the only one who could deliver.  Turning
around from the window, he faced the young chemist.
d1100 1
a1100 3
"OK, you know there's some kind of hack going on here.  Maybe you even
suspect that this is some kind of front operation.  But you haven't
figured out the truth, let me assure you."
d1102 5
a1106 3
Mercuriou paused for effect, as his mind flashed back to college, to
one of his most energetic professors, scrawling "RHETORIC" across the
blackbord in foot-high block letters.
d1108 1
a1108 2
"This is a manned mission to Mars," he stated calmly.  "I'm the
commander; Burns is chief engineer; Vic is the ship's doctor."
d1110 1
a1110 5
Alister looked around the room.  He could believe that he was about to
be fired.  What he couldn't imagine that the man backed by the picture
window was a space captain, or that the pot-smoking hacker reclining
on the coach was a chief engineer, or that the mischievous
cook/doctor/gardener was "Bones" McCoy.
d1112 1
a1112 1
"Yeah, right, and I'm Mother Theresa."
d1114 1
a1114 1
"This is no joke," Burns informed him.  They were absolutely serious.
d1116 4
a1119 1
"What I saw on that computer last night was no space shuttle."
d1121 1
a1121 4
"You saw the California state Keno lottery drawing,"
Mercuriou stated in a tone of voice Burns might have used to declare
that gravity manifested itself as curvature of a four-dimensional
space invarient under Lorentz transformations.
d1123 11
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ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY, the blackboard had read.
d1135 9
a1143 4
"Of course, you could have walked into Rumors and seen the California state
Keno lottery drawing," Mercuriou continued, walking forward
and consciously dominating the space of the room, without approaching
close enough to impede on Alister's private space.
d1145 2
a1146 2
"Except that you saw _today's_ California state Keno lottery
drawing."
d1148 3
a1150 1
Alister looked from one man to the other.
d1152 2
a1153 1
"So, what, you've hacked the state lottery to pay for a Mars mission?"
d1155 1
a1155 3
"Not even close," Mercuriou answered.  "We could hack every state
lottery in the country and barely have the money to put a communications
satellite in orbit."
d1157 2
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RHETORIC IS A PERFORMANCE ART.
d1160 1
a1160 3
Mercuriou slowly waved his arm in a sweeping gesture that including
the desk, the office, the computers, the house.  The truth slowly
started to dawn on Alister.
d1162 1
a1162 1
"You mean TenTech... all this... is stolen?  Hacked?"
d1164 9
a1172 1
"Stolen," Mercuriou answered.  "Every penny."
d1174 1
a1174 1
Only the rain could be heard.
d1176 3
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MORALITY EXISTS IN A CONTEXT, read the blackboard.
d1180 1
a1180 5
"Now, we could have moved to Arruba and spent the next ten years sipping
pia coladas on the beach," Mercuriou continued.  "We could have
bought a restaurant, used it to launder the money, and then sat back
and let someone else run it.  We could have checked out of this great
society here and done whatever the hell we pleased."
d1182 1
a1182 8
"But I'm no petty thief!  We hacked that lottery because we _needed_
the money, needed it to do something that'll make a difference for
this whole world.  We going to push this space technology forward,
come up with a rocket fuel that works well, that will really let
people do what Robert Heinlein just dreamed about, quit piddling
around in Low Earth Orbit, and _fly_to_Mars_.  Grow your own food in
orbit!  Make your own power!  Mine the asteroid belt for the
minerals you need!  Design your own computer chips up there!"
d1184 8
a1191 8
"Think about it, Alister!  Six billion people on this people!  How
many of them make a difference, really?  How many of them change the
world?  If the human race is going into space, it won't happen seven
people at a time in a space shuttle, that's for sure.  It going to
take someone to jump start it; to show that ordinary people can make
it up there, not just a bunch of government prima donas.  And
_to_hell_ with what our great leaders here on Earth think with all
their millions of dollars."
d1193 6
a1198 5
"What do they want to do with those millions?  Drive technology
forward?  Really?  Promote innovation?  Is that why they've outlawed
on-line libraries?  Promote freedom?  Is that why they want a wall
across our southern border?  Liberty?  Is that what you call the drug
war?"
d1200 2
a1201 9
"All they want to do is sell you gasoline, or video games, or ballgame
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!
The only innovation our leaders want is innovation that they can
control!"
d1203 1
a1203 2
"So we need a revolution, and it's not going to happen in this world;
the police and the military are too strong.  But out there..."
d1205 3
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Mercuriou let his voice trail off, walked to the window, and folded
his hands behind his back.
d1209 1
a1209 1
MAKE IT SEEM LIKELY!
d1211 3
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"OK," he concluded in a low voice, "so it all sounds too wild to be
true.  Fine."
d1215 1
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He turned and looked Alister straight in the eye [CA].
d1217 6
a1222 1
"Look at our launch facility.  Then tell me I'm full of shit."
d1224 1
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T - 131 days
d1231 2
a1232 167
An entire side of the two story warehouse was taken up by large
stainless steel tanks, interconnected with various machines by a
complex system of plumbing that ran across the ceiling.  Various
blueprints, rulers and small engine components were spread across a
series of tables arranged haphazardly throughout the room.  A
discarded rocket engine, with a large crack down one side, lay propped
against the far wall.  About a dozen latinos, busy working on one
piece of equipment or another, glanced at the two Caucasians as they
entered and then went back to work.

"This is where we're building the rocket engines," Burns explained.
"The entire nozzle and combustion chamber is fabricated as one
monolithic piece, and a lot of the plumbing, too.  First, we cut
cross-sectional patterns out of ceramic fiber and stack them up to
form the engine shape."

He led the South African to one of the large tables as he spoke.  On
it were bits and pieces of a black fabric that looked like course wool.
Next to the table was an automated cutting machine controlled from a
computer on the table.  A large roll of the fabric lay on the other
side of the machine, and one the workers was supervising it as it ran.

The cutting was done by an industrial laser in a moving mount about
two feet above the table, its beam pointed straight down at the sheet
of fabric laid flat on the table beneath.  The laser moved left and
right on a thin horizontal beam that moved forward and backwards, all
under computer control.  The net result was that by positioning the
horizontal beam with one servo motor, and positioning the laser along
the beam with another, the computer could aim the laser at any point
on the table below.

"Don't stick your hand in there!"  Burns joked.

The laser was cutting a piece of fabric as they approached, and the
smell of burning fiber wafted up into the air as a thin but steady
stream of smoke rose up from where the pencil-thin red light touched
the black fabric.  The laser moved slowly around the pattern, cutting
a thin line through the fabric as it went, its position indicated by a
red dot on the computer screen on the table to its left, which showed
a graphic animation of the pattern being cut.  The cuts were a
concentric series of near-circular gray lines, and the areas between
the lines were colored yellow and green on the display.  As they
watched, the computer completed cutting one of the lines.  The laser
shut off briefly as it repositioned to the next line, then turned on
and began cutting again.

"The yellow areas are discards," Burns explained, kicking at a pile of
scrap fabric underneath the table for emphasis.  "Each of the green
areas is a thin cross-section of the rocket engine.  There's 231 of
them in total.  They get stacked up in order in this graphite mold."

He walked past the laser cutter and showed Alister a large, solid
black casing covered with soot.  Rectangular on the outside, it opened
in two halfs to show the outline of a rocket engine cut out within.

"After a complete set of fabric cross-sections are in the mold, we
close it, compress it down, and put it in the kiln."

The kiln was a shiny steel tank that reached nearly to the roof
of the building.  Much of the facility's plumbing came into it.
An entire side of the tank swiveled open to reveal electric
heating coils, as well as various valves and gauges.

"We turn on the kiln and start pumping hydrogen and MTS gas into its
bottom."

"MTS?" Alister asked, unfamiliar with the acronym.

"Methyl trichlorosilane.  It's stable at room temperature, but starts
reacting with hydrogen at about a thousand degrees Celsius.  Decomposes
into silicon carbide and hydrogen chloride.  The silicon carbide is
deposited as a solid into the gaps between the carbon fibers; that's
why we use such a course fabric.  It's the silicon carbide we're
really interested in; it's stable until almost 3000 degrees Celsius,
and that makes it ideal for rocket construction.  Once the entire
fabric has been filled in with silicon carbide, we shut down the
kiln, crack open the mold, and take out our new rocket engine!"

They walked towards the rear entrance of the building, where a pile of
black ceramic pieces lay against one wall.  Burns picked up one of
them and handed it to his student.

"That's what it looks like when it's done.  If you look closely,
you can just barely see where the fabric was layered, but it's
really hard to tell."

Alister took the piece in his hand.  It was heavy and dense, smooth
and curved on its front and back surfaces, with ragged, sharp edges
around the sides.  Several larger pieces in the pile were clearly
broken parts of a rocket engine, and Alister concluded that the entire
pile had once been an engine as he tossed the piece back.

"What happened to that one?" he asked.

"It blew up when we test-fired it," Burns replied.  He continued his
explaination as Alister looked at him sharply.  "The Mexicans didn't
do a good enough job of aligning the fabric pieces.  They learned the
hard way."

They walked out the back of the building onto the flat dirt mesa.
Burns continued straight ahead, towards an asphalt runway stretching
away into the distance.  A black rocket engine was mounted
horizontally on a test stand and aimed away from the complex, across
the empty expanse of scrub brush, the closest ground to the stand a
charred black ellipse.

"We test each rocket after it's finished.  We just fired this one this
morning."

They walked around the rocket.  Laid on its side, it was about equal
in height to the two men.  Alister peered into its business end and
was surprised to see what appeared to be fan blades mounted on a shaft
that extended out into the nozzle from the combustion chamber.  The
blades, along with the shaft, were made from the same black ceramic
material as the rocket itself.

"I've seen these fan blades on jets, but I didn't know rocket engines
had them," he noted.

"As far as I know, this is the only rocket design that does.  See, one
of the problems with liquid-fueled engines is that you need to inject
the fuel under pressure.  That implies a pump of some kind, and the
rocket exhaust is the obvious thing to power it with.  Most
liquid-fuel designs syphon off some of the exhaust into turbo pumps on
the side of the rocket.  I played around with that, but it was a huge
pain.  So I decided to just stick a simple turbine in the nozzle and
drive the pumps with that shaft."

"So you, like, designed a whole new engine yourself?"

"Pretty much."

"Why didn't you just use an existing design; wouldn't that have been
simpler?"

"Well, yes and no.  A lot of this stuff is new, like the ceramics, for
example.  When they designed the space shuttle engines back in the
70s, they didn't have silicon carbide, at least not like this.  That's
one of the reasons they didn't put turbine blades right in the exhaust
stream - the materials couldn't handle the heat."

"So what did they use for materials?"

"A lot of the early rocket designs used copper, believe it or not."

"Copper?  Wouldn't it just melt?"

"It does if you don't cool it.  They used copper because it conducts
heat so well.  So then you have to surround your engine with cooling
pipes and pump either something through 'em fast enough to keep the
metal walls cool enough so they don't melt."

"No shit?"

"No shit.  And the easiest coolent to use is your own liquid oxygen
fuel.  Then there'ss the turbo pump design - they used metal blades,
and _they_ had to be cooled, so you ended up putting little holes
through middle of the blades so you could run cooling fluid through
the turbine fan...  It gets to be a real pain."

They were now walking back towards the building complex.  Alister was
feeling a bit overwealmed, but Burns kept talking about rocket engine
design, continuing on about how he had used the computer array to
simulate the heat transfer properties of the engine in order to design
its mounting arrangement.  The young South African had basically tuned
out of the conversation, but had realized now that the pot-smoking
American was absolutely the most brilliant engineer he had ever met.
d1234 2
a1235 3
Mercuriou walked up, his facial features hidden behind a pair of dark
sunglasses, just as Alister was asking Burns about the workers.  The
captain answered the question himself.
d1237 5
a1241 15
"Compartmentalization, Alister, need to know.  The surfers don't ask
too many questions.  But there's some stuff we need done that can't be
compartmentalized.  So if you're in, you get a spacesuit and a ticket
to Mars."

"After that, the asteroids.  They're 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
spaceships.  Some of it, like silicon chip production, will actually
be easier in a vacuum.  We've got plenty of food, but we'll also have
to figure out hydroponics for when it runs out.  That's Vic's job."

Alister looked back and forth between them.  It all seemed like a
dream.
a1242 1
"So what's my job?"
d4685 7
@


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@
text
@d4995 2
a4996 2
In a azure haze, below them hung Texas, above them spanned space, and
above space blazed a stupendous light.
d4998 1
a4998 2
Mercuriou turned to them as the earth, the sun, the galaxy fell away
beneath.
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a5003 2
"There is no beginning.  There is no end.  This is the Great
Conversation."
@


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@Get rid of cannolis; bring back Borzov as el-XX
@
text
@d1444 1
a1444 1
Mercuriou's look was cold, but there was a smile behind it.
d1448 3
a1450 3
Mercuriou's jaw went slack, and they all looked at him as if he had
just ruined the punchline to a good joke.  Then for a moment they
briefly looked at the ship and visualized...
d1461 1
a1461 1
-- _Icarus'_Wing_!
d1463 1
a1463 1
     -- What?
d1465 3
a1467 1
          -- You heard me.
d1471 1
a1471 1
-- You know who Icarus was?
d1473 1
a1473 1
     -- Yeah.
d1475 1
a1475 1
Mercuriou blew.
d1477 1
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-- Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it _Xplorer_1_!
@


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@got rid of cannolis
@
text
@d983 2
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office's plate glass windows.  The gray-green ocean frothed and
seethed, reflecting the chaotic smear of light patterns that radar
@


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@d21 4
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THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
IT IS A WORK OF FICTION.
d206 6
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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.
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[ The main rationalization here is that he's going to Mars to avoid jail. ]
d237 3
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"Cannoli?"
d241 1
a241 1
"What's that?"
d243 3
a245 6
"Do you want a cannoli?"

Vic held open the refrigerator door and montioned to a white paper box
on the middle shelf.

From his perch on the couch, Mercuriou shook his head, no.  What
a248 9

"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."

"Burns."

Mercuriou nodded.

d251 2
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mischevious smile.  They had met in college.

"So what's the point?  Why?" he asked as the teakettle began to
whistle.
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Mercuriou puckered his lips, then answered with a single word.
d256 1
a256 1
"Mars."
d259 5
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have discovered extraterrestrial life.  No, he was serious.  Walking
into the living room, he had to return to the kitchen for teabags, as
the mugs contained nothing but hot water.  Meanwhile, Mercuriou
launched into a prepared speech.
a277 2
He paused.

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a295 2
At this Vic sighed, handed one of the mugs to his young friend and sat
down across from him.
d300 2
a301 3
"Mars, huh," Vic muttered.  "Did you steal the money to go or going
because you stole the money?  Why are you doing this, Marc?  What's it
all about... really?"
d305 3
a307 1
"Let's go for a walk."
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a704 3
Andrea thought again over yesterday's press conference.  Some new
rocket fuel, no _revolutionary_ new rocket fuel, truly revolutionary.
What were they calling the company?  TenTech?
d708 3
a710 3
they're just 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."
d2658 1
a2658 4
====== America must look like it's run by fools ======


T + 5 days
a2661 2
T + 6 days

a2663 2
T + 7 days

a2665 82
T + ? days

"Whoo-hoo!"

Alister barrelled down the capsule 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.  Now he waved his arms
in front of his face.

"Ahhhhh!"

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

"waHHHH!"

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

"We did it!" he yelled.  "Yeah!"

Mercuriou grinned.

"So what do we do now?"  Yeats asked.

Burns, furthest from the door and enveloped in a haze of marijuana
smoke began to guffaw loudly.

"What now?  I don't know about you, doctor, but I'm taking about a
month off!"


T + ? days

"OK, that's enough."  Andrea drifted into the camera alongside Mercuriou.

"Dr. Yeats... to the rescue again!" cried the President.

"He's got a lot of flaws, Mr. President, but you're not lily-white
yourself."

"I'm neither a liar nor a thief."

"No, you're just the head of the largest prison system in the world."

"Dr. Yeats, federal penitentiaries house only a small percentage
of American prisoners.  Most are held in state facilities."

"Don't mince words.  You know what I'm talking about."

The President leaned forward on his desk and folded his hands in front
of him.

"Are you suggesting that our government is unjust?"

"No, I'm just noting that 'world's biggest warden' is not a title I
would aspire to, any more than 'thief'."

The two "eyed" each other as best they could over 20,000 miles.

"You know, I've heard a lot of conflicting stories about your
involvement with these people."

Andrea broke out into a genuine laugh.

"You know, I've heard that propaganda turn so many times I'm amazed it
still works."

"Well, captain, our prison system is going to remain a little short.
I don't think it's worth the expense to apprehend you right now."

Mercuriou now broke out into a long, genuine laugh.  The President
paused for a moment, then kept talking.

"I suppose there's no harm in leaving you be for now.  You'll
eventually have to come back down.  In the meantime, when you make it
Mars, if you make it to Mars, do me a favor.  Have the dignity to
plant an American flag.  It's the least you can do for the country
that footed the bill."

d2812 31
d2844 1
d2846 1
a2846 1
T + 15 days
d2848 2
a2849 1
"What the hell stinks so in here?"
d2851 2
a2852 1
Mercuriou was floating in the doorway of Alister's quarters.
a2855 1
T + 54 days
d3912 1
a3912 1
T + 699 days  [Make sure this is a Sunday!]
d4174 1
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T + 729 days    terrorists must be involved
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a4206 1
"You guys better come in here!" Alister yelled, then got up and
d4214 15
a4228 1
"Somebody just smashed an airplane into the World Trade Center!"
d4238 7
a4244 7
_guided_missile_.  One of these geniuses buried his discovery in the
pages of a novel.  The other held its blazing red light up to the sun
that terrible September morning.

"Another Timothy McVeigh or something," Mercuriou was saying.  "The
country is so hated; hell, you can say a lot about me, Andrea, that
I'm a thief and all that, but I never did anything like this."
d4247 18
a4264 16
first the event on Earth and then a radio transmission lag of exactly
3 minutes 17 seconds, the silent crew of three 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.  Within hours, the
towers fell.  Burns would have then made a quick calculation based on
the potential energy of a given mass at a given height along with the
published weight of construction materials used in 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 that terrible morning.
d4269 8
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alive in the tons of rubble.  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.
d4281 10
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In Maryland, a youth's dream earlier that year had prophesied disaster
for the United States and war in the Middle East.  In Texas, a
fifth-grader had told his teacher the day before that World War III
was going to start tomorrow, and that the United States was going to
lose.  In Afghanistan, an Islamic militant had a dream that his nation
defeated the United States in a soccer match in which all of their
players were dressed as airline pilots.  In Afghanistan, in Pakistan,
or perhaps in Khartoum, Osama bin Laden was smiling.
d4293 1
a4293 1
T + 733 days
d4300 5
a4304 4
procedure should be followed rather than an invasion.  His first
officer had further rankled feathers by suggesting that Islam was a
religion of war and that the Middle East needed to accept Christ, not
democracy.
d4315 2
a4316 2
Brrrmpf! Whoop, whoop, pull up!  Whoop, whoop, pull up!  And if the
co-pilot just stays meek and silent, then the plane's going to crash!"
d4513 1
a4513 1
T + 1253 days
d4584 1
a4584 1
T + 799 days
d4835 1
a4835 1
T + 1237 days
@


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@
text
@d4619 1
a4619 121
America, I am announcing tonight my candidacy for President.

The militant capitalists who have dominated our country for years tell
us to "love it or leave it", and that if we don't like how America is
run, then we can "get the hell out".  Tonight I say... let's take them
up on that offer.

My platform is simple - Hawaiian succession.

Those who point to my low poll numbers miss a critical point - I don't
need to win a national election.  I don't even intend to try.  I need
only to win a _Hawaiian_ election.

Under our laws, American citizens are free to travel anywhere in the
United States and establish residency there.  Hawaii currently has
just over one million inhabitants.  Around three quarter of a million
people are arrested each year for marijuana possession _alone_.  So if
just the people _arrested_ in _one_year_ for _possession_ would pack
up and move to Hawaii, we'd easily have enough people to win the next
election.

In the U.S, there are 300,000 registered Greens and 200,000 registered
Libertarians - easily enough to decide a Hawaiian election if they
could set aside their differences and decide on a common platform.

What is that common platform?

First, a solid rejection of capitalism.  This does not mean an embrace
of socialism.  We must always remember that government is a coercive
institution, and that you can not force people to be nice to each
other.  On the other hand, leaders have a weapon more powerful than
laws, and that weapon is the WORD.  We must always seek through
persuasion, through guidance, through LEADERSHIP to enjoin upon our
citizens the need to reject the capitalism philosophy of greed and
replace it with the Christian philosophy of generosity.

So we'll go to our restaurateurs and remind them to feed the hungry.
If they can't pay rent, we'll ask the carpenters and masons to build
them a new building.  We'll ask the farmers to provide them produce.
We'll ask the chefs, waiters, and busboys to work there instead of at
a capitalist restaurant.  And most importantly, we'll ask our citizens
to support those people, who will base their lives on charity, instead
of supporting those who know mainly the pursuit of money.

One of the biggest challenges we face is energy.  We need energy for
lights, heat, transportation, communication.  We need energy to drive
our machines and energy to - our -.  And we are dependent for that
energy on Arab governments and petro-conglomerates.  Energy, short of
the spiritual crisis of capitalism, is the greatest challenge we face,
because practically our entire society depends on it, and nobody can
claim true political or economic independence unless we have energy
independence.

Without economic independence, political independence doesn't mean
much.  "You have freedom," we are told by the cynics.  "We will leave
you hungry, homeless, ill-clad, without tools or training, but you
have freedom - you can vote in our elections."  It's time to take them
up on that offer, too!

Rather than outlawing on-line public libraries, we will commit to
building and maintaining them, by scanning the books in our libraries
and putting them on-line.

As for the capitalist publishers, they can change their name, they can
change their business model, the people who work for them can go on
with their lives and work somewhere else.  But given the current
business model of these publishers, that information is a weapon to be
locked down and controlled for economic gain, they MUST BE PUT OUT OF
BUSINESS.

We can not - WE WILL NOT - tolerate a future where on-line public
libraries are outlawed!

We need to look at our employers the way we look at our politicians.
We need to always remember that we support our economic bosses with
our labor as surely as we support our political bosses with our votes.
When we are faced with employers with immoral, capitalist lifestyles,
employers who have rejected the gospel of Jesus Christ in favor of the
gospel of Adam Smith, employers who expect their employees to support
this depraved philosophy of social Darwinism, then we must treat them
the same way we would treat aberrant politicians - refuse them our
support by refusing them our labor, by "Just Saying No" when told
that we must work for them!

Now let us turn to our political system.  We've got a lot of problems.
We've built the largest prison system in the world.  Our military is
armed with the most lethal killing machines that have ever been
devised by man.  Our flag has become a target of hatred and oppression
to almost as many people as see it as a symbol of liberty and freedom.

There is one central issue, though, that dwarfs all the others, that
drives all the others - CAPITALISM!  It is one of the most depraved
and immoral philosophies that has ever been proposed by man.  It is a
modern day slavery that has corrupted and co-opted our entire society.
NONE of the other issues can be addressed without addressing it first.

The majority of the American people, those few that are still
listening, are dumbfounded at what they hear.  That the police are not
an instrument of social reform; that goods and services should be
free; that books should be on-line; that capitalists must be driven
out from every post of leadership.  They will never accept this.  They
have build their entire society around rejecting this.  And they are
not going to change.

Those of us who reject capitalism face stark choices.  We can continue
to live in a society where we have no voice, no opportunity, and no
future.  We can trickle out in twos and threes, trying to find
someplace in this world that doesn't exist.  Or, we can unite and we
can concentrate.  We can find a place in this world by making it.
We can win an election in one state, and make that state our own.

We can SECEDE!  SECEDE!  SECEDE!

Finally, let me tell you the three most important things about democracy.

We've been told that democracy gives everyone freedom.  It doesn't.

We've been told that democracy will save the world.  It won't.

Freedom is choosing your own leaders.

@


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"Because the solution to missing the school bus is not to build a
@


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@
text
@d2403 1
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Mercuriou opened his door a crack.
d2410 7
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modules.  They had worked through the Greenwich Mean "night" [CHECK
THIS] into the morning, collecting them together by matching orbits
with them, docking their nose to them, then re-positioning them into
higher orbit, connecting them together as they went.  As soon as
Module A-1 Captain's Quarters was connected to A Core, Mercuriou
demanded that Module A-1-1 Captain's Storage be attached immediately
to Module A-1 Captain's Quarters, then halted the entire operation to
dock with A Core, equalize pressure, and disappear.
@


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@d1386 1
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T - 100 days    the police must be hot on everyone's tails
d1911 1
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Launch Day
a2395 1
====== long political rants must be interspersed throughout the text ======
d2398 2
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T + 1 day
d2411 7
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THIS] into the morning, collecting the first dozen modules together by
matching orbits with them, docking their nose to them, then
re-positioning them into higher orbit, connecting them together as
they went.  As soon as the first ring was finished, Mercuriou demanded
that Module A-1-1 Captain's Storage be attached immediately to Module
A-1 Captain's Quarters, then halted the entire operation to dock with
A Core, equalize pressure, and disappear.
d2419 1
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"I'm working on my speech for this evening, Doctor.  It must be
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"On Icarus' Wing five flew into the night,
 full three-score days they drove into space;
 On the barren shore there, descended two dared,
d3847 1
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 Watched the President here
d4232 1
a4232 1
T + 729 days
@


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@
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@d711 1
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know his stuff, but the CEO struck me a con artist."
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"Kyle, we've got airplanes flying between all 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."
d743 1
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bus stop.  Andrea got out with him and pulled her bag out of the
trunk.
d746 2
a747 2
his he pulled five twenty-dollar bills and handed them to her.  "Just
humor me this once and at least take the Greyhound!"
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Kyle nodded and got back in the car before answering.

"I love you too, girl," he replied quietly, and then cried out "Call
me when you get home!" before he drove away.
d767 6
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older sections of town, exiting at a hundred-year-old Catholic church
that occupied almost an entire city block.  Built of stone and with
metal bars on its windows, it could have been mistaken for a prison
except for the cross mounted on its steeple.  Walking around back, she
found a rear entrance, bearing a colorful sign that read, "The
Franciscan Fryer".
d783 2
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"Go hence, Francis, and rebuild my church, for it is nearly falling
down!"
d791 3
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money into the hands of a reluctant priest, who refused it.  Andrea
had always felt that it was a typical message from God: simple,
powerful, and very easy to misunderstand.
d836 8
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Dunstan put the finishing touches on the food, then shared lunch with
him 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 variety, and tuna salad, replete with
chopped Granny Smith apples and stuffed into the fresh bread, one of
Dunstan's signature dishes.
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Houston, she walked another quarter mile to Interstate 45, sat down
d878 1
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the distinctive yellow car. _Judge_not_by_appearances_
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Those twenty 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.  She also
didn't want trouble with the management for solicitation.  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 Iowa.

She talked with Darryl through the afternoon as the miles fell away.
Their conversation was quite good, since they were both technically
knowledgeable.  He was an aspiring writer who wanted to hear
everything she could tell me about NASA.  He had also been busted for
computer crime and was wearing a monitoring bracelet on his ankle.  As
dinner time approached, Andrea explained a bit more about her
religious order.
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gave all my money away.  I fast.  Seriously."

"You get everything by begging, right?"
d903 1
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"Yes.  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."
d911 31
a941 1
"He was inspired by a Gospel quotation
d978 1
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T - 137 days    some politician must make a big speech of lies
d1386 2
d1479 1
a1479 1
T - 7 days
d1913 12
a2391 1
_That_explains_Hawaii..._doesn't_it_?
d2411 7
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THIS] into the morning.  They collected the first dozen modules
together by matching orbits with them, docking their nose to them,
then re-positioning them into a common spot in a somewhat higher
orbit, connecting them together as they went.  As soon as the first
ring was finished, Mercuriou demanded that Module A-1-1 Captain's
Storage be attached immediately to Module A-1 Captain's Quarters, then
halted the entire operation to dock with A Core, equalize pressure,
and disappear into his quarters.
a2431 1
carries.  In fact, you could say that they are the only cargo it
d2434 1
a2434 1
He shushed her out the door and didn't appear again for another hour.
d2452 1
a2452 4
call me Marc.  I have no weapons to launch against you, and I seek
only to go on my way in peace.  I have been told repeatedly by people
to Love It or Leave It, and I wish to tell them that I have decided to
Get The Hell Out."
d2462 4
d2758 1
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T + 10 days
d3390 1
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T + 407 days
@


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@
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@d53 1
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T - 691 days
d229 1
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T - 370 days
d396 1
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T - 355 days
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T - 312 days
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T - 139 days
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T - 137 days
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T - 93 days
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Mercuriou: "It's time.  Any suggestions?"
d1417 1
a1417 5
Burns: "_Technical_Sketch_17_?"

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

"Well, that's how I think of it... I dunno, _The_Royal_Way_?"
d1421 1
a1421 2
Mercuriou's look was cold, but there was a glimmer of a laugh behind
it.
d1425 3
a1427 5
Mercuriou looked at him as if he had just ruined the punchline to a
good joke.

Mercuriou's jaw actually went slack, then for a moment they briefly
looked at the ship and visualized...
@


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@
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@d703 4
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"Well, N-1033's no con, Andrea!  This stuff's gonna revolutionize
spaceflight!  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!"
d878 44
d937 1
a937 1
physics, then decided to stay in the United States after graduating.
a939 13
The work challenged him to hone his skills
at numerical simulation of quantum mechanical systems well
beyond his undergraduate work.  Burns had hired him both
because he had graduated so quickly with a double
degree, and because the young man had a natural aptitude working
with the computers that were so critical to the project's success.

Yet now, with all the key software finished, that aptitude was
begining to land [Alister Compton / the young South African] in trouble.  He had noticed
that Burns and Mercuriou periodically used a computer that no one else
had access to.  His inquires about the machine had been vaguely
dismissed.

d942 3
a944 5
young chemist to watch him login to 'genie', and now Alister used to
password to enter the system himself and began looking around it.  The
master hacker hadn't even bothered to encrypt the files on his own
machine.  Its accounting records showed one program used more than any
other.  Alister ran it.
@


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The entire eastern sky was lit a brilliant red hue, as if a frosted
pane of red glass had been slipped in behind the mountains.  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.
d438 7
a444 7
_So_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 philosophical debates, the night Burns
drove home on three hits of acid, the computer 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.
d453 2
d460 1
a460 1
He could be making lasanga for lunch, ahh, lasanga, he could go back
d462 1
a462 1
tomatoes from the garden, cheese, he needed Parmasean cheese.
d465 1
a465 1
perfect baked lasanga or _discerning_the_will_of_God_, or the Great
d470 5
a474 5
almost cried.  Of course, after a while, you realize that you wouldn't
actually be accomplishing any of those things, but rather filling the
hours with all the _distractions_ - television, food, drugs, games,
books, sex, talking, walking, driving, cleaning.  Out here, alone, you
realize _this_is_what_you_waste_seven_times_a_week_.
d481 11
a491 14
Benedictine monk arose at three in the morning to pray, and the strict
Buddhist drank no water after sunset.  Vic had fasted three days and meditated
through the night, 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.
d511 2
a512 1
coconuts and pineapples, pureed in a blender with only a dash of rum.
d534 2
d551 8
a558 3
_What_else_are_you_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.
d562 2
a563 1
_Did_the_fish_want_to_live_in_water?_ he wondered.
d566 1
a566 1
One time in his life he
d585 4
a588 2
Vic felt depressed.  _If_I_was_up_there_,
_I_could_still_see_the_sun._ Finally the sunlight was gone, leaving
d598 1
d604 1
a604 1
demanded that their equations eventually produce something real.
d657 4
a660 5
Once, long ago, a monk had prayed fervently 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.
d668 3
a670 2
the verdict, started, stammered, then the prosecutor spoke.  There was
new evidence.  The defendant was innocent.  The charges were dropped.
d673 4
a676 3
brighten and he could just make out the arroyo.  What did the dream
mean?  Do they mean anything?  He lay on the cool earth, wrapped in
his blanket, watching the stars fade out above.
d679 2
a680 2
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,
d683 3
a685 6
yet dawn.  Slowly he rolled his blanket, then started down the trail.
Though looking forward to the company of people,
he always missed this place.

Halfway to the car, he looked back toward the arroyo,
regretting that he hadn't returned to bathe.
d696 1
a696 2
the roadway advised, "NASA Road 1 - 5 minutes".  In the passenger
seat, Andrea Yeats thought over yesterday's press conference.
d718 1
a718 2
as well be space shuttles for all the chance they have of flying on
one.  Our problems are here on Earth."
d724 1
a724 1
not going into space again."
d728 2
a729 1
"Thanks for inviting me down, though; it's been too long."
@


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@
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@d688 1
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seat, Andrea Yeats thought for a moment over the previous day's press
conference.
d702 5
a706 10
spaceflight!"

"Yeah, yeah..."

The car wavered slightly in the lane as the driver gesticulated.

"TenTech's ramping up to full production!  Terry and Steve are working
on a new Delta design; they're talking single stage to lunar orbit!
Maybe a new shuttle design without SRBs!  I thought you'd be excited
about this, I mean, this could really mean people living in space!"
d713 1
a713 1
"Well, I thought you'd be excited about this."  He was visibly deflated.
d715 3
a717 4
"I didn't mean it like it sounded.  I mean, if you... if other people
want to work on rockets and space stations, great.  I just know that
_my_ problems are here on Earth.  That's what I meant.  I'm not going
into space again."
d721 1
a721 2
"Thanks for inviting me down, though.  I was really glad to see you
again, Kyle, it's been too long."
d724 1
a724 1
fright, a single woman, hitchhiking!"
a728 4
Kyle's relationship with Andrea Yeats was purely platonic, but the
thought of her in a miniskirt brought a grin to his face that was more
humorous than sexual.

d731 7
a737 8
Andrea shared the laugh as Kyle pulled off the Interstate and stopped
at a city bus stop.  Andrea got out with him and pulled her bag out of
the trunk."

"OK, the city bus goes into Houston from here.  Sweatheart, you sure
you don't want a plane?"  She shook her head as his he pulled five
twenty-dollar bills and handed them to her.  "Just humor me this once
and at least take the Greyhound!"
d739 1
a739 2
"Thanks, Kyle," Andrea said, giving him a hug.  "You're my best friend.
I love you."
d746 2
a747 2
It was ten o'clock in the morning.  Andrea climbed on a largely empty
downtown express and gazed out the bus window as the controlled access
d749 1
a749 1
busy downtown streets and finally the transfer station.
d757 28
a784 30
bus schedules, then climbed on a local headed into one of the older
and more run-down sections of Houston, exiting at a hundred-year-old
Catholic church that occupied almost an entire city block.  Built of
stone and with metal bars on its windows, it could have been mistaken
for a prison except for the cross mounted on its steeple.  Walking
around back, she found a rear entrance, bearing a colorful sign that
read, "The Franciscan Fryer".

Entering the building, she found herself in a white tiled dining room
populated by collapable tables and chairs which two 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.  Universal symbol of the
Franciscan Order, it was a replica of the crucifix which, eight
hundred years earlier, had spoken in a vision to the young man in his
mid-twenties who knelt before it in prayer.

"Go hence, Francis," it had said, "and rebuild my church, for it is
nearly falling down!"

The man history would remember as Saint Francis of Assisi looked
around at the crumbling chapel he knelt in and set out immediately to
do as the vision commanded.  He returned to his father's cloth shop,
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 a
reluctant priest, who refused it.  Andrea had always felt that it was
a typical message from God: simple, powerful, and very easy to
misunderstand.
d789 1
a789 5
"I'm looking for Brother Dunstan," she answered.

"Oh, well, he's probably in the kitchen, then," came the reply, and he
motioned to the rear of the room, seperated from the kitchen by a long
serving counter.
d791 1
a791 4
Behind the counter, she saw a pot-bellied man in his late forties,
with balding hair and a worn apron covering the brown habit of the
Franciscan order, muttering to himself as he stirred a steaming kettle
on the commercial stove that dominated the rear of the kitchen.
d793 5
a797 2
"I'll come back at eleven," she said after a moment's hesitation,
but it was too late.
d799 1
a799 1
"Andrea!" exclaimed the chef, now peering out over the counter.
d801 1
a801 1
"Hello, Dunstan!" she exclaimed.
d839 3
a841 3
"No, thanks, I'm heading back to my family's place in Iowa today.  I
just came down to visit Kyle Becker, he had a new project with NASA,
some people have developed a new rocket fuel."
d843 2
a844 2
"Yes, you know, I heard about that on the news!  They say it's quite
revolutionary, is that true?"
d846 1
a846 2
"Yes, it certainly seems to be.  I don't know all the details, but
Kyle's quite excited about it."
d865 2
d877 6
a882 9
"Bed-roooom!"  Alister bobbed his head in time with the bass line
and sang the refrain out loud.
The "Big Three" were out of town somewhere,
and most of the other guys had taken the weekend off,
so the young South African had the place to himself.
Twenty years old, with matted blond hair, he had
left his home to study abroad, finished a double
major in chemistry and physics, then decided to stay in
the United States after graduating.
d1364 1
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Mercuriou: "It's time to name it.  Any suggestions?"
d1375 11
a1385 2
"Well, that's how I think of it... How about
_Manifesto_of_the_Secessionist_Party_?"
d1390 2
a1391 2
Vic: "I suggest
_On_The_Evil_of_Capitalism_and_The_Danger_of_Democracy_"
@


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@a678 114
T - 350 days

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 Schroedinger's equation, the defining
physical equation for explaining the complex interactions between the
electrons and nuclei 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 gravitational
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 to explain the entire physical
universe.  Like two teams drilling a tunnel from
opposite directions, physicists and chemists had pursued this common
quest, the physicists cutting deeper and deeper into the
mysteries of the atom, the chemists measuring and categorizing dozens
of properties of the myriad array of chemical
substances.  In the early decades of the twentieth century, men
like Planck, Schroedinger, and Dirac developed the quantum theory that
could finally explain the layered construction of atoms and molecules.
For the first time, physics was beginning to decode the Rosetta Stone of matter.
Quantum mechanics, the most spectacularly successful physics theory of all time,
came with one slight caveat - nobody knew how to solve its equations.

"Bloody hell!" exclaimed the young South African as he smacked the
side of the computer monitor.  The screen image
wavered and recovered as Burns walked over behind
him.  He was wearing a tee-shirt a student group had made in
college.  Emblazened across the top was the Generalized Stokes (Navier-Stokes equation)
Theorem in its most abstract form:

"You wouldn't understand," read the caption, "it's a MATH 462 thing."

"I'd kill this program, but it already died!"

"Remember, this stuff's primitive," Burns calmly noted.

"Yeah, yeah," Alister Compton muttered, pushing his chair
violently back from the table.

"Think of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse.  We've been building
bridges for two thousand years, and still occasionally drop one in the
river.  We've been building computers for fifty years.  That's why the
technology moves so quickly, because it's so primitive.  All of it -
_Gaussian_, _Windows_, _Mathematica_, the web - fifty years on, people
will look back on it like we look at the Collesium today - how the
hell is it still standing?  How did they build it with just ropes and
levers?  How did they do quantum mechanics with numbers that don't
even form a group under addition?"

"It's just so _stupid_!"

"You're talking about how primitive we are?" a new voice interrupted.

"Vic!" Burns exclaimed, turning away from the computer as Mercuriou
walked up with the doctor.

"Hey, Burns!" Vic greeted his old college roommate with
handshake and then a hug.

"This is it!", Mercuriou exclaimed, waving his hand all around him.
"The 'Crap Shoot', that's what I call it!"

His wave encompassed a late-twentieth-century gamble for a
chemistry breakthrough of the first magnitude.  The office they stood
in was actually the living room of a large beach house, which he
shared with Mercuriou and a team of a half-dozen young programmers.
In the garage they had built a parallel-processing system of more than
a thousand computer processors with its own air conditioner.  The
house's red tile floors and stucco walls overlooked a sandstone cliff
dropping to an expansive beach and the Pacific Ocean.  Surfboards were
propped lazily against a wooden shed near the beach trail, and broad
overhead fans circulated the sea breeze while the surf pounded
incessantly below.  Mexican gardeners tended a broad field of aloe
along the cliff, and a housekeeper took care of the kitchen and
laundry.

They were looking for a new type of liquid rocket fuel.  Many such
fuels, such as liquid hydrogen, were cryogenic and required elaborate
cooling systems to keep them refrigerated.  Worse, even the most
efficient liquid fuels had rather poor specific impulse, that crucial
ratio between the force generated by the propellant and the force
exerted on it by gravity, and also rather poor specific volume,
resulting in the need for very large tanks to contain tons of
propellants.  Solid fuel propellants performed better, which is why
the space shuttle used a pair of booster rockets to help propel it
into space, but with the severe drawback that they couldn't be simply
throttled back or turned off like liquid fueled engines.  Burns wanted
a fuel that would remain liquid at room temperature and have specific
impulse and volume rivaling the best solid propellants.

"We've also got a test site in an industrial park," Mercuriou
explained.  After the computers predicted melting point, boiling
point, chemical potential, and a dozen other values, the next step was
to actually create the fuel.  The computers were asked again to
compute more predictions for the possible byproducts and derivatives
of the compound in question, to find out if certain reactions would
actually proceed forward in reasonable time at some specified
temperature.  Since none of the software was more than a few years
old, really, and since it crashed constantly, and produced bizarre
predictions like its belief that kerosene would react with hydrogen
peroxide without a catalyst, the only way to find out if any of the
predictions were true was to test them, and Burns set up both a
well-stocked chemistry lab and eventually a small rocket engine on a
firing range.

The three men had retired to the kitchen, where Vic produced a stack
of casseroles from his car.

"So, Doctor Vic, what have we got here?" Burns wondered, taking off a
lid.

"Lasagna!"

@


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@a5206 3007


======================================================================
======================================================================
======================================================================

			   ===== NOTES =====

T - 691 days <****>

"The hack"

strong setting, Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom; strong plot, a
blow-by-blow of a major hack; moderate character development, we see a
bit of Burns - his technical skill, his drug use, his deceitfulness

The college hack described here was an amalgam of two different hacks
- the news server hack done by friends of mine, and the student
workstation hack that I did.  I finally ditched my own hack and used
my friends exclusively - this is just a one-paragraph intro, not a
thesis.

The company is basically Cisco, the only Silicon Valley operation I
got to see from the inside, but I think the description here is
sufficiently general that it could be any one of dozens of high-tech
startups.  Its name is a hats-off to my friend Terry Slattery and
Chesapeake Computer Consultants, which in its hey-day was one of
Cisco's top training partners (and my first corporate employer).

"'Red' Briwom" is also a tip of the hat to Rob Widmer, Terry's first
employee (I was his second).  I respect Rob's "staying power with the
boring tedium the finicky machines impose on their masters."

T - 370 days <****>

"A tough reception"

Mercuriou visits Vic.  Description of the hydroponic farm - has to
be a more extensive operation than just marijuana

T - 355 days <*****>

Vic's vision quest

The site exists as described, but it is not in New Mexico.  It
is on the Baja Peninsula, in Sierra Laguna Biosphere Reserve,
close to the town of Santiago, Mexico.

Don't ask me how Orion got into a _summer_ sky, I don't know, either.

T - 350 days <****>

"The crapshot"

John Pople.  Gaussian.  Vic joins up.

isn't it usually a "house with an attached garage"?

T - 313 days <***>

Press conference announcing the new fuel

Moderate plot, at least its moving forward (the chapshoot paid off);
weak setting, but something I learned from Tom Clancy is that you can
use the ability to explain technical details to create setting, here
and in about a hundred other places in the novel; moderate character
development - we meet Andrea Yeats for the first time!

I found out after this book was mostly written that Andrea Yeats is
the name of the Texas women who drowned her four kids in a bathtub.
Coincidently, her husband worked for NASA.  I'm not changed the name -
her identify is too deeply ingrained in my mind.  Or maybe it's not
coincidence - maybe God's trying to tell me something about was this
character espouses (I hope not)...

"Kyle" was originally "Lou" but my friend Kyle Hourihan demanded one
the characters be named after him, so I lent his moniker to this minor
character.

T - 312 days <****>

"The Franciscan Frier"

strong setting - a inner-city soup kitchen; slow plot (but who cares);
strong character development - we learn a lot about Andrea here.

Brother Dunstan is a amalgram of two religious I know - one is a
California-based Franciscan in culinary school (probably graduated by
now) that proposed basically this idea for a "Franciscan restaurant"
as a class project (and what a great idea it is), though I "cooked up"
its name myself; the other is my good friend, the Benedictine Dunstan
Robaduex, who lends this character his name.  The Benedictines don't
make it into this novel (sorry guys), but any fraternity couldn't good
far wrong by patterning its house management after the Benedictines
and its work ethic after the Franciscans.

Dunston only appears this one time, but he's probably my most
important minor character.  St. Francis has been such an influence in
my life; it's so important to me to showcase the Franciscan movement
in such a compelling scene (one of my favorites in the novel).

T - 138 days <****>

Alister's hack

T - 137 days <****>

Alister's meeting with Mercuriou and Burns - they cut him in

T - 131 days <****>

Alister's tour of the production facility

T - 93 days <**>

description of Burn's reworked 747

they name it Icarus

T - 17 days <***>

we meet Andrea for the first time.  Kyle dispatches her to look into all this

T - 2 days <**>

Andrea picking up a hitchhiker

T - 1 day <***>

Andrea hitchhiking.  picked up by Merceriou and Alister and locked up

Launch Day <***>

Andrea esacpes and warns NASA.  Merceriou decides to launch

We see his company name here for it's one and only time.  "TenTech",
in addition to its obvious play on N-1033, was inspired by "TempTech",
one of my mother's old accounting clients (an HVAC contractor).

T + 1 day <***>

Mercuriou's first press conference

T + 3 days <****>

ship's library

the air leak

T + 4 days <***>

Mercuriou's first media appearance.  Asked to justify his theft.  Retorts
that in a capitalist society you had to have a business plan to justify
your returns and that, as he has none, could not expect to get funding.
Justifies theft from capitalists - the "most selfish people in the world".

But he's broken the rules - rules made collectively, through a democractic
process.  Answers that democracy is simply the rule of the majority and
compares U.S. to Soviet Union - "it's same kind of trash that runs it".

"By all means, doctor... jump in anytime you please!"

T + 5 days <***>

Mercuriou vs congressman Richard Ecks.

Ecks justifies capitalism as having produced the highest standard of
living on the planet.  Mercuriou answers that communism also produced
a higher standard of living and asks rhetorically if you want Sputniks
or freedom

Ecks invokes democracy and freedom to justify the society.

Mercuriou gives an example of how capitalism 'works' - the reading program.

[I wrote this program, only it works for Spanish rather than Greek.
Unlike our hero, I didn't even bother to try and publish it, for all
the same reasons.  It sits on my computer disk, waiting for a freely
available Spanish-English dictionary.]

Ecks says he was guilty - he stole someone else's intellectual property;
tells Mercuriou he's got a 'problem with authority'

Little bit here about the secrecy of capitalism

Ecks - "who the hell are you to tell someone else what they can and can't
do with their property?!?!"

Mercuriou says we could build a twenty-first century library of Alexandria,
but our leaders want an 'information economy' where knowledge is one
more commodity to be bought and sold.

T + 6 days <***>

Mercurious vs senator David Wye.

Wye starts right off with democracy, and Mercuriou asks if
communism/KGB/gulags would be justified by elections.

Wye answers that we don't have KGB/gulags and Mercuriou counters with
the War on Drugs - "isn't it funny how in all of these great
_people_'s societies, the biggest enemy of all always ends up being
_your_own_people_?"

Wye cuts to the Constitution, and we have a big discussion over it.
At the end, Wye loses, and tries to trump Mercuriou by answering that
all the unconstitutional powers are supported by "the overwealming
majority of the people of this country."

Mercuriou - still would like to see additional powers codified in Const.

Wye again answers that that's what the majority of people want, and
Mercuriou slams populist government in general - look at the police
slamming people to the ground and draging them off in handcuffs.

Criminals!  Wye says,  Criminals!

Mercuriou tries to lept out of his chair!  He's one of those criminals!

We've got freedom!  Wye says

The issue is what people have chosen to do with their freedom, Mercuriou
says.

Andrea's attempt to butt in.

Andrea Yeats tries to interrupt with 'morality'.  Wye asks who's
going to tell people what they can and can't do with their freedom.
Obviously, the Bible.  Wye says we've got freedom of religion,
invokes the Salem Witch Trials, and the interview breaks up.

A small scene between Andrea and Mercuriou - 'right and wrong are
subject to a vote'  Andrea says seperation of church and state
is a chimera


T + 7 days <***>

Govenor Zee.  Mercuriou gets in trouble when he starts talking
about morality (imagine that).  Andrea to the rescue.  Gates could
decide to be a Christian, instead he's decided to be philanthroper.

Andrea demolishes pop morality.


T + 8 days <**>

Mercuriou vs. Governor Zee

MAYBE CHANGE THIS TO BE MORE A HISTORY LECTURE

"the majority don't want good leaders"

Zee tries to claim Communism wasn't populist, and Mercuriou retorts.

"The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe."

Zee says "you'll be telling us the Germans elected Hitler".  Mercuriou
disects Fascism and shows its populist nature.

"Democracy is another communism."

Zee: "democracy may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better
than just about anything else out there."

back to the abolition of slavery.  Zee claims democracy is a "legitamite
system of government" and Mercuriou disects this.

A little bit about Napoleon.

Mercuriou summerizes - "the broken record of democracy for the last
two hundred years." 'put the people in control'

reaction - "you tell 'em Marc",  "let the bastard die up there"

FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKS
This T-shirt isn't original.  A friend of mine has one.


T + 16 days <***>

decision to move out of LEO to higher orbit

T + 21 days <***>

Vic appears on TV.  We get a snapshot of his views - the back-to-earth,
hardcore environmentalist, American Indian perspective.  Mercuriou
breaks in when the TV opponent declares that human society has
abandoned greed/force/human nature and "it's called democracy".
Back to Dr. Antonov - all society is coercive.

Alister, Yeats and Burns all reject the opportunity to grandstand
for the cameras

T + 33 days <***>

Andrea's press conference.  She presents a positive philosophy
(as opposed to her negative criticisms of T + 7)

do you advocate a welfare system?  isn't picking up hitchhikers dangerous.

You bet.


T + 54 days <****>

Description of the stable module configuration now achieved.

MUTE: This T-shirt is original.  I've never seen one as described.

Andrea asks Burns about Merciruou.

The problem with being smart.

We find out why Burns answers to Mecuriou - Merciriou does the
management.


T + 60 days <****>

Andrea and Vic.  why he went to medical school.


T + 188 days <***>

Soy beans and sushi.


T + 231 days <****>

Plutarch. Sparta.  Vic challenges Andrea to prescribe rules to be
Christians.  'Primitive' societies.  Modern societies based on
dependancy and forced labor.  The bastardization of Christianity.

Andrea: faith in God got _her_ there.

T + 424 days <***>

discussion of landing

"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you for
another man."

T + 637 days <***>

"Live from Mars orbit"
crew conference

T + 639 days <***>

Andrea, Merceriou, and Burns.  Andrea argues against the landing.
Merceriou goes ahead.

T + 650 days <***>

the landing attempt

interestingly enough, in this chronology, if you plug in all the dates
to figure out when "T + 650" was, Mars was on the wrong side of the
solar system!  (see, i actually did think of trying to propose a
realistic series of orbit transfer burns, but gave up)

T + 651 days <***>

"remove the spacesuits and launch it"

crew conference.  

T + 652 days <***>

suicide watch

T + 653 days <***>

talking to NASA

T + 654 days <***>

"Can the kid get them home?"

I guess they better all die.  Who am I to argue with Nostradamous?

T + 657 days <**>

memorial service

T + 658 days <*>

Alister begins maneuvering the cargo modules.

T + 690 days <***>

Mercuriou and Andrea - everybody cuts corners.

T + 695 days <**>

OMS-17

Do these numbers add up?  Does a 17 minute, 37.42 mega-newton burn
give something roughly the mass of the spaceship about a tenth-gee
acceleration?  I have no idea!  Does a five-minute wait in a six-hour
orbit change your orientation by about one degree?  No, it should be
about 5.

The quote is from Deutscher's 'The Prophet Unarmed', part two of his
three-part biography of Trotsky:

	Nearly thirty years had passed from the moment when the young
	Trotsky saw the towers and the walls of Moscow for the first
	time.  He was then being transported from a jail in Odessa
	to a place of exile in Siberia; and it was from behind the bars
	of a prison van that he had his first glimpse of the 'village
	of the Tsars', the future 'capital of the Communist International'.
	It was from behind such bars also that he now had his last
	glimpse of Moscow, for he was never to return to the city of
	his triumphs and defeats.  He entered it a persecuted
	revolutionary; and so he left it.


T + 699 days <**>

need this to buffer between OMS-17 and 9/11

I suspect you could have found another way... like writing a book?

What if you don't beleive in Jesus?  People once thought the Earth was
flat.

T + 705 days <**>

we don't run this ship.  Burns runs this ship.

T + 714 days <***>

Alister: do you think we're living in the end times?

"parts of it are inspired by God, and parts of it are the errors of men"
   maybe a little bit like this book?
   like its introduction said?

T + 729 days <***>

September 11, 2001

wine in orbit.

T + 733 days

turn on the camera, Alister

T + 734 days <****>

they took advantage of capitalism, not freedom

the attack was against the majority - the people who run democracy

Alister - maybe they're just incompotent

T + 770 days <***>

Vic: We're not sufficiently advanced to possess jet aircraft.

lot of talk about 9/11

technology is a tool

atheism is a severe handicap to moral value judgements

humanity is primitive

T + 904 days <**>

What's going to happen to the U.S.?

T + 974 days <**>

Do you support the War on Terror?

T + 1033 days <***>

The Great Conversation

A critical scene to set the stage for the end of the novel

T + 1094 days <**>

Big government was in.

T + 1253 days <****>

Earth orbit burn.

T + 1257 days <**>

"Look what I found"

T + 1262 days <****>

Arrival at International Space Station.  Borzov.

Our patient reader, who lasted this far, gets (hopefully) a reward -
an interesting new character, then the grande finale

Borzov was the mission commander in Rama II.  I've always imagined
him something like this, and _who_knows_ what people will think
of Col. Ramon - he doesn't say anything too unreasonable I hope

OK, so _Columbia_ couldn't even dock with the ISS.  Sue me for giving
you a lossy ending.

T + 1237 days <*****>

February 1, 2003

9/11 was Julian day 254 of 2001, February 1 was day 32 of 2003
all these years had 365 days, so (365 - 254) + 365 + 32
536 days from 9/11 to Columbia

so 9/11 is T + 729 days, that makes Columbia T + 1237

9/11/1999 - Launch Day (Julian date 254)
11/30/1999 - T + 80; Exxon-Mobil merge (Julian date 334)
12/31/1999 - T + 110 (Julian date 364)
1/1/2000 - T + 111
4/3/2000 - original court ruling in U.S. vs Microsoft
7/10/2000 - T + 302; pipeline explosion in Nigeria kills 250 gasoline scavengers
9/8/2000 - 9/16/2000 - UK fuel protests
9/26/2000 - T + 381; anti-globalization protests in Prague
1/1/2001 - T + 476
6/20/2001 - T + 646; Andrea Yates drowns her children
6/24/2001 - T + 650; landing attempt
8/12/2001 - T + 699 (JD 224 of 2001); a Sunday
9/6/2001 - DOJ no longer seeking to break up Microsoft
9/11/2001 - T + 729 (JD 254 of 2001)
1/1/2002 - T + 841
1/1/2003 - T + 1206
1/16/2003 - T + 1221
2/1/2003 - T + 1237; Columbia reentry

this and 9/11 are the _only_ two dates I've 'pegged' in the
chronology, so any kind of speculation about why the author picked "T
+ 650" is absurd - they're just random numbers

"The prequel is all human history.  The sequel is the fate of mankind."


======================================================================
======================================================================
======================================================================


"Now in addition to yourself and Dr. Antanov, you also have your engineer,
Burns, and at least one other astronaut, is that right?"

"Yes, we have two other astronauts.  Alister Compton is the assistant
engineer, and Dr. Andrea Yeats, of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, has volunteered to lend her expertise to our mission.
I guess you could call her an observer."

In Houston, Kyle was watching the broadcast from a conference room in
the Johnston Space Flight Center, where an entire floor of a building
had now been dedicated to monitoring the flight of the _Icaraus_.  A
number of people exhaled loudly and began chattering amongst
themselves as soon as Mercuriou had mentioned Yeats' name.  Someone
picked up a contingency plan that had been rapidly developed and
flipped down several pages, to one entitled "Captain invokes volunteer
status".  Kyle stood silently watching the broadcast for a few more
seconds, until a phone rang and it was handed to him.

--- The Next Day (maybe) ---

"Dr. Yeats has not been kidnapped.  She has made that very clear
to us in our communications with her.  She insists that she was
given the opportunity to leave and elected to stay in order to
help these people."

Kyle Becker's news conference was being carried live on national
television.  It was the first official statement from a NASA official
that mentioned Yeats, and the first that had received any kind of
serious press attention.  After each of his remarks, several reporters
would all try to interrupt with a question simultaneously, and
Becker had to make a conscientious effort to control the situation
and pick one question to hear and answer.  Though not his first
press conference, it was his first under this degree of scrutiny,
and he was somewhat nervious.  It didn't show.

"OK, Mary," he stated firmly, pointing to one of the reporters that
usually covered the NASA beat, and tending to avoid the glut of
strange faces that had suddenly crowded into the usually sedate press
room.

"Does Dr. Yeats support these people?  And is she acting in any
kind of official role?"

"No, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I don't think she
supports them so much as she is willing to help them.  Those of you
that know her, understand that she's a very kind person and very
willing to help even those she doesn't agree with.  As for an offical
role, she was acting in an official role, but her decision to
volunteer for this mission was strictly personal, and it remains to be
decided by NASA if her role on the _Xplorer_1_ is as an offical
observer."

"Why didn't NASA immediately come forward with the admission that a
veteran astronaut was involved in this caper?"

The question came from a political correspondent who had learned to
carefully note a speaker's tone of voice and body language, and loudly
injected his voice at the end of the response before anyone else could
nose in.  Kyle pulled out a canned response he had prepared in advance.

"Well, frankly, because of questions like that!  This thing has become
a media circus that's on T.V. night and day, and we wanted to take
the time to try and get the answers to these questions, such as
how Dr. Yeats came to be on board the _Xplorer_1_, and whether this
is an offical NASA role, and how _she_ wants the situation dealt with,
and frankly, I'm glad we've had two days to talk about this amongst
ourselves without trying to ask and answer these questions all at
the same time with the glare of the T.V. cameras on."

"So, basically, you've been trying to decide how to spin it."

"No, I think that's _your_ speciality, and let me now take a question
from over here."

"Dr. Becker, it sounds to me like Dr. Yeats was basically kidnapped
and somehow convinced to join up with these people, I mean, you know,
Patricia Hurst and the Mansons, it's not uncommon for kidnap victims
to identify with their captors."

"Look, Andrea Yeats arrived at their launch site less than two days
before they lifted off, certainly not long enough for her to be
brainwashed, which is what that question rather implies.  If anything,
her presence there seems to have thrown a major kink in their plans,
and you'd just have to know Andrea to appreciate that she's not going
to be coerced by anyone to do anything she doesn't want to."



--------   [ T + 33 days ]

"For example, you proposed a twenty-first century library of
Alexandria at one point, right, Captain?"

Mercuriou nodded in silent agreement.

"And you couldn't really answer who was going to pay for it, right?
Well, the Christian answer is that the authors pay for it.  They write
the books, publish them on the Internet, give copies freely to anyone
who wants them whether they pay or not, and end up homeless and
starving on the streets, because most people will just take whatever
they can get for free, but you better believe that the shopkeepers and
the restaurants and the landlords aren't going to just 'give to all'.
That's what happens to Christians in this world."


------   [ T + 7 days ]

"This isn't Christianity!  Christianity is about redemption through
faith.  You're redeemed through faith, not through your deeds!"

"If that's so, then why does Jesus spend so much time talking about
how we live in this world?  Why did he bother to say 'turn the other
cheek' and 'give to all those who beg of you' and 'if a man steals
your cloak, give him your cloak as well'?  Yes, he talks about faith,
but he talks about deeds, too, and if deeds aren't important, why does
he spend so much time discussing them?"


-----

"OK, this is A-core," Burns announced as he led Andrea into the first
cargo module past the 747.  "It's basically a backup command center.
It might become our command center in time."  Much of A-core was still
in packing boxes secured to the walls of the module.  Some things had
been unpacked, however, most notably an enormous flat-panel LCD
screen, considerably bigger than a conventional TV, which had been
installed against one wall and was now lit with a standard computer
status display, showing the ship's position in its orbit, their a
ground track, and a radar composite two hundred kilometers to either
side of the ship, showing the various cargo modules.  This image,
unlike the others, appeared blurry at first, since it was actually two
images alternated rapidly with each other and designed to be viewed
with 3-D glasses.  The far side of A-core was almost empty.  To this
far side, and the pressure door there, Burns led Andrea.

"There is no other A-module, because there's nothing else docked to
A-node," Burns said, passing through the pressure door into a docking
node with four empty ports, their portholes showing only star fields
and, in one, a spectacular view of Australia.  Only one door directly
across from A-core was occupied, not surprisingly, but a cargo module
Burns called B-core.  Andrea closed the pressure door behind her as
Burns opened the one in front of him.

B-core was almost completely empty.  Burns explained as he propelled
himself across it that it was intended, like the far end of A-core, as
a staging and work area for any modules that might be temporally
docked to the A-node.  Past B-core was B-node, but this one was fully
occupied with docked modules.

"These are the crew quarters, Doctor, we've each got one of these;
well, I don't know about you.  I'm in B-2, the captain's in B-1,"
Burns said, pointing to pressure doors around him as he spoke,
"Alister's got B-3, and the doc's in B-4.  I don't know where we'll
put you, but let's take a look at C-core."

C-core was intended as a crew lounge.  Stowed here in boxes was
exercise equipment, more computers and TV panels, all of it yet
untouched.

C-1: sickbay storage
C-2: sickbay
C-3: electronics lab
C-4: chemistry lab

----

Bush: "Quit all this politic'ing around and land that plane before
       somebody gets hurt."

      "Theft is wrong.  These people have done wrong, and they deserve
       to be punished.  And they will be punished."

----  [ T + 54 days ]

"That's the problem with being smart.  The smarter you get, the more
you can do, and the fewer other people there are who can help you do
it.  Eventually, you get so smart that you can do almost anything, and
none of it actually gets done."

Eventually, you get so smart that you can do anything, and nothing gets done.
Eventually, you get so smart that you know how to do anything, and nothing gets done.
Eventually, you get so smart that you know how to do almost everything, and none of it actually gets done.
You can do almost anything, and almost nothing gets done.

----- [ T + 8 days ]

*maybe a t-shirt?*

"Propaganda is not a substitute for leadership."
"Good propaganda is not a substitute for good leadership."

"Propaganda is like sacarin; it can substitute for leadership,
but it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

----- [ T + 33 days ]

Andrea made a conscious effort to be constructive.  "Democracy isn't
magic.  It's a system of government where the majority of people choose
their own leaders.  If they choose well, it succeeds.  If they choose
poorly..."  Her voice drifted off into silence; the humming of the
air conditioners was the only sound for many seconds.

---- [ T + 1 day ]

"How much money did you steal?"

"Hard to say.  Adding up everything we lied about, everything we
bought on empty credit, everything we just flat out stole - probably
close to a billion dollars."  He paused for a minute.  "And that's a
shoestring budget for what we're trying to do.  We've cut a lot of
corners.  A billion isn't much for a manned space launch, let alone
one going to Mars."

"How many corners did you cut?"

"A bunch.  I'd like to have three identical ships going, but we've
only got one.  We don't have any kind of landing vehicle yet, and
of course I'd like to have one built already and tested here on Earth,
but that isn't going to happen either."

"How do you plan to land on Mars if you don't have a landing vehicle?"

"We've got an old 747 we managed to put in orbit this morning, and
I'm hoping we can modify it to function as a space shuttle."

"How much do you have of... uh, supplies?"

"We've got a year's supply of food, water, charcoal to extract carbon
dioxide from the air.  Then we'll have to start recycling."

"Do you expect to be gone longer than a year?"

"Of course, yes.  There's no way we could get to Mars and back in a
year.  Plus, I'm planning on making a stop at the astroid belt on the
way.  I'm looking at five years..."


---- [ T + 770 days ]

"Vic had really good points.  We live in a world where individuals
are dependent on society to an almost unprecidented degree, and
that's not a good thing.  Then you compound this with the majority's
total inability to choose good leaders."

---- [ T + 231 days ]

"All this is true, but again, the most serious problems are spiritual
and not political or technological.  As long as people are willing to
stand behind their counters and refuse to serve a hamburger unless
they're getting money, you're going to have these problems.  It's a
bottom up proposition.  If people can't eat without money, it's
pointless to talk about building some hi-tech system without money.
You've got Christ there telling you 'give to all those who beg off
you' and the masses of people just don't want to hear it.  They refuse
to believe that he was talking to _you_, in _your_ business, standing
there behind _your_ counter.  They didn't want to hear it two thousand
years ago, and they don't want to hear it today."


----- [ T + 7 days ]

Zee: "Paul teaches very clearly in Romans that government authority is
consituted by God and that we have a moral duty to obey that
authority."

"Can you show me where that is taught by Christ?"

"It's taught in the Bible, Dr. Yeats, it's taught in the Bible."

"Well, there's lot of things taught in the Bible.  The Bible
teaches us to stone prostitutes to death, for example, but
we all know what Jesus had to say about that.  So that's..."

Zee cut her off.  "So you don't believe in the Bible?"

Andrea took a deep breath.  "I don't believe it's word-for-word
exact."

"Well, Dr. Yeats, I do believe in the Bible.  I believe it's the
inspired word of God, every bit of it.  Maybe that's why you find
yourself mixed up with these people; maybe you need to read that Bible
of yours and take it a little more seriously."

Andrea gritted her teeth, ignored the personal slight, and went on.

"I do take the Bible seriously, governor, but I don't believe it's
word-for-word accurate..."

"The Bible is the Inspired Word Of God!"

Mercuriou: "Is this guy a governor or a preacher?"

"OK, well maybe you can clear up some simple points for me.  Like how
did Judas die?"

"I really don't this is relevent..."

"No, how did Judas die?  Can you tell me?"

Zee took a deep breath before answering.  "Judas hung himself from
a tree, consumed with the guilt of having betrayed Christ."

"But that's now what the Bible says!  At least that not what the Bible
says in Acts!  In _Matthew_ we're told Judas hung himself.  In _Acts_
we're told he bought a field with the silver he had been paid and died
after falling down a ravine in that field.  Now, Governor, how can one
man die two different ways?"

Zee remained silent.  Andrea went on.

"Or perhaps you can tell me what happened to Christ after his baptism
by John?  In _Matthew_ we're told he went to wilderness for forty days
where he was tempted by the devil.  In _John_ we're told that the
_next_day_ he began calling his disciples - no wilderness trip, no
forty days.  So what happened that days after his baptism, Governor,
did he head for the wilderness or start his ministry?"

"So what are you trying to say, Doctor, that we can't beleive the Bible?"

"No, I've just pointing out some of it's many internal
inconsistencies.  There's no way it can be word-for-word exact.  I've
come to see it as a historial document, and like many other historical
documents flawed and inaccurate, but one that deals with some of the
critical events of human history - the life, ministry, death, and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  Asking if any particular event
happened just the way it's related is like asking if Julius Cesear
actually uttered the words "the die is cast" as he crossed the River
Rubicon.  Who knows?  Yet we can be fairly certain that was a man
named Julius Cesear and that he did most of the things attributed to
him.  It's like that with the Bible - you can't just pick out some
verse and insist that it's exactly infallible; you have to evaluate it
with a critical eye."

"So now we come back to Paul, and we note first that he's not Christ,
he's a great Christian leader, possible the greatest misionary in the
history of the church, but he's not Christ.  He didn't come back from
the dead.  He didn't know God.  His teaching doesn't have the same
weight.  And I think we need to be somewhat critical of his philosophy
that government leaders are placed into authority by God.  So people
who lived in the Soviet Union had a moral obligation not to possess
shortwave radios?  Because it was against the law?  Because their
leaders were consistuted by God?"

"First of all, a communist dictatorship..."

Now it was Andrea's turn to interrupt.

"Oh, no, he didn't say that.  He didn't say that our obligation to
obey the laws depended on whether it was a dictatorship or a
democracy!"

In the television studio on Earth, Zee paused for a moment and
collected his thoughts.  Having watched the earlier interviews, he had
expected Mercuriou to be a push-over.  He hadn't expected Andrea Yeats.

"We have a moral obligation to obey the laws of a legitimate government."

"Do you find that somewhere in the Bible, that distinction between
legitimate and illegitimate government?"

"Absolutely.  Legitimate government is government inspired by God."

"I'll agree with that.  But how do we decide if a particular
government is inspired by God?"

"A legitimate government is one that rules with the support of its people."

"You find that in the Bible?  That a government inspired by God is one
that rules with the support of its people?"

Zee flared up.  "Look, Dr. Yeats, if you can't tell the difference
between a democratically elected government and a dictatorship, then I
guess you belong on that ship of theives with their rebel capitan!"

"Governor, I most certainly can tell the difference, but you're
evading the question about Biblical teaching.  There is absolutely
nothing in Christ's teachings which tell us we have some moral
obligation to obey every law promulgated by any government, nothing
that teaches democracy as some holy philosophy, in fact, I think one
of the main themes of _Revelation_ is the presence in this world of
governments that are _not_ ordained by God, and if you take Paul's
philosophy in Romans at face value, it tells us that people in Russian
had a moral obligation to God not to have shortwave radios because
that was the law of the government!"

"So, what, you're trying to tell us that all government is evil, that
we should have anarchy, that people should do whatever they please?"

"No, I'm just pointing our that our _moral_ obligation is not to obey
the laws of government, but to obey the laws of God!"

"And part of the laws of God is obedience to constituted authority!"

"Where do you find that in the Gospel, governor, I'd really like to
know!"

"So there's nothing wrong with murder?!"

"Murder is against the laws of God; _thou_shall_not_kill_!"

"So the only time we have to obey the law is when it's in accord with
our ideas of what God wants?"

"Governor, the _only_ law we _have_ to obey is the _law_of_God_!"

Zee paused and considered this.

"So all these laws we have, people should just pick and choose
whenever they want to obey or not to obey them?"

"People should concern themselves first and foremost with the laws
of God!  The laws of man are secondary!"

"Well, then we'd just have anarchy!  I could just say that my religion
teaches human sacrifice, that I think that's the will of God, right?"

"You can believe whatever you want.  You can believe the world is
flat, but that doesn't change the fact that it's round.  But I'll go
so far as to say that if you truly believed that human sacrifice was
ordained by God, then you'd have a moral obligation to practice it
irregardless of the laws of men!  Which is why the Bible is so
important!  So we can clearly know that human sacrifice is _not_
ordained by God!"

"So let's see, you think men are only obligated to obey the laws of
God, and yet you don't believe the Bible is literally true, so how are
we supposed to determine the law of God?"

"It's not easy.  In fact, I think it's about the hardest thing to do
in life.  You start by making a conscience decision to seek the will
of God, to try and make every decision in your life, big and small,
based not on what you want, but on what God wants, you pray, you
worship, you study the Bible, especially the Gospels, and then you do
the best you can."

"And if that's in conflict with our laws, you just ignore the laws,
then?"

"I think it's more a case of looking somberly at the laws, and looking
somberly at the men who make the laws, and coming to a conclusion that
the men are self-serving materialists far more concerned with their
economic and political theories of capitalism and democracy that with
the Christian gospel, and that most of their laws are convoluted,
misguided, and unjust."

"So our laws are convoluted, misguided, and unjust?"

"Well, look at them.  Go into any law library and ask to see the law.
Just the Code of Federal Regulations alone takes up entire shelfs.
It's tens of thousands of pages of inscrutable legalize.  And people
say that 'ignorance of the law is no excuse'; I personally think it's
a great excuse - who understands all these laws?  Then compare it with
the laws of God - simple things like "don't kill", "don't steal",
"don't lie", "give to all", "do no violence to any man".  That's what
I mean by convulted.  As for misguided, well, look at how much of it
is to somehow 'regulate' people's greed - this capitalist democratic
idea that everyone should just be in it for themselves and we use the
law to build some kind of a 'playing field'.  And unjust!  You've got
to be kidding me!  One guy cuts a deal to testify against his friends
and gets four months; another guy refuses to snitch and it's a ten
year sentence!  You call that justice?"  [Jamal Lewis]

"And if you decide the laws are unjust, then you just take it
upon yourself to ignore them?"

"Well, basically, yes.  That's what people did in Russia, that's
what people did in Germany."

"This isn't Russia, and this isn't Germany!  We have freedom in this
country, and respect for our laws!"

----- [ T + 54 days ]

"Genius?!", Burns sneered.  "What is genius?  A lot of it is passion.
I've heard it said that we use less than ten percent of our brain
power, and I believe it.  When I a teenager, I just loved math.  I
read every math book I could get my hands on.  Marc was like that with
literature.  I figured it out from watching him - you want to learn
Greek, get a copy of the _Iliad_ and just plow your way through it;
you want to learn Spanish, read _Don_Quixote_ or something; you want
to be a pianist, just play the piano every day.  I don't know
if you're going to be Elton John, but you're going to be a good pianist.

If I got behind in a college class, I'd sit down and put an hour a day
into it and be caught up in no time - and I'd time that hour with a
watch.  You put an hour a day into anything, and you're going to get
good at it, but most people just drift through life.  They have no
passion.  Or maybe their passion is being socially accepted, or making
money, or getting laid.  For whatever reason, they do just enough to
get by, and then they look at someone who has passion, who's just
driven to do something, and they think, 'man, that guy's a genius; I
wish I could be like him.'

-----

"Alister, it's not just democracy.  This has been going on for
thousands of years.  Humanity is barbaric.  Democracy just
demonstrates is what Christ said two thousand years ago, 'the path to
salvation is narrow and those who find it are few'.  People won't live
the way they were taught by Christ, it's just too hard.  Thoreau said
this, too, 'in their sacrifices to humanity they ran no risks.'
People want a watered-down, riskless religion, and that's not what
Christianity is."

-----  [ T + 54 days ]


idiot routing protocol.  It's just boring, and I always had managers
pushing me to do more and more and more.  If anything, Marc pushes me
to do less and less.  He'll offload anything he can.  And Alister was
a great find.  He's a lot of fun to work with, and a lot of stuff I'm
sick of fooling with, he'll jump into.  Marc hired him, of course."

---- [ T + 8 days ]


"Communism made a lot of sense - 'class warfare', I mean, look around.
A bunch of people trying to make money off publishing books pushing
the government for all these legal restrictions, the high-school kid
who can't afford the music he wants copying it anyway.  The 'haves'
verses the 'have nots'.  How could it not make sense?  It's the story
of human nature - the rich man and the thief.  Communism tells the
thieves that their theft was justified, that they had been oppressed,
that they could have a people's revolution and expropriate the
expropriators.  Capitalism tells the rich man that his wealth is
justified, that it's his 'right' to decide how it gets spent, that all
these people gripping about it could just go get a job and make the
money they keep begging for.

"Christianity, of course, refuses to justify either man.  God tells
the thief, 'thou shall not steal', and Christ tells the rich man 'if a
man steals your coat, give him your cloak as well'.  So to put that
in a modern context, if a man breaks into your house, holds you and
your family up at gunpoint, takes everything of value that he sees,
you give him the keys to the car and offer to help carry the stereo
out, because it's pretty heavy."

Laughter.

"Well, you laugh because people just don't want to hear it, but that
_is_ what Jesus said.  He also told the thief some things he doesn't
want to hear, either.  In fact, even your majority don't want to hear
it.  Despite all your condemnation of Communism, you still keep trying
to glorify your own revolution.  You keep trying to tell us George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson were justified in an armed revolution
against the British crown.  Yet Christ tells us in the garden to
sheath our swords.  The oppressed are not justified in theft, and they
are not justified in revolution.  If people would live both sides of
that equation, if the 'haves' would give to anyone who begged of them,
and the 'have-nots' would accept whoever was in power, things would
tend to work out.  But the 'haves' always abuse their power, and the
'have-nots' always scream for revolution.  For a democratic
revolution, if they are sufficiently localized geographically to be
able to control one, because democracy really 'legimitizes' it.  If
all the drugs users in the United States were completely localized in
one state, that they could easily control the state government through
democratic elections, you'd see a much different drug policy in the
United States.  I can't tell you exactly what it'd be, but I can tell
you that the dissident groups that get oppressed most in democracy are
the ones that are so broadly spread geographically that they can't
influence even local elections."

---- [ T + 770 days ]

"It was like that movie 'The Untouchables', in that scene where the
accountant got blown away by the mob, and scrawed on the wall in blood
was the word 'touchable'.  That's what nine-eleven was for this
country - 'touchable' scrawed in blood across the rubble of Ground Zero.

"What changed in nine-eleven is this majority finally figured out that
all the billions they've blown on weapons, weapons, and more weapons,
hasn't had then _untouchable_.  Nine-eleven was just like the scene in
the movie, written in blood on the wall for all the world to see:
'touchable'.  That's why we hear all this crying now about weapons of
mass destruction, because these are the _only_ weapons that can really
target THE MAJORITY.

"Who else you gonna attack?  Who else is really guity?  It's the
people who keep voting militant capitalists back into power, keeping
working for their corporations, keep supporting their system - in a
word, the majority."

"What do you mean by mititant capitalism, you've used the phrase
several times."

"Well, first of all capitalists, men and women who subcribe this
pseudo-religion of greed, that you've got this whole battery of goods
and services you offer, but nobody gets any of it without money, and
secondly militants, people who sit around at cocktail parties and say,
"Man, that technology worked great in Iraq!" and marvel at tanks that
can fire twice as far as any other and do it at forty miles per hour,
people who insist that we've _got_ to have those weapons, to protect
our _freedom_, you know, _militant_capitalists_, or in other words,
_the_majority_.


----

"Do I 'beilive' in democracy?  No.  I mean, do I believe that it
exists, sure!  Do I believe that it's the
greatest-system-of-government- ever-invented-by-man(TM), no.  Do I
believe that it can consistently produce decent leadership, no.  Do I
believe that there's a snowball's chance in hell that it won't be
remembered as one of the most hated systems of government ever...
maybe."

"Well, the fact is that people will follow selfish and violent leaders
- this has been demonstrated time and time again, from the French
Revolution forward."

"You keep saying the French Revolution, what about the American?"

"Well, the nice thing about the French Revolution was that it came to
pieces so quickly - you could directly see what'd you'd get from a
democracy.  It took the American Revolution another two hundred years
to conjuer and annex northern Mexico, rip itself to pieces in the
Civil War, exterminate native Indian society, and generally unlease
capitalism on the planet after it had muddled through fascism and
communism."


---- [ T + 8 days ]

In 1848, based almost entirely on his name recognizition, the French
elected Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte their president (his uncle was the
famed Little Cornnel), and within five years he had disolved the
Republic and proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III, but I digress.


---- [ T + 21 days ]

Vic: "Well, I don't reject technology outright, but I certainly think
we've got a serious, serious problem with industrialization and the
consequent de-humanization of labor on the assembly line.  In the
twentieth century, we've seen the emergence of labor unions and the
general success of the labor movement to gain improvements in working
conditions through both legislation and contract negotiation.  Yet
those gains are largely confined to the West, and we've also seen
factories essentially exported to third-world nations that don't have
strong labor movements in order to avoid the high costs of labor in
the West.  One thing you don't see is an _international_ labor
movement; labor unions are typically local or national institutions
that are perfectly willing to sacrifice the interests of foreign
workers in order to protect their own; thus you see labor leaders
advocating restrictive immigration policies, for example, while
basically turning a blind eye to the working conditions in those
countries."

"So what's the point?"

"Well, the point is that despite all the much publicized successes of
labor we've still got serious problems with industrialization."

"But hasn't the world gone post-industrial?"

"No, it hasn't.  We still use industrial processes to manufactuer our
cars, our appliances, our food, the concrete, the steel, the plastic
that so much of our society depends on.  The hype and the money has
gone post-industrial, but there's still a lot of people working on
assembly lines in Middle America, and getting a computer certification
so you can quit your job when the factory moves to Thailand isn't the
answer."

"So what is the answer?"

"Well, I think a lot of the answer is technological.  I'm a firm
believer that we need technological solutions to our technological
problems, political solutions to our political problems, and spiritual
solutions to our spiritual problems.  It doesn't do any good to try
and find political solutions to technological problems.  The robotics
technology that we're using to grow our food here has a lot of
potential.  Basically, we can think now about replacing our assembly
line workers with robots.  But we can't do that if replacing the
workers means putting them homeless and jobless on the streets!"

----

"Th age-old propaganda technique - get personal!  Turn the discussion
into a _personal_ attack on your opponent

---- [ T + 6 or 8 days ]


Mercuriou: Yeah, I've got some closing remarks...

Mercurio rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over the
compartment.  Finally, he pulled out one of Burns' T-shirts, brushed
away a pair of jeans that had drifted in front of the TV camera and
spread the black T-shirt out so it dominated the view field of the
camera.

"Here's my closing remark!"

The shirt read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.


-----

"Christianity _commands_ capitalism!"

It was again Andrea's turn to compete in the televised circus that the
_Xplorer_1_ mission had become.  Her opponent was a minister in a major
Protestant church.

"The civil magistrate has a God-given duty as a minister of justice,
and God's ministers are not to exceed their duties!"

Andrea thought about this, then answered.

"I'm a bit confused.  I stated several days ago that I don't advocate
a welfare system, but that seems to be what you're implying

----


LINGURING ISSUES
----------------
Burns' and Alister's drug use
Andrea's response to September 11



Congressman Ecks - capitalism
Senator Wye - freedom / drug war / border policy / liberties of democracy
Govenor Zee - the religious right



----

nobody's going allow the vegitarian minority to do this to
the majority.  So why don't you get off my back about drugs?"

----

We are forced to consider the possibility that there is a Great Evil
Spirit, which oposses us at every great turn in our lives.  We
consider that Earth may be a testing ground between Good and Evil, and
that Evil is always present, especially near end turns [near end of
life].  Then we are forced to discern Evil.


We are forced to consider Evil.
We may be opposed at every great turn in our lives.
Earth may be but a joust.
Thus we are forced to discern Evil.

   Evil may be a quest for the naive!
   Good is all there in the universe!
   Just move a little forward,
   You'll get by OK next time.

Maybe you will, God's all of love
But that's not the point.
You do his will now,
the best that you can.

----

I should've been there instead of Vic.
If anyone deserved to go down in flames it was me and Burns.

---- [ T + 7 days ]

"OK, this actually happened to me.  One day I didn't have any money, I
had just hitchhiked up from Mexico to Corpus Christi, I was walking
down the streets of this city and eventually ending up sleeping behind
an abandoned house, but before that happened..."

"Excuse me, what were you doing hitchhiking up from Mexico?"

"Well, I had gone down to visit a friend of mine who was a Franciscan
monk, I had taken the time to spend a week on a mountaintop in prayer
and then another couple of days recuperating before I went home."

...

"So when I got to Corpus Christi, I walked into this fast-food place,
I think it was a Popeye's Chicken, and I asked for a bowl of their
dirty rice.  I told the woman straight up that I didn't have any
money, she called her manager, and that woman's answer was 'We don't
give out food for free, thank you, have a nice day,' or something like
that.  So I walked out.  Now what do you want to call that?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"What do you want to call that?  Is that capitalism?"

"Well, the woman there has the freedom to give to you or not give to
you.  Capitalism doesn't tell her not to give to you, that's up to
her, she has the freedom to choice."

"No, she has the obligation to give."

"Obligation?  Whose obligation?"

"Her obligation.  She has a obligation to give."

"And who is obligating her to give?"

"Christ.  We're taught by Christ to 'give to all those who beg of
you'.  She has an obligation, imposed on her by God, to give.  Christ
said 'I give you a new commandment', and because that commandment was
to love, sometimes we forget that it wasn't just a request, it really
was a _commandment_.  So if capitalism is telling her she had the
freedom to chose one or other, it's flat-out wrong because she had an
obligation to choose to one over the other."

"Well, Doctor Yeats, whose going to impose that obligation?"

"The obligation is imposed by God."

...

"Does democacy tell us we have to freedom to drive however fast we
want in a car?  I mean, I exceed the speed limit all the time, clearly
we _do_ have that freedom, are we told that?  Do we constantly hear
from our leaders that we have the freedom to drive how fast we
please?"

"But that is prohibited by law!"

"As is the behavior of the woman in the store - it's prohibited by
God's law, despite the fact that we have the freedom to break that law
if we choose!  So are our leaders constantly telling us that we have
to give to all, they're always telling us we have to drive the speed
limit!"

...

Zee was doing a slow burn.

"Well, maybe if you had a job, you wouldn't need to hitchhike."

Now it was Andrea's turn to simmer.

"I've flow two space shuttle missions, done ground support for a half
dozen more, and spent almost ten years of my life giving my all to
NASA; that isn't good enough for you?"

"No, Doctor, it's not.  In this country we don't let people rest on
their laurels.  Whatever you may or may not have done in the past, we
expect people to work.  If you're not working now, then you've got no
reason to expect anything from anyone."

"Yet some guy makes twenty million or so pitching a baseball for a few
years, he gets to retire at thirty and relax in his beach house the
rest of his life!"

"Well, those are the decisions the majority has made..."
"Well, if he invests it wisely..."

"Well, he got that money working a job, didn't he?  That's the value
this society places on his labor, just like it placed a value on
yours, and you invest it wisely then, yes, you can retire."

...

"Let's face it - it has nothing to do with 'resting on your laurels'.
That's what 'Captain' Mercuriou here would call your propaganda.  It's
greed, pure and simple.  It doesn't make a difference what I've done
in the past; all that matters is that I don't have any money
_right_now_, all that's all most people are interested in."

"I am a _Franciscan_oblate_; let me explain just what that means..."

"So, what, you left NASA to join some goofy cult?  Maybe they're
better off without you!"

"The Franciscan movement is over 800 years old and is one of the most
storied franchises in the Christian church!"

---------

They're not fighting against freedom,
they're fighting against democracy!

---------

"Alister, most employers check to see if their employees are legal.
We checked, too, and I can tell you that not one of these guys here
has a green card!"

---------

Vic: "I guess I saw myself as the voice of morality in this whole
venture, well, maybe more the voice of spirituality!  But you've got
me beat, Andrea, they didn't need me at all!"

---------

Andrea: I think Henry Kissenger once asked a Chinese diplomat his
thoughts on the French Revolution and the man answered that it was too
early to tell.  I guess I feel that way about both the French and
American Revolutions - two hundred years isn't long when it comes to
earth-shattering political movements - it's just too early to tell.

---------

Andrea to Alister:

"Don't worry about it.  Let Kyle and his engineers back in Houston
figure it out, they understand all the orbital mechanics and can come
up with a burn schedule.  All we've got to do is make sure this ship
stays together."

---------

Back in Earth orbit, the satellite phones were working again,
and Andrea was talking to Kyle.

"As soon you're on the Internation Space Station, we're handing
off to Mission Control, and I'm flying to Flordia.  I'll see you
on the ground."

"Kyle, when you asked me to look at what NuTech was doing, I figured
it was just a favor for a friend.  I never dreamed how much I'd need
you through this."

"Andrea, I never dreamed you'd make such an impact through this.
Everytime I see you on TV, I'm just in awe."

---------

Asked if she supported the government / believed in democracy:

"No, and I'll tell you why.  I'm a Christian, and when you get right
down to it, I don't see where the Christian has hardly any use for
government, at least as we know it.  Government is coercive, and
passivism is a mainstay of Christianity.  Think about it.  The
Christian will 'give to all those who beg of him', the Christian will
give even to thieves - 'if a man steals your coat, give him your cloak
as well', so what use does he have of a court system to sue for
damages?  The only way he'd end up in court is if someone else was
suing him.  He's taught not to resist evil, but to love his enemies;
the soldier is taught to 'do no violence to any man', so what use does
the Christian have for national defense?  If someone nails him to a
cross, with his dying words he'll say, 'forgive them, they know not
what they do', so what utility is a criminal justice system, if he'll
let murderers walk?"

--------- [ T + 1033 days ]

"X, in _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance_, described the
Great Books program as the last major attempt to change the course of
a university.  That's probably a pretty accurate description, too."

"Did it work?"

Mercuriou sighed.  "Well, yes and no.  It'd be accurate to say it
changed the course of _some_ universities.  St. John's, for example.
They don't give grades; they don't have exams; it's all based on
reading and writing and discussing what you've read.  But so far it's
been limited to a liberal arts program, and after watching Burns in
action, I think the methodology could be applied to hard sciences as
well.  You study geometry by reading Euclid and Descartes and Hilbert.
You read Faraday to understand how to conduct experiments.  You read
modern authors, too, Maor, and Jackson, and Albert; you pick apart
algebra, and trigonometry, and calculus, and then you go through
physics, and chemistry, and biology.  Of course, you might just end up
producing a generation of Frankensteins crammed full of all this
knowledge without any moral context on how to use it."

... maybe something here about different styles of education ...


---------

		CHARACTER BIOGRAPHIES

MARCELIUS MERCURIOU

The tragic hero, in the Greek sense.  His tragic flaw is his ambition,
driven by his hatred for democracy and capitalism.  He has to 'pay'
for this, but it takes form of his friend's death, and not his own,
because he's still around to be 'resurrected' by Andrea Yeats.

BURNS

The amoral technocrat.  Like the men who built the atomic bomb, he
facilitates Mercuriou's ambition without passing judgement on it
because it offers him the ability to excel at his technical skills.

VICTOR ANTONOV

American Indian heritage.

ANDREA YEATS

Symbolizes Christianity.  A super-hero in the Ayn Rand sense,
she has no significant character flaws.

Entered university at 17, majored in mathematics and graduated Cum
Laude in three and a half years.  Traveled to Europe, where she was
nearly killed in a swimming accident when she was trapped under a
wooden platform and became too disoriented to find her way out.
(Tesla'a accident) Nearly out of air, she saw in a vision that there
was a tiny amount of air just under the platform where it floated on
the water and survived.  A week later, she cut her vacation short and
returned home to enter a seminary.

Dropped out of seminary after a year and a half, despite excellent
grades, because it's theology seemed all too mechanical and she had
decided she didn't want to be a minister.  Decided to be an astronaut
instead, applied to NASA and was rejected.

She returned to school, got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, doing
her thesis on a new mathematical system that could be programmed into
a computer to avoid round-off errors in simulations of microwave
circuitry.  Re-applied to NASA's astronaut program.  This time she was
accepted as a payload specialist and at the age of 34 flew into space
for the first time.

During her second (and last) shuttle mission, she had a religious
epiphany during an EVA when she witnessed a sunrise over the Earth,
was blown away in awe by the majesty and beauty of the planet, and
heard a voice in her head ask "So why are you up here?"  After
returning to Earth, she quit NASA and tried to rediscover religion,
thinking that the meaning of her experience was that there was nothing
for her in spaceflight.  At some point in the _Xplorer_1_ mission, she
realizes that there might be a positive answer to the question in her
head.

Are her parents still alive?  Maybe her father is dead and her Mom
lives up on that farm - that's why she stays there, to take care of
her Mom.  So she should call her Mom first thing in space, then Kyle.

KYLE BECKER

FRIAR DUNSTAN

CONGRESSMAN ECKS

Elected mayor of a major city at 22.  (Jerry Springer)

champion of capitalism

SENATOR WYE

champion of democracy

GOVENOR ZEE

sees himself as Christian moralist



Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - Sept 11 mastermind


-----

"...and then _this_ thing," Mercuriou declared, waving his computer
tablet in the air, "'Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen', in translation, of course..."

"The representatives of the French People, formed into a National
Assembly, considering ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the
rights of man to be the only causes of public misfortunes and the
corruption of Governments..."

"What a fantastic claim!  That ignorance or contempt of the rights of
man are the _only_ causes of public misfortunes!  What about greed!?
What about violence?!"

"What about ignornace or contempt of God?" Andrea asked.

"No, but let's continue!  Perhaps it's in there somewhere!  Perhaps greed
violates the rights of man!"

Mercuriou continued to quote aloud from the tablet.

"Article 2.  The aim of every political association is the
preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.  These
rights are Liberty, Property, Safety and Resistance to Oppression."

"Hmmm..." he continued in dramatic fashion, "Nope!  The right of
Property but nothing about greed!  Nothing about the _responsibility_
of those with Liberty and Property - all rights, no responsibilities!"

"And Christ taught us to forgive our oppressors and pray for our enemies,
not that we have a right of Resistance to Oppression," Andrea chimed in.

"Article 12. To guarantee the Rights of Man and of the Citizen a
public force is necessary..."

"Article 13.  For the maintenance of the public force, and for
administrative expenses, a general tax is indespensable..."

"There you have it!  _The_People_ need a public force to guarantee their
Rights and a general tax to pay for it all!"

"But isn't there something to be said for it, I mean don't people have
rights?"

Andrea answered first.

"Alister, the violation of those 'rights' arises because the men in
change have responsibilites, too - love, charity, forgiveness."

"Witness the great, modern Free Man!  He has Liberty, he has
Property, he lives Unoppress'd, and Oppresses not others!  So what if
another man begs the steak in his freezer?!  Has not that other man
Liberty, too?  Can he not aquire his own Property as well?"

Has he not Liberty?  Has he not Property?

"The public misfortunes and corruption of Governments arise not because
men have forgoten/contempt their _rights_," Mercuriou now thundered
from Olympus, "it is because they have forgotten/contempt their
_obligations_!"




======

liberation theology is alive and well in the United States


======

One of the worst aspects of capitalism is how it promotes mediocrity.

======

"And if you could land and take off again, you could claim the X Prize."

It was weak, but Andrea was grabbing at straws.

"The X Prize?  Doctor, I'm after the M Prize."

======

Kyle near the end:

"Well, it's in the hands of the boys over in '39', now.  I'm flying to
Flordia, Andrea, I'll see you on the ground!"


========= [ T - 312 days ]

talking about St Francis


=========
You make it sound like a utopia!


Impossible task: a voyage to Narnia




Anyway, if they made it to Mars, she wanted
to be there, and if they didn't, they'd _really_ need her help.


On late night T.V, a comic quipped, "Captain Mercuriou wants to open
spaceflight to the masses.  Anybody who can steal five billion
dollars is welcome to join him."


A hundred and twenty miles in altitude,
the ship was in a ninety-minute Low Earth Orbit in the midst of over
hundred free-floating cargo modules.

Once in orbit, the crew got right to work.  They had to.  Most of
their fuel and supplies were in the cargo modules, which were built
around a three-part design.  The first stage boosted the module to
orbital height and speed, though with a perigee still in the
atmosphere.  After detaching the first stage, the second stage fired
briefly at apogee to raise the module to a circular orbit, while the
first stage dropped back into the atmosphere and burned up.  Atop the
second stage was the cargo module itself, equiped with a laptop
computer using a radio communications link and a fuel cell fed
from supply lines of N-1033 and peroxide.




Mercuriou would have lept out of his chair, but of course, he
had no chair.  He was floating free in the cabin of the 747,
so had to be content with a bizarre gestation of his arms
before firing back his retort.




"Excuse me," came a female voice from just outside camera range, and
Andrea Yeats propelled herself into view.

"Excuse me, but I really don't think the issue is freedom.  The issue
is morality.  Freedom has to be used morally, and I think these
objections come down to morality, even though very few people like to
use that word.  Freedom is not an absolute good.  It can abused, and
the crux of the issue is that the majority of people have freedom, but
have abused it and used it immorally."

"Well, who's going to define this morality, Doctor Yeats," came the
sarcastic response from Earth.  "Who's going to tell people what they
can and can't do with their freedom?"

"Morality is a function of religion, Senator.  As a Christian, I look
to the gospel of Christ to define morality."

"Well, that's fine for you, Doctor, but we've got freedom of religion
in this country!'

"Freedom of religion is fine up to a point, but somewhat unrealistic..."

"It's not unrealistic, Doctor Yeats, we've got it!  What you advocate
is something we abandoned centuries ago, that there should be some
prefered state religion!"

"Well, you've got to have a prefered religion..."

"_Got_to_have_a_prefered_religion!"  Interrupting, Wye echoed her words
with a sneer.  "Doctor Yeats, I hate to break this to you, but you're
about two hundred years behind the times!  Ever heard of the Salem
Witch Trials?"

The NASA engineer turned red and practically ripped the microphone off
her shirt before pushing away from the bulkhead behind her and fleeing
from the TV cameras without saying another word.  Mercuriou jumped
into the gap.

"OK, now you're back to picking on someone your own size!"

The televised confrontation ragged on another fifteen minutes, with
Senator Wye repeatedly asserting that the United States had freedom
because the majority of people supported the government, and Mercuriou
repeatedly charging that all the majority wanted to do with their
freedom was use it to oppress others.  Later, the captain found Andrea
Yeats back in C-3, working on a computerized radar system Burns
planned to install on the front of the spacecraft.

"So what where you talking about there?  You've got to have a hide of
steel to debate those bastards; it's a blood sport.  They're not
trying to have some intellectual debate; they'll stoop to any low to
get their sound bite and 'win'."

Yeats brushed back the long blond hair that was starting to
drift in front of her face.

"What I was trying to say was that you just can't have a human society
without some kind of shared standard of morality, and that's one of
the main functions of religion.  I mean, how can you judge right or
wrong?  You invariably end up with some kind of preferred religion;
complete freedom of religion is totally unrealistic.  Why can't
someone say that his religion allows human sacrifice, for example?
Where's your freedom of religion then?"

"I'll tell you what their prefered religion is - it's democracy!"
Mercuriou responded.  "The murderer can't make his human sacrifice
because the majority won't allow it!  I can't smoke pot because
the majority has decided to outlaw it!  Our ship's library
is illegal because that's what the majority has decided to call it!
Right and wrong are subject to a vote, now, Andrea."

"Well, we both know right and wrong are not subject to a vote.  I
think half of what religion is, heck, maybe 90% of what religion is is
giving us standards to judge right and wrong.  Murder isn't wrong
because it's illegal, it's wrong because it's immoral, and you can't
decide what's moral and immoral without religion.  So that's why I
think freedom of religion, or more precisely seperation of religion
from public life, is a chimera.  You can have freedom to go to
whatever church you want, but you can't have a society without some
kind of shared norm of morality, and that means a shared, what I
called a preferred, religion."

Mercuriou was silent as he thought about this for a minute.

"You know, you've got a good point there, Doctor - morality!  Maybe
it's something I don't talk enough about.  These people crow on to no
end about 'freedom', but they don't want to talk about morality!"




Mercuriou: I'll agree with that, but I'd still like to see these
additional powers codified in Constitutional Ammendments, and I'll
tell you why.  One of the big accusations people made against Soviet
Russia was that their government didn't obey their Constitution, that
it was tiny little bunch of communists who had taken over the
government, that it wasn't really what people wanted, that if they had
only had 'freedom' everything would have been so different.  Now, I
don't want anybody being able to come around a hundred years from now
and try to say that the U.S. wasn't really a democracy, that the
people didn't really want these things, that some bunch of politicians
took over the government, that if only the Constitution had been
enforced, then everything would have been so different.  This
government, this majority, talks so much about law and order, is so
determined to make all these rules for everyone else to obey, I'd just
like to see them have to obey the rules that were laid down for them.
It's a bit of a side issue, but I'd really like a precedent
established that the powers of the government are limited by the
Constitution.


cut from T + 6 days




Mercuriou: Freedom for whom, senator, freedom for whom?  Freedom for
the two million people sitting in your jail cells?

Wye: So now you're trying to compare us with fascists!

Mercuriou: The basic premise is the same.  The solution to our
problems is to build all these super-weapons, arm ourselves to the
teeth, have a war against our own people, send armed men busting into
their homes, make people so terrified of what will be done to them
that they'll be too afraid not to just fall in line and do what
they're told when the great majority barks out its orders.  Isn't it
funny how in all of these great _people's_ societies the biggest enemy
of all always ends up being _your_own_people_?

Wye: Fascist Germany was a dictatorship, captain; its government
_wasn't_ responsive to its people; THAT'S HOW WE GOT THE HOLOCAUST!!

Mercuriou: It was DEMOCRACY that brought Hitler to power, senator!
Germany had not one, but two national elections in 1932, and the Nazi
party won a plurality in both of them!  Hitler was the leader of the
largest political party in the country and the obvious choice for
chancellor!

Wye: This is outrageous!



Mercuriou: After the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw the truth about
democracy.  The U.S. was left as the world's only superpower, and
could really have done something to make all this talk about liberty
and freedom real.  Instead, they built a wall across their southern
border, declared war on their own people for what they smoked, and
decided to keep all their technology secret and controlled so they
could make billions off it for themselves, and told the rest of the
world to 'compete'.  That's when we really saw the truth about
democracy.



Mercuriou: Drug addiction, alcoholism, thirty thousand suicides a
year, clinical depression at near epidemic proportions... and it's all
because of some guys sitting on their couches smoking dope, right?
Couldn't have anything to do with your leaders, ehh?  Couldn't be
because you're raised from childhood to be a little cog in this
capitalist system, that you're basically forced to work because the
capitalists control everything, and the people you're forced to work
for are the most selfish bums you'd ever want to meet in your life.
Couldn't have anything to do with your problems, right?  Couldn't be
_the_people_in_charge_of_your_society_ that are responsible for any of
this?



Mercuriou: Yet people believe that if they've got money in their
hands, they've got freedom.  They absolutely insist that they _aren't_
living off the clerk stocking the shelfs at Safeway, only because they
sit behind some desk pushing paper and some corporation cuts them a
check every other Friday.




Mercuriou: OK, now let's take a look at the history of democracy!

Wye: Fine, let's look at it's history.  Let's start with freeing the slaves!

Mercuriou: In the bloodiest war in American history.  I mean, let's
face it - the Lincoln government had got to be the most disastrous
administration in American history!  Do you ever think that maybe if
he was told by God what was going to happen he might have just say,
'I'll just sit this one out... let someone else be president this
year'?

Wye: Most disasterous!  Lincoln was one of the countries greatest
presidents!

Mercuriou: OK, fine.  But you have to admit that 'freeing the slaves'
is was least a push.  Not to even go into civil rights, but clearly we
can't afford too many 'successes' like the Civil War!

Mercuriou: What else was happening to democracy in the nineteenth
century?  We had this thing called 'Manifest Destiny', remember?
Hitler had something similar called 'Liebingstrum', but I digress.
The point...

Wye: What the hell are you muttering about?

Mercuriou: The point is that 'Manifest Density' meant we were going to
rule this continent from sea to shining sea.  The two main groups of
people in the way were the American Indians and the Mexicans.
American Indian civilization was basically wiped off the face of this
planet.  The _best_ you can say is it was pushed back into
reservations on some of our most worthless land we've got.  The
Mexicans were invaded, conjuered, and California, New Mexico, Arizona,
Utah was taken from them.  President Polk's war, remember?  Henry
David Thorugh wouldn't pay his ten-dollar tax because he was so
opposed to it?

Mercuriou: This is democracy, or at least American democracy.  In
Europe, it gets even better!  In 1848, the French once again overthrow
their monarchy!  The king flees the country, and they proclaim another
Republic!  They produce a constitution that looks on paper like the
most democratic in Europe!  It provides for an elected President and
universal sufferage - all males can vote, and at the time a
revolutionary concept, and I mean revolutionary!  There was exactly
one election under this new constitution [check this] and guess who
won?  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew!  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, who
within five years proclaims France an empire and himself Emperor
Napoleon III!  Now this is pretty good.  Should silence anyone with
any idea that Napoleon Bonaparte wasn't one of the most popular
leaders in French history, and that he came to power in a democracy.

Wye: So I guess democracy is some evil monster imposed on this planet?

Mercuriou: Something like that.  I think _populist_government_ is a
disaster, and things like democracy show it.  I think things like
Communism and Fascim show it, too!

[now we do russian and germany]

Wye: And now we come to capitalism, I suppose?

Mercuriou: That's right.  We come to capitalism.  It isn't an
encouraging track record.




Wye: Look here, I don't know what you're trying to say...

Mercuriou: Well then let me be crystal clear, Senator.  I don't think
your 'participatory government' is worth a hill of beans [CA].  The
majority of people - not all the people, mind you, just one group of
people - make all the decisions.  Everybody else gets to 'participate'
about the same way you could 'participate' in Russia!



Mercuriou: Well, senator, I'll agree with you that this is a
democracy, but I don't think that changes things much.  Let's say
Russia had had freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and free
and open elections every two or four years, and they had still elected
the communists, and still supported the KGB, and still shipped their
citizens off to gulags.  Would that have changed things all that much,
just that they had elections?

Wye: No sir, the people of these country don't support the KGB, and we
don't ship our citizens off to gulags!

Mercuriou: Oh, but you do.  Haven't you heard about 'zero tolerance'?
Haven't you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?
It has got to be one of the most violent programs on television, and
it's all real!  Remember who you're talking to, senator - a drug user!
Don't expect me to sit here and crow on about freedom while this whole
society is hell-bent on a war against me and everyone else like me.
You do ship your citizens off to jail, and while you may not torture
them, and your prisons may not be as cold as the ones in Siberia, the
fact remains that fear of the police is just as readily used in this
society as in those others.

Wye: I don't think you can compare the DEA with the KGB.









Moderator: So what do you really think of democracy?

Mercuriou: I think it's another communism.

Wye: Democracy is not another communism!  We have freedom in this country!

Mercuriou: Really?  Go tell all the people who smoke pot that they've
got freedom.  Democracy isn't about freedom; it's about putting one
particular group of people in control - the majority.



Mercuriou: Well what about the people in jails?  Do they choose their
own leaders?  Or the people who want to copy music around the
Internet?  How about drug users?  Is that why we have a War on Drugs,
because they choose their own leaders, too?



T + 8 days

"The majority don't want good leaders."

"So you actually do think the majority of the American people support
their government?" the moderator asked.

Mercuriou went on without waiting for an answer.

Mercuriou paused briefly before continuing in a calmer voice.


NEED TO BACK THIS UP MORE

"And then we've got the granddaddy of them all, at least as far as
European democracy is concerned - the French Revolution!  The great
French republic, who leaders preached liberty, fraternity, and
equality... and guillotines in the public squares of Paris to chop off
the heads of the noblemen!  Europe's first democracy - and every one
of those thugs was elected - Coulton, Saint Just, Robespierre, and of
course, finally, Napoleon.  And don't let anyone tell you that
Bonaparte wasn't elected, because he could have won any election he
ever stood for.  He came to power in a democracy and was one of the
most popular leaders in French history."

MORE ABOUT FRANCE ... 1848

"Meanwhile, while all this is going on in Europe, we've got the great
American 'experiment', based on all men possessing certain inaliable
rights... unless your skin was black, of course, because if capitalism
is the issue that has dominated the last hundred years of American
history, then, really, slavery was the issue that dominated the first
hundred years.  



Well, you said it yourself, captain - the majority
_of_southern_whites.  It wasn't really a true democracy!

Mercuriou: No sir, that is simply not going to cut it.  If democracy
was really so great, if it sounds

AT THIS POINT, WE HAVE TO HAVE MADE THE CASE AGAINST CAPITALISM A SLAM-DUNK

MEXICO AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS


"Basically, the only legimitate form of government is democracy,
right?  Everything else is illegimiate, and if your government is
illegimiate, you basically have no rights, there is no international
law for you, so better buddy up with the U.S. or you might find the
SEALs airdropping on your international airport one morning."

"It's the same with all these populist governments. Communism was one
of the biggest mass populist movements of the twentieth centry.
How did it manage to take
over half this planet?

This is the sick truth about
populist government.  The masses of people are selfish and violent.
That's why they chose people like the communists and the fascists and
the capitalists to be their leaders!"



"This has been the broken record of democracy for the last two hundred
years.  It just keeps repeating the same lyrics - 'put the people in
control', 'put the people in control', 'put the people in control'!
All these people talk about these grandeose ideas of liberty and
freedom, and then choose absolute garbage for their leaders, and build
societies based on the basest and most vicious traits of mankind.
This time around it's the capitalists - the most selfish sons of
bitches you'd ever want to meet, and the majority support these bums
every step of the way.  And of course they can't spend enough money to
build the most lethal killing machines this planet has ever seen.
This is what the majority of people want - militant capitalists, about
the most selfish men you'd ever want to meet, and they're going to get
tough with anybody who won't follow all these laws.  Real good
leaders."

Mercurio stopped.  He had been lecturing the TV camera non-stop for
almost half an hour.  A tense silence fell over the television
program.  Across the country, millions of people in their homes
murmorred amongst themselves, at least those who were still watching.
"I don't want to hear any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Marc!"  "That
bastard deserves to die up there!"  "I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is
this what people think about us?"

In New York, the broadcast was nearing it's end.  There would be
plenty more opportunities for debate.

"Captain, what are your plans?  How long can you stay in orbit?"

Mercurio rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over the
compartment.  Finally, he pulled out the T-shirt he was looking for,
brushed away a pair of jeans that had drifted in front of the TV
camera and spread the black T-shirt out so it dominated the view field
of the camera.  It read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.

"We're going to Mars!"

-----

"Please grip about socialized medicine.  Hell, our medicine already is
socialized; it's just capitalist socialism instead of communist
socialism.  Doctors don't make the decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and
hospital administrators and pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom
line is still the same.  It's still some screwed up system that
everyone is a little cog in.  You can buck it.  But just like John
Cougar Mellancamp said, 'whenever I fight the system, the system
always wins'.  You fight the system, nobody'll hire you because you
won't churn out the billable hours, you very well may lose your
hospital privileges 'cause you don't have some 'group' you're part of,
if you just ask people to pay what they can afford, you'll get a
pittance, and on top of it all you'll still have medical school loans
to pay off, and they're astronomical because the medical schools
expect that you'll do like everybody else and make a killing, so they
want a nice little piece of the pie, too."




T + 33 days

After her one ill-fated attempt to butt in, Andrea had let Mercuriou
have the debates to himself.  One thing was for sure, though, and that
was that the crew of the _Xplorer_1_, loved or hated, had become media
darlings, and Yeats was one of the big 'gets' for a TV interview.
Rather than returning to Mercuriou's format, Andrea decided to accept
an offer for a one-on-one interview from a prominent female journalist
with a reputation for objectivity.

"Captain Mercurio says the problem is democracy, that it's another
communism.  Do you agree?"

The NASA engineer thought for a moment before answering.

"Not really.  The problem is human nature.  Democracy is just another
political system.  In some ways it's better than others, in some ways
worse.  Ultimately, the solutions to our problems are spiritual and
not political.  Unfortunately, democracy tends to accentuate a lot of
problems, because you can't just go blame it off on some dictator."

"How does democracy accentuate problems?"

"Well, the problems have always been there.  Democracy shows us that
the problems aren't caused because people don't have political
representation.  Now people do have political representation, and a
lot of the problems are still here.  So, just giving political power
to the masses of people doesn't magically solve your problems."

"Dr. Yeats, you mentioned a moment ago that democracy is better than
some political systems, worse than others, or something to that
effect.  If I'm not reading too much into your words, can you give us
an example of a superior political system?"

"Well, like I said, our problems are spiritual more than political,
and thus we need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.  Now
take a monarch like King Arthur or King Solomon; you can have a good
king, genuinely interested in caring for his people, so yes, a good,
generous, tolerant monarchy would be superior to a self-serving and
violent democracy."

"So, do you advocate monarchy as a system of government?"

"I don't advocate anything as a system of government.  I advocate
Christianity as a system for people to live their lives.  Monarchy is
like any other system of government, you might get a good king for a
while, but eventually you'll get a bad one, so it's no answer.  If you
go back to the Old Testament, the book of First Samuel, I think, you
find the people actually _demanding_ a king!  We have this idea today
that a king is somehow imposed on people against their will, but in
those days it was the commonly accepted form of government.  And
Samuel basically told those people that they didn't need a king, that
all they needed was to follow the will of God, but they didn't want to
hear it.  So they got their king, it was Saul, and Samuel told them
again that if they and their king followed the will of God, things
would work out well for them, but if they didn't, there would be
problems.  It's a lot the same today.  People don't need a king, and
they don't need a democracy.  They need to follow the will of God, but
of course you've got half of them screaming that militant capitalism
_is_ the will of God, so there you go."

"So, doctor, I'm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say
that you advocate Christianity rather than any system of government.
For example, what do you say to Captain Mercurio's very vocal
criticisms of western society?"

The astronaut paused before responding.

"I think he makes a lot of good points, but this has been human
society since the dawn of time.  Take Saint Anthony of the Desert, for
example.  God appeared to him in a vision and told him to flee from
men, so he went to live in the desert, and founded the Christian
monastic tradition.  This was during the Roman Empire, when Christians
were thrown to the lions, so these problems have been around for a
while."

"Haven't we come a long ways from that?  We don't throw Christians to
the lions anymore."

"No, we don't, thank God, but it's still tough to live as Christians.
Generally, the people who rise to the top in human society do so
by abandoning Christian values, so living as a Christian generally
means that you're going to get a lot of doors slammed shut on you."

"Could you elaborate on that?  How do people not live as Christians?"

"Well, look around.  Christ gave us two great commandments, to love
God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And
he elaborated on them, and lived them in his own life.  I think the
second commandment is more obvious than the first; we look around and
see how we don't love each other as Christ taught, that's more obvious
that how we fail God."

"Could you be more specific; I'm not trying to be dense, but
why don't you think a Christian can rise to the top in our society?"

"Well, consider what Christ said.  He taught us to give to all those
who beg from us; that if someone asked to borrow from us we should
give without expecting anything in return.  If you do that, if you
give to all, you often end up with nothing, at least nothing material."

"Capitan Mercuriou has talked about making books and dictionaries
freely available and has been accused of theft.  Do you support
intellectual property rights?"

"Well, I think it's somewhat of a mute issue.  Christ said that if a
man steals your coat, you should give him your cloak as well - you
love your enemies, and not just in an abstract sense, either, you
really try to do good for your enemies.  So if someone steals your
intellectual property, the Christian response is the same as to any
other theft - you make sure the thieves have got the latest and most
up-to-date versions of your books or software.  When you take that
kind of an attitude, I think you quickly reach a point where you just
say that you'll publish all this information anyway, I mean, why would
you give to a thief, but withhold from someone who just asks
politely?"

"So do you advocate a welfare system of some kind?"

"Well, no, not if I understand your question, because welfare to me
implies some kind of government operation.  Christ didn't tell us to
give our money to the government to run welfare, he didn't tell us to
give our money to the church so it could fund charities, he told us,
he spoke to us as individuals, he said _you_, give to all those who
beg of _you_.  So, if you see someone standing by the road begging,
you stop and give them a dollar or two, if you see someone asking for
a ride, you pull over and ask them where they're going, if you see
someone sleeping in a park, you say 'hey, I've got a spare room, you
can come stay with me', or whatever.  And people don't want to do
that.  If they see a beggar, they keep driving, they choose leaders
that always tell us not to pick up hitchhikers, the guy in the park,
well, that's what the homeless shelter is for."

"But isn't it dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?"

"Yeah", Andrea replied, sucking in her breath, "picking up hitckhikers
is dangerous.  But we remember the story of the good samartain, we
remember that we're called to love our neighbors, and we don't let one
bad experience turn us against all hitchhikers."  She uttered the last
phrase as though a robot, it was her voice, she was preaching to
herself, but she didn't really beleive it.

"It's more dangerous not to pick them up.  It's dangerous because then
we're violating the commandments that Christ gave us to live by; we're
acting out of fear and not love.  And the reason someone, well a lot
of people, actually, like Captain Mercurio, really dislike democracy
is because people don't choose leaders who say, look, you should stop
and pick these people up, they choose leaders who say, no, don't do
that, think of how dangerous it is, put your own safety first."

"You mentioned homeless shelters, in a somewhat negative way.  Do you
not support homeless shelters?"

"Well, I've been in a few, many years ago, before I had a steady job
with NASA.  The problem with homeless shelters is that people think
because there's a homeless shelter, well, the problem's taken care
of, they don't have to do anything, but again, Christ tells us that
we should..."

"But can't people take advantage of that?  I mean, won't some people
just take and take and take without working or really doing anything
productive?"

"Sure, a lot of people will, in a lot of different ways.  Christianity
is about being taken advantage of, when you love unconditionally, when
you give unconditionally, when you forgive unconditionally, people
will just take and take and take, and most people, understandably,
don't want that, and that's why they really don't live as Christians.
They give up to a point and then they say no more.  But one of
Christ's stories was about a woman who came to the temple in Jerusalem
to give a donation.  There were all these other people who gave all
these big donations, and this old woman gave just two bits.  Jesus
told his diciples that she went away redeemed rather than the others,
because she had given all she had, while the others had just given
their surplus.  So it's not about how much you give, it's about you're
willingness to give all."

"Well, that raises a good point, that's been made by people like
Warren Buffett.  I mean, can't you do a lot more good in the world by
working hard, so then you'll have the money to spend on charities that
can really make a difference?"

"Well, now we come back to the first commandment, the one about loving
God.  The point isn't to do as much good as we can in the world, the
point is to live in harmony with God.  That's really what's going on
here, ultimately we're all spiritual beings, first and foremost, so
how much good we can do in the world is really secondary if we're not
living in harmony with God, so that's why the woman who just gives a
little goes away redeemed, because she's the one who's living in
harmony with God."

"What does it mean to live in harmony with God, how do we do that?"

"That's what Christ taught us.  That's what his Gospel teachings are
all about.  I mean, Christ could have chosen to be a political leader,
he was tempted to do that by the Devil, he could have liberated the
Jewish people from the Roman Empire, heck, he could have become the
Roman Emperor, he could have freed the slaves two thousand years ago,
he could have done a lot more 'good' in the world if he'd been
tougher.  But what he was trying to teach us is that living in harmony
with God, loving God, loving each other as sons and daughters of God,
is more important that all the 'good' you do."

"I don't think I understand, completely.  Isn't the 'good' we do, I
mean, isn't that what living in harmony with God is about?"

"No, not really, it's just an effect.  Christ taught us that faith in
God is the most important thing, and that our works come from our
faith.  Our good deads, our works, they are the outward expression of
our inward faith, but it's the faith that's the most important thing.
So you can do all kind of good works, but if the faith isn't there, it
doesn't amount for much.  On the other hand, if you have faith, then
it will be expressed in your works, because you'll always be looking
for ways to help people, to give to people, to forgive people, because
you love people, or at least try to.  I guess it's kinda like what
Marc, what Captain Mercurio did to defraud his investors, he created
some kind of robot that could cook dinner, but it didn't work the way
he said, because it actually had a person operating it.  Good works
are like that, it's not the outward appearance that's important, it's
what's going on behind the scenes."

"What do you think of the Christian right?"

"Well, the Christian right seems to be much more a political movement
than a spiritual one.  To listen to them talk, you'd think the
Christian gospel was mainly about sex, drugs, and alcohol.  Yet if you
look at the gospel, you find basically nothing about drugs and
alcohol, and only a little about sex.  Christ instead hammers
constantly on love, forgiveness, generosity.  Chirst say 'give to all
those who beg of you'.  He told one of his followers to sell all his
worldly possesions and give the money to the poor.  Go ahead - try it.
Sell all your worldly possessions, give the money to the poor, and see
how people treat you then.  The Christian right almost completely
ignores this.  They rail about sex, but are strangely silent about
the neighborhood merchant who puts a price tag on everything in his
store and is standing there behind the cash register to take your
money before you walk out the door.  And then you look at what they
really propose.  So much of it involves more and more government
regulation.  They want the government to ban abortions.  Look, I don't
support abortion, but having the government 'get tough' with abortion
clinics isn't the answer.  They're tough on crime.  Fine.  Christ said
love your enemies.  Why don't you see them agitating for decent
treatment of prisoners in jails?"

"You mentioned the treatment of prisoners.  The United States,
in particular, has all manner of regulations designed to ensure
humane treatment of prisoners.  How are they inadequate?"

"Well, I've never spent more than a night in jail, but if you look at
the videotapes of how prisons are run, they look to me like military
boot camps.  The prisoners are told when to get up, marched through
dining halls, assigned to work projects, ordered here and there.
Maybe more significantly, the prisons are seen as something between a
threat and a punishment.  They're there to create fear in people; you
obey the laws or else you go to jail.  In my mind, just about the only
reason to imprison someone is because they're dangerous to other
people and need to be isolated.  And once they've been isolated,
there's no reason to go beyond that.  Just give them an apartment in a
guarded complex, the level of security being dependent on how
dangerous they are.  What rational reason is there for anything else?
So much of how our prisons are run is based on anger and hatred.
People don't love their enemies; they hate them, and they want to make
them suffer, so that's why they want their prisons to be 'tough'."

"OK, we've only got a few minutes left, let me change the subject, at
least slightly.  You're a scientist, or at least an engineer, so what
do you say to people who claim that there's no scientific proof from
the existance of God, so it must be just a myth?"

"You know, I've been asked that question before and here's my answer:
Scientific proof is based on experiment.  Now, just because something
is factual doesn't mean we can design a experiment to test it.  For
example, you might as well ask if there is life elsewhere in the
universe.  Few people today would suggest that it's unscientific to
speculate thus, but any kind of experiment to exhaustively search the
universe for life is totally impractical.  So the question of
extraterrestrial life, while in no way unscientific in itself, admits
no realistic experiment, and thus no realistic scientific proof!"

"Now let's return to the question of God.  There is an experiment you
can perform to find out if God is real - you can die.  You can put a
gun to your head and pull the trigger, and you'll find out real quick
if there is life after death.  But, like searching the universe for
alien life, this experiment is somewhat unrealistic.  Most of us don't
want to perform that experiment just to satisfy our academic
curiosity.  Yet the fact remains that we will all die some day, and
then we'll know.  So my answer is that the existence of God and the
question of life after death is no more unscientific than speculating
about extraterrestrials, and to people who refuse to accept that I say
just wait - the day will come where you're going to find out all about
God."

"Well, thank you for joining us this evening.  My guest had been
Dr. Andrea Yeats, astronaut, philospher, and Christian.  We'll be back
in a minute with my final thought."

The entire crew had watched the broadcast, floating on the other
side of the TV camera.  After the program ended, they were
fairly quiet for a while, the captain in particular.

"You did really good, I was quite proud of you," he finally said.

Andrea's television interview aired four days later, to a large
audience.  It provoked widespread public response, evidenced by a
deluge of e-mails whose subject lines ranged the spectrum from "May
God bless you and your crew" and "Thank you, you are a genuine saint"
to "Christianity COMMANDS Capitalism" and "This is __HERESY__!!!".

"Live from Los Angeles" - name of the program?



======

The 747's crowded crew
compartment was the hub of activity, with the remainder of the ship
docked to its upward-facing airlock.  The first module, docked
directly to the 747, had become basically an extension of the
aircraft, where the crew tended to take their meals and gather for
all-hands briefings.  Past the first module was a docking nexus, with
four modules extending out from its sides, and other module mated
above.  These four modules had become the crew quarters.  Alister and
Burns shared one, Vic had another.  Andrea, as the only woman
aboard, had an entire module all to herself, as did the Captain.  Next
came Module 2, primarilly used for storage of immediately needed
items, such as a supply of food rations, with enough open space in the
middle to allow easy passage to the next docking nexus, with four more
modules faning out from it.  Two were basically engineering workshops,
packed with a variety of tools Burns had brought up from Earth, a
third Vic had converted into the ship's sick bay, and the fourth was a
library, loaded mainly with Burns' various technical books.

CREW QUARTERS SHOULD BE A LITTLE FARTHER "UP"

Beyond the second module, the side modules were taken up with a mix of
greenhouse modules, of which there were twelve, and storage modules,
containing both supplies carried from Earth and the crew's refuse and
waste, which the Captain and Burns had forbid throwing overboard.
Though it would be some time before they figured how to convert their
waste into fertilizer for the plants, they knew that everything had to
be recycled if they were to make it to the red planet and back.

Past the greenhouse modules were the tank modules of fuel, oxidizer,
and water, attached to the sides of more docking nexuses,
interconnected by storage modules so packed with supplies that it was
almost impossible to move through them.  The crew hardly ever ventured
that far into the spaceship, having organized all of their valuable
supplies close to the 747 and relegated things like the dishwasher to
the more distant modules.  In all, there were 14 modules arranged in a
line, with 13 docking nexuses interconnecting them and with another 52
modules attached to the various docking ports.

They still had about a dozen of the rocket engines from the cargo
modules' second stages, attached, with their fuel tanks, to the ends
of the side modules jutting out from the docking nexuses.  Under
Burns' direction, three of the cargo modules were converted to act as
Orbital Transfer Vehicles, which could hold two or three people,
maneuver, and fire their single rocket engines.




=======


said that all parties should try to resolve their problems peacefully,
though she ruefully noted that the Muslems would do good to accept
Christ, and ruffled feathers by suggesting that the terrorists,
misguided though they may have been, were probably the only people
that morning who got on the airplanes because they were trying to do
God's will.

At Andrea's suggestion, Mercuriou issued
a statement of condolence, expressing his "deapest reget", and stating
that it grieved him as nearly as much the death of his "dear friend
Burns".  The entire crew followed suit.  Asked via videomail by the
press about his comparison with Burns, he replied that though he
deeply felt the loss in New York, he was sure the family's victims
would concer that no one feels a loss more acutely than that of a
loved one.  The media largely accepted this.


Within months, most of the old animosities had resurfaced.  The
Captain was still openly critical of the western democratic
establishment in general, and the President in particular.
Dr. Yeats became far more prominent, and far more controversial, by
her repeated advice to end the war, moarn over the dead, then ask
ourselves why so many people hated the country and decide to give our
lives over to God to do something about it.

While the political prong of the twin assult had failed, the economic
prong had succeeded beyond belief.  Considering not only the twin
towers of the World Trade Center, but the smaller buildings destroyed,
or ravaged with all their windows blown out, plus the entire
multi-block area that had been shut down for months, the center of New
York City's financial district had been devastated.



We see it with our educational system.  Knowledge, education, they've
just become one more thing to be packaged and sold.  On-line public
libraries will be outlawed... this is our future under capitalism!



It just won't work.

Well, I'm determined to try.

It's been tried!  Socialism's been tried, and it doesn't work!

I am not a socialist.  I believe that


People who say that they can't afford to live like this, that they'll
go out of business if they do, are absolutely correct, because we live
in a society based on forced labor.  Let's get the hell out!



It just won't work.

So after all our talk about how generous this country is, after all
our bragging about our charities, now we say that we just can't afford
charity after all.  We can afford it a little bit of charity here and
there, but we can't build a society based on charity.

Maybe this is true.  Maybe, despite the fact that we walk into our
supermarkets and see them overflowing with plenty, we really can't
produce enough food to feed the people of this world.  I doubt it, but
if it's true, then we really need to change the way we eat.  We need
to cut way back on the meats, we need to get the land back into
production that our government pays farmers to leave fallow...

---!

Well, you just can't have it both ways, congresman!

---.

So, we can feed our people, but human nature is so depraved that the
only way to do that is to force them to work for some darwinistic
'system'.  That I'll believe.


==========

Capitalism is based on a simple principle - that people should be
rewarded for their work.

Well, I wouldn't have (so much of) a problem with that if capitalism
actually achieved that!  Take two men running a restaurant.  One only
accepts paying customers.  The other will take anybody off the street,
regardless of whether they've got money or not.  They procure the same
food, cook the same meals, and serve them in identical dining rooms -
they do the same work.  Yet one man gets rewarded for his work, and
the other does not.

Well, then you become a capitalist!  Anyone can be a capitalist,
irregardless of race or sex or religion!

Yes, Russia had freedom in this manner - you had freedom if you became
a communist!  And anyone could become a communist!

======

To be a capitalist, you have to reject Christianity.  Oh, you can
carry on the motions, go to church on Sunday, say your prayers at
dinner, but you can't serve God and mammon.  When the homeless man
walks into your hotel, you have to choose.

=====

...under conditions of industrial production, and with the promise of
capitalism fulfilled, it is possible for a whole society to be
economically free and for all men to have the opportunity to live like
human beings.

"slavery, or the equivalent of it in grinding toil and drudgery, was
the necessary price that mankind had to pay for the advancement of
civilization itself"

"problem of organizing production, or diffusing ownership, or liberty
and equality"

"property is the only basis for participating in the production and
distribution of wealth"

"The fact that men are by nature equal makes the democratic
distribution of citizenship - universal and equal suffrage - just"

"distributive justice is done if the share received by each
participant in production is proportionate to the value of his
contribution to production"


This - THIS is democracy!


The two astronauts were silent.  Mercuriou could have been viewing the
transmission as well from his cabin, but there was no immediate way to
tell.



You're against America!

Well, what does it mean to be pro-American?

We believe in freedom!

Freedom for whom?  Freedom for bin Laden?  Freedom for the millions of
people in your jail cells?



Andrea's got some stuff about Christianity in 1.5->1.6


Work!  Work!  Vic had to work!

He had to get through medical school.

He had to work!  Work!

He had to take care of his patients.

He had to work!

He had to finish the encyclopedia!

He had to work!

Work!  Work!

Finally, Vic laid his head down in his arms.  "I'm tired," he said.
"I want to go to sleep now."

WORK!  cried the Lord.  WORK!

"Why do men have to work?"

IT IS THE CURSE OF ADAM.  WORK!

"But I'm the one who drives myself to work!"

IT IS THE CURSE OF MEN, THEN.  WORK!






"Just leave.  Just get out!"

"And go where?"

"I don't care.  Cuba, China, Venezuela."

"I don't like any of those countries..."

"Well to leave one place you must arrive somewhere else.  If you don't
have a place for us to go, then I do - Hawaii!"



"OK, here's who I am - I smoke pot; I copy books on my computer; I
chase teenaged boys.  And then we talk about freedom!  What's my
freedom?  To sit in a prison cell if I'm true to who I am?"



"Can it really make a difference?  Can it really change?"



"So you don't believe in democracy!?"


"So you don't think authors have the right to decide what happens to
their works?"



"You'll make Hawaii into a third-world country"

"This isn't what the majority of the people of this state want!"


after 9/11, somebody tells Mercuriou to "get the hell out!"

"Then let's get out, and let the terrorists reform democracy by
killing as many of you as they can!  You can't TALK to the MAJORITY!"



"Secession is legal; oldest precedent in U.S. history.  All the
cheering for Poland, Hungary, Lithuania - was it all just partisan
politics?  They can't afford an American Prague Spring.  It would
finish them politically."




"But I thought we were going to jumpstart space travel!  Develop this
new fuel!  Get mankind into space!  Grow crops!  Make clothes!  Mine
the asteroid belt!"

RHETORIC appeared on the college blackboard [in Mercuriou's mind],
then evaporated before the stark reality of his two best friends dead.
_Maybe_I_should_have_taken_a_course_called_"Honesty"_instead.

[ Mercuriou answered now, slowly. ]

"No, that was just my sales pitch.  My real reason was... it was a
stunt.  It was biggest stage I could think of to get myself heard.
And Andrea kept telling me I had already done that, that my most
important mission goal had been achieved, but I wouldn't listen."

Alister fell quiet.

"So what was the point then, that it was all for nothing, and this is
the end?"

"No, think about it, Alister," the captain answered slowly but with
conviction.  His thoughts drifted back to college.  _Rhetoric._
_Maybe_they_should_have_required_a_class_in_honesty_instead._

"This nerve we've struck with people, the
stuff we've talked about - freedom, democracy, religion, God,
the role of the individual in society, money, power - this is
the stuff Socrates debated in Athens,
the stuff Plato and Aristotle wrote about, St. Matthew and Thomas
Aquinas, this is the soul of our species.  Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Leo
Tolstoy, and none of them had all the answers.  I mean, if this is the
stuff _they_ talked about _then_, and it's the same stuff _we're_
talking about _now_..."

The captain's voice trailed off.  Behind him, _Columbia_ gleamed in
the razor-sharp sun of low-Earth orbit.


======
"Now, if the government had built the first airplane, everyone would
be walking around laughing that anything lighter than a skyscraper
could fly.  
======

Mercuriou was stumbling through a haze clutching a book in his hands.
Three hags struggled to get up from their airline seats, calling out
to him as he hustled path through gathering smoke.

"The book is evil!"  "It soes discord!"  "Listen to the warnings!"

Mercuriou bolted awake, his heart pounding.  No fire!  There was no
fire!  He was on _Xplorer_1_.  It was just a dream... there was good
and evil... which was he?  He couldn't remember.  Which was I?  Good
or evil?  Was I good or was I evil?  Why can't I remember?


------

I'll give democracy another shot.  I'll give it its best shot.  I'll
suggest proxy voting; we have the technology to do it.  Every voter
can electronically assign his vote to a representative at an assembly,
and can change their proxy to a different representative at any time.
You can vote for whoever you want, on whatever issue.

------

Andrea was working on the re-orbit problem late one night when the
door opened.  Vic floated in.  Andrea felt a moment of panic as Vic
grinned at her.

"Vic, you're not here, you're..."

"So are you, you just don't know it yet.  And your food is tainted."

...

"Marc, get up here!"

They were in Xplorer I - the _real_ Xplorer I - and Burns was calling
from the pilot's seat.

"Marc!"

"Yeah!" Mercuriou scampered up.

"Get in here!"  Burns yelled as he got out of his seat.

Mercuriou stared at him.  My God, he hadn't seen him for so long!  It
was so _good_ to see him, and he had a million questions to ask!
There'd be plenty of time for that later.

"Marc!"

"What's wrong!"

"Get in here!!"

Mercuriou climbed into the pilot's seat.

"What's going on?!"

"You're in charge now, you're in command!"

Mercuriou started laughing, and began climbing out of the chair.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm the captain, I'm in command!"

Burns pushed him back into the seat.

"No, I mean it!  You're in command now!  You'll need to lead them out
of it!"

------

Andrea found Mercuriou doing a slow brew over his coffee.  He said
nothing as she prepared her breakfast, then broke the silence.

"I had a disturbing dream last night.  Vic believed in dreams, do
you?"

Andrea stopped eating her bagel.  She stared at him for a moment.

"Andrea?"

She shook her head.

"Sorry... it's just... I also had a distrubing dream last night, and
yes, I do believe in dreams.  In fact, mine was about Vic."

"Mine was about Burns."

They stared at each other in silence.

"So what did ol' Vic say?"  Mercuriou asked with a mischievous grin.

Andrea grimaced.

"He said we're not going to make it."

"That's what Burns said."

They sat in silence.  Andrea started to eat again, then stopped.

"Vic said something else, too... he said the food was tainted!"

"What?"  Mercuriou thought for a minute.  "Yeah, Burns said something
else, too, what was it... damn it! why can't I remember!"

And try as his might, he could not remember.

-----

Constitutional  Ammendments

1. States shall have the right to secede from the Union.

2. Federal authority in individual states, beyond that granted to it
in this Constitution, is entirely that granted to them by individual
States.

3. Juries shall be selected at random, shall witness court proceedings
in their entirity, and shall judge not only the fact, but the law.

4. Federal authority to regulate patents and copyrights is repealed.

5. All extra-Constitutional Federal authority over drugs,
communications, agriculture... is repealed.  Article 1, Section 8, and
Ammendment 10 clearly delineate Federal authority.

6. Federal authority to regulate immigration is repealed.  States may
regulate their own immigration, and must guarantee American citizens
the right to travel and reside anywhere in the United States.

-----

Immigration - sounds like you're trying to push this issue off on the states.

Sometimes that's what we need to do with tough issues, like
immigration, like drugs, like patents and copyrights - push them off
to the states.  Promote diversity and let the best idea win.

----

Mercuriou will be all intelectual and ask "why should we believe
anything that this guy said 2000 years ago - or didn't say!  We don't
know what parts of the bible are real?"

----

Let's review a model of trust right now.  I want the computer to
format my document a certain way; I want colors to show a certain way;
I want the keys to work a certain way.  I want revision history and
dictionary lookup to work a certain way.  I need to download a program
I know nothing about, install it, and hold my breath that its legit
and does what I want just because its web page said so.  I'll then
need to spend hours learning it, but we won't go into that.  All that
because I had a list of specification that I couldn't communicate to
the machine in plain English and instead had to rely on something like
an untrusted executable.  Now, how do you figure that closed source is
going to help in that situation?

Well, I can't answer all of that, but I can say that one way to solve
that problem is put trust in organizations to write those binaries and
then to protect that design information so that it doesn't fall into
the hands of hackers.

----

{t + 1 day}


-----

a T-shirt - WORK TIL SURF



Am I just kidding myself with this thing?  Am I just blowing
everything on one last hurrah?  Am I sunk in prison for the rest of my
life?

This isn't me.  I'm fighting my nature.  I just don't want to do this.

But I have to!  It's my job!


Mercuriou turned off the stereo.  It was too depressing.

-----

How do you justify this theft?


----


@


1.311
log
@improved day 1 a bit
@
text
@d2719 1
a2719 375
"Get the hell out of the left lane!"

Congressman Richard Ecks honked his horn and zoomed around the slower
car on the right.  His talk radio/TV show had been on the air longer
than he had been in Congress, and his harried commute from Capital
Hill to his studio in Fairfax had become a daily ritual.

Today he had landed the biggest scoop of his career.  The liberal
space captain had agreed to appear on the show and Ecks, who had heard
his earlier interview, was determined to rebut him.

He pulled into his reserved parking spot outside the studio and
hustled inside, skipping the elevator and instead jogged up three
flights of stairs.

"What did I miss?" he gasped as he reached the top.

His producer met him with a blank stare.

"Nothing.  We're still on with the space captain at 9."

Ecks gulped down one of the steamed broccoli and banana seed
milkshakes that he relied on to keep his 300 pound bulk under control.
He changed, put on his makeup, and drank half of another milkshake at
his desk on the set, then set it out of view as the cameras came on.

Ecks: Good evening, and welcome to 'Outside the Beltway'.

"Capitalism has produced a society with the highest standard of living
that has ever been seen on this planet.  People are well-fed,
well-housed, generally content with their jobs, with a surplus of
leisure time and disposible income.  Yet our opponents slam capitalism
at every turn because they can't stand the idea of people working hard
and getting rewarded for that work.  And now this thief comes along,
this criminal who has taken advantage of our society, stolen from our
businesses and our government, lied, cheated; he comes along with the
nerve to blame capitalism for what?  For letting him take advantage of
it?  For giving him the opportunity to pull of one of the greatest con
jobs in history - the 'Republic of Mars'?

Let me ask you something, _Captain_ - how do you justify this theft?

I was just wielding a little Executive power.

I'm sorry?

Executive power.  We have three branches of government, executive,
legislative, and judiciary.  I was just wielding a little executive
power, by appropriating some taxation.

Taxation is a legislative power, not an executive power.  You
confusion brings to light a key issue with the "Republic of Mars".
You appropriate not just Executive but also Legislative power by both
collecting taxes and also imposing them.  In our system, different
people perform different functions.

Yes, but they are all chosen by elections.

There was a pause.

I'm sorry?  You object to elections, why am I not surprised to hear
that?!

[TRANSITION BETTER]

Mercuriou: That was quite a nice speech; now let me make mine.

Mercuriou: The communists made speeches.  They loved to go off about
how they had put the first man in space, and how they had brought
tractors and steel factories to this backwards, feudal country, and
how everyone was guaranteed an education, and health care, and
retirement, and how wonderful communism was.  And the fascists loved
to talk about their Zeppelin airships, and their autobahns, and how
they had pulled Germany out of a worldwide recession, and how they
were rebuilding their Reich and how wonderful fascism was.  And it's
all true, but at some point you step back and see some kind of
objective truth.  Every one of these great societies was run by some
screwball system based on the most viscious traits of mankind, and
captialism is no exception.  "Conflict and competition drive human
progress forward," they say.  We've see fascism - racial conflict
drives human progress forward, we've see communism - class conflict
drives human progress forward, and now we've got capitalism - economic
conflict drives human progress forward.  All the nice speeches come
down to one thing - social Darwinism.  So if you want want Zeppelins,
or Sputniks, or Microsoft Windows, and these things are more important
to you than your freedom, then should pick whichever one of these
brutal philosophies most appeal to you and go sign up.

Ecks: All this justifies theft how?

Mercuriou: You want to talk about my theft, you do it full screen.
You want to talk about capitalism, you can do it split screen.

There was another two second pause.

Ecks: Alright, Mercuriou, I'll debate.  Capitalism may not be perfect,
and this society may not be perfect, but what sets us apart from
communism and fascism is our commitment to freedom.

Mercuriou: Freedom?  What freedom?  You have the freedom to become a
capitalist, or to work for the capitalists, or to be put homeless on
the streets!

Ecks: Well, I guess freedom _is_ limited for people who don't want to
work...

Mercuriou: Let's just cut right to the chase [CA] and shortcut this
debate.  'Work' is a propaganda term that means 'making money', right?

Ecks: No, 'work' means 'work'!

Mercuriou: For the capitalist system!  Work
_for_the_capitalist_system_!  You always like to leave that part out!
You carry on like everyone who opposed this society is a lazy bum who
wants to sit around drinking beer and watching Jerry Springer all
day!"

Ecks: Well, that's what they are!  That's exactly what they are!  We
reward people who work, not a bunch of lazy bums!

Mercuriou: What's 'work'?  Does a stay-at-home mom 'work'?  Does
someone running a soup kitchen 'work'?  And do they get the same
reward as someone running a restaurant?  If I write a book and put it
up on the Internet for free, is that 'work'?  Where's my reward?

Ecks: Well, that's a hobby.

Mercuriou: A hobby?

Ecks: A hobby.  Something you do in your spare time.  A job is what
you do to put food on the table.

Mercuriou: Let me get this straight.  A job is whatever you do that
makes money, and everything else is a hobby?

Ecks: We have to work in order to eat, Captain.  We have to work to
have houses, cars, clothes, computers, all of it.

Mercuriou: You dodged my question, Congressman.  Are you defining work
as making money, or doing something productive?

Ecks: There's no difference!  That's the beauty of capitalism; people
get rewarded for hard work!

Mercuriou: There most certainly is a difference!  We've got people who
make millions throwing a baseball, and people who work their butts off
for nothing!  I want to know if a man running a soup kitchen 'works',
or is it just a hobby?

Ecks: Well, if his soup kitchen can solicit enough donations to
provide for him and his employees, then I'd call it 'work'!

Mercuriou: And this is capitalism?  Soliciting donations?

Ecks: It can be.

Mercuriou: No, sir, you're just twisting the words around.  Capitalism
is a restaurant that refuses to serve people unless they pay;
capitalists do not solicit donations.

Ecks: It most certainly is capitalism, because the difference between
capitalism and socialism is _individual_freedom_.  You can be a
businessman if you choose, you can be social worker if you choose, you
can be an author, you can be a doctor; it's nothing imposed by the
government; it's your choice!  And maybe you don't like to hear this,
Captain, but what most people want is to _make_money_!  Most people
want the opportunity to better themselves through hard work, not
charity handouts!

Mercuriou: OK, I'm going to give you a perfect example of how
capitalism 'works', Congressman.  Fifteen years ago, I and a college
friend of mine developed a computer program to aid people in reading
Greek literature.  You could load any Greek text into the program, and
it would display it on the screen.  If you came across a word you
didn't understand, you could click on it with the mouse, the program
would look it up in a Greek-English dictionary and display the entry
at the bottom of the screen.  It was a lot faster than flipping pages
in a dictionary, trust me, and a great learning tool.  I finished the
last half of the _Iliad_ using it, and it was like night and day
compared to old way of stopping at every other word and looking it up
in a different book.  We put a copy up on the Internet.  We started
telling a lot of people in the classics community about it and started
getting some really good feedback.  We had plans to develop a Latin
version, too.  Then came along the publishers of the dictionary - the
capitalists.

Mercuriou: See, we had just taken a Greek-English dictionary that we
had on one of the computers at the university and incorporated it into
the program.  When we put the program up on the network, we of course
included the dictionary, because the program was pretty useless
without it.  A lot of people thought our program was a great idea, but
the publishers of the dictionary didn't.  They sued us for copyright
infringement.

Mercuriou: Now they were willing to cut a deal, of course.  If we took
the program down off the network, changed it into a for-profit product
and paid them a royalty on every copy we sold, we could use their
dictionary!  But we couldn't use it just to let people download the
program for free.  I decided to fight.  I still believed in the great
U. S. of A. back them.  I thought that without the money for a lawyer,
I could represent myself in court.  I believed that I could appeal
beyond the copyright law to generosity and [WHAT].  I didn't realize
that our legal system was built like a casino game, and everytime you
tried to assert your rights, it just gave the lawyers a chance to
double down.  After a year-long legal battle, I ended up with a court
judgement against me for a half million dollars, and for what?
Because I worked hard, developed a useful product, and wanted
available to everyone who wanted a copy.

Ecks: Well, Captain, it sounds to me like you were guilty!  That's a
real noble cause, but the bottom line is that you stole someone else's
intellectual property and published it without their permission.  You
seem to have a problem with authority.

Mercuriou: You're damn right I've got a problem with authority!  I've
got a problem with authority when the people in authority are just a
bunch of self-serving creeps!  Now why couldn't we have just put that
program up on the network?  What is so terrible about that?

Ecks: Captain, again, the bottom line is that it wasn't your property.
The publishers of that dictionary, whoever they are, could have chosen
to publish it for free, but it's their property and their choice.  I'm
sure they put as much work into it as you did into your program, maybe
more, and they chose to sell it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Mercuriou: There's a hell of a lot wrong with it.  For starters, what
about all this talk of how competition drives innovation and progress.
Where was my reward for my innovation and hard work?  Sure seemed like
the only way to get it was to slap a credit card form on everything!

Ecks: Because in the real world, if you just give everything away,
you'll be out of business.

Mercuriou: That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of capitalism - you
become a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you
won't work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the
street and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they
walk past and call you a bum who doesn't want to work!

Ecks: So who's going to pay for these free dictionaries, Captain, the
government, right?  Who's going to make all those evil capitalists put
those dictionaries on the Internet, the government, right?  It's the
same old tired story of socialism all over again.

Mercuriou: Look, I'm no great politician, and I can't lay out some big
complex scheme for paying those dictionaries, and I'm no great
philospher either, but I can tell you that people should be generous,
not selfish, especially the _leaders_ of society!

Ecks: So, you have no answer, Captain, by your own admission you have
no answer!

Mercuriou: I most certainly do have an answer!  Your 'capitalist
system' is depraved - that's my answer!  Your leaders are trash!  Your
entire society is built on forced labor for these bums!

Ecks: I know, I know, everyone who wants to make money is trash,
everyone who just wants a better life for themselves and their
children is a bum...

Mercuriou: No, Congressman, but a bunch of men determined to outlaw
twenty-first century public libraries before they're ever been created
_are_ trash, they are!  This society isn't going to be remembered for
all this so-called freedom, let me assure you.  It's going to
remembered for secrecy.  The books, the blueprints, the source code,
the circuit diagrams, the manufacturing processes!  All kept secret by
these capitalists determined to keep the whole world dependent on them
and their nightmare system, and then they tell the rest of the world
to 'compete'!  They talk about 'freedom', 'freedom'; the only freedom
they're interested in is their own!

Mercuriou: You no good bum, you sit there with your jacket and tie on
and try to defend a bunch of creeps that won't lift a finger for
anyone unless they're getting something out of it for themselves!
What is so terrible about public libraries?  What is so terrible about
information being free?  What is so terrible about taking these books
and putting them up on our networks for anyone to read and use?  I
tell you that we could build a twenty-first century library of
Alexandria, we could take every book in every library on this planet,
scan it, and put it up on that network, but that's not what our
leaders want.  They want an "information economy", where knowledge is
just one more commodity to bought and sold, and the only way people
will pay for it is if it's kept secret.  That's the sick truth about
your 'global economic system'!

Ecks: Who the hell are you to tell someone else what they can and
can't do with their property?!?!  How dare you, you socialist crook,
you shameless thief, how dare you tell someone who's sweated tears and
blood that they have to give everything away for free?!  I've let you
rant on because I felt like listening to your bombast! You're like a
blind man screaming 'You blinked!'  How are you so much better than
all these terrible capitalists you lambast?  You're the worst kind of
capitalist - you've stolen millions, billions of dollars to stroke
your own pet!  You needed money - that's why most people go to work in
the morning!  That's why all these evil capitalists don't just publish
all their books on the Internet - because the authors need money to
write them, money to print them, money to put food on the table in
front of their children!

Mercuriou: Well I've 'learned my lesson'!  I've figured how to 'get
things done' in the 'real world'!  I've learned to 'compete'!  You
crow on about rewarding people for their hard work!  Why doesn't
everyone get rewarded for their hard work?  Why do only the most
selfish people get rewarded?  Why do you have to become either a
capitalist or a thief to get this kind of opportunity?

Ecks: Captain, you seem to think everyone has to do things your way!
Again, those people have the right to decide what happens to _their_
work, simply because it is _their_ work.  The authors, they could
decide to put it online like you suggest, they have that power, they
have that _right_!

Mercuriou: You know, I am so sick of hearing about people's 'rights'!
Whenever I hear that word, the next thing I start figuring is 'who's
getting screwed'.  People talk about their 'rights' when they want to
jam somebody else's face in the mud.  You want to build this
'information economy', where knowledge is just one more commodity to
bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
kept secret.  Then they talk about their 'rights'!  They've got the
'right' to keep that information secret, so copying books online is
illegal, and it's illegal for the same reason that photocopiers and
fax machines were illegal in the Soviet Union - the potential of the
technology represents too great a threat to the system's ability to
control people's lives.

Ecks: It's called _freedom_.

Mercuriou: What freedom?  When you live in a society where everything
is controlled by money?  The freedom to starve if you won't become a
capitalist?  The lion and the wilderbeast both have 'freedom',
Congressman...

Ecks: Captain, capitalism may not be perfect, but if you don't work,
you will not starve, because just about every American city has a soup
kitchen or homeless shelter of one kind of another.  On the other
hand, those who do work can expect to be paid for their labor, and it
is entirely up to them what they do with it.  The abundance of
charities in this country is an elegant testimony to the generosity of
the American people.

Mercuriou: Sounds great.  Sound like everywhere you go in the U.S, you
must see charity after charity after charity, and occasionally a
business.

Ecks: There's nothing wrong with running a business, captain.  Where do
you think all that money comes from for those charities?

Mercuriou: OK, well if those businesses are so generous, then why
bother with the price tags?

Ecks: Again, it comes down to a simple principle, captain - freedom!
The businessman does not dictate to his stockholders how they should
spend their money.  Instead, the businessman collects revenue from his
customers, uses those revenues to pay the expenses of the business,
and then returns the surplus both to the employees in the form of
bonuses and to the investors in the form of dividends.  It is then up
to the employees and investors how to spend _their_money_.  If they
wish to give to charities, they can do so.  Furthermore, the
businessman has a moral responsibility to operate his business
responsibly, because it _isn't_his_money_.

Mercuriou: Isn't his money?!

Ecks: That's right, captain.  It's the shareholder's money.  For the
businessman to simply give it away as you suggest would amount to
taxation without representation, or to put it more bluntly, theft.
Many capitalists are good, decent people who have founded charities,
started schools and universities, established endowment funds...  Your
ideas sound very noble and idealistic, but how do you put them into
practice?  Force them on people with the government, right?  That's
what it always comes down to.  [IMPROVE] We're almost out of time; any
final remarks?

Mercuriou: Is is time for the "democratic response"?

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"Simply put, this country is run by its people, through their elected
representatives, and the capitalists don't simply 'own' the
government.  If anything, it's the other way around - capitalism is
regulated by the government, though laws."

Senator David Wye was Mercuriou's next opponent in the video Colosseum.

Mercuriou: Oh, it's regulated, all right.  You've got laws to regulate
factories, you've got laws to regulate fisheries, you've got laws to
regulate farmers.  Has it ever occurred to you that maybe if you chose
decent leaders to begin with, you wouldn't need all of these laws?

Wye: Well, we have to have laws, captain.

Mercuriou: Why?  I'll tell you why.  Because otherwise you'll have two
factory owners trying to 'compete'.  The one will try to run a clean,
safe factory, the other one will just dump his waste into the nearest
river.  The first one will go out of business, and the second one will
be laughing all the way to the bank [CA].
_Ha_ha_ha_,_you_can't_'compete'!_

Wye: And we don't allow that, captain!  We allow free markets and free
enterprise because they are beneficial to society, but we also need
laws to protect the environment and ensure a level playing field, so
that good corporate citizens are not victimized by abusers.

Mercuriou: "Good corporate citizens" - there are none!  A bunch of
'special interests' that lobby to for this restriction or that
exemption and you cook up some convoluted, five hundred page law that
gets another five hundred pages of regulations tacked on by the
bureaucrats - oh, it keeps the lawyers busy!  The little guy [CA] is
buried under paperwork, big business [CA] figures how to make their
millions, and people go around wringing their hands that we've still
got global warming, still can't swim in our rivers, and your answer is
what - pile on more regulations?

Wye: I think those regulations have done a pretty good job!  Would you
have us abandon the Clean Air Act, or the Clear Water Act?  We have
food stamps because we're not willing to let people starve!  We have
social security and Medicare because we're not willing to put the
elderly out on the streets!  Don't go brushing off everything that
this country has accomplished just because you can't see anything but
its faults!

Mercuriou: And who pays for it all?  More taxes?  Or just run it all
up on the national credit card / Or just keep funding the government
like a magician pulling a kerchief out of his fist?

Wye: We have to get deficit spending under control, but we are also
not willing to get rid of these programs because that would cut off
the truly needy.

Mercuriou: You've been saying that for years and the deficits keep
getting bigger.  I've come to the conclusion that you will never be
able to pay off your debts, but that begs the question. [CA] If this
society is so great and so wonderful, why do we need all of these
government programs in the first place?

Wye: Because those government programs have a lot to do with making
our society great!  We allow free enterprise, we allow competition, we
give people the opportunity to earn a reward from their labor, but we
also have programs in place to achieve other goals, such as a clean
environment, a safe food supply, transportation infrastructure, a
minimal social support system.  Women and minorities need protection
against discriminatory labor practices, and our children deserve a
quality education that isn't based on how much money their parents
make.  Those decisions are made through a cooperative political
process.

Mercuriou: That's quite an agenda!  Why do you need to do all that
with the government?  You talk so much about a cooperative government,
but coercion is the very essence of government!  Coercion is what sets
government apart from a business, or a charity, or an individual.
Government is either picking your pocket or twisting your arm, so
essentially you're saying that we need a coercive society to acheive
those goals.  Why is that?

Wye: Well, life is coercive, captain.  You're forced to build shelter
or you'll freeze.  You're forced to plow and harvest or you'll starve.
We have certain social goals that we achieve through tax funding and
government regulation.  We're also careful to check and restrain the
power of government through constitutional law and free elections.

Mercuriou: Why not just put good leaders in positions of authority to
begin with?  Then you wouldn't need the government.

Wye: Well, that's a nice utopia, but we do need the government, just
like we need business and charity.  There's always the criminal
element who thinks that the rules don't apply to them, eh?

Mercuriou: Take the case of my Greek reading aid.  What's your
solution?  Fund free software development with government taxes?

Wye: There are software development efforts funded through government
grant; you could certainly have sought an NSF grant to pursue your
development efforts.

Mercuriou: Aside from all the bureaucracy invoked, the time wasted
writing grant proposals, the documents "included by reference" in a
contract that's already fifty pages long, the usual end-of-year waste
when everybody tries to burn whatever money's left in the budget
because it just evaporates come March 31st, I've got one overriding
question - does any worthwhile project get funded?

Wye: We certainly don't just give out grants for anything.  Grants
are subject to careful review and oversight.

Mercuriou: So what about this much-vaunted freedom to innovate?  The
only funding options you've got are to either become a capitalist, or
convince the government to cut you in on the tax handouts.  To take
another example, you like to talk about heath care reform.  Well,
here's my program for health care reform.  You go to the doctor of
your choice, he provides the care that you need, and if you can't pay
for it, he says "don't worry about it."

Wye: Well, that's just not very realistic, captain.

Mercuriou: Of course it's not realistic!  It's not realistic because
we live under capitalism!  It's not realistic because the doctor can't
eat without money, can't live in a house or rent his office or buy
equipment without money.  We don't need a government health care
system.  We need to create a society where you won't be put out of
business if you won't turn away the poor!

Wye: And how do you propose to do that?

Mercuriou: Get rid of the capitalists!

Wye: How?  Do like the Bolsheviks?  Beat them to death with clubs?
Tie them to stakes and start handing out cigarettes?
Line them up in front of a wall and shoot them? [CA]

Mercuriou: Just stop working for them!  Stop supporting them!
"Just say no" to their nightmare "system"!

Wye: Captain, most people _want_ capitalism!  Progressives have spent
much of the twentieth century convincing voters that some government
controls are needed, but most people want a path to prosperity!

Mercuriou: Well, then maybe your system of government is part of the
problem!  If the majority want a bunch of self-serving creeps to be
their leaders, then maybe we need to get rid of the majority!

Wye: [laughing] So now you're against democracy...

Mercuriou: You're damn right I'm against democracy!

[DO WE WANT SOMETHING IN HERE ABOUT THE CONSTITUTION?  1.6->1.7]

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Perhaps because of his attitude, perhaps because of his altitude,
perhaps because of his impunity, completely beyond the reach of any
terrestrial authority, or perhaps simply because of what he said and
how he said it, Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of nearly every
American political leader, regardless of party affiliation or personal
background.  Tonight, he faced off against Jeffrey Zee, a state
governor widely expected to run for president in the upcoming national
election.

Mercuriou: The majority don't want good leaders.  No, I take that
back.  They want good leaders, but they can't tell the difference -
they're incompetent.  So they've picked about the most selfish
bastards you'd ever want to meet, with this nightmare capitalist
system based on the most vicious traits of mankind to be jammed down
everyone's throats.  And this time, nobody can say it isn't really a
democracy, that one man took over the government, that the dissidents
were 'disappeared', that we don't have freedom of speech or freedom of
the press.  Nobody can claim that this isn't really what the majority
of people want.


"The people chose their own leaders!" Mercuriou sneered.  "Which
people, Governor, surely not all the people!"

Zee: Yes, _the_people_!

Mercuriou: Well what about the two million people you've got locked up
in your jail cells?  Do they choose their own leaders?

Zee: We have a participatory democracy, Captain!  The people can
petition their government to change the laws, and if enough people
support them, the laws _will_ change!

Mercuriou: But that's not what you said!  You didn't say the people
could _participate_ in their government!  You said the people could
_choose_their_own_leaders_, but in fact only the majority get to
_choose_their_own_leaders_; everyone else participates, and loses!
Hell, I'll take 'participatory government' any day!  You participate,
and I'll make all the decisions!  What do you say?

Zee: Well, that would be a dictatorship, Captain.

Mercuriou: What's a dictatorship?  Anything that isn't a democracy?
The majority rules; everybody else does what they're told.  And then
you talk about 'freedom'!  Governor, turn on the T.V!  Don't you see
the police slamming people to the ground, half of whom have done
nothing more than fire up a joint, gang-tackling them, and dragging
them off in handcuffs!  That's your 'freedom'!

Zee: Criminals!  Yet even _they_ are entitled to freedom!  We provide
them with lawyers, ensure them fair trials...

Mercuriou: Fair trials!  Senator, _I'm_one_of_those_criminals_!
Because I smoke marijuana!  Because I copy books and software from 'C'
drive to 'D' drive!  Because I don't concede to this blasted democracy
that it can control every aspect of my life, and all your
_fair_trials_ are is a convoluted route to a jail cell!  And then you
sit there are talk about 'freedom'!  What freedom?  The freedom to
invade people's homes with guns because there's a hundred million of
you and only ten million of us?

Zee: Captain, the entire operation of our government is based on
persuasion.  That's why every four years men contest to become
President, and the way they do that is through giving speechs, running
advertisements, talking to voters, and the whole point is to persuade,
captain, persuade, not force, people to vote for them.

Mercuriou:
Humanity_has_abandoned_greed_and_force_and_this_great_event_goes_by
the_name_of_democracy! Well, if your government is so based on
persuation, then why do you have the highest incarceration rate on the
planet?  Why are you screaming for war on your own people and 'zero
tolerance' for your own children?  The only people your politicians
persuade is the majority.  Everyone else is ruled through threat and
fear.  The majority act real nice and polite to each other, then as
soon they find out that you're a druggie, or a copyright violator, or
just don't want to work for their bastard leaders, they scream for
blood and elect all these men who talk about cracking down and getting
tough, and how wonderful a world it is where anybody can start a
business and ruthlessly try to compete in this brutual capitalist
system.  The majority are perfectly willing to resort to force; they
do it _every_single_day_.


Mercuriou: Yes, and that's really the problem - populist government -
this stupid idea that you can put the masses of people in charge of
society.  It was talked about by philophers in the eigthteenth
century, brought to power in Europe and the Americas by a string of
revolutions in the nineteenth, and brought to fuition in the twentieth
century.  What it produced was fascism, communism, and capitalism -
three of the most depraved societies that have every been seen on the
face of this planet.  Fascism, based on brutal, viscious, racial
competition; communism, based on brutal, viscious, class competition;
and capitalism, based on brutal, viscious individual competition.  And
they have one other thing in common - millions upon millions upon
millions of people went chasing off after every one of them!


Mercuriou: You want to understand communism, read the last page of the
Communist Manifesto - let the world tremble in fear of a communist
revolution.  _That_'s communism - stick AK-47s in the hands of the
peasants and let the world tremble in fear!  That's what _millions_ of
people wanted!  Because communism was one of the biggest populist
movements of the twentieth century!  Practically every country in
existance had some kind of communist insurgancy!  They took over half
this planet!  Millions upon millions of people _believed_ in
communism!  To claim that the communists were some tiny bunch of
dictators flies in the face of history!  Take Vietnam - why were all
those 15-year-olds hauling AK-47s around the Mekong Delta if the
communists were just some tiny cliche holed up in the Kremlin?!  Take
China - Mao Tse Sung, the Long March, the defeat of Chang Kai Chech,
heck, look at Russia itself!  Then how did they win their Civil War in
Russia?  The Whites had all the old czarist military officers, they
had foreign aid from the United States and Great Britian, the Reds
were isolated and on their own, yet still they managed to win that
war!  How did they did that if nobody supported them?  If communism
wasn't populist, then why did forty percent of the Russian electorate
vote for Zyuganov in 1996?  Forty percent!

Zee: Not a majority!  Not a majority!

Mercuriou: Oh, get off repeat!  What is so sacrosanct about that magic
51 percent?

Zee: Communism was a brutual, murderous dictatorship.  And I want to
be very clear on that word - dictatorship.  There was nothing populist
about it in the least.

  There are _millions_ of Russians who _to_this_day_
support communism!  And let's face it, the problem with communism
wasn't their economic system, it wasn't the structure of their
elections, it wasn't their lack of constituional guarantees.  The
problem with communism was that their leaders had some nightmare
system to be jammed down everyone's throats, and
_millions_of_people_supported_them_!

Mercuriou: The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe.
Walk into one of these stores anywhere in the Western world without a
credit card or a twenty dollar bill in hand.  Ask for a plate of food.
See what you walk out with.  The fact is that the majority of people
are crude, selfish, and violent.  That's why communism came to power
in these backwards countries - if the people have nothing, tell them
to expropriate the expropriators at gunpoint - it sounds great!  Now
in the more developed nations, the majority have a lot more material
possessions, expropriating the expropriators doesn't sound nearly as
good, better to make sure that those who have can keep what they've
got.  Most people are selfish - both capitalism and communism play to
that, just on different sides of the coin. [CA]

Mercuriou: It was the same thing with fascism, after the Germans
basically elected the Nazis in 1932, with a plurality of over thirteen
million votes!  They got enough votes to make Hermann Goering
president of the Reischtag, enough votes to defeat Von Papen's
government on a vote of no-confidence, enough votes to create a
situtation where Adolf Hitler was basically the only viable choice for
German chancellor.  Generally speaking, that means they won the
election!  You hear these apologists for democracy try to blame
Hindenburg for what happened, try to say the German industrialists
pushed him to appoint Hitler, or that his son was whispering in his
ear, what about the thirteen and a half million people who voted Nazi
in '32?!  Did they have anything to do with Hinderburg's decision?
Thirteen and a half million!  There isn't a city on this planet with
thirteen and a half million people in it!  And this in a nation of
only about eighty million total!  Yes, Hitler proceeded to build a
dictatorship, but a dictatorship with the support of millions upon
millions of people!  And don't try to say that the Germans didn't knew
what they were getting.  Read the first chapter, the first page, of
_Mein_Kampf_!  The part where Hitler talks about 'the moral right of
armed conquest'!  That book was a best-seller in Germany!  That's what
those people voted for - 'the moral right of armed conquest'!  People
supported the Nazis for basically the same reason people supported the
communists and the same reason people today support the capitalists -
because they were brutal as hell, and that's what works in the 'real
world' and that's all these millions and millions of people 'know'!
That's populist government!  That's democracy!"

Mercuriou: What's democracy?  Another pile of books and theories that
sounds good on paper, and in practice has produced a depraved,
nightmare society.  Everybody runs around yelling about how 'the
people' support it!  Of course they support it - they're the majority!
Democracy isn't about putting 'the people' in control, it's about
putting the majority in control!  Why should one group of people rule
everyone else's lives just because there's more of them than anybody
else?  Why shouldn't the factory workers run society - they're the
ones who have to break their backs for industrialization, right?  Why
shouldn't we generically engineer some 'super race' of men, and put
them in control, huh?  I mean, they'd be stronger, smarter, healthier,
superior to us in every way, so shouldn't they be the ones to rule?
Isn't that logical?  Isn't that rational?  Let's face it - communism
and fascism make at least as much sense as democracy does - they're
all equally absurd!"


Mercuriou: The majority care about three things: getting rich, getting
tough, and getting laid.



Mercuriou: I call it the Paradox of Freedom: how do you give freedom
to both the Nazis and the Jews?  You can't, because if you give
freedom to the Nazis, they will murder the Jews!  The issue isn't how
much freedom this 'majority' has got.  It's what they've chosen to do
with it!  They've chosen to build a society based on some of the most
vicious traits of mankind; they've chosen the most selfish bastards as
their leaders, build some nightmare society based on greed, declare
war against millions of their own people because they won't just do
what their told when the great free democracy barks out its orders,
and then jam it down their throats at gunpoint!

Zee: We have laws!  What's the alternative?  To let every murderer and
rapist walk free, preying on their victims at will?  You'll call that
freedom, I suppose!

Mercuriou: So why do you have the largest incarceration rate on this
planet?  Does the U.S. have so many more murderers and rapists than
everyone else, senator?

Zee: Somebody has to make the laws, captain, and we choose to let THE
PEOPLE make them!  THE PEOPLE decide what crimes will be punished and
by what means!

Mercuriou: The People?  Again, you mean THE MAJORITY!  And we see just
what kinds of laws and what kind of society they want.  They want to
build all these super-weapons, arm themselves to the teeth, declare
war against their own people, send armed men busting into their homes,
make people so terrified of what will be done to them that they'll be
too afraid not to just fall in line and do what they're told when the
great majority barks out its orders!

Zee: So you're against democracy!!

Mercuriou: You're damned right I am!!

Zee: Well I'm not surprised.  At least you don't seem as dangerous as
Stalin or Hitler.  To reject majority rule is to reject the most
basic, the most foundational principle of modern government!

Mercuriou: A principle based on what?  Another election!?

Zee: Look, I've got a web update for you, captain.  The people of this
planet have decided on democracy, and we're not going back.

Mercuriou: 'The people of this planet'; you guys don't even fool
around with 'the people of this nation' anymore, you're onto global
democracy!

Zee: Yes, the people of this planet!  You should speak to some of the
people who have lived under communism!  You should let them tell you
what it's like to live under a dictatorship!  Let me explain the
difference, captain, since it seems to have escaped you.  Democracy
isn't perfect; we've had a lot of problems in the past and we'll face
more in the future.  Yet our government is _responsive_ to its people;
we have the ability to change!

Mercuriou: Oh, the communists talked about change too, senator.  The
dictatorship of the proletariat was just going to wither away and
leave us with some utopian socialist future.  I'll bet it came as one
hell of a shock to a whole lot of people in Russia when it finally
dawned on them that communism was going to remembered for
_exactly_what_it_was_ and not some fantasy future that never happened!
And now I've got a 'web update' for you - you can talk change all you
want; democracy is going to be remembered for
_exactly_what_we_live_in_today_... no fantasy futures allowed!

Zee: I'm not worried about that comparison, captain, not in the least!

Mercuriou: Well, you should be!  You've got this nightmare of
capitalism that's another slavery all over again...

Zee: Look here, capitalism has its flaws, but it is most certainly not
another slavery!  We don't bind men in chains to force them to work!

Mercuriou: It is another slavery, governor, because it's another one
of these depraved philosophies that has become entrenched in our
society; your majority today, just like the majority in the 1800s, can
see nothing wrong with it, and democracy, once again, appears
completely incapable of making the basic moral value judgements
necessary to govern a society!

Zee: We did make those value judgements, captain!  Those who rejected
freedom fought against it, but freedom ultimately prevailed!

Mercuriou: Freedom ultimately prevailed!  Senator, the Civil War shook
this country to its core.  Oh, the United States survived, but the
most serious questions raised by slavery have never really been
answered.  Where were all the checks and balances?  Where was the Bill
of Rights?  Where were the noble statesmen, deliberating together in a
free and cooperative government to advance the great banner of
liberty?  If it took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to end slavery,
how much can this system of government really be worth?  And what if
it takes the same thing to end capitalism?  How many more 'successes'
like the Civil War can this country afford?"

Zee: The Civil War was a success, captain; sometimes you have to fight
for your freedom.  The abolitionists tried for many years to work
within that system; but it was too badly flawed.  Finally, one of the
greatest Presidents this country has ever produced took a stand for
liberty and freed the slaves.
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"Why not?" Mercuriou fired back.
d2830 1
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"Because the solution to missing the school bus is not to invent a
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"And don't tell me you've never tried it up here."
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"Can I say something?" Alister asked.
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"Sure," Mercuriou answered, "that's what we're here for, say whatever
you want."
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Ecks: A Christian!  So the thief has converted to God!

Mercuriou: I've done wrong... Yet what I've done and what I haven't
done is beside the point.  I'm done arguing with you, Ecks.  I'm
presenting a plan of action to my supporters and you're not one of
them.  I couldn't care less [CA] what you think of my conversion, my
religion, my politics, or anything else.

Ecks: So we just aren't supposed to talk about your screwball
religion, Captain?

Mercuriou: You can talk about anything you want.  If don't have any
questions about my secession proposal, I'll just turn the camera off
now.

There was a pause longer than the satellite delay.

...

Ecks: You seem to have quite a library, Captain.  I'd like to suggest
a book you may have overlooked.  It's called _The_Wealth_of_Nations_.

Mercuriou: I wouldn't argue with Adam Smith's logic, but I'll argue
against his morality!  Take a look at the beginning of that book,
Chapter 2:

He produced a tablet computer and began reading from it.

   In almost every other race of animals, each individual, when it is
   grown up to maturity, is entirely independent, and in its natural
   state has occasion for the assistance of no other living creature. But
   man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it
   is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will
   be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his
   favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him
   what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any
   kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall
   have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it
   is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part
   of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the
   benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
   dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
   ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never
   talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody
   but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his
   fellow-citizens.

Mercuriou: Now, is this what we're taught by Christ?  Smith presents a
compelling argument if you're willing to completely ignore its utter
immorality!  The man was another Machiavelli!

Ecks: What's immoral about asking people to pay what something cost to
produce?

Yates: Christ taught us to 'give to all those who beg of you', and
that 'if a man steals your coat, give him your cloak as well'.  Now if
this is how we are to treat thieves, then how should we treat people
who just ask politely?  Not only is Smith's philosophy immoral because
it is based on 'self interest' and 'self-love', but hidden in his
argument is the assumption that everyone actually lives that way.  If
someone adopts the Christian lifestyle instead, she is clearly at a
'competitive disadvantage' because she no longer has the resources
that in Smith's argument are so critical to adjust and balance those
prices.



Ecks: So basically, you want to turn Hawaii into an offshore piracy
haven, where criminals can steal our technology with impunity!

Ecks: How can we compete with a bunch of thieves?!?

Mercuriou: You won't be able to compete because your product is
inferior.  Let's take, for example, Kenya.  Now, what you offer Kenya,
under the guise of "globalization", is a straightforward deal - find
something to sell, something you've got and we want, and then in
return we'll sell you our closed, secret, proprietary technology that
you'll have to pay out of the nose [CA] for.  What I'll offer Kenya is
something else - all the software, the chip masks, the factory
blueprints - everything they need to build their own computers, their
own cell phones, their own data networks.  Now, which of these two
"products" do you think this "customer" will prefer?

Ecks: Freedom for thieves!  That's what you want!  Freedom for thieves!

Mercuriou: What "theft"?  You walk into a museum and take a picture of
the painting, or setup an easel to paint your own copy, nobody calls
that "theft"!  You lift the painting off the wall, put it under your
arm and walk out the door - _that_'s theft!  What you call theft is
nothing more than education, and what you call virtue is a world where
knowledge is a weapon used to maintain an economic and technological
tyranny!  "Give a man a fish, he's fed for a day; teach a man to fish,
he'd fed for life."  Well, the capitalists have a new way - get a
process patent on fishing, then he has to pay you everytime he throws
a line in the water.


Ecks: We need to lower taxes and get rid of government regulation on
private enterprise.

Mercuriou: Then you'll be right back to where you were a hundred years
ago, with massive pollution, key industries run into the ground by
monopolies.

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Wye: (smillaughing) We have a long-standing principle, captain, that
states are not allowed to secede from the Union.

Mercurio: Oh, that won't be a problem.  We'll just wave a bunch
of orange flags around in the air.  You'll let us go.

Wye: (laughing) This isn't a [communist] dictatorship, captain.  We
live in a nation of laws.  You are not going to just make up rules to
interpret the election results however you see fit.

Mercurio: How are you going to stop me?  You gonna to crack down?  You
gonna get tough?

Wye: We will enforce our laws, captain, we will enforce our laws.
You're not the only criminal in this country.  Also, I'd like to know
what's going to be so different once you achieve this great goal of
throwing off our hated government.

Mercurio: First, I'm going to close the prisons and release the
prisoners.  Whatever problems we have in our society, we're not going
to deal with them by finding someone to blame and throwing them in a
jail cell.  And I intend to open the borders.  Freedom will be for
anyone who wants to come to Hawaii, not just for those with a U.S.
passport in their pockets.  In short, it's not just going to be
'freedom for us'; it's going to be freedom for everyone.

Wye: So some thug pulls a gun and kills someone, you're just going to
let them walk free.

Mercurio: That's right.

Wye: I don't know how many people are going to support that, captain.

Mercurio: Well, the alternative is a prison state, senator.  You've
got me convinced that if you let people imprison the most violent
criminal, you're next, because the majority will never stop screaming
for tougher laws and more jail cells.

Yates: Letting murderers walk free is not going to fix our problems.
It is essential that violence be addressed through ministry, and not
simply ignored.  I don't advocate a state church, but it is essential
that religion and spirituality be an integral part of daily life.
Furthermore, a broad-based rejection of capitalism is essential,
because when people grow up in a society who leaders are driven by
self-interest, it's easy for them to turn lawless.  On the other hand,
people are unlikely to steal from a baker who has a free loaf of bread
for them whenever they are hungry.


Wye: You can make all this nice talk about everyone should be good and
caring to each other, but the fact is that there are always people who
will abuse freedom, and for them we need laws.  Take the environment,
for example.  What are you going do when somebody dumps their garbage
into the river?

Yates: Well, we'll try very hard to ensure that people don't have much
motivation to dump their garbage in the river.  We're not going to
charge them to rent a truck and then charge them again when they get
to the dump.  We'll try to be patient and tolerant with malefactors.
And, finally, when our patience runs out, we'll have to find some kind
of legal sanction to impose against them.  But you do this backwards.
With your constant nickle-and-diming [CA], you incentivize people to
cut corners to save money, and then figure that the only way to
protect the environment is a bunch of government regulations.

Mercuriou: Let me add something - free technology isn't just about
free software, it's about going green, too.  What happens when one of
your capitalist gizmos breaks?  You toss it into the nearest landfill.
Now if the design is open, that device can be repaired.  The
capitalists don't want this.  They don't want technology that can be
repaired.  They want throw-away technology.  Instead of repairing
these devices, they want you to buy a new one.  Going green doesn't
have to be mandated carbon scrubbers on smoke-stacks.  It's building
clean, open, sustainable technology that everyone can build, improve,
and repair.


Wye: We're not going to let these sexual predators walk free to molest
our children!

Mercuriou: How many lives have _you_ destroyed!?  How many people have
you disappeared into your prisons for fear of what they haven't done!?
You!  _You_ are the predator!  You!  You and your _government_!

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Zee: So I understand that now you're advocating freedom for murderers!

Yates: Yes, I am.  Christ set this example himself.  He walked to
his death and with his dying breath forgave his murderers.

Zee: This isn't Christianity!  Christians are decent, law-abiding
citizens, not a bunch of thieves and murderers and dope heads!

Yates: Don't have sex, don't do drugs, don't drink alcohol, and give
me ten percent of all your money, ehh?

Zee: Christians are obedient to authority, that is made clear in
Romans 13: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.
For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have
been instituted by God."

Yates: Romans contains the teaching of Paul, and Paul was not Christ.
Are we to believe that communist authority was from God, or that Adolf
Hitler was instituted by God?  The United States Congress once passed
a Fugitive Slave Act.  Would you have us believe that Christians in
that day were under a moral duty to God to return slaves to their
owners?  We are surrounded in this world by authority that is clearly
not from God.  I prefer to look to First Samuel 12, where the prophet
says "If you will fear the LORD, and serve him, and obey his voice,
and not rebel against the commandment of the LORD, then shall both you
and also the king that reigns over you continue following the LORD
your God... But if you shall still do wickedly, you shall be consumed,
both you and your king."

Zee: We don't have a king!

Yates: Then you shall be consumed, both you and your democracy!  The
point isn't the method of government, it is a warning against the
wicked leadership which abounds in this world!  And a far more
accurate assessment it is than the truckling Romans 13!

Zee: Wicked leadership!  You mean the hop heads and thieves you've
associated yourself with!

Mercuriou: How about this, governor... forget your elections!  I'll
just overthrow your government!  Then you can climb your pulpit and
preach about how I'm the God-constituted authority and now everyone
has to do what I say!

[ Yates: I'll take hop heads any day over a bunch of militants who think ]
[ that 'turning the other cheek' applies to everyone but them! ]

Zee: You don't want _any_ laws!  You want anarchy!

Yates: It comes back to First Samuel 12 - people have to choose to
serve the Lord, otherwise it _is_ anarchy!

Zee: And what about people who don't choose to serve the Lord!
Murderers and thieves, rapists and perverts!  For them we have to have
laws!  What about the victims of these Godless monsters?  Do we just
sacrifice them on the alter of your supposed piety?

Yates: We are the victims, governor, and yes, we choose to accept our
fate.  We choose to love our enemies and pray for our murderers.  For
those who aren't willing to accept that fate, they have the freedom to
live under any other system of government they please - yours, for
example.

[ Zee: How?  You're determined to make your own government! ]

Mercuriou: Genuine political freedom comes not from a ballot box but
from the freedom to travel, coupled with a variety among nations.  If
people are so terrified of these murderers and rapists that they want
your prison state, they can have it - it's just an airplane ride away!

Zee: So the people who don't agree with you, you throw out!

Mercuriou: Well, that's the freedom you've handed us, right?  Once
we're in charge, the people who don't like it can "get the hell out!"
They can "love it or leave it!"  They can "stick an egg in their shoe
and beat it!"


Zee: See, your problem is that you don't believe in democracy!  You
don't think this country can change!  But I've seen it change!  I've
seen the civil rights movement!  If you believed in this country, then
you would lead it to change instead of destroying it!

Mercuriou: Then change!  I'm not stopping you, in fact, I'd love to
see this country change!  But I've seen the choices that its people
have made and the kind of leaders they've chosen!  I'm not interested
in some half-hearted change watered down and opposed every step of the
way by special interests!  I'm not going to keep waiting for the
election, and then the next election, and the election after that!
And I _don't_ see, at all, how I'm "destroying" this country.  Why
does everyone have to move together in lock step?  Why can't one group
go one way, and another group another?  Why should we sacrifice
freedom for the sake of unity?

Zee: The country is at war!  We need unity, not division!

Mercuriou: The country is always at war!  It's invaded and conquered
four other nations just in my lifetime!

Zee: Four countries!  What four countries?

Mercuriou: Granada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Zee: (laughing) Granada...

Mercuriou: Yes, Granada.  We steamrolled over some little nothing
country in a one-day war, but it was still the armed conquest of a
sovereign nation.  And Panama was conquered by the
_very_same_president_ that two years later stood up and told the world
that we were in Kuwait to stop a large country from pushing around a
small one!

Zee: I think the people of Panama have a different version of that
"conquest" - they were glad to get rid of Noriega!

Mercuriou: Right - there are two different versions of international
law, one for democracy, and one for everyone else.  If you're not a
democracy, you basically have no rights.  You can be conquered by an
overwhelmingly more powerful neighbor, and it's a "liberation".  I
don't know why we even bother with international law.  We just do
whatever seems expedient at the moment.

Mercuriou: You talk about unity, but freedom and unity are often opposing
interests.  If I want to walk left and you want to walk right, then
one of us has to sacrifice our freedom to achieve unity.  For me,
the bottom line is that I do not support the leadership of this
country, and therefore I am not willing to sacrifice my freedom
for the sake of unity.



Zee: Capitalism is not immoral!

Mercuriou: Governor, capitalism is one of the most immoral
philosophies that have ever been proposed for men to live their lives.
_You_do_for__yourself_and_let_this_'invisible_hand'_take_care_of_'society'._
It's depraved, not to mention a solid rejection of half the Christian
gospel.

Zee: Capitalism is not about doing for yourself.  If people want to
give to a charity, they are more than welcome to do so.  Capitalism is
about freedom.  It's about giving people the freedom to decide what to
do with their own wealth.

Mercuriou: Govenor, if that's what you want to believe, fine.  But
Christ taught us to 'give to all those who beg of us', and not just
when we feel like it.  There are plenty of people out there who stand
behind a counter and won't lift a finger for anyone unless they're
being handed a credit card.  You can call it 'freedom' or anything
else you please.  I call it capitalism and it is immoral.

Mercuriou: Remember the story of the rich man and the old woman?  The
rich man went to the synagogue, gave a big donation.  The old woman
gave two bits.  Christ then asked which of them went away redeemed.
Now let's stop for a minute and think about this.  How would
capitalists answer?  How would the majority respond?  They would say,
'Look at how much good can be done with that rich man's generosity!
Look how many people can be helped!  He worked hard to earn that
money, now he gives it back!  You can run a soup kitchen for a month
with what he gave!  What can you do with two bits?  You can't even buy
a homeless man a cup of coffee.  The old woman might as well have not
even given anything!'  But what did Christ say?  He tells us the old
woman goes away redemed because she gave _everything_ she's got!  It
was the totality of her generosity that is significant to God, not its
quantity.  So if capitalists would live as Christ taught us, they
would do as the old woman did and give _all_that_they_have_!

Zee: So what are you trying to say?  That Christian morality is based
on giving away all our worldly possessions?

Mercuriou: No, but that's a common misconception, because Christian
morality often _does_ require us to give away all our worldly
possessions.  It is not _based_ on that, though.  It's based on love -
unconditional love, not only for God, but all of mankind as well.
Often that involves generousity, but what's more important is how you
treat other people; generousity is just one of the most obvious
manifestations of that.

Mercuriou: Christ told us that if a man steals our cloak, we should
give him our coat as well.  Now, to put that in a modern context, if a
man breaks into your home, holds your entire family up at gunpoint and
takes everything of value that he sees, you give him the keys to the
car and offer to help carry the stereo out, because it's pretty
heavy.

Zee: You can't be serious.

Mercuriou: I'm completely serious, and so was Christ.  Of course, he
also told the thief some things he doesn't want to hear, either, like
'thou shall not steal'.

Zee: So he told the thief not to steal and he told the rich man to
give his stereo to the thief, ehh?  A little self-contradictory, isn't
it?

Mercuriou: No.  It's two seperate instructions, for two different
people, but it comes down to the same commandment - love your
neighbor.  The thief is told not to steal, for love of the rich man,
and the rich man is told to give up his possessions, for love of the
thief.  Of course, the Christian isn't in either situation - he's not
going to steal, and all the thief needs to do is ask.  So if Mr. Gates
lived this way, all we'd have to do to get the source code for Windows
would be to ask.  He could have been a Christian, instead he's decided
to be a philanthroper.

Zee: Well, the great thing about freedom is that Mr. Gates can be a
Christian if wants to, he could give away all his source code, it's up
to him!

Mercuriou: And does he want that?  Does he 'give to all who beg of him'?

Zee: Well that's his choice.  That's freedom.

Mercuriou: You're dogging the question, sir.  Every murder ever
committed in human history was perpetrated by the freedom of the
murderer!  Every rape, every theft!  Every slave was enchained by the
_freedom_ of his master!  Freedom in the absence of morality is the
single most destructive force this planet has _ever_ seen, and people
talk about freedom largely because they _don't_ want to talk about
morality!  As for Mr. Gates, we've all seen the choices he's made with
his freedom.  We've all seen America's choices.  We've all seen the
choices of the _majority_.

Mercuriou: The path to salvation is narrow, governor, and those who
find it are few.  The path to damnation is broad, and those who find
it are many.  Most people sing their hymns on Sunday and then go work
those jobs on Monday because they need the money, live in an immoral
society where they can't live without it, and have no intention of
just giving it all away to anyone who asks.

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Mercuriou: "Yes?"
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"I've revising my speech for this evening, Doctor.  I had planned to
give it live immediately after achieving orbit, but you disrupted my
timing.  Now I have to have to revise my plans."
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Andrea stared at him in wonder, then mumbled out a reply.
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She was dumbfounded; he shushed her out the door and didn't appear
again for another hour.
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"Good evening."

The sight of men floating in zero-gee had galvanized the world, or at
least everyone in the world, or at least everyone in the Most
Important Country In The World.

"My name is Captain Marcelius Mercuriou.  Most people call me Marc.  I
have no weapons to launch against you, and I seek only to go on my way
in peace.  I have been told repeatedly by people to Love It or Leave
It, and I wish to tell them that I have decided to Get The Hell Out."

"Captain, excuse me," the news anchor cut in 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?"
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car on the right.  "Outside the Beltway" had been on TV longer than he
had been in Congress, and his harried commute from Capital Hill to
Fairfax had become a daily ritual.  He pulled into his reserved
parking spot outside the studio and hustled inside, skipping the
elevator and instead jogged up three flights of stairs, a feat he
attributed to the daily milkshakes of steamed broccoli and banana
seeds that he relied on to keep his 300 pound bulk under control.
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Ecks: Welcome to 'Outside the Beltway'.
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and getting rewarded for that work.  And now this man comes along,
this thief, this criminal, who has taken advantage of our society,
stolen from our businesses and our government, lied, cheated; he comes
along with the nerve to blame capitalism for what?  For letting him
take advantage of it?  For giving him the opportunity to pull of one
of the greatest con jobs in history?

Mercuriou: That's quite a nice speech.  The communists also had their
speeches.  They loved to go off about how they had put the first man
in space, and how they had brought tractors and steel factories to
this backwards, feudal country, and how everyone was guaranteed an
education, and health care, and retirement, and how wonderful
communism was.  And the fascists loved to talk about their Zeppelin
airships, and their autobahns, and how they had pulled Germany out of
a worldwide recession, and how they were rebuilding their Reich and
how wonderful fascism was.  And it's all true, but at some point you
step back and see some kind of objective truth.  Every one of these
great societies was run by some screwball system based on the most
viscious traits of mankind, and captialism is no exception.  "Conflict
and competition drive human progress forward," they say.  We've see
fascism - racial conflict drives human progress forward, we've see
communism - class conflict drives human progress forward, and now
we've got capitalism - economic conflict drives human progress
forward.  All the nice speeches come down to one thing - social
Darwinism.  So if you want want Zeppelins, or Sputniks, or Microsoft
Windows, and these things are more important to you than your freedom,
then should pick whichever one of these brutal philosophies most
appeal to you and go sign up.

Ecks: Capitalism may not be perfect, and this society may not be
perfect, but what sets us apart from communism and fascism is our
commitment to freedom.
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"So are you, you just don't know it yet.  By the way, your food is
tainted."
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yes, I do believe in dreams.  Mine was about Vic."
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1. States shall have the right to secede from the Union, by any
process established in their respective Constitutions.
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2. The Federal Government may fund coordinating agencies to oversee
national policies not under its Constitutional authority.  Their
authority in individual states is entirely that granted to them by
that State's Constitution.  Criminal cases arising from such
extra-Constitutional authority must be tried in State courts.

3. Juries shall have the right and the obligation to witness court
proceedings in their entirity.  (this might require frequest long
recesses so that one side or the other can consider its case)
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political party.  You need to hold a congress and a convention, too.
You need to do all of that stuff, but, finally, you have to convince
your people to go somewhere on Election Day and just _demand_ to be
counted."
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dead.  They don't need me.  They really don't."
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"Everybody tight up!" Husband called into the intercom.
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glove, he looked up and caught Vic's eye.
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"Vic?!" Mercuriou stammered.  "W-what are you doing here?
You're... I mean..."
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"So are you, Marc.  It wasn't sabotage.  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."
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"You mean..."
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Mercuriou was interrupted by a ear-splitting crack, as if someone had
taken a pound of linguini and snapped it in half in front of a
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tunnel detached from the crew module.  In fact, the entire cargo bay
detached from the forebody as _Columbia_ split in two, with only a
strip of aluminum skin connecting the sections on the left.

The lights cut out, but they were not long in darkness.  The remaining
fuselage tore free and the cargo bay began to disintegrate in the
hypersonic slipstream.  Spacehab's forward bulkhead began to glow red.
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"What!" Alister exclaimed.  "It was for nothing!?!"

Mercuriou turned to him as the earth, the sun, the galaxy fell away
beneath them.
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"I'm just wondering what you're doing."
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Andrea stared at him in wonder.  Of all the thoughts that had gone
through her head, about what he might be doing, this was never one of
them.  She mumbled out a reply.
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"We stole more money that Berny Madolf every saw!"
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Congressman Richard Ecks pulled into his reserved parking spot outside
a Fairfax, Virginia studio and hustled inside.  His TV show, "Outside
the Beltway" had been on TV longer than he had been in Congress.  Once
inside, he skipped the elevator and instead jogged up three flights of
stairs while barely breaking a sweat, a feat he attributed to the
daily milkshakes of steamed broccoli and banana seeds that he relied
on to keep his formidable 300 pound bulk under control.

Mercuriou's next TV appearance was on a political talk show that
usually featured a panel discussion.  This evening the only other
guest was Richard Ecks, a prominent congressman, who had heard his
earlier interview and was determined to rebut him.
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on this program with the nerve to blame capitalism for what?  For
letting him take advantage of it?  For giving him the opportunity to
pull of one of the greatest con jobs in history?
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started schools and universities, established endowment funds...

Moderator: Gentlemen, gentlemen, I'm afraid we're almost out of time.
Congressman Ecks, do you have any final, closing remarks?

Ecks: Well, nothing more than to reiterate that freedom is the very
essence of capitalism.  Captain Mercuriou's ideas sound very noble and
idealistic, but how do you put them into practice?  Force them on
people with the government, right?  That's what it always comes down
to.

Moderator: Captain Mercuriou?
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Finally, let me share with you what I've learned about democracy.
a5526 1
We've been told that democracy is about freedom.  It's not.
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Democracy is about choosing your own leaders.  It's high time we
started choosing ours.
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Mercuriou: I've read it from cover to cover.

Ecks: Well you seem to have missed the point.  When you get right down
to it, it's a simple, logical argument that most people find quite
convincing.  There are natural prices associated with all goods and
services.  They are the costs of the land, labor and material required
to bring those goods and services to market, and it is a system of
free enterprise that most naturally adjusts market prices to match
natural prices.  So when I walk into a store and buy a sofa, the price
that I pay is what it actually cost to make that sofa!

Yates: I wouldn't argue with Adam Smith's logic; I'd argue his
morality!  Take a look at the beginning of that book, Chapter 2:
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She produced a tablet computer and began reading from it.
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Yates: Now, is this what we're taught by Christ?

Mercuriou: Precisely!  Smith presents a compelling argument if you're
willing to completely ignore its utter immorality!  The man was
another Machiavelli!
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Wye: We have a long-standing principle, captain, that states are not
allowed to secede from the Union.
d5647 3
a5649 3
Wye: This isn't a [communist] dictatorship, captain.  We live in a
nation of laws.  You are not going to just make up rules to interpret
the election results however you see fit.
d5651 2
a5652 2
Mercurio: How are you going to stop me?  You going to crack down?  Get
tough?  That's what it's going to take!
d9177 9
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"Well, that's how I think of it... I dunno,
d1517 2
a1518 2
Vic: "I have a better idea.  How about
_On_The_Evil_of_Capitalism_and_The_Danger_of_Democracy_?"
@


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@
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@a1541 2
[ And _Xplorer_1_ it was. ]

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@a1525 2
Burns: "Maybe just _Manifesto_."

@


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@d180 1
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the finicky machines imposed on their masters.
d202 7
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Forty five minutes later, with the main system shut down and half its
components spread across a table, two of the three technicians were
out of the room.  Burns sent another email, "Let's try Bogart's."
Back in the apartment, Marc 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 from someone who had already hung up by the time he took
it.  Burns had contemplated taking a shot of J.D. that morning to
steal himself for this moment, but decided that he had to be
d211 6
a216 12
Nothing did.  He dashed across the room (as the door closed).
The situation was almost ideal;
one of the scenarios he had drilled for.  The new machine was still
unpowered; the hard drive installed but uncabled.  Burns
connected a data cable from his laptop to the drive, then plugged in a
custom-built cable that could briefly power a server's hard drive
from the laptop's battery.  He hit a three-key sequence on the laptop,
and ventured a glance at the door.  Nobody.  The laptop beeped.  He
killed the power, disconnected both cables, and dashed back across the
room with his laptop.
It would become one of the world's most infamous hacks.
It had taken less than 15 seconds.
d223 4
a226 4
Buoyed by adrenaline, Burns floated back out to the
parking lot, tossed the laptop in the back seat, fired up a
sneak-a-toke cleaverly designed to look like a cigarette, cranked the
tunes and floored the rag-top all the way home.
d242 4
a245 16
From his perch on the couch, Mercuriou shook his head, no.  In his
late thirties and a shade under six feet tall, his cheekbones betrayed
the mixed features of his hybrid Romanian/Irish ancestry.  A white
T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes comprised the undistinguished
attire of Burns' roommate.  What differentiated him?  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.  Like his paternal ancestors, who had
decended from the Scythian plains to ravage the heart of the Roman
Empire, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to conquer
the unconquerable, undetered by any setbacks in his plans, and
absolutely convinced that he would ultimately win.

[ "We had to wait four more months to make sure it got into their
[ production system.  Burns got sick of the job and quit after two, but
[ it didn't matter.  They've been shipping it for half a year now."
a250 2
A silence fell punctuated by a single word.

d257 1
a257 5
mischevious smile.  They had met in college, when Mercuriou was an
eighteen-year-old freshman in love with classical literature and Vic
was finishing medical school.  Marc had briefly dated the future
doctor's cousin. The courtship had foundered; the friendship had
lasted almost twenty years.
d266 5
a270 5
Antonov furled his brows and looked at him like he had just claimed
the sky was not blue.  No, he was serious.  Walking into the living
room, he had to return to the kitchen for teabags, as the mugs
contained nothing but hot water.  Meanwhile, Mercuriou launched into a
prepared speech.
d285 1
a285 1
He paused, the speech degenerating into a tirade.
d287 3
a289 6
"Well, now we've got money," he concluded cynically, produced a wad of
fifty-dollar bills and fanned them on the table like a deck of poker
cards, then picked up a "U.S. Grant" and examined it with the air of a
conosuer sniffing a fine wine.  Vic stood in the doorway holding
something forgotten.  Mercuriou leaned back on the couch and returned
the gaze.
d292 1
a292 1
longer completely random," he replied to the unasked question.
d296 1
a296 2
"Well, maybe I've changed," the younger man answered, the words dry
and emotionless.
d298 1
a298 1
Vic looked straight into his eyes.  He had changed, as we all men do.
d307 2
a308 31
"Mars, huh," the doctor muttered.  Mercuriou wasn't joking, that much
he knew.  He thought back over the years he had known Marc
Mercuriou.  If he had learned one thing about the man, it was that he
wouldn't undertake a project if he didn't think he could finish it.
He'd sit and do nothing before undertaking something half-baked.  On
the other hand...

"Why are you doing this, Marc?  What is it about... really?"

Mercuriou didn't answer.  Couldn't answer.  Didn't have an answer.

[ The trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of a single man.  A small
[ siting room to the right of the door was partitioned from the kitchen
[ by a small counter.  Beyond the sink and its clutter of dirty dishes,
[ a sliding door lead to a small bathroom and then to the only bedroom
[ on the far end of trailer, where a gray cat had disappeared as soon as
[ a stranger had entered the abode.

The doctor's curiosity broke the awkward silence.

"Can it really work?" he wondered aloud.

"Well, we should be able to milk this hack for millions, maybe even a
billion or two.  But the money won't make a difference if we can't
overcome the technical problems."

"And can Burns overcome them?"

"He says it's a crap shoot... one that I'm willing to take.  Hell, what
else am I going to do, take my stolen millions and retire on a beach
somewhere?"
d310 3
a312 1
Finally, he elicited a smile from Antonov.
d314 1
a314 2
"Why not?" the doctor asked mischievously, his grin bristling under
the moustache for the first time.
d316 1
a316 6
"Because I'm not even forty yet!  Speaking of which, old man, what
have you been doing up here in these hills, anyway, early retirement?"

Vic chuckled.

"Let's go take a look."
d320 5
a324 9
surf board, and the P.C.H, before Southern California had 
turned into a game of Sim City.  He paused
and inhaled deeply, saving the aroma of desert flora.
_Warm_smell_of_colitas,_rising_up_through_the_air...

Mercuriou's Toyota and Vic's Jeep were the only vehicles in sight,
parked next to the trailer at the end of a long driveway that wound
along between a fifty-foot cliff rising to the left and a dry riverbed
on the right.
d369 6
a374 2
now well intoxicated.  Mercuriou was ready to leave, but still waiting
to see if his old friend would join his venture.
d376 1
a376 9
"I'll play their money game," Mercuriou was saying.  "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.  He had
always loved the way he felt years younger in the company of
Mercuriou's brash bravado, but now it was like a father seeing his son
drunk for the first time.
d386 1
a386 1
minutes of silence.
d388 2
a389 17
Mercuriou nodded his assent and left.  He couldn't help but feel
disappointment as he drove off down the dirt road.  What had he
expected, really?  Maybe for the first time since he and Burns had
dreamed up the hack, he really thought seriously about how crazy the
whole scheme was, and realistically how slim were the chances of
success.  _We're_just_a_bunch_of_lunatics_in_an_apartment_who_keep
reinforcing_each_other's_insanity. Yet he has no intention of spending
the rest of his life the way he spent his last ten years, fumbling
around from one dumb job to another while a court settlement ate all
his money and his best ideas sat barely started.

[ "Fuck it," he said aloud as the car reached the paved road and he hit the
[ gas.  If Victor Antonov didn't want in, he'd find another doctor...
[ and another horticulturalist.

Almost at the same time, Vic was still standing in the New Mexico sun,
watching the driveway Mercuriou's car had disappeared down.
d393 1
a393 2
"This," he said in a low voice to nobody in particular, "will require
a vision quest."
d1571 1
a1571 1
about three hundred conventional shuttle launches."
d2118 16
a2133 2
"Look, that's not important now..." she began as the door's electronic
lock clicked open and Mercuriou dashed in.
d2135 5
a2139 8
"They're planning a launch!" she yelled as her irate captor sprinted
across the room and slammed his hand down on the telephone to sever
the connection.

"What the hell are you up to... _captain_?" she demanded, but instead of answering,
Mercurio took her by the arm and half led, half dragged her back down
the hall to her improvised cell, put her back inside, then closed and
locked the door behind her without saying another word.
d9171 3
a9173 1
Mercuriou was stumbling through a haze holding a book in his hands.
@


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@'Red' Rimdew and Abruce Scowl
@
text
@d1601 2
a1602 1
Mercuriou's jaw actually went slack.
d1915 2
a1916 4
buttons on it.  "Fucking Russians," he muttered under his
breath.  Meanwhile, Andrea slowly digested what she had heard and began
to wonder about who her new benefactors were.  The passenger
was making another phone call.
@


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@
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@d177 4
a180 5
'Red' Brimow 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 the finicky machines
imposed on their masters.
d1526 2
a1527 3
"We run it just like the CIA, Alister, compartmentalization, need to
know.  The Mexicans are all illegals, so they don't ask too many
questions.  But there's some stuff we need done that can't be
d1531 8
d1542 1
a1542 1
"So what do you need me to do?"
d1549 8
a1556 8
NEW YORK - A major investment firm has declared bankruptcy in the wake
of a computer malfunction that triggered an automated series of losing
trades.

Keystone Securities (NYSE: KEY), 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 computer programs.
d1564 3
a1566 3
program," says Tess Winperd, a consultant with Bull, Bull and Bear,
"but rather that there weren't sufficient controls and safeguards in
place to prevent a disastrous loss."
d1587 1
a1587 1
Mercuriou: "It's time to name the ship.  Any suggestions?"
d1590 3
a1592 2
with rockets, its doors welded shut, and a hydraulic mating adapter
mounted near the center of the aircraft and opening directly upward.
d1606 3
a1608 2
Mercuriou shook. "You seriously want me to put _that_... _there_!"  He
motioned toward the skin of the ship near the cockpit.  Vic shrugged.
d1648 4
a1651 4
"None. We've tested ten-thirty-three extensively; it's everything it's
cracked up to be.  That's what doesn't make sense about it.  They're
not trying to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge.  We've actually got the
goods in hand, hell, we've still got about a hundred liters of the
d1673 1
a1673 1
techno-babble from these guys."
d1688 11
d2316 4
a2319 4
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.
d9247 4
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a1600 2
"You seriously want me to put _that_... _there_!"  He motioned toward
the skin of the ship near the cockpit.  Vic shrugged.
a1676 5
Yet before Kyle left, he adivsed her:

"I just can't understand Hawaii.  I just can't understand why they're
doing this in Hawaii!"

d2022 9
a2030 9
what they were being asked to do, but Burns got up and lead first
Alister and then Vic down a hallway, leaving Andrea and Marc to eye
each other in silence, she sitting on a chair in the middle of the
room, he perched on a tabletop.  Twenty minutes later, the South
African returned to announce that the room was ready.  Mercuriou
escorted the NASA engineer down a hallway and around a corner to a
windowless twenty-by-forty-foot room populated solely by a rectangular
grid of floor-to-ceiling black steel frames.  Upon entering, Andrea
turned back to face Mercuriou.
d2039 3
a2041 3
The card key flashed through the lock with such audible violence that
Andrea took an involuntary step back from the door, then another as it
was pushed open.
d2112 2
a2113 2
"Uh... sure, it's right down the hall," he answered, before leading the
way about a hundred feet to a ladies' room.
d2287 7
a2293 2
simply jumped down beside him, planting her hands on his shoulders to
break her fall.
d2295 16
a2310 9
"Dr. Yeats!", the flabbergasted space captain blurted out, but Andrea
ignored him and walked forward through a narrow corridor that only
widened just before the cockpit.  All eyes turned to her.  Burns was
in the left-hand pilot's seat; Alister occupied the co-pilot's
position, and Vic was strapped into a seat a short distance behind
him.  A fourth seat, behind Burns, waited vacant for Mercuriou.  All
three were wearing pressure suits, but hadn't donned their helments or
gloves yet.  Andrea looked around at the cramped quarters, then turned
to find Mercuriou glowering at her.
@


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@
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@d1591 2
a1592 1
"Well, that's how I think of it... I dunno, _Mars_Voyager_?"
d1594 3
a1596 1
"I have a better idea.  How about
d1599 2
a1600 1
Mercuriou's jaw actually went slack for a moment.
d1602 1
a1602 2
"You seriously want me to put _that_..." and he motioned toward the
skin of the ship near the cockpit.  Vic shrugged.
d1604 1
a1604 1
"Perhaps something shorter would be better."
d1882 3
a1884 1
"Look, there's just been a delay, that's all," the passenger
a1886 4
"No, no, there's no problem, it's just a production shortfall.  We
haven't been able to produce the fuel in the quantities we had hoped
for."

d1892 2
a1893 7
"Well, then make it yourself!  We can pay for the spacesuits in cash, you know."

"Would you rather NASA find out about our arrangement?"

"OK, then just let me handle it."

"I know how my own government works."
d1895 1
a1895 1
"Thank you.  Thank you."
d1897 1
a1897 1
"Goodbye."
@


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@d1581 1
a1581 2
Mercuriou: "First test flight's tomorrow.  I think it's time to name
the ship.  Any suggestions?"
d1583 3
a1585 1
Burns: "I think of it as _Technical_Sketch_."
d1587 5
a1591 1
Mercuriou stared at him in disbelief, but Vic was quicker to respond.
d1598 4
a1601 2
"You actually [DUP] want me to put _that_..." and he motioned toward
the skin of the ship near the cockpit.  Vic shrugged.
d2534 2
a2535 2
She was dumbfounded; he shushed her out the door and she didn't see
him again for another hour.
d2633 1
a2633 1
"I'm not part of the majority."
d2637 1
a2637 1
"I'm not part of the majority... I'm a thief!  I'm a socialist!  I'm
d2657 2
a2658 2
have the right to rule everybody else's lives and build some big
prison system for those who won't do what they're told."
d2666 5
a2670 5
progress forward...'  I feel as bad about ripping off the capitalists
as I would about ripping off communists or fascists, because to me
they're all basically the same.  Just another bunch of men with some
nightmare system based on the most viscious traits of mankind to be
jammed down everyone's throats."
d2673 5
a2677 4
has been conquered, colonized, and civilized.  No matter where you go,
there's some established government, be it democracy or dictatorship,
and you're just a little cog that better not need too much oil.  Out
here, though, is an entire solar system waiting to be tamed!"
d2742 8
d2802 6
a2807 1
Mercuriou: For the capitalist system!  People who don't want to work
a9217 33


=============

Burns suggested a 767 for a manned launch vehicle, and Mercurio had
adquired one on lease from a company that specialized in mothballing
jumbo jets that the air carriers didn't want anymore.  The leasing
company let the airplane go for a fraction of its value, partly
because it was insured against air disasters and partially because of
the expected ease of recoving the airplane in case of a default.  They
would eventually go bankrupt, partially because of their unexpected
inability to recover one of their aircraft once it had been launched
into orbit.

The Mexicans dropped the aircraft's engines and replaced them with
rockets.  Next, they converted almost the entire main body of the
aircraft to hold N-1033, leaving just an extended cockpit section, and
an access corridor leading to an airlock fashioned near the center of
the aircraft and opening directly upward and featuring a hydraulic
mating adapter.

All four men - Burns, Mercuriou, Victor and Alister - now stood at the
base of the aircraft, parked behind the warehouse near where the
rocket stand had once stood.  Burns had just completed a test flight.

"We still need more cargo modules," the engineer explained, "and a lot
of equipment in them, but the aircraft is ready to go."

Mercuriou was ecstatic.  He had fist-pumped the air as he watched the
rocketcraft take off, then lead a cheering ovation after it landed.
For the first time in more than [two years], he finally felt he had a
real option for the day the feds came knocking on his door.

@


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@
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@d1584 1
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Burns: "I think of it as _Technical_Sketch_171_."
d1594 1
a1594 1
the skin of the ship near the cockpit.
d1596 1
a1596 1
-- How about _Icarus'_Wing_?
d2468 1
a2468 1
Two hours after _Mars_Explorer's_ launch, Burns fired the rocket
d2593 3
a2595 3
It _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."
d2602 2
a2603 2
capitalist leaders could be mass producing spacecraft by the thousands
if they desired.  Ask yourselves, 'if they needed them for a war...'"
d2608 1
a2608 1
I'll bet not a one of them would buy a bum a hamburger at McDonalds.
d2638 1
a2638 1
buildings, why do people bomb our embassies, who do people burn the
d2643 4
a2646 4
because they're afraid of what will happen to them if don't.  They
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
d2648 4
a2651 4
think that because they're more advanced, or because they've been
oppressed, or because there's more of them than anybody else, that
they have the right to rule everybody else's lives and build some big
prison system for them if they won't do what they're told."
d2658 12
a2669 5
garbage in charge of society.  And I feel as bad about ripping off the
capitalists as I would about ripping off communists or fascists,
because to me they're all basically the same.  Just another bunch of
men with some nightmare system based on the most viscious traits of
mankind to be jammed down everyone's throats."
d4278 2
d4402 3
d4409 1
a4409 1
it, _Mars_Explorer's_ 767 was not equipped with a protective heat
d4441 2
d6311 3
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T - 100 days  [SHOULD BE A MONDAY]
d1541 1
a1541 3
"By the way, did you see this?" Mercuriou asked Burns as they walked
back to the warehouse.  He handed him a two-day-old copy of a major
financial newspaper.
d1571 1
a1571 2
"This could be serious," the engineer concluded as his returned the
newspaper.
d1573 1
a1573 1
"Oh, it _is_ serious.  There's a countdown clock running on this
d1581 2
a1582 2
"First test flight's tomorrow.  I think it's time to name the ship,"
Mercuriou announced.  "Any suggestions?"
d1589 1
a1589 1
_On_The_Evil_of_Capitalism_And_The_Danger_of_Democracy_?"
d1593 2
a1594 2
"You actually want _me_ to put _that_..." and he motioned toward the
skin of the ship near the cockpit.
d1606 1
a1606 1
     -- Yeah, I know.
d1649 2
d2485 1
a2485 1
when 170 missiles get fired off in Utah?"
d2495 7
a2501 2
watched the press conference alone and in silence.  Andrea Yeats was
never mentioned.
d2506 1
a2506 1
"Excuse me?"  Andrea asked.
d2508 1
a2508 1
Mercuriou looked up from his laptop and a pad of paper.  "Yes?"
d2510 1
a2510 1
"I'm just wondering what you're doing.  I haven't seen you all day."
d2512 3
a2514 3
"I've revising my speech for this evening.  I had planned to give it
live immediately after achieving orbit, but you disrupted my timing,
Doctor.  Now I have to have to revise it."
d2517 2
a2518 2
through her head that afternoon, about what he might be doing in
there, this was never one of them.  She mumbled out a reply.
d2523 3
a2525 1
"Dr. Yeats, my speeches are the most important cargo this vessel carries."
d2527 2
a2528 2
She was dumbfounded, and he shushed her out the door with the grace of
a nanny.  She didn't see him again for another hour.
d2532 8
a2539 13
The sight of men floating in zero-gee had galvanized the news media.
Everyone in the world, or everyone in The World, or at least everyone
in the Most Important Country In The World, it seemed, was watching
the interview live.

"My name is Captain Marcelius Mercuriou, but you may call me Marc.
The most important things to know about me is that I mean you no harm,
I have no weapons to launch against you, and I seek only to go on my
way in peace.  I have been told repeatedly by people to Love It or
Leave It, and I wish to tell them that I have decided to Get The Hell
Out.  I am going to Mars.  I would invite anyone to join us, but of
course you are prevented from doing us by your evil and wicked
society."
d2556 14
a2569 13
"Venture capital funding," Mercuriou sneered.  "How do you get it?
I'll tell you how.  You sell your soul to these people.  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%.  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."
d2582 1
a2582 1
"Well, that's a good question.  I guess, basically, I'm 38 years old
d2584 1
a2584 2
facinated me, and I want to do something with my life, not just sit
around and enjoy a big pile of cash."
d2590 1
a2590 1
was to either be rich, or be the government, or steal it."
d2592 3
a2594 7
"Now, if the government had built the first airplane, everyone would
be walking around laughing that anything lighter than a skyscraper
could fly.  It's more of a surprise, at least to me, that with all the
Hollywood spaceflight spin-offs, it hasn't been done until now.  It
shows how little opportunity we really have to pursue our dreams.  It
_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
d2599 5
a2603 6
"Why don't you ask all those people you're interviewing?  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 if they so desired.  If they needed them
for a war, they'd be doing it."
d2608 6
a2613 8
I'll bet not a one of them would lift a finger for anybody unless they
were getting something out of it for themselves.  They're some of the
most selfish people in the world, hell, their whole philosophy is
based on greed.  I mean, let's just apply their own rational.  I'm
'helping them compete'.  If some of them go out of business, so what?
Businesses fail every day.  I'm developing technology to fly to Mars,
so the whole society benefits.  We rip and claw at each other throats,
and that drives civilization forward, right?"
d2626 1
a2626 1
"I'm not part of the majority."  He started to chew a piece of gum.
d2628 24
a2651 22
"I'm not part of the majority," he repeated. "I'm a thief!  I'm a
socialist!  I'm an anarchist!  I'm the most anti-American person since
Jane Fonda!  I'm not part of the majority, and I don't like this
system of government."

"We need rules..."

"And You make it sound like everyone agrees on these _rules_.  If
that's the case, then why do people blow up federal buildings, why do
people bomb our embassies, who do people burn this 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 make 'through
a democractic process'.  People obey the rules because they're afraid
of what will happen to them if don't.  They 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 millions and millions of people that think that because
they're more advanced, or because they've been oppressed, or because
there's more of them than anybody else, that they have the right to
rule everybody else's lives."
d2664 1
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Merceriou was done - for now.  He terminated the "interview".
d2667 1
a2667 1
contact you... I'll let you know the next time I'll be in touch."
d2719 3
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a2732 2
Ecks: Capitalism has produced a society with the highest standard of
living that has ever been seen on this planet.  People are well-fed,
d2734 1
a2734 1
leisure time and disposible income.  Yet these people slam capitalism
d2736 6
a2741 6
and getting rewarded for that hard work.  And now this man comes
along, this thief, this criminal, who has taken advantage of our
society, stolen from our businesses and our government, lied, cheated;
he comes on this program with the nerve to blame capitalism for what?
For letting him take advantage of it?  For giving him the opportunity
to pull of one of the greatest con jobs in history?
d9210 7
@


1.292
log
@can't understand why they're doing this in hawaii!  (kyle)
@
text
@d1670 2
a1671 2
"I just can't understand Hawaii.  I just keep coming back to that.  I
just can't understand why they're doing this in Hawaii!"
@


1.291
log
@kyle and andrea at mom's house - tighten it up
@
text
@d1668 5
@


1.290
log
@the naming of the book
@
text
@d1584 2
a1585 9
Burns suggested a 767 for a manned launch vehicle, and Mercurio had
adquired one on lease from a company that specialized in mothballing
jumbo jets that the air carriers didn't want anymore.  The leasing
company let the airplane go for a fraction of its value, partly
because it was insured against air disasters and partially because of
the expected ease of recoving the airplane in case of a default.  They
would eventually go bankrupt, partially because of their unexpected
inability to recover one of their aircraft once it had been launched
into orbit.
d1587 1
a1587 22
The Mexicans dropped the aircraft's engines and replaced them with
rockets.  Next, they converted almost the entire main body of the
aircraft to hold N-1033, leaving just an extended cockpit section, and
an access corridor leading to an airlock fashioned near the center of
the aircraft and opening directly upward and featuring a hydraulic
mating adapter.

All four men - Burns, Mercuriou, Victor and Alister - now stood at the
base of the aircraft, parked behind the warehouse near where the
rocket stand had once stood.  Burns had just completed a test flight.

"We still need more cargo modules," the engineer explained, "and a lot
of equipment in them, but the aircraft is ready to go."

Mercuriou was ecstatic.  He had fist-pumped the air as he watched the
rocketcraft take off, then lead a cheering ovation after it landed.
For the first time in more than [two years], he finally felt he had a
real option for the day the feds came knocking on his door.

"I think it's time to name the ship," he announced.  "Any suggestions?"

Burns spoke first.  "I think of it as _Technical_Sketch_171_."
d1596 2
a1597 2
"You want _me_ to put _that_..." and he motioned toward the skin of
the ship near the cockpit.
d1611 2
d1623 3
a1625 3
Kneeling down by the lettuce patch, Andrea continued to read the sheaf
of papers in silence.  Standing over her, Kyle continued to talk on,
half to himself.
a1630 3
Picking up her spade and gloves, Andrea stood and led the way back
towards the main house.

d1633 10
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"Absolutely none," Kyle answered.  "We've tested ten-thirty-three
extensively; it's everything it's cracked up to be.  That's what
doesn't make sense about it.  They're not trying to sell us the
Brooklyn Bridge.  We've actually got the goods in hand, hell, we've
still got about a hundred liters of the stuff over in Building 17."

"They're not trying to get money out of us.  They've got the contract,
and we've paid them a little, they've ramped up to make massive
quantities of ten-thirty-three, but we just haven't seen any product.
I've thought they might need design help with their plant, but they
evade all our inquiries.  I've thought they might be selling it
overseas, but I can't figure why or how.  They always claim to be
having production problems, and that they need more time."

"Production problems," Andrea echoed.  "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."
d1648 1
a1648 15
launch.  Andrea had performed basically the same estimate in her head.
He had come here for a reason.

Leaving the gardening tools on a table by an outside sink, Andrea sat
down at a wooden picnic table on the veranda as her elderly mother was
coming out of the house.  Eighty-six and sharp as a wit, she carried a
tray with a large pitcher and glasses on it.

"Kyle, would you like a nice cool glass of limonade?  I just squeezed
the limes."

"That sounds great, Mrs. Yeats," the NASA manager replied.

"Use Equal if it's not sweet enough for you; it dissolves in cold
water better than sugar."
d1650 1
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"It's fine, ma'am," he replied, sipping the cool beverage.  "A little
on the tart side, but that's just the way I like it."
d1652 1
a1652 9
"Andrea, if you think you can glean anything from those papers, be my
guest.  If you want to see ten-thirty-three in action, go see Wilcox
down in Houston, you can fire up a rocket in a test chamber.  But bottom
line, I think somebody's got to go out there, see their production
facility, talk to these people, figure out what the heck's going on."

Yeats was shaking her head.

"I'm not a detective, Kyle."
d1658 2
a1659 5
Andrea sighed deeply.  She had left NASA for a reason, and had no
desire to be drawn back in.  This particular assignment looked like a
quagmire.  She hated dealing with business types.  She would have no
real authority.  She'd have to sleep in a hotel.  Still, Kyle was her
best friend, and we were taught to _give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_us.
d1663 4
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Barely able to conceal his joy, Kyle beamed with delight.

"Great!" Kyle beamed.  "I've got everything set up.  You still have
your I.D, right?  You'll be a special consultant.  I'll advance you
all the expenses, and I'll make sure they know you're coming.  Just go
out there and see what you can figure out."
d9171 33
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1615 1
a1615 1
Vic's mustache bristled.  "I was thinking of _The_Asylum_."
d1617 1
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Mercuriou barely cracked a smile.  "Any other suggestions?"
d1619 2
a1620 1
Burns spoke next.  "I liked _Vanguard_One_..."
d1622 1
a1622 2
"That's good!"  Mercuriou interjected, "since we're spearheading man's
drive into space!"
d1624 2
a1625 1
"...but it's been taken.  NASA already used it."
d1627 1
a1627 5
"Oh."

Alister finally spoke.

-- _Icarus'_Wing_
d1631 1
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          -- You heard me, _Icarus'_Wing_.
d1633 1
a1633 1
Mercuriou stared at him in disbelief.
d1641 1
a1641 1
And _Xplorer_1_ it was.
@


1.288
log
@Got rid of Borzov
@
text
@a6040 22
T + 804 days

Prince: Beth in Pennsylvania, you're on the Nathan Prince show!

Beth: Yes, I'm a small business owner; I own a dry cleaner and I'd
like Mercuriou to know that I can't afford to give away my services
for free.  I'm not some rich capitalist; I have employees that count
on me for a paycheck, and there are some months when they get paid and
I don't.  He's up there in a space capsule, down here on Earth people
just can't afford his dreamy ideas!

Mercuriou: Well, it's about making sacrifices for what's important to
you.  If it's important to live in harmony with God, to treat others
as we're taught by Christ...

Beth: Look, I'm a Christian, but that doesn't mean I have give away my
livelihood so I can live like a bum on the street!

Mercuriou: Why is it, that when so many people say that they're a
Christian, the next word out of their mouth is "but"?


d6217 23
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T + 1257 days
d6263 1
a6263 3


T + 1262 days
d6276 1
a6276 1
T + 1265 days
d6353 1
a6353 1
"Nope," McCool answered after pushing buttons for a moment.  "Looks
d6393 1
a6393 1
"So are you Marc.  It wasn't sabotage.  There was a piece of frozen
d6402 4
a6405 5
microphone.  The cabin pitched to the side as the SpaceHab detached
from the crew module.  In fact, the entire cargo bay detached from the
forebody as _Columbia_ split in two across its width, [find technical
term for this] with only a strip of fuselage connecting the sections
on the left.
d6408 2
a6409 3
fuselage broke free with another crash and the cargo bay spun free in
the hypersonic slipstream.  Spacehab's forward bulkhead began to glow
red.
d6941 1
a6941 1
T + 1265 days <*****>
d6943 1
a6943 1
March 1, 2003
d6945 2
a6946 2
9/11 was Julian day 254 of 2001, March 1 was day 60 of 2003
all these years had 365 days, so (365 - 254) + 365 + 60
d6949 1
a6949 1
so 9/11 is T + 729 days, that makes Columbia T + 1265
d6965 4
a6968 1
3/1/2003 - T + 1265; Columbia
@


1.287
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a6270 182
"Dr. Andrea Yeats!" exclaimed the booming, heavily accented voice
of an overweight Russian cosmonaut.

"Borzov!  They didn't tell me you were still here!  Why didn't Kyle
tell me?"  Andrea broke out in amazed laughter.

"I wouldn't let him!" the Russian snorted.  "_Still_ here!  Yes,
the whole time I've been up here waiting for you."

"Have you really?"

"No, Andrea, of course not."  Everyone broke up laughing.

"But I was here when you launched, and I've come back up just to greet
you!  Captain, I would have sent you off with a bottle of Russia's
finest if you had only stopped by!"

Mercuriou found himself somewhat awkwardly clasped by a simultaneous
bearhug and handshake.

"Thank you, spaseba..."

"Ah, you speak some Russian, oyeng xoropho!"

_Columbia_ was the space shuttle slatted to return the _Xplorer_1_ crew.
They had docked the day before on the tail end of a scientific
mission.  Plus the space station's standard three-man crew, the head
count in orbit now balloned to thirteen.  (no one thought this number
significant) After an exchange of gifts and introductions, a dinner
followed.  The _Xplorer_1_ crew, after an almost completely vegetarian
diet, tore into the space station's freeze-dried meats, while the
shuttle and space station astronauts showed a marked preferenced for
the fresh vegetables from _Xplorer_1_.  Afterwards, Borzov predictably
produced two bottles of "Russia's finest" and began passing vodka
shots around.

"So, Captain," the cosmonaut asked, "what do you think will happen to
you back on Earth?"

The space station fell quiet, at least as quiet as all the machinery
running would allow.

"Well, I don't know," drawled the intoxicated Mercuriou.  9/11 was the
only other time on the mission he'd been even mildly inebriated.  "I
suppose there'll be some kind of big civil trial, for all the money.
Probably there'll be a criminal trial first, we broke a lot of
computer crime laws.  I don't know.  Maybe some prison time.  Who
knows?"

"There's another way down, you know."

Borzov, despite having drunk more than three times any of the others,
didn't seem particularly drunk.

"Seriously, captain, _Columbia_ is not the only way off this station.
There are many in Russia who have heard your words against capitalism.
There is also a Soyuz capsule attached here, too."

A different kind of quiet settled over the space station.  Andrea broke
the spell.

"Communism dies hard, eh, Vladymir?"

"Communism _is_ dead, nawsha tovarisha, but not everyone is my country
believes capitalism is the best thing for Russia."

"And democracy?"

Borzov shrugged.  "We're defined more by our limitations than by our
abilities, my dear, as I have tried to tell you many times."

"Defined by our limitations?" Alister asked.

"Yes, young man.  Defined by our limitations.  Our friend Andrea talks
a lot about religion, doesn't she?  All these people who talk about
religion, talk about giving to all who beg of them, talk about
forgiving their enemies, and then go to work for the capitalists on
Monday morning, why?  Because they are
_defined_by_their_limitations_."

Borzov let his words sink in, then continued.

"Captain, would you say your mission has been defined more by your
abilities or more by your limitations?"

"Limitations, definitely," Mercuriou answered quietly, but without
hesitation.

"You see!  _Defined_by_our_limitations_, young Alister Compton!
Andrea here believes men can walk on water!" Borzov exclaimed, perhaps
extracting a small vengeance for Andrea's remark about communism.  "So
why, my dear, do we need ships?"

Andrea answered slowly.  "We can't walk on water because our faith in
God isn't strong enough, I think that's the only answer really
consistent with the Gospel."

"A limitation of faith!"  Borzov exclaimed.  "Or perhaps her
limitation is her inability to accept that the world
_is_completely_deterministic_ and _there_is_no_God_!"  and that
_anything_heavier_than_water_sinks_!"

"People can overcome their limitations, Vladymir."

"That's part of how they define us, Andreaysha!"

"Booker Washington."

A puzzled look crossed Borzov's face.  His English was not perfect,
and he had not understand this last remark from the _Xplorer_1_
captain.

"I'm sorry?..."

"Booker Washington," Mercuriou repeated.  "He said that we should
judge men not by what they've achieved, but by what they've overcome
to achieve it."

"Ah," Borzov comprehended.  "One of your great authors.  And was
'Booker Washington' defined by _his_ limitations?"

"Absolutely," replied Mercuriou after a moment of thought.  "He could
never accept how bitterly race has divided my country."

The silence that followed this remark was broken by Ilan Ramon,
an Israeli air force cournel turned _Columbia_ payload specialist.

"I'll tell you what I think'll happen if you go back home", he
interjected.  The other astronauts turned to face him.

"Captain, I haven't hung on your every word, like the people in your
country, but I've spent enough time among Americans while training for
this mission to tell you there are basically three kinds of reactions
to you.  Some people just think you're nuts and dismiss everything you
say as the words of a lunatic.  Others listen; they don't believe
everything, but they do listen.  And some hate you so passionately you
may not be able to walk down the street without a police escort."

"Personally, I think you're the biggest thief I've ever met in my
life.  They'll probably give you jail time.  I think you expect it,
and I think you deserve it."

Mercuriou nodded.  "Thank you," he answered Borzov, after a pause.
"SHPASEBO. BOLSHOIUS SHPASEBO.  But I'll take the shuttle.  Col. Ramon
is right.  I am a thief, and maybe I'll get some clemency, and maybe I
won't, but I'd just rather go home now."

"You might want to consider putting _him_ on that Soyuz," Ramon
continued, indicating Alister.  "From what I've heard, he had a good
bit to do with your hacks; he might end up on trial, too.  At the very
least, your police will want to question him extensively about Burns'
methods.  And he's not even from your country."

Marc stared at Alister, then nodded slightly before looking to Borzov.

"Can he take the Soyuz?  What are the terms?"

"Yes, we've talked about him.  We'll let him go to any country that'll
take him, but that might be a problem.  He could end up stuck in
Russia if South Africa decides to extridite him to the U.S."

"And if the government changes in Moscow?" Andrea asked.

Borzov roared out a deep-bellied laugh.

"My dear, how many times have I told you, _governments_are_always_
_changing_in_Moscow_!"

"Go home, son," the Israeli advised.  "People like young pilots to be
their national heros, trust me, I know.  Go home."

Alister looked back and forth at his two crewmates.

"Whatever you want to do is fine with me," Mercuriou told him.

"I'll take my chances with my own people, then," Alister finally
stated then continued slowly.  "I'll take the Russian Soyuz and then
hand myself over to the South African embassy in Moscow.  If they
extridite, they extridite."

"OK, then that's what we'll do."

d6276 1
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"What's wrong, David?"  She could see that he was agitated.
d6309 1
a6309 1
here... I'm going home."
d6314 1
a6314 1
now.  I'll take my chances with _Columbia_," she told XX.
d6347 1
a6347 1
from the seat behind.
d6355 2
a6356 2
"Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not
copy your last."
d6398 5
a6402 5
microphone.  The cabin floor pitched to the side as the SpaceHab
detached from the crew module.  In fact, the entire cargo bay detached
from the forebody as _Columbia_ split in two across its width, [find
technical term for this] with only a strip of fuselage connecting the
sections on the left.
@


1.286
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d6456 1
a6456 1
"Andrea!" XX called in a low voice.  "I need to talk to you."
d6458 1
a6458 1
"What's wrong, XX?"  She could see that he was agitated.
d6463 1
a6463 1
"Why?" Andrea wanted to know.  XX lowered his voice further.
d6474 1
a6474 1
"XX has very good reason to be concerned about the safety of our
d6528 2
a6529 2
"Does it look like instrumentation?" Husband asked.  [XX asked,
leaning forward from the seat behind Husband.]
d6532 1
a6532 1
solid.  We've got a blown left rear tire."
d6540 3
a6542 2
Husband ignored the radio, instead pointing to the yellow light that
indicated RCS thruster activity.  It was lit solid.
d6571 3
a6573 3
"So are you Marc, you just don't know it yet.  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
d6580 5
a6584 7
microphone.  The cabin floor pitched forward thirty degrees as the
SpaceHab detached from the orbiter, and the _Xplorer_1_ astronauts
would have been thrown against the forward bulkhead had they not been
strapped in.  In fact, the entire cargo bay detached from the crew
module as _Columbia_ split in two across its width, [find technical
term for this] with only a strip of roof and some plumbing connecting
the sections.
d6587 3
a6589 2
roof section broke free with another crash and the cargo bay spun free
in the hypersonic slipstream.  The forward bulkhead began to glow red.
@


1.285
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1642 1
a1642 1
-- Like hell we're naming it _Icarus'_Wing_!  We're naming it _Mars_Explorer_!
d1644 1
a1644 1
And _Mars_Explorer_ it was.
d2402 1
a2402 1
he returned aft to lock the hatch.  _Mars_Explorer_ sped down the
d3806 1
a3806 1
been designated _Mars_Explorer_' bridge, so Burns now spent several
d4335 1
a4335 1
other space mission to date.  _Mars_Explorer_ will go down along with
d4382 1
a4382 1
full-time to the _Mars_Explorer_ video feed, which now featured the
d4587 1
a4587 1
them were packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Mars_Explorer_
d4691 1
a4691 1
_Mars_Explorer_ - something about "the great bird crippled in the
d5001 1
a5001 1
from fundamentalists.  Most of the _Mars_Explorer_ crew deleted it along with
d6295 1
a6295 1
_Columbia_ was the space shuttle slatted to return the _Mars_Explorer_ crew.
d6300 1
a6300 1
followed.  The _Mars_Explorer_ crew, after an almost completely vegetarian
d6303 1
a6303 1
the fresh vegetables from _Mars_Explorer_.  Afterwards, Borzov predictably
d6380 1
a6380 1
and he had not understand this last remark from the _Mars_Explorer_
a6453 1

d6520 2
a6521 1
thing.  I know that sounds harsh, but it's how I feel."
d6528 2
a6529 1
"Does it look like instrumentation?" Husband asked.
d6549 4
a6552 5
political party.  You need to hold a congress and agree on a platform.
You need to hold a convention, too, so the delegates can agree on a
common slate of candidates to support in the election.  You need to do
all of this stuff, but, finally, you have to convince your people to
go somewhere on Election Day and just _demand_ to be counted."
d6570 4
a6573 4
"So are you Marc, you just don't know it yet.  It wasn't sabotage.
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."
d6580 10
a6589 8
SpaceHab detached from the orbiter.  In fact, the entire cargo bay
detached from the crew module as _Columbia_ split in two across its
width, [find technical term for this] with only a strip of roof
connecting the sections until it, too, broke free.

The lights cut out, but they were not long in darkness.  The forward
bulkhead began to glow red as it plowed on through the hypersonic
slipstream.
d6601 2
a6602 2
Hanging in a azure haze, below them lay Texas, above them black space,
and above space stupendous light.
d7208 1
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decided by NASA if her role on the _Mars_Explorer_ is as an offical
d7222 1
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how Dr. Yeats came to be on board the _Mars_Explorer_, and whether this
d7860 1
a7860 1
_Mars_Explorer_ mission had become.  Her opponent was a minister in a major
d8178 1
a8178 1
for her in spaceflight.  At some point in the _Mars_Explorer_ mission, she
d8779 1
a8779 1
was that the crew of the _Mars_Explorer_, loved or hated, had become media
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d6457 70
a6526 2
On the flight deck, Husband and McCool were studying a tire pressure
warning; Pilot McCool pushing most of the buttons.
d6530 2
a6531 2
"Nope."  he answered after a moment.  "Looks solid.  We've got a blown
left rear tire."
d6539 2
a6540 2
Rick Husband ignored the radio, instead pointing to the yellow light
that indicated RCS thruster activity.  It was lit solid.
d6560 2
a6561 2
"tight", but Alister's gloves were off.  As he started to glove
his left hand, he looked up and caught Vic's eye.
d6572 2
a6573 5
during launch," Vic explained to the stunned _X-Wing_ crew in a tone
he might use to describe a walk to the mailbox.

"Smashed a pretty good hole in the leading edge of the wing, right
through all that protective heat shielding."
d6591 1
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The bulkhead turned white, then morphed into a sheet of flame that
d6594 2
a6595 2
Burning, BURNING!!, and then their suits burnt off and the flames went
away with them.
d6599 2
a6600 2
Hanging in mid-air, below them lay Texas, above them the blackness of
space, and above space a stupendous light.
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d6457 2
a6458 1
"That's everything?"  Alister asked.
d6460 1
a6460 1
"Pretty much," Andrea called up from _Columbia_'s mid-deck.
d6462 2
a6463 6
Borzov had been blustering, at least somewhat.  He had no desire
to use the escape Soyuz, and had talked Alister into staying
on the space station, or at least the docked OTV module, until
another Soyuz had been sent up.  Almost all of the gear had
been transferred now to _Columbia_, leaving only Alister's
personal effects and some food on the OTV.
d6465 2
a6466 1
Mercuriou turned to Borzov.
d6468 2
a6469 27
"Feel free to move the OTV if it's in your way."

"How do you say it?" the Russian answered, "'The keys are in the ignition'?"

Mercuriou nodded.  Andrea had come back up out of _Columbia_.

"Everybody else is on board.  I guess this is goodbye."

Alister practically broke down in tears.  Andrea did break down,
and hugged the young man strongly.  Mercuriou did almost the
same, with a bearhug more comfortable than Borzov's and less
intimate than Yeats'.  They shook hands.

"I can't believe this.  I mean, I guess I knew this day would come,
but I just can't believe this is goodbye."

Alister looked from him back to Andrea during these last moments
together, then asked an obvious question.

"Do you think we'll ever come back to _Mars_Explorer_, I mean, it's still up
there, do you think there'll be a follow-up mission?

Andrea answered first.

"A follow-up?  No, not for me; for you, maybe, you're young enough.
I've abandoned space flight once in my life, and I'm abandoning it
again.  Vic was right.  Our problems are here on Earth."
d6471 2
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Mercuriou nodded slowly.

"Yeah, I'll see you on Earth, man, but I think I'm done for space
travel, too."

"But I thought we were going to jumpstart space travel!  Develop this
new fuel!  Get mankind into space!  Grow crops!  Make clothes!  Mine
the asteroid belt!"

RHETORIC appeared on the college blackboard [in Mercuriou's mind],
then evaporated before the stark reality of his two best friends dead.
_Maybe_I_should_have_taken_a_course_called_"Honesty"_instead.

[ Mercuriou answered now, slowly. ]
d6474 1
a6474 4
"No, that was just my sales pitch.  My real reason was... it was a
stunt.  It was biggest stage I could think of to get myself heard.
And Andrea kept telling me I had already done that, that my most
important mission goal had been achieved, but I wouldn't listen."
d6476 2
a6477 1
Alister fell quiet.
d6479 6
a6484 2
"So what was the point then, that it was all for nothing, and this is
the end?"
d6486 2
a6487 3
"No, think about it, Alister," the captain answered slowly but with
conviction.  His thoughts drifted back to college.  _Rhetoric._
_Maybe_they_should_have_required_a_class_in_honesty_instead._
d6489 1
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"This nerve we've struck with people, the
stuff we've talked about - freedom, democracy, religion, God,
the role of the individual in society, money, power - this is
the stuff Socrates debated in Athens,
the stuff Plato and Aristotle wrote about, St. Matthew and Thomas
Aquinas, this is the soul of our species.  Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Leo
Tolstoy, and none of them had all the answers.  I mean, if this is the
stuff _they_ talked about _then_, and it's the same stuff _we're_
talking about _now_..."
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The captain's voice trailed off.  Behind him, _Columbia_ gleamed in
the razor-sharp sun of low-Earth orbit.
d6495 1
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"Columbia, Houston, we see your tire pressure messages and we did not
copy your last."
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Rick Husband keyed his mike.  "Roger, uh, bu-" He never finished his
sentence.  An klaxon went off.
d6502 4
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"Master alarm!"  McCool declared.  "We lost... the antenna?!"
d6507 2
a6508 1
"What?"
d6510 1
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"Multiple master alarms!  We've lost hydraulics!"
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"Everybody tight up!" Husband called.
d6520 3
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Only Alister was not completely 'tight', and only because his gloves
were off.  He shoved one glove onto his left hand, clicked the locking
ring shut, and was about to don the right glove, too, when he stopped
cold.  Vic was standing in front of him.
d6524 1
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"Don't bother," he said.
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Suddenly, the orbiter lost power.  The lights cut out, and the cockit
displays went blank.  Only the sunlight gleaming through the windows
illuminated the flight deck.

"What's going on?" Alister asked 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."

A ear-splitting crack punctuated this reply, like someone had taken a
pound of linguini and snapped it in half in front of a microphone.
The cabin floor pitched forward thirty degrees.

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

The forward bulkhead morphed into a sheet of flame that drenched the
cabin at ten times the speed of sound, then evaporated as quickly.
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Suspended in mid-air, above them was the darkness of space, and above
space a stupendous light.
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@


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5. it must be unalterably opposed to capitalism
d240 2
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Mercuriou raised a finger in the air.
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close enough to impede on Alister's space.
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MORALITY ONLY EXISTS IN A CONTEXT, read the blackboard.
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orbit!  Make your own clothes!  Mine the asteroid belt for the
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"Can it really make a difference?  Can it really change?"@


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@d30 1
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1. it must be rabidly anti-democracy
d32 1
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2. it must be unalterably opposed to capitalism
d34 1
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3. it must feature a long-haired fanatic
d36 1
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4. it must reek like an ivy tower
d38 1
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5. it must have long political rants interspersed throughout the text
d40 1
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6. drugs must be involved
d48 1
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10. "freedom" must win in the end
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"Fuck it," he said aloud as the car reached the paved road and he hit the
gas.  If Victor Antonov didn't want in, he'd find another doctor...
and another horticulturalist.
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_Gaussian_, _Windows_, _Mathematica_, the web - fifty years on,
people will look back on it like we look at the Collesium today -
how the hell is it still standing?  How did they build it with just
ropes and levers?  How did they do quantum mechanics with floating
point numbers that don't even form a mathematical group under
addition?"
d822 1
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"Hello, Burns!" Vic greeted his old college roommate with
d825 2
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"This is it!", Burns exclaimed, waving his hand all around him.  "The
'Crap Shoot', that's what I call it!"
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His wave encompassed a late-twentieth-century physics gamble for a
d842 1
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They were looking for a new type of liquid rocket fuel.  Many liquid
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throttled back or turned off like liquid fuel propellants.  Burns
needed a fuel that would remain liquid at room temperature and have
specific impulse and volume rivaling the best solid propellants.
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as well be space shuttles.  Our problems are here on Earth."
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"I love you too, girl," he replied quietly, and then "Call me when you
get home!" as he drove away.
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for lunch.  Hanging against the far wall was a large icon cross,
painted in Byzantine style, with a red background behind the figure of
the crucified Messiah - the San Damiano Cross.  Andrea recognized it
immediately.  Universal symbol of the Franciscan Order, it was a
replica of the cross which, eight hundred years earlier, had spoken in
a vision to the young man in his mid-twenties who knelt before it in
prayer.
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for lunch that it's really helped the church, you know, their social
life, and I get regular donations now from the congregation, and well,
I just don't know what I would have done without it!"
@


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live immediately after achieving orbit, but you disrupted my timing.
Now I have to have to revise it."
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"Why do have to revise it?"
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"So I don't sound like an idiot dropping had for have!  It has to be
revised!" he cried.
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She sighed deeply.  "You know, there's really a lot of work to be done
with the cargo modules..."
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"Dr. Yeats, my speeches are the most important cargo this vesile caries."


Among the many high-ticket items that the _Mars_Explorer_ crew had
purchased with their stolen millions was a set of satellite
telephones.  These were similar to ordinary cellular telephones, but
were designed to operate in remote regions of the Earth lacking cell
phone coverage.  Thus, instead of using cells ten miles wide and
switching the phone calls from one cell to another as the mobile user
moved between them, the satellite system used cells two hundred miles
high and switched calls from one satellite to another as they moved
through their orbits in a carefully choreographed pattern.  Burns had
studied the system closely to make sure it would work from a
spaceship.

Though the crew was quite busy collecting the cargo modules together
and assembling them into a single interlinked chain, Mercuriou made
time for a phone call.  It was to the news bureau of a major
television network.  The captain finally convinced the skeptical
editors that he really was in space by agreeing to a television
interview, then handing the telephone to Burns, who then spent another
hour discussing with the network's technicians how to relay the video
signal while Andrea took her first turn at piloting _Mars_Explorer_
through its cargo-related OMS maneuvers.  As soon as the network
received the first images of men floating in zero-gee, they knew they
had their scoop, and carried the interview live, conducted by the
anchor of their nightly national news program.  Thus, the world got
it's first dose of Captain Marcelius Mercuriou.

"Captain, I just don't understand," the news anchor was asking.  "Your
company has developed a major new rocket fuel; you _did_ legitimately
develop N-1033, didn't you?"

"Sure we did.  But where do you think we got the money to develop it?
You think they just give computational chemistry software away for
free?  You think you get laboratory equipment handed to you just
because you want to play around with some crazy idea that might
somehow make the world a better place?  People just put food in front
of your chemists because they get up and go to work in the morning?
Hell, no, you need money for all of it!  It cost us over ten million
dollars just to _develop_ N-1033; that was before you ever heard of
us!"
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"So where did you get the money from?"
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"I told you, we stole it!"
d2597 14
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"But couldn't you have gotten venture capital funding?"
d2626 1
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"And what was that?  Did you rob a bank?"
d2628 1
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Mercuriou starting laughing.
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"Captain, some people lost their life savings when Keystone collapsed;
what do you have to say to all those people, I'm sure many of them are
listening to this program."

"Trust me, we didn't steal from Mother Teresa.  I've got copies
of Keystone's books, I mean their _real_ books, not the ones
they showed the regulators."


T + 3 days

_Mars_Explorer_ began her third full day in orbit amid a jumble of
cargo modules.  Each was a solid steel cylinder 50 feet long and 10
feet in diameter, equipped with female mating connectors on both ends.
These were interconnected using circular nodes equipped with six male
mating connectors and about as much interior space as an automobile.
The 767 was docked directly to one end of the ship's bridge cylinder,
which contained mostly with computer equipment, including several
large flat-panel LCD screens along its walls, showing the ship's
position in its orbit, its ground track, and a radar composite
extending two hundred kilometers around the ship.

The other end of the bridge connected to 'A' node, from which modules
A-1 through A-4 fanned out to its sides.  These were the main crew
quarters; each of the four original astronauts had been assigned one.
Continuing along the main axis was 'AB' core, intended to serve as a
crew lounge.  Its far end was docked to 'B' node, from which the
ship's sickbay, in modules B-1, B-2, B-3, and B-4 fanned out.  The
crew's working modules continued in this manner from A to F.  A
hydroponic garden was planned started at node G and continue through
to node R.  The dozen modules around S, T, and U were purely for
storage.  After U, the remaining cargo modules were unpressurized;
they stored fuel and water.  Burns also planned to put some of the
spent fuel modules from the launch on the far end of the chain to help
protect again meteor strikes.

About two dozen of the modules had now been assembled, more were stacked
up in a parking orbit 50 to 200 kilometers behind the craft, and the
rest still sat down in low Earth orbit, their computers awaiting radio
instructions to boost them into higher orbits.  The docking procedures
were going slowly, though this wasn't entirely unexpected.

Alone among the crew, Andrea didn't have any assigned duties, and
today had squirreled herself away into the ship's electronics lab, a
cargo module filled with boxed equipment that had been docked the day
before at C-3.  The boxes she left untouched; her interest lay in a
tablet computer connected to the ship's wireless network.  After
skimming through the hundreds of documents related to the ship's
design, all the result of Burns' prodigious mind, she found her way
into the ship's library.

It was extensive, numbering well over ten thousand books, completely
electronic, and completely illegal.  Every major publisher of
technical books in the English language had been targeted by Burns'
super-hack, and the few books they wanted which Alister couldn't
spirit off electronic copies from the publishers' computers had been
purchased and scanned in by the Mexicans.  Without lauching more than
a few pounds of books, most of these for nostalgic value, the
_Mars_Explorer_ crew enjoyed easy access to major reference works on
every aspect of technology.  There was an entire book, for example,
simply titled _Uranium_, that described almost everything known about
the chemistry of that important element - it's dozens of compounds,
their properties, the reactions used to convert between them, and of
course its nuclear properties, despite the fact that _Mars_Explorer_ carried
only a small sample of uranium in its chemistry lab and Burns had no
intention of using a nuclear fuel source.  In fact, all the major
chemical elements were well represented, with entire books on silicon,
iron, and dozens on carbon and its various compounds.  The ship's
custom navigation software was littered with references that
hyperlinked directly into a book called _Celestrial_Mechanics._ There
were dictionaries, encyclopedias, entire scientific journals.  There
were books on antenna theory, orbital mechanics, geology, hydroponics,
plant pathology, and Mercuriou's hand-picked collection of literature,
both in translation and in the original tongues.

Almost as impressive was the software collection.  Every major
technical product was present, many including all their source code,
stolen from the manufacturer's computers by Burns and Alister.  The
scientific software was second to none.  In addition to _Gaussian_ and
programs like it, there were sophisticated packages to model and
simulate high-frequency microwave circuitry, the most advanced robotic
control software from Japan, including the factory blueprints and
source code to a complete automobile assembly plant, and the most
sophisticated mathematics systems, which turned the complex algebraic
and trigonometric manipulations of orbital mechanics into typing
practice.  Andrea was impressed.  The three-pound computer tablet in
her hand offered the same information that would fill an elite
university library, and the same software packages available at the
most prestigious research centers.  The legal penalties for acquiring
and possessing all of it added up to more than a hundred and eighty
years of prison time.

"We've got a pressure drop," Alister announced on the bridge, as an
amber alert window popped up on the LCD screen to his right.  Burns
was there, sporting a brand new T-shirt that he had custom printed
months before, but had only unpacked once they were in orbit.  "Why
drink and drive," it asked, "when you can bake and fly?"  Mercuriou
floated into from his quarters in A-1.

"We're down to 97.4," Alister informed them, reading off the
atmospheric pressure in kilopascals.

"That's not down much," Mercuriou observed.

"Yeah, but it should be a closed system," Burns answered.

"97.0," Alister stated.

"Let's go to Condition Zed," Burns suggested, using the traditional
nautical term for closing watertight doors, and Mercuriou nodded.

"Captain to crew, set Condition Zed," Mercuriou announced into the
microphone clipped to his shirt, while Alister keyed a command
sequence on his computer.  A audible C-chime sounded throughout the
ship, and the hydraulic doors separating the different modules hissed
shut.

"What's happening?" Dr. Yeats asked as she watched the door hizz shut
on the C-3.  She was at the far end of the module, full of lab
equipment, and didn't have time to reach the door before it shut.

"We're closing the airtight doors, Dr. Yeats, we seem to have a
pressure leak" Mercuriou answered through the com system.  "Vic, where
are you?"

"I'm in sickbay, of course," the doctor answered, stopping his
inventory of the drug supply.

"He's got a spacesuit in there if he needs it," the captain noted.
"What about Dr. Yeats?", he wondered aloud.  Burns was shaking
his head, no.

"I don't think there's a spacesuit in here," she answered.  "Nothing
but oscilloscopes and silicon wafers."

"We're down to 90 in C-4," Alister declared from his computer
terminal.  "Looks like the rest are holding."

"That's right next to where Yeats is," Mercuriou noted.

Burns nodded in agreement. "It's probably a micro meteor strike.
We're not fully assembled yet, so C-4 is in front.  But if we lose 'C'
node, she'll be cut off, so we probably want to get her out of there."

"OK," the captain concurred, keying his microphone, "Dr. Yeats, why
don't you exit the module you're in and come back here to where we've
at least got a spacesuit for you, then we'll check on the problem, it
looks like it's in C-4."

"I can open the pressure door from here," Burns added, "or you can
use the control panel in the node to do it."

The NASA engineer drifted to the pressure door and examined its
touchscreen controls.  Sure enough, there was a menu option for the
door.  Although she had seen it before, she had never had reason to
use it.  Meanwhile, Burns selected a control sequence in the bridge
and the door opened automatically.  Andrea pulled herself through it
and into 'C' node. Burns opened the door to 'BC' core, which lead back
towards the bridge.

But Andrea didn't go there.  Instead, she went to the door leading
into C-4, and was about to ask what it's pressure was, when she saw it
displayed on the LCD panel by the door.  87 kilopascals.  She knew as a
rough rule of thumb that supplemental oxygen wasn't needed until the
pressure dropped to 70 kilopascals.  She keyed the sequence on the
panel that opened the door.  Designed to seal its pressurized contents
against an exterior vacuum, it popped open under the force of the
higher pressure outside, accompanied by a whoosh of air flowing into
the damaged node.  Andrea's sinuses popped under the pressure change.

"I'm going to take a look at the problem in here," Andrea informed
the others as she pushed herself into the node.

On the bridge, the door changed colors on the computer animation of
the ship's layout.

"She just opened the door to C-4!" Alister declared in surprise.

"That node appears to be damaged, it's loosing pressure, Doctor!"
Burns told the NASA engineer through the intercom.

In C-4, Andrea could hear a quiet whoshing of air.  The node was
definately loosing pressure, but not very fast.

"First of all," she told Burns as she passed into the center of the
node, "no matter how much reserve oxygen you've got now, this is the
beginning of the mission, so trust me, it's not enough.  And second,"
she continued, removing her water bottle from her belt, "it's a lot
easier to find the problem with air in here then with a vacuum."
Carefully, she squeezed the water bottle and released a stream of
liquid aimed straight down the center of the module, then watched to
see where it went.

"She's got some good points, there," Burns mussed aloud on the bridge,
"but I don't like the fact that she doesn't have a spacesuit."  Behind
him, Mercuriou dove to the rear of the 767 and grabbed a spacesuit.

"What's going on?" Vic asked over the radio.

Mercuriou flushed red, clenched his teeth, and smacked his fist into
his palm.

"We've got a pressure leak, Vic, and Dr. Yeats, _as_usual_, is
_EXACTLY_ where we don't want her to be!"

"Aren't you going to prep?" Alister asked.

"I don't have time!" he exclaimed, exasperated.  "What if she gets
stuck in there?  Open the door."

"Opening bridge airlock," Burns stated in a resigned tone of voice as
he keyed the computer panel to his left and Mercuriou dove into A core
with the packaged spacesuit under his arm.

Andrea released the harnesses on several large packing crates and
moved them aside to follow the trail of the water droplets.  A wave of
fear swept over her.  _You_have_no_spacesuit._ Calming herself, she
said a silent prayer, _Father,_watch_out_for_me_in_here._

"Alister, keep reading the pressure off to me," she told the assistant
engineer.

"It's at 82 now," he answered from the bridge.  "It came back up for a
second when you opened the door, but now it's dropping again."

"Opening 'B' node," Burns dryly noted as he continued to open pressure
doors in front of the captain, now moving down the central chain of
cargo modules.  Mercuriou bumped against several walls as he went, and
pushed off roughly from them, partly because he hadn't fully learned
how to maneuver in zero-gee, but more because his mood grew ever more
irate the further he went.

Meanwhile, Andrea had found the pinhole leak at the root of the
problem.  Unlike the space shuttle, designed for manned spaceflight
operations from the beginning, the cargo modules were just large
pressure tanks with cargo containers secured to their side.  At times
this meant an inconvenient jumble of conduit that could have been
better designed, but in this case it meant easy access to the
punctured wall of the module.  She began looking around for
something to plug the hole with.

Just then, Merceriou opened the door and propelled into the module.

"Doctor Yeats, we've got to get a few things clear right now,"
he began.

"Excuse me... sir," she interrupted as she reached for the spacesuit
and pulled out one of its gloves.  Turning back to the puncture, she
slapped the glove against it.

"That'll hold until we can patch it permanently," she announced, then
put her left hand on her hip while still holding a cargo strip with
her right.

"Now you wanted to get some things clear?" she asked.

Red-faced, Merceriou stared at her for several seconds, then left the
cargo module without saying another word.


T + 4 days

Despite the work going on in orbit, Mercurio always found time for the
"ground sqwalk", as he called the Earth-based media pundits,
and at that moment the stunning private space launch was all
the rage.  As soon as Burns had established a network connection from
the ship to the global Internet and announced a network address to the
public, Mercuriou was deluged with email requests for interviews,
product endorcements, technical specifications, and a growing quantity
of both fan mail and hate mail.  Most of it he ignored; he certainly
didn't have the time to read it all.  His next major appearance was on
a prime-time national news program.

"Captain, by all accounts you have stolen hundreds of millions of
dollars, and many people think you could have gotten away with at
least another hundred million undetected.  Why not just take the money
and retire on a beach in Aruba?  Why fly into space?"
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"Couldn't you have raised money for your flight just by being honest
with people about what you were attempting, have say, hey, we're
flying to space, finance us?"

"No, I don't think so.  Look at the X Prize.  They're trying to raise
ten million dollars to reward a private manned spaceflight and have
struggled every step of the way.  Ten million is nothing; you'd be
lucky to get one man into orbit for ten million, heck, you'd be lucky
to put an unmanned satellite into orbit for ten million.  The only
manned space programs are funded by national governments with huge
bankrolls.  Other than that, you've got these commercial satellite
launches backed by large corporations with some kind of scheme to make
the money back, and plenty of those schemes fail."

"Let's face it - 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', they call it, and we've got no business plan of any
kind for how you can recoup a billion dollars from this flight or any
other.  So the only way to do it was to either wait for the
government, or be independantly wealthy, or steal it.  I want nothing
to do with the government, we're not independantly wealthy, so we
stole it."

"Well, it's interesting that you mention the government space
programs, because I think there was a general belief that you needed a
big government program to accomplish manned spaceflight.  What are
your thoughts on that?"

"Well, if some big government agency had built the first airplane,
everyone would be walking around laughing at the notion that two men
in a bicycle shop could do it.  Building a spacecraft _is_ harder than
building an airplane, but it can be done, and it doesn't require a
couple thousand people to pull it off.  It should be more of a
surprise, at least it is to me, with all the popular culture
surrounding spaceflight, it hasn't been done until now.  Really, it
shows that despite all the hype about freedom, how little opportunity
we really have to pursue our dreams.  It _can_ be done, but we
live in a society hell-bent on forcing people to work, and
telling them constantly that they have freedom."
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"So you don't think there is freedom in this society?"
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spacecraft by the thousands if they so desired."
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"What do you have to say to the investors in Keystone Securities?
I'm sure many of them are listening."
d2678 2
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"Well, we didn't steal from Mother Teresa.  These 'investors' were
people with money to burn, dumping cash into a high-risk mutual fund,
and I'll bet they won't lift a finger for anybody unless they're
getting something out of it for themselves."
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"So you don't have a problem stealing from capitalists?"
d2683 1
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"Why should I?  They're some of the most selfish people in the world,
hell, their whole philosophy is based on greed.  I mean, let's just
apply their own rational.  I'm 'helping them compete'."  Mercuriou's
voice now took on a strong tinge of sarcasm.
d2685 1
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"If some of them go out of business, so what?  Businesses fail every
day.  I'm developing technology to fly to Mars, so the whole society
benefits.  We rip and claw at each other throats, and that drives
civilization forward.  This is the capitalist philosophy, isn't it?"
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"Well, just to play the devil's advocate, I think a lot of people would
say that we play according to rules, and that you've broken those
rules."
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"Yeah, and who makes the rules?"
d2691 4
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"Well, the rules are made collectively, through a democratic process."
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The captain paused a moment before answering.
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"You make it sound like everyone agrees on these rules.  If that's the
case, then why do people blow up federal buildings, why do people bomb
our embassies, who do people burn this country's flag?  Obviously,
there's a lot of people who don't agree with these rules, and frankly,
I'm one of them.  The majority makes up all these rules, and then
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a democractic process'."

"I think many people would say that even if we don't necessarily agree
with all the rules, we obey them and work to change them
democratically."

Mercuriou chuckled.

"Sure, that's why everyone drives the speed limit, because they're so
committed to obeying the rules.  Look, I don't buy any of that.
People obey the rules because they're afraid of what will happen to
them if don't."
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a2714 19
"Well, that might be true in a dictatorship, but in a democracy?"

"How's it different?  It's just that the majority makes up the rules
and forces the minorities to obey instead of the other way around.
They 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 millions and millions of
people that think that because they're more advanced, or because
they've been oppressed, or because there's more of them than anybody
else, that they have the right to rule everybody else's lives."

"So do you see America as similar to the Soviet Union?"

"Very much so.  It's the same kind of trash that runs it."

"Meaning... the capitalists?"

"Sure.  The communist philosophy was based on brutal, cut-throat class
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cut-throat individual competition.  It's basically the same thing,
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men with some nightmare system based on the viscious traits of mankind
to be jammed down everyone's throats."
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With the exception of Burns, who had his head buried in front of a
computer screen, the rest of the crew watched the interview from
behind the TV camera.  After it was concluded, Mercuriou asked them to
wait a moment while he stowed the camera away.
a2734 2
"You know, I've been thinking about what happened yesterday, and the
truth is I was way out of line.  Dr. Yeats has more experience up here
d2790 4
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leisure time and disposible income.  Yet socialists insist on slamming
capitalism at every turn because they can't stand the idea of people
working hard and getting rewarded for that hard work.  And now this
man comes along, this criminal, who has taken advantage of our
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Ecks: Well, I guess we don't have too much freedom for people who
don't want to work...
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blood that they have to give everything away for free?!  You're like a
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your own pet project!  You needed money - that's why most people go to
work in the morning!  That's why all these evil capitalists don't just
publish all their books on the Internet - because the authors need
money to write them, money to print them, money to put food on the
table in front of their children!
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		REQUIREMENTS FOR THE GREAT ANTI-AMERICAN NOVEL
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10. freedom must win in the end
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1. it must be rabidly against democracy
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10. everyone must die
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3. it must have a long-haired religious fanatic
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3. it must feature prominently a religious fanatic
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9. the military must look like fools
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On the one hand, an afternoon of sailing on Red's thirty-six-foot Catalan
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On the other hand were the weeks
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attire of Burns' roommate.  What differentiated him more were the
subtleties - a 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.  Like his
paternal ancestors, who had decended from the Scythian plains to
ravage the heart of the Roman Empire, he was fiercely loyal to his
friends, determined to conquer the unconquerable, undetered by any
setbacks in his plans, and absolutely convinced that he would
ultimately win.
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"Oh, man, not Mars," Antonov exclaimed almost involuntarily as he
rolled his eyes, sighed deeply, then slowly poured the water into a
pair of ceramic mugs.  _Not_Mars, he thought, _not_again_...
Walking into the living room, he had to return to the kitchen for
teabags, as the mugs contained nothing but hot water.  Meanwhile,
Mercuriou launched into a prepared explaination.
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He paused, the explanation degenerating into a familiar tirade.
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"Well, now we've got money," he concluded cynically, produced a wad
of fifty-dollar bills and fanned them on the table like a deck of
poker cards, then picked up a "U.S. Grant" and examined it with the air of a
conosuer sniffing a fine wine.  Vic stood in the doorway to the kitchen, staring directly
at him, the tea forgotton.  Mercuriou leaned back on the couch and
returned the gaze.
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Vic looked straight into his eyes.  He had changed, as all men do as
they age into their thirties.  Yet now he switched his tone of voice
to that of a teenager stammering to explain a 2 A.M. party to his
parents.
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"Why are you doing this, Marc?  Is it about Mars... really?"
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waiting for hundred dollar lunches.  Programmers
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10. everybody must die
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		REQUIREMENTS FOR THE GREAT ANTI-AMERICAN NOVEL

it has to have a rabid anti-capitalist

it has to have a rabid anti-democrat

preferably a religious fanatic, too

it has to reek like an ivy tower

it has to have long political rants interspersed throughout the text

drugs have to be involved

some anti-government plot must be hatched

communism must be given a favorable treatment

the military must look like fools

everybody has to die at the end
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 We bid fairwell to thee
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 Watched, challenged, and proded, the Diety / Godhead Three."
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"It's been a week now since we have lost our friends," Mercuriou
stated.  Everyone else was silent.
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"We have no graves to dig, we have no bodies to bury.
 We have our memories, and we have their dreams.
 We have hope; we have loss.
 We have the past, and we have the future."
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It became that the captain was extemporizing, trying to find a way
to finish.  Andrea finished for him.

"We have the hope of seeing them again."
 
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laws to protect the environment, and to provide a minimal social
safety net, and ensure a level playing field, so that good corporate
citizens are not victimized by abusers.
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Wye: We have some serious problems with deficit spending, we
definitely need a bipartisan commitment to fiscal responsibility, but
we are also not willing to get rid of these programs because that
would cut off the truly needy.
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minimal social support system.

Mercuriou: Why do you need to do all that with the government?  What
you lose sight of is that the government is an instrument of
_coercion_, so essentially you're saying that we need a coercive
society to acheive those goals.  Why is that?
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We have certain social goals that we achieve through government
funding and regulation.
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Wye: Because we do need the government, just like we need business and
charity.  The government has a role to play.
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Mercuriou: So any worthwhile project gets funded through tax dollars?
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convince the government to cut you in on the tax dollar handouts.  You
like to talk about heath care reform.  Well, here's my program for
health care reform.  You go to the doctor of your choice, he provides
the care that you need, and if you can't pay for it, he says "don't
worry about it."
a3536 7
Mercuriou: We need to get rid of the capitalists!  If there wasn't all
of this pressure to 'compete', then maybe the people who actually know
what they're doing - the chemists, the architects, the engineers -
would build clean, safe technology.  We wouldn't need food stamps
because restaurants and supermarkets would be able to feed the hungry
without being put out of business if they won't turn away the poor.

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Wye: Well, those government programs have a lot to do with making our
society great.  We allow free enterprise, we allow competition, we
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environment, a safe food supply, a minimal social support system.
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charity.  The government has a role to play
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Wye: Well, there are some software development efforts funded through
government taxes.  You could certainly have sought an NSF grant
to pursue your development efforts.
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convince the government to cut you in on the tax dollar handouts.


Mercuriou: That's not my point.  I'm pointing out that your "solution"
to the problems of capitalism is state-sponsored funding.



Mercuriou: You like to talk about heath care reform.  Well, here's my
program for health care reform.  You go to the doctor of your choice,
he provides the care that you need, and if you can't pay for it, he
says "don't worry about it."
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before it closed again as he headed down the hall.
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"Well, Doctor, you can go now," Mercurio announced as he walked.
"Sorry for your detention, but it was necessary at the time."
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laws to protect the environment, and to ensure a level playing field,
so that good corporate citizens are not victimized by abusers.
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Wye: I think those regulations have done a pretty good job!  Our
pollution problems haven't gone away, but we're a lot better off than
we'd be without a Clean Air Act, or a Clear Water Act!  We have food
stamps because we're not willing to let people starve!  We have social
security and Medicare because we're not willing to put the elderly out
on the streets!
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the police slamming people to the ground and dragging them off in
handcuffs!  That's your 'freedom'!
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Mercuriou: The majority care about three things: getting rich, getting
tough, and getting laid.

a8822 11
"The majority don't want good leaders," the astronaut repeated,
floating weightless on the screens of 10 million people watching the
live program.  "They want garbage leaders.  They want the most selfish
bastards you'd ever want to meet, with this nightmare capitalist
system based on the most vicious traits of mankind to be jammed down
everyone's throats.  And this time, nobody can say it isn't really a
democracy, that one man took over the government, that the dissidents
were 'disappeared', that we don't have freedom of speech or freedom of
the press.  Nobody can claim that this isn't really what the majority
of people want."

a8825 14
"Yes, and that's really the problem - populist government - this
stupid idea that you can put the masses of people in charge of
society.  It was talked about by philophers in the eigthteenth
century, brought to power in Europe and the Americas by a string of
revolutions in the nineteenth, and brought to fuition in the twentieth
century.  What it produced was fascism, communism, and capitalism -
three of the most depraved societies that have every been seen on the
face of this planet.  Fascism, based on brutal, viscious, racial
competition; communism, based on brutal, viscious, class competition;
and capitalism, based on brutal, viscious individual competition.
Now, tell me, what do all of these things have in common... other than
the fact that millions upon millions upon millions of people went
chasing off after every one of them?"

a8827 28
"You want to understand communism, read the last page of the Communist
Manifesto, where Marx and Engles talk about letting the world tremble
in fear of a communist revolution.  _That_'s communism - stick AK-47s
in the hands of the peasants and let the world tremble in fear!
That's what _millions_ of people wanted - expropriate the expropriators
and let everyone tremble in fear!"

"And communism was one of the biggest populist movements of the
twentieth century!  Practically every country in existance had some
kind of communist insurgancy!  They took over half this planet!
Millions upon millions of people _believed_ in communism!  To claim
that the communists were some tiny bunch of dictators flies in the
face of history!  Take Vietnam - why were all those 15-year-olds
hauling AK-47s around the Mekong Delta if the communists were just
some tiny cliche holed up in the Kremlin?!  Take China - Mao Tse Sung,
the Long March, the defeat of Chang Kai Chech, heck, look at Russia
itself!  Then how did they win their Civil War in Russia?  The Whites
had all the old czarist military officers, they had foreign aid from
the United States and Great Britian, the Reds were isolated and on
their own, yet still they managed to win that war!  How did they did
that if nobody supported them?  If communism wasn't populist, then why
did forty percent of the Russian electorate vote for Zyuganov in 1996?
Forty percent!  And this is part of an ongoing trend that has seen the
Communist Party consistently drawing a third of the vote in Russia
elections!  Now what possible explanation is there for this except
that millions upon millions of Russians _to_this_day_ support
communism?!"

a8829 64
"The problem with communism wasn't their economic system, it wasn't
the structure of their elections, it wasn't their lack of
constituional guarentees.  The problem with communism was that their
leaders were a bunch of trash with some nightmare system to be jammed
down everyone's throats, and _millions_of_people_supported_them_!
They were a lot like the people who run democracy today!"

"The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe.  Walk into
one of these stores anywhere in the Western world without a credit
card or a twenty dollar bill in hand.  Ask for a plate of food.  See
what you walk out with.  The fact is that the majority of people are
crude, selfish, and violent.  That's why communism came to power in
these backwards countries - if the people have nothing, tell them to
expropriate the exproriators at gunpoint - it sounds great!  Now in
the more developed nations, the majority have a lot more material
possessions, expropriating the expropriators doesn't sound nearly as
good, better to just build some brutal society where those who have
can keep it and don't lift a finger for anyone else.  The bottom line
is that the majority of people are selfish - both capitalism and
communism play to that, just on different sides of the coin."

"It was the same thing with fascism, after the Germans basically
elected the Nazis in 1932, with a plurality of over thirteen million
votes!  They got enough votes to make Hermann Goering president of the
Reischtag, enough votes to defeat Von Papen's government on a vote of
no-confidence, enough votes to create a situtation where Adolf Hitler
was basically the only viable choice for German chancellor.  Generally
speaking, that means they won the election!  You hear these apologists
for democracy try to blame Hindenburg for what happened, try to say
the German industrialists pushed him to appoint Hitler, or that his
son was whispering in his ear, what about the thirteen and a half
million people who voted Nazi in '32?!  Did they have anything to do
with Hinderburg's decision?  Thirteen and a half million!  There isn't
a city on this planet with thirteen and a half million people in it!
And this in a nation of only about eighty million total!  Yes, Hitler
proceeded to build a dictatorship, but a dictatorship with the support
of millions upon millions of people!  And don't try to say that the
Germans didn't knew what they were getting.  Read the first chapter,
the first page, of _Mein_Kampf_!  The part where Hitler talks about
'the moral right of armed conquest'!  That book was a best-seller in
Germany!  That's what those people voted for - 'the moral right of
armed conquest'!  People supported the Nazis for basically the same
reason people supported the communists and the same reason people
today support the capitalists - because they were brutal as hell, and
that's what works in the 'real world' and that's all these millions
and millions of people 'know'!  That's populist government!  That's
democracy!"

"It's another communism.  Another big pile of books and theories that
sound real good on paper, and in practice has produced some of the
most depraved societies that's every been seen on the face of this
planet.  Everybody runs around yelling about how 'the people' support
it!  Of course they support it - they're the majority!  Democracy
isn't about putting 'the people' in control, it's about putting
one group of people in control - the majority!  Now, why should
one group of people rule everyone else's lives just because there's
more of them than anybody else?  Why shouldn't the factory workers
run society - they're the ones who have to break their backs for
industrialization, right?  Why shouldn't we generically engineer
some 'super race' of men, and put them in control, huh?  I mean,
they'd be stronger, smarter, healthier, superior to us in every
way, so shouldn't they be the ones to rule?  Let's face it - communism
and fascism make at least as much sense as democracy does, which
is to say that they're all equally absurd!"
a8937 39
-----


"Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it has happened.  It's
called democracy.  Maybe you've been living in the woods too long to
have noticed that the entire operation of our government is based on
persuasion.  That's why every four years men contest to become
president, and the way they do that is through giving speechs, running
advertisements, talking to voters, and the whole point is to persuade,
Doctor, persuade, not force, people to vote for them."

Mercuriou could take no more.  He propelled himself into the camera's
field of view, bumping into Vic and sending him clutching for a
strap to neutralize his momentum.

"You sound like a fucking communist!" he snarled at the camera, while
in Washington the moderator winced as the broadcast profanity.

"Humanity_has_abandoned_greed_and_force_and_this_great_event_goes_by
the_name_of_democracy!" he continued in a sarcastic drawl.  "Well, if
your government is so based on persuation, then why do you have the
second highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet?  Only the
great _people's_government_ in Russia imprisons a larger percentage of
its citizens than the great _people's_government_ of America, and I'm
sure the _people's_government_ of China isn't far behind.  Why, every
time you turn on C.O.P.S, do you see the police chasing after
'criminals', half of whom have done nothing more than fire up a joint,
gang-tackling them, and dragging them off to jail?  Why are you
screaming for war on your own people and 'zero tolerance' for your own
children?  The only people that the democrats persuade are the
majority.  Everyone else is ruled through threat and fear.  The
majority act real nice and polite to each other, then as soon they
find out that you're a druggie, or a copyright violator, or just don't
want to work for their bastard leaders, they scream for blood and
elect all these men who talk about cracking down and getting tough,
and how wonderful a world it is where anybody can start a business and
ruthlessly try to compete in this brutual capitalist system.  The
majority are perfectly willing to resort to force; they do it
_every_single_day_."
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"OK.  I accept."
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Ecks: The fact is that capitalism has produced a society with the
highest standard of living that has ever been seen on this planet.
People are well-fed, well-housed, generally content with their jobs,
with a surplus of leisure time and disposible income.  And yet these
psuedo-socialists insist on slamming capitalism at every turn because
they can't stand the idea of people working hard and getting rewarded
for that hard work.  And now this man comes along, this criminal, who
has taken advantage of our society, stolen from our businesses and our
government, lied, cheated; he comes on this program with the nerve to
blame capitalism for what?  For letting him take advantage of it?  For
giving him the opportunity to pull of one of the greatest con jobs in
history?
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capitalist, or to work for the capitalists, or to be homeless on the
streets!
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capitalists do not solicit donations, sir.
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government; it's your choice!  And what most people want, Captain, is
to _make_money_!  Most people want the opportunity to better
themselves through hard work, not charity handouts!
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Greek literature; I majored in classical languages.  You could load
any Greek text into the program, and it would display it on the
screen.  If you came across a word you didn't understand, you could
click on it with the mouse, the program would look it up in a
Greek-English dictionary and display the entry at the bottom of the
screen.  It was a lot faster than flipping pages in a dictionary,
trust me, and a great learning tool.  I finished the last half of the
_Iliad_ using it, and it was like night and day compared to old way of
stopping at every other word and looking it up in a different book.
We put a copy up on the Internet.  We started telling a lot of people
in the classics community about it and started getting some really
good feedback.  We had plans to develop a Latin version, too.  Then
came along the publishers of the dictionary - the capitalists.
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Mercuriou: Now the funny thing was, they were willing to cut a deal,
of course.  If we took the program down off the network, changed it
into a for-profit product and paid them a royalty on every copy we
sold, we could use their dictionary!  But we couldn't use it just to
let people download the program for free.  I decided to fight.  I
still believed in the great U. S. of A. back them.  I was naive enough
to think that without the money for a lawyer, I could represent myself
in court.  After a year-long legal battle that I lost, I ended up with
a court judgement against me for four hundred thousand dollars in
damages, and for what?  Because I worked hard, developed a useful
product, and wanted available to everyone who wanted a copy.

Ecks: Well, Captain, it sounds to me like you were guilty!  That
sounds like a real noble cause, but the bottom line is that you stole
someone else's intellectual property and published it without their
permission.  You seem to have a problem with authority.
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sure they put as much work into as you did into your program, maybe
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Ecks: Well, that sounds very noble, Captain, but in the real world, if
you just give everything away, you'll be out of business.
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Mercuriou: That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of capitalism right
there - you be a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And
then if you won't work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and
starving on the street and all these great, decent people will spit on
you as they walk past and call you a bum who doesn't want to work!
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_are_ trash, sir, they are!  This society isn't going to be remembered
for all this so-called freedom, let me assure you.  It's going to
remembered for its secrecy.  All the design information for the
computers, all the source code, all the circuit diagrams, all the
manufacturing processes!  It's all kept secret by these capitalists
determined to keep the whole world dependent on them and their
nightmare system, and then they tell the rest of the world to
'compete'!  They talk about 'freedom', 'freedom'; the only freedom
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Mercuriou: You no good bastard, you sit there with your jacket and tie
on and try to defend a bunch of bums that won't lift a finger for
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can't do with their property?!?!  How dare you, how dare you, you
socialist crook, you shameless thief, how dare you tell someone who's
sweated tears and blood that they have to give everything away for
free?!  How dare you?!!?
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jam somebody else's face in the mud.  Your bum leaders want to build
this 'information economy', where knowledge is just one more commodity
to bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
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Moderator: Gentlemen, I'm afraid we're almost out of time.
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basis of capitalism.  Captain Mercuriou's ideas sound very noble and
d3413 2
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up on the national credit card!
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society to acheive those goals. Why not just put good leaders in
positions of authority to begin with?  You like to talk about heath
care reform.  Well, here's my program for health care reform.  You go
to the doctor of your choice, he provides the care that you need, and
if you can't pay for it, he says "don't worry about it."
d3467 20
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Mercuriou: So you concede that we can't fund our government like a
magician pulling a kerchief out of his fist?

a3648 61



Zee: Captain, you are a liar and a thief!  You're like a blind man
screaming 'You blinked!' How are you so much better than all these
terrible capitalists you lambast?  You're the worst kind of capitalist
- you've stolen millions, billions of dollars to stroke your own pet
project!

Mercuriou: Look, I needed a lot of money to put this launch together...

Zee: That's right!  You needed money - that's why most people go to
work in the morning!  That's why all these evil capitalists don't just
publish all their books on the Internet - because the authors need
money to write them, money to print them, money to put food on the
table in front of their children!

Mercuriou: Because of capitalism!  Because of democracy!  Because the
entire society is based on forced labor!  You work or you starve!

Zee: Or steal a billion dollars and bankrupt a dozen companies along
the way, ehh?

Zee: Captain, capitalism and democracy may not be perfect, but if you
don't work, you will not starve, because just about every American
city has a soup kitchen or homeless shelter of one kind of another.
On the other hand, those who do work can expect to be paid for their
labor, and it is entirely up to them what they do with it.  The
abundance of charities in this country is an elegant testimony to the
generosity of the American people.

Mercuriou: Sounds great.  Sound like everywhere you go in the U.S, you
must see charity after charity after charity, and occasionally a
business.

Zee: There's nothing wrong with running a business, captain.  Where do
you think all that money comes from for those charities?

Mercuriou: OK, governor, well if those businesses are so generous, why
bother with the price tags?

Zee: Well, it comes down to a simple principle, captain - morality!
It would be immoral for the businessman to dictate to his stockholders
how they should spend their money.  Instead, the businessman collects
revenue from his customers, uses those revenues to pay the expenses of
the business, and then returns the surplus both to the employees in
the form of their paychecks and to the investors in the form of
dividends.  It is then up to the employees and investors how to spend
_their_money_.  If they wish to give to charities, they can do so.
Furthermore, the businessman has a moral responsibility to operate his
business responsibly, because it _isn't_his_money_.

Mercuriou: Isn't his money?!

Zee: That's right, captain.  It's the shareholder's money.  For the
businessman to simply give it away as you suggest would amount to
taxation without representation, or to put it more bluntly, theft.
Many capitalists are good, decent people who have founded charities,
started schools and universities, established endowment funds...


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"Burns, the minute, nay, the second those wheels touch the ground,
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T + 6 days

"Simply put, in this country we have freedom.  This country is run by
its people, through their elected representatives, and the capitalists
don't simply 'own' the government.  If we have capitalism, it's
because the people choose it."

Senator David Wye was Mercuriou's next opponent in the video Colosseum.
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"The people!" Mercuriou sneered.  "Which people, Senator, surely not
all the people!"
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Wye: Yes, _the_people_!
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Wye: We have a participatory democracy, Captain!  The people can
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Wye: Well, that would be a dictatorship, Captain.
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you talk about 'freedom'!  Senator, turn on the T.V!  Don't you see
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Wye: Criminals!  Yet even _they_ are entitled to freedom!  We provide
d3467 2
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drive to 'D' drive!  Because I don't concede to this God damned
democracy that it can control every aspect of my life, and all your
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you and only ten million of us?  I call it the Paradox of Freedom: how
do you give freedom to both the Nazis and the Jews?
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Wye: So now you're trying to compare us with fascists!
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Mercuriou: I'm pointing out that you can't give freedom to everyone,
because if you give freedom to the Nazis, they will murder the Jews!
The issue isn't how much freedom this 'majority' has got.  It's what
they've chosen to do with it!  They've chosen to build a society based
on some of the most vicious traits of mankind; they've chosen the most
selfish bastards as their leaders, build some nightmare society based
on greed, declare war against millions of their own people because
they won't just do what their told when the great free democracy barks
out its orders, and then jam it down their throats at gunpoint!
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Wye: We have laws!  What's the alternative?  To let every murderer and
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Wye: Somebody has to make the laws, captain, and we choose to let THE
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Wye: So you're against democracy!!
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Wye: Well I'm not surprised.  At least you don't seem as dangerous as
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Wye: Look, I've got a web update for you, captain.  The people of this
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Wye: Yes, the people of this planet!  You should speak to some of the
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Wye: I'm not worried about that comparison, captain, not in the least!
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Wye: Another slavery!  Look here, capitalism has its flaws, but it is
most certainly not another slavery!  We don't bind men in chains to
force them to work!

Mercuriou: It is another slavery, senator, because it's another one of
these depraved philosophies that has become entrenched in our society;
your majority today, just like the majority in the 1800s, can see
nothing wrong with it, and democracy, once again, appears completely
incapable of making the basic moral value judgements necessary to
govern a society!
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Wye: We did make those value judgements, captain!  Those who rejected
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Wye: The Civil War was a success, captain; sometimes you have to fight
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T + 7 days
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Perhaps because of his attitude, perhaps because of his altitude,
perhaps because of his impunity, completely beyond the reach of any
terrestrial authority, or perhaps simply because of what he said and
how he said it, Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of nearly every
American political leader, regardless of party affiliation or personal
background.  Tonight, he faced off against Jeffrey Zee, a state
governor widely expected to run for president in the upcoming national
election.
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"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.  That's why we use Gantt charts and Capability
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Mercuriou: Right!  So all the 'special interests' lobby to get for
this restriction or that exemption and you cook up some convoluted,
five hundred page law that gets another five hundred pages of
regulations tacked on by the bureaucrats - oh, it keeps the lawyers
busy!  The little guy [CA] is buried under paperwork, big business
[CA] figures how to make their millions, and people go around wringing
their hands that we've still got global warming, still can't swim in
our rivers, and your answer is what - pile on more regulations?
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we'd be without a Clean Air Act, or a Clear Water Act!

Mercuriou: We don't need a Clear Water Act - we need to get rid of the
capitalists!  If there wasn't all of this pressure to 'compete', then
maybe the people who actually know what they're doing - the chemists,
the architects, the engineers - would build clean, safe technology.

Wye: We tried that, and we've seen the results!  We're not willing to
take that risk, that's why we need government regulation!
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Mercuriou: Right!  So all the 'special interests' lobby to get this
restriction or that exemption and you cook up some convoluted, five
hundred page law that gets another five hundred pages of regulations
tacked on by the bureaucrats - oh, it keeps the lawyers busy!  The
little guy [CA] is buried under paperwork, big business [CA] figures
how to make their millions, and people go around wringing their hands
that we've still got global warming, still can't swim in our rivers,
and your answer is what - pile on more regulations?
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Mercuriou: Why don't we just get rid of the capitalists?  If there
wasn't all of this pressure to 'compete', then maybe the people who
actually know what they're doing - the chemists, the architects, the
engineers - would build clean, safe technology.
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background.

"Captain, you are a liar and a thief!"

Tonight, he faced off against Jeffrey Zee, a state governor widely
expected to run for president in the upcoming national election.

"That's not the issue..."
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"Let's make it the issue.  You're like a blind man screaming 'You
blinked!' How are you so much better than all these terrible
capitalists you lambast?  You're the worst kind of capitalist - you've
stolen millions, billions of dollars to stroke your own pet project!"
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"I can tell the difference between right and wrong..."
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"You can?!  OK, here's test question number one - is betraying the
trust of your colleagues to implant some computer virus in their
network right or wrong...?  No?  How about cheating a state lottery
system to the tune of a couple million dollars - right or wrong?"

"Look, I needed a lot of money to put this launch together..."

"That's right!  You needed money - that's why most people go to work
in the morning!  That's why all these evil capitalists don't just
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table in front of their children!"
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"Because of capitalism!  Because of democracy!  Because the entire
society is based on forced labor!  You work or you starve!"
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"Or steal a billion dollars and bankrupt a dozen companies along the
way, ehh?"
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Mercuriou stammered.  [ For the first time since launching himself
simultaneously into orbit and onto the front page of every news
magazine on the planet, he appeared flustered.  ] Zee kept going.

"Captain, capitalism and democracy may not be perfect, but if you
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generosity of the American people."
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"Sounds great.  Sound like everywhere you go in the U.S, you must see
charity after charity after charity, and occasionally a business."
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"There's nothing wrong with running a business, captain.  Where do you
think all that money comes from for those charities?"
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"OK, governor, well if those businesses are so generous, why bother
with the price tags?"
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"Well, it comes down to a simple principle, captain - morality!  It
would be immoral for the businessman to dictate to his stockholders
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business responsibly, because it _isn't_his_money_."
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"Isn't his money?!"
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"That's right, captain.  It's the shareholder's money.  For the
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It's a simple Biblical concept: 'Thou shall not steal'"

Mercuriou stumbled and again found himself fumbling for an answer.  He
felt certain that something was amiss in the persuasive arguments of
this suave politician, but couldn't quite figure what it was, and thus
found it impossible to respond.  Salvation came from the A-core
airlock.

"OK, Zee, that's enough."  Andrea Yeats propelled into the camera's
view.  "You talk a good game, and Captain Mercuriou is no holy man,
but America haven't exactly embrassed Christianity, either."

"I have to disagree, Dr. Yeats.  The United States has for years been
a paradigm for Christianity!"

"Well, Captain Mercuriou is wrong in his actions, but he is right that
capitalism is _immoral_, and that is the real issue we are discussing
here - morality."

"Capitalism is not immoral!"  Zee had heard almost nothing else.

"Governor, capitalism is one of the most immoral philosophies that
have ever been proposed for men to live their lives.  _You_do_for_
_yourself_and_let_this_'invisible_hand'_take_care_of_'society'._ It's
depraved, not to mention a solid rejection of half the Christian
gospel."

Zee took a deep breath himself and stared at the video monitor in the
studio, as if trying to peer into the soul of this unexpected new
provacator.

"Doctor Yeats, you've been listening to too much of your captor's
propaganda, I think.  Capitalism is not about doing for yourself.  If
people want to give to a charity, they are more than welcome to do so.
Capitalism is about freedom.  It's about giving people the freedom to
decide what to do with their own wealth."

"Govenor, if that's what you want to believe, fine.  But Christ taught
us to 'give to all those who beg of us', and not just when we feel
like it.  There are plenty of people out there who stand behind a
counter and won't lift a finger for anyone unless they're being handed
a credit card.  You can call it 'freedom' or anything else.  I call it
capitalism and it is immoral."

"Andrea, listen to me, not to Mercuriou.  Many capitalists are good,
decent people who have founded charities, started schools and
universities, established endowment funds such as the Carnegie
Foundation..."

"Carnegie built his empire too long ago for us to remember all the
backs he broke along the way.  Take Mr. Gates, governor, he's a better
example, a big philanthropher."

"Mr. Gates is an exceptional philantroper."

"If he was so generous, he would publish his source code."

"And who, pray tell, dictates this demand?  Marcelius Mercuriou?"

"Christ, governor, Jesus Christ."

"Jesus Christ?"

"That's right.  The source of morality is religion, and the source of
Christian morality is the Gospel.  Remember the story of the rich man
and the old woman?  The rich man went to the synagogue, gave a big
donation.  The old woman gave two bits.  Christ then asked which went
away redeemed.  Now let's stop for a minute and think about this.  How
would capitalists anwer?  How would the majority respond?  They would
say, 'Look at how much good can be done with the rich man's
generosity!  Look how many people can be helped!  He worked hard to
earn that money, now he gives it back!  You can run a soup kitchen for
a month with what he gave!  What can you do with two bits?  You can't
even buy a homeless man a cup of coffee.  The old woman might as well
have not even gone!'  But what did Christ say?  He tells us the old
woman goes away redemed because she gave _everything_ she's got!  It
was the totality of her generosity that is significant to God, not its
quantity.  So if Mr. Gates would live as Christ taught us, he would do
as the old woman and give _all_that_he_has_!"

There was a pause in the broadcast.

"And, governor, I've had to suffer through Captain Mercuriou's tirades
just like you.  You know how many times he's used the word God?"

"I don't think he's used the word once."

"I don't think so, either, and I've listened to him far more than any
of you.  So if you want to believe that my 'captor' has gone and put
all these ideas in my head, be my guest."

Zee paused again to contemplate the video image of the space captain
and the NASA engineer.

"You know, doctor, I've heard many conflicting stories about your
involvement with these people."

"You know, governor, there's a time-honored debate, or should I say
propaganda tactic called attacking the messenger."

Zee laughed.  "OK, Doctor Yeats, so what are you trying to say?  That
Christian morality is based on giving away all our worldly
possessions?"

"No, but that's a common misconception, because Christian morality
often _does_ require us to give away all our worldly possessions.  It
is not _based_ on that, though.  It's based on love - unconditional
love, not only for God, but all of mankind as well.  Often that
involves generousity, but what's more important is how you treat other
people; generousity is just one of the most obvious manifestations of
that."

"Christ told us that if a man steals our cloak, we should give him our
coat as well.  Now, to put that in a modern context, if a man breaks
into your home, holds your entire family up at gunpoint and takes
everything of value that he sees, you give him the keys to the car and
offer to help carry the stereo out, because it's pretty heavy."

"You can't be serious."

"I'm completely serious, sir, and so was Christ.  Of course, he also
told the thief some things he doesn't want to hear, either, like 'thou
shall not steal'."

Andrea had addressed the last sentence directly to Mercuriou, who said
nothing.

"So he told the thief not to steal and he told the rich man to give
his stereo to the thief, ehh?  A little self-contradictory, isn't it?"

"No.  It's two seperate instructions, for two different people, but it
comes down to the same commandment - love your neighbor.  The thief is
told not to steal, for love of the rich man, and the rich man is told
to give up his possessions, for love of the thief.  Of course, the
Christian isn't in either situation - he's not going to steal, and all
the thief needs to do is ask.  So if Mr. Gates lived this way, all
we'd have to do to get the source code for Windows would be to ask.
He could have been a Christian, instead he's decided to be a
philanthroper."

"Well, Andrea, the great thing about freedom is that Mr. Gates can be
a Christian if wants to, he could give away all his source code, it's
up to him!"

"And does he want that?  Does he 'give to all who beg of him'"?

"Well that's his choice.  That's freedom."

"You're dogging the question, sir.  Every murder ever committed in
human history was perpetrated by the freedom of the murderer!  Every
rape, every theft!  Every slave was enchained by the _freedom_ of his
master!  Freedom in the absence of morality is the single most
destructive force this planet has _ever_ seen, and people talk about
freedom largely because they _don't_ want to talk about morality!  As
for Mr. Gates, we've all seen the choices he's made with his freedom.
We've all seen America's choices.  We've all seen the choices of the
_majority_."

Zee didn't answer.  Andrea went on.

"The path to salvation is narrow, governor, and those who find it are
few.  The path to damnation is broad, and those who find it are many.
Most people sing their hymns on Sunday and then go work those jobs on
Monday because they need the money, live in an immoral society where
they can't live without it, and have no intention of just giving it
all away to anyone who asks."

Mercuriou finally spoke.

"My point exactly."
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"We're sitting in an air-conditioned tube with nothing to do and no
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"You just gave me a nice little list.  Forgiveness for the past;
a5647 57

After the debate was over, Alister had a question for Mercuriou.

"When did you learn all this stuff, I mean, did you read these books
in college?"

"No, I started reading all this stuff in high school.  My parents
bought me a set of about fifty books called 'Great Book of the Western
World'.  It had been assembled by this univeristy professor named
Mortimer Adler who believed in liberal education, that by reading the
works of great authors you can peer into the human soul.  It was in
college, I started reading all this stuff in the native languages -
'Great Books' was all in translation."

"So what makes a great book?"

"Well, for starters it should be well written, though there have been
some spectacularly poorly written great books.  The real criteria,
more than anything else, is that it has to be part of what Adler
called the 'Great Conversation', carried out over centuries, from one
age to the next, by men and women discussing the 'Great Ideas' -
things like love, war, religion, government.  Each author, in his own
time, had read those before him and then added something of his own to
the conversation."

"But don't people talk about those kinds of things all the time?
There's all kinds of books written about religion and politics."

"Yes, but a truly great book has to add something new to the
conversation; it can't just regurgitate old ideas.  And there's a
definite, almost snobby intellectual bias to Adler, but then you read
something like _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintence_ and you get a
whole different perspective on the Great Books program.  My only real
problem with it was that it was all in translation."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Well first of all, some of the translations, especially the Great
Books translations of the ancient Greeks, were absolutely horrible.
All the sexual double-entendres were lost.  I've heard they've
improved.  But then you take something like _Faust_ - it's almost
untranslatable because it's an epic poem, and poetry is very hard to
translate."

"I guess you can translate the ideas, right, that's what important,
isn't it?"

"Yes, but there is also beauty in language, too.  Take the Gettysburg
Address.  'We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not
hallow this ground.'  I mean, is this poetry or prose?  Lincoln didn't
just communicate the ideas, he did it with such beauty and power that
the words _endure_ - and they carry the ideas with them.  That's what
makes a great author, Alister, not just that they write down their
ideas, not just that they add something to the conversation, but that
they so craft the language as to practically compel you to listen."


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"Crew!" called Husband, "Suit up!"
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Only Alister was not completely suited, and only because his gloves
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"What's going on?" Alister asked.
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cabin at ten times the speed of sound.
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Mercuriou: For the capitalist system!  For the capitalist system!  You
always like to leave that part out!  You carry on like everyone who
opposed this society is a lazy bum who wants to sit around drinking
beer and watching Jerry Springer all day!"
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"Why not?" Mercuriou fired back.  Andrea thought for a moment before
answering.
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"Because sometimes _all_ of your options are unacceptable.  Then it
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the hydroponic pods.  He did a lot of work remotely, partly because it
avoiding having to go all the way down the cargo chain just to do a
transplant, partly because the robotics software Alister had stolen
from the Japanese enabled a lot of the work to be automated anyway,
and partly because his experience with hydroponics taught him to keep
all the pods sealed, to contain any fungal or virual outbreak to a
single pod.  Today, he was training a neural net to pick cherry
tomatoes with a robot hand.

Andrea thought for a moment before answering his question.
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more time in space with you guys than with any other astronauts, and I
barely know anything about you!  Take your medical degree, for
example, I mean why aren't you using it?  Sounds to me like until this
gig came along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot."
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"And as far as sitting up in the hills growing pot," he concluded,
"I'm pretty good at it, and I don't have to deal with any HMO's!"
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[ "I see that I'm not the only one here who's read _Decline_and_Fall_," ]
[ Mercuriou answered a thoughtful pause. ]

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freedom there.  Their latest 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 they don't have freedom, they'll
scream you down as a Communist until the bell rings and then it's off
to work.  Go to church on Sunday to hear how you need to work hard and
drop ten percent of your money in the collection plate as they pass it
around."
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the bar and in the alcoves, older men flirted with youth.  The crowd,
high on liquor and pot, sweat and sex, moved and vibed with the latest
rock/rap hit.
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perch," Marcellus continued, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "but
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"just like NASA / Challenger" as she zoomed away through the spacecraft.
Mercuriou watched her go.
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"Kinda like Apollo 10," Andrea noted.  "Make a landing pass without
actually landing."

"Right.  Also, since we're landing an airplane, we need something like
the salt flats at Edwards.  We don't have a VTOL capability, so our
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careful look at this site _before_ we land."
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"You know what I think," the first officer sniffed.

"Burns and Vic go," Mercuriou summarized, "the rest of us stay, at
least for the test."


T + 639 days

"Anything could go wrong.  You're not landing on a runway; your tires
could blow out; you could even crash.  You could be unable to refuel
for some reason.  We have absolutely no ground support _whatsoever_.
We've never even _attempted_ a reentry in this vehicle, and it certainly
wasn't designed for it.  And we have no rescue option should
_anything_ go wrong."

For the last time, Andrea was trying to convince Merceriou to cancel
the landing attempt.  The meeting was in the captain's quarters; only
Burns, Yeats, and Merceriou were present.
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crazy venture which is half about trying to prove that capitalism and
democracy aren't all they're cracked up to be, and _still_, Apollo was
a better design."  Merceriou started to shake his head, but Andrea
wouldn't be stopped.  "The entire vehicle was designed from the start
with spaceflight in mind; they had tested the command module on
Apollos 7 and 8; they had tested the lunar module on Apollos 9 and
10."

"The moon does make a lot more sense than Mars," Burns observed.
"Heck, the astroid belt makes a lot more sense than Mars.  We've
only..."

Mercuriou cut him off, his temper short.

"We're not in lunar orbit, this isn't a mission to the asteriod belt,
this is a mission to Mars, that's where we are, and that's where we're
going."

Burns broke the silence that followed.

"I'm just trying to give you an objective engineering assessment, Marc.
We're picked a hard target.  The moon's got one-sixth Earth gravity
and no atmosphere.  Nobody's ever attempt to land on another planet
before.  We're definitely pushing the envelope in a big way."

"Bottom line, will this work or not - objective engineering
assessment?"

"I can't read into a crystal ball, Marc.  Yes, for all it's
disadvantages, I think the vehicle is as sound as Apollo, 'cause
Apollo had big disadvantages too.  Spaceflight is _dangerous_.  More
than anything else, as I've told you from the beginning, we should
have more than one ship.  Three ships worked for Christopher Columbus,
and it's hard to argue with the results from _that_ mission."

"So you think we should go back and get two more ships?"  A twinge
of sarcasm had now crept into the captain's voice.

Burns sniffed.  "Ideally, we should never had left Earth orbit without
more ships.  Maybe it would've made more sense to wait to see if we
couldn't get someone else to come with us."
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Mercuriou drifted backwards, stared at the posters on the
wall of his cabin and slowly shook his head.
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"We didn't come all this way to turn back.  We're landing on Mars."
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"It didn't happen on Earth.  We're still over the speed of sound; I'm
going to hit the brakes."
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Burns pushed the throttles forward.  They were still more than 50
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contracting, all turning counterclockwise and forming into a massive
counterclockwise disturbance that engulfed the aircraft.  Just as it
began to break up, NASA Houston cut back onto the monitor.  Kyle was
sitting in his accustomed place behind a long desk with computer
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Kyle's face cut back onto the monitor.

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30-minute communications time lag prevented it.
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"And we still don't think the crash was survivable, so I really
have to advise against your resupply plan.  I know you want
to do it, and so do I, but I'm looking at it from the angle
of maybe needing those supplies to get the three of you home."
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She knew everything on both lists, having helped compose them, and
skipped the primary checklist, since Alister said it was loaded.  That
meant they had oxygen, water, first aid equipment, radio equipment,
rescue balls, both large - a good-sized, circular tent when inflated,
and small - two men in spacesuits could just fit into one, and a small
quanity of the remaining military rations.  It was the secondary
checklist she was more concerned with, and not all of it, but only the
part that contained things more valuable, irreplacible.  They had
begun to form in her mind a third checklist even.  None of them were
packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Mars_Explorer_ would then
be left with only two.
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of many woes to befall you guys, the last death was caused by fire,
the next death will be caused by ice, your captain is the last to go,
and, oh yeah - none of you will ever make it back to Earth alive."
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atmosphere.  Five miles up the engine re-ignited to brake its decent.
Another, smaller maelstrom quickly developed around it.  Radio contact
was lost, it disintegrated in the storm, and another cloud of debris
rained down to the red planet's soil.
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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 hour-long time lag required for the signal to reach
her, then for her response to return to Earth.  They arranged an
elaborate system of communications, transmitting each other a sumary
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.
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He held a popular American newsstand tabloid to the camera.
Alister's face dominated the front, which asked 'Can the kid get
them home?'

"Just to let you know the details, there's a panel of 'experts',
telling what Vic and Burns' last moments must have been like, how
you're all on your own now to do all these critical orbital
calculations, and, oh yeah, that apparently some of Nostradomes's
quatrains refered to the _Mars_Explorer_ - something about "the great bird
crippled in the night" - looks like the death of your brilliant chief
engineer is only the first of many woes to befall you guys, and that
none of you will ever make it back to Earth alive."
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coffee!"
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tradition."
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T + 804 days

"...and what about the people in Hawaii that don't want this?  What
happens to them?"

"What about them?"

"_What_about_them?_ They just don't matter, right?"

"You think that nobody opposes your rule here?  There will be people
who oppose my rule in Hawaii, just as there are people who oppose
yours!  They'll have the same options that dissidents have now - They
can LOVE IT or LEAVE IT!  They can DO WHAT THEY'RE TOLD or they can
GET THE HELL OUT!"

d6531 3
a6533 2
The orbiter suddenly lost power.  All the cockit displays went blank.
The lights cut out.  Sunlight gleamed through the windows.
d6550 1
a6550 1
The shuttle was gone.
d6557 1
a6557 1
Mercuriou turned to him as the earth, moon, and sun fell away
@


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@d3018 6
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vehicles.  It worked for Columbus."
d3028 2
a3029 1
"I'm still the captain.  I get the final say."
d3033 1
a3033 1
"All right.  I accept."
d3037 5
a3041 4
"And you actually did most of the right things yesterday.  Secure the
air tight doors and come after me with a spacesuit in case I get into
trouble.  Just one thing - next time, bring two suits.  It would sure
suck if we got stuck out there with only one suit between us."
d3745 6
a3750 1
manifest defects."
d3809 6
a3814 6
"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
d3843 2
a3844 2
"Fine, you can go to Mars," Merceriou started to interrupt but Yeats
would not let him, "but first you've got to test this spacecraft in a
d3859 1
a3859 3
"Hey, I'm just saying what she says makes a lot of sense!  I've told
you from the beginning that we should have three vehicles to try
this."
d4365 1
a4365 1
with Gagarin's flight and Apollo 11.  So what that we didn't land..."
d4406 10
a4415 4
than a million people were watching the crew conference on television.
Most cable TV systems now carried the _Mars_Explorer_ video feed, and
a small colored box stating "Live - Mars Orbit" had become a standard
fixture in the upper-left-hand corner of many a television screen.
d4420 13
a4432 1
manned presence in orbit is still by far our best observation option."
d4434 2
a4435 3
"So someone has to stay behind," Merceriou stated.  It wasn't
a surprise; landing options had been discussed even before
construction had began.
d4438 4
a4441 1
I have to go," Burns said.
d4443 1
a4443 2
Mercuriou spoke again, after a pause.  "I think the command function,
so to speak, has to remain in orbit, so I'll stay here."
d4445 1
a4445 4
"Alister should stay, too," Burns continued.  "I think it's important
for one of the engineers to remain in orbit, and he knows more about
the overall setup of the spaceship than anyone but me, well, maybe
Andrea, too, at this point."
d4447 1
a4447 2
The South African was staring silently at the bulkhead in front of
him.  "Sorry, kid," Burns apologized.  Alister nodded.
d4449 1
a4449 5
"I'll stay," Andrea volunteered.  "Alister can go, if he wants, but I
think I've got a pretty good idea of how the ship is run that Marc and
I can handle things here."  She had remained silent up until this
point in the conversation, mainly because her opposition to the
entire landing attempt was by now well known to the crew.
d4451 2
a4452 12
"You'll probably need help with the refueling, if nothing else," Vic
told Burns.  "If Alister doesn't go, I will."

"So," Mercuriou summarized, "Burns goes, Andrea and I stay, and either
Vic or Alister goes, and the other one stays."

"Let Alister go," Vic continued.  "He's young.  Give him the chance to
walk on Mars."

"No," Merceriou stated, after a pause.  "Andrea knows a lot about the
ship, that's true, but I won't have both the engineers on the ground."
Now it was his turn to apologize to Alister.  "Sorry, kid."
d4525 22
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The bottom line was that any reentry attempt, even without a landing,
required flying the 767 in atmospheric flight.  Only Burns had ever
flown a 767.  Furthermore, the thin Martian air required a much higher
airspeed and possibly presented handling challenges to the pilot.
Only Burns, it seemed, could make a reentry attempt, and after the
incident in the asteroid belt, the Captain decided against sending
Alister with him.  Finally, it was decided that he would pilot the
aircraft alone.

Disaster on Mars.  Burns attempts to land the 767, but they hadn't
gotten everything figured quite right.  The wings snap off during
reentry and the whole thing goes up in a fireball.  Burns dies.

The wings of the aircraft had been designed to flex, yet the carbon
coating was rigid.  Burns and Alister had correctly calculated the
aerodynamic forces from the reentry, and the dense layer of carbon
was strong enough to withstand those forces, yet hairline cracks
began to creep into the carbon during reentry.

Burns' first warning was a loud crack that sounded like a firecracker
or gunshot.

"What was that?" he wondered aloud.

The answer came less than a second later, as the left wing tore away
from the fuselage and slammed into the tail before falling away
towards the red planet below.  Liquid hydrogen gushed from the jagged
hole in the plane's left side as it swerved into an uncontrollable
spin.  The right wing crumbled under the new stresses, but before much
more could happen one of the remaining engines ignited the leaking
hydrogen and the entire aircraft disappeared into a ball of flame.

In orbit, the Icarus crew were first stunned by the sudden loss of
telemetry, then watched speechless as the aircraft flamed red on black
against the planet surface below, then disintegrated into hundreds of
tiny meteors that streaked silently into the Martian dawn.
d4548 9
a4556 1
-----
d4558 3
a4560 63
The carbon coating itself was strong enough to withstand the
forces of reentry and thick enough to act as an effective heatshield.
The coverings on the wheelwells was a different story.  Removing
them to test them, then replacing them and recovering them had
introduced cracks and fissures along their edges, where they
joined to the main body of the spaceplane.  Now, during reentry,
the superheated gases began working into these cracks around
the edges.  Finally, one of the coverings detached completely,
broke off in a single piece, and let the superheated gas pass
through to the aluminum airplane skin beneath.  In less than
a second, a hole the size of the wheelwell had burn completely
through the plane.

From orbit, the _Mars_Explorer_ crew saw a red dot appear on the left
wing of the spaceplane about a minute into reentry.  On board
the 767, Burns heard a load pop.

"What was that?" he wondered aloud.

Alarms started going off in the cockpit.  The puncture had
passed right through the wing's fuel tank and ignited the
fuel, which now poured out the hole in the top of the wing
in a geyser of flame.

"Looks like something on the left wing," Mercurio noted, looking over
at the computer telemetry coming from the spaceplane.  "You might have
lost part of the heatshield."

Even before he finished speaking, the same thing happened to the
wheelwell covering on the right wing and a second geyser of
flame erupted from it.

"I've got flames coming out of the right wing now," Burns observed
from the right-hand pilot's seat, looking over his shoulder.  "We
might be losing the heatshield," he speculated as a knot formed
tighter in his stomach.

There was nothing he could do at the moment about the heatshield, but
as great as that concern was, he also had to worry about the fuel in
the wing tanks.  Without sufficient fuel, he couldn't return to orbit.

"I'm aborting reentry," he declared as he made a snap decision.
Starting the engines for a return to orbit would be dangerous,
but if he lost much of the fuel, it'd be a moot point, since he'd
lack the fuel to return to orbit.

In orbit, Andrea suddenly realized why the two failure points
seems so symmetrically positioned on the wings.

"It's the wheelwells," she declared, and the rest of the crew
turned towards her.  "The wheelweels are failing."

Before anyone could say another word, or do anything, the third
wheelweel, almost directly beneath the cockpit, failed.  A torrent of
flame erupted into the cockpit from below.  Clad in his spacesuit,
Burns was swept out into the Mach 13 flowstream.  The acceleration
alone probably killed him instantly, even before his spacesuit was
consumed by the raging flames that engulfed the crew compartment.

From orbit, the crew watched a third speck of red appear at the
front of the plane, neatly centered, just short of the nose.
At the same moment, all the telemetry ceased, as the cockpit
computers were destroyed by the flames from the breach.
d4568 1
a4568 1
snapped off the fuselage, and slammed into the tail.
d4570 3
a4572 3
Vic watched the mad swirl of the artificial horizon like a tank
commander watching an armor piercing round headed straight for his
turret.  He glanced over at Burns, fighting madly against the
d4575 2
a4576 2
_Well_, _this_is_it_, he thought, _now_I_get_the_answer_key._ Then he
reached toward the window, and exploded into light.
d4586 3
a4588 1
gusts.
d4590 1
a4590 1
"We've been able to enhance it now to clearly show the eddies."
d4604 4
a4607 5
Andrea squirmed.  She wanted to see the final breakup in slow
motion, but she could get that later from Alister.  More than
anything, she wanted to interject and ask Kyle to show the
rest of the film, but the 30-minute communications time lag
prevented it.
d4631 1
a4631 8
The two astronauts were silent.  Mercuriou could have been viewing the
transmission as well from his cabin, but there was no immediate way to
tell.

Alister said nothing, but stared at Andrea, almost dumbly awaiting
instructions.

"The resupply module?" she asked.
d4633 2
a4634 2
A cargo module had been attached to a fuel module and an engine, then
docked to A-core.
a4640 5
Alister scribbled an instruction on his tablet and the checklist
appeared in a window on Andrea's. _Kyle_will_want_to_see_this_.
She scribbled another instruction on her machine and a copy
of the file began its 10,000,000 km (check this) journey.

d4648 1
a4648 1
part that contained things more valuable, more irreplacible.  They had
d4650 2
a4651 10
packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Mars_Explorer_ would then be left
with only two.

Andrea made her first command decision, but said nothing and instead
excused herself from the bridge and entered the captain's quarters,
closing the hatch behind her.

Less than sixty seconds later she was back.

"What'd he say?" Alister asked.
d4653 1
a4653 1
"He said that I'm in command, that I should do whatever I want."
d4655 1
a4655 6
"OK."

"Remove the spacesuits from the resupply module and launch it.  I want
a bulls-eye on the 767's crash site."

The resupply module was launched under computer control.  Its engine
d5144 9
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a9330 1
This - THIS is democracy!@


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people are more unlikely to steal from a baker who has a free loaf of
bread for them whenever they are hungry.
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@


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Mercuriou: Yeah, I've got some closing remarks...

Mercurio rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over the
compartment.  Finally, he pulled out one of Burns' T-shirts, brushed
away a pair of jeans that had drifted in front of the TV camera and
spread the black T-shirt out so it dominated the view field of the
camera.

"Here's my closing remark!"

The shirt read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.


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Without control computers to balance manuevering thrusters and control
surfaces, the spaceplane lost its equilibrium, pitched back and began
to yaw.  The aerodynamic forces of the hypersonic airflow overwealmed
the now unstable spaceplane.  The left wing snapped off the
fuselage, and slammed into the tail...

A half-hour time lag in communications left both NASA and the rest of
Earth as passive observers of the dramatic events.

Vic watched the fireball erupt like a tank commander watching
an armor piercing round headed straight for his turret.

_Well_, _this_is_it_, he thought.  A calm peace enveloped his soul.
_Now_I_get_the_answer_key._ He reached toward the
window, and exploded into light.
d4642 2
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a4648 1
"OK, now this is what Alister recorded on the high-speed film."
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Vic watched the fireball erupt like a tank commander watching
an armor piercing round headed straight for his turret.

_Well_, _this_is_it_, he thought.  A calm peace enveloped his soul.
_Now_I_get_the_answer_key_for_the_test._ An image of Andrea Yeats
flashed through his mind and a strangly Christian phrase came to mind.
_Father,_into_your_hands_I_commend_my_spirit._

d4640 8
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"I wasn't all that impressed."
d873 2
a874 2
"But they're publishing the whole sythesis pathway!  And disclaiming
all the patent right!  I thought you'd love it!"
d918 1
a918 1
"An space suit, yes; a mini-skirt, never!"
d937 4
a940 4
It was ten o'clock.  Andrea climbed on a largely empty downtown
express and gazed out the bus window as the controlled access highway
gave way to mid-market chain restaurants, landscaped malls, busy
downtown streets and finally a downtown transfer station.
d1014 8
a1021 9
nice location, but we just had to leave.  I prayed about it a lot,
well I worried about it 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 church,
you know, their social life, and I get regular donations now from the
congregation, and well, I just don't know what I would have done
without it!"
d1025 3
a1027 3
him just as the first customers, mostly homeless men, came in.  The
food, especially considering its meager pretensions, was excellent.
There was fresh baked bread, coffee and orange Tang ("the drink of
d1034 1
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always like to do something nice for the congregation?"
d1051 1
a1051 1
"Not a chance, not a chance."
d1055 7
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Gospel of Matthew: "When I was hungry, you fed me."  She put the four
remaining twenty dollar bills she had into the envelope, sealed it,
and slipped it into the drop box on her way out the door.  Taking a
city bus to the northern extremities of Houston, she walked to
Interstate 45, sat down her duffle bag beside the on ramp, and began
thumbing for a ride.
d1074 1
a1074 1
and lip synched the refrain out loud.
d1121 1
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office's plate glass windows.  The steel gray ocean frothed and
a1127 3
The same accounting records that Alister studied had told Burns about
the unauthorized access.

d1155 1
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big hack."
d1164 3
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Burns thought for a moment, begining to follow Mercuriou's line of
thought.  He had known Alister for almost two years (check
chronology) now.
@


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"I got to get this optical interface installed."

"Well, fill in your own timesheet, but I'm hitting the bay.  Sure you
don't want to come?"
d170 1
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"No, thanks," Burns replied without a hint of deceit.
d187 1
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steal himself for this moment, but designed that he had to be
d203 1
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"Forget Bogart's; let's shoot for Vacarro's instead!" he emailed
d239 3
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"We had to wait four more months to make sure it got into their
production system.  Burns got sick of the job and quit after two, but
it didn't matter.  They've been shipping it for half a year now."
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a buck a pop and half the planet can't
d324 1
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Mercuriou didn't answer.  He couldn't.  He didn't have an answer.
d326 6
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The trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of a single man.  A small
siting room to the right of the door was partitioned from the kitchen
by a small counter.  Beyond the sink and its clutter of dirty dishes,
a sliding door lead to a small bathroom and then to the only bedroom
on the far end of trailer, where a gray cat had disappeared as soon as
a stranger had entered the abode.
d361 2
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surf board, and the P.C.H, before Southern California had been paved
over by twelve-lane highways and built up by condos that looked like
they'd been dropped down from the sky in a game of Tetris.  He paused
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a369 2
along between a high cliff rising to the left and a dry riverbed on
the right.
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One of his favorite prayer spots, the desert canyon
looked from the air like a single massive stroke of white slashed
through brown hills by a giant's hand.  Pristine granite boulders were
strewn out fifty feet on either side of a spring-fed river.  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 torrential storms that, once or twice a decade,
filled the arroyo with the raging waters that had carved out this
canyon over the centuries.  The water was drinkable, and a gentle
d482 1
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the day, not to mention the ample bathing spots in the cool river.
d488 1
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right phase.  He wanted to finish the novel he was reading.  It was
d494 1
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neither was he looking forward to spending several days in silence and
d614 3
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_What_else_are_you_going_to_do?_, the voice sneered back at him.
_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.
d620 1
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_Did_the_snake_want_to_be_a_belt?_ he wondered.
_Did_the_fish_want_to_live_in_water?_
d639 1
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The sun was setting when he awoke.  He sat and watched it slip down
d679 1
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Mercuriou?  Blown to bits in some goofy launch attempt?
d689 1
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death.  Death he could handle.  Death meant a meeting with God.
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MAN I WARN OF ITS EVIL
@


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T + 1253 days

"Five."

"Four."

"Three."

"Two."

"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.

"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.

"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.

"Perfect burn," Alister declared, as he broke out into a wide grin and
let out a whoop.  "I almost expected a disaster."  (did you really?)

"Sometimes you make it back alive, Alister," Andrea declared as she
unbuckled.  "I've done it twice already."

"There's South Africa!" the young man whooped, pointing out the
window.

"There's South Africa!"
d9257 23
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"Do you want to leave?"
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"Dear Lord, forgive me my sins."
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"If we're dead..." Alister exclaimed.  "then it was all for
nothing!?!"
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sentence.  The orbiter suddenly lost power, and all the cockit
displays went blank.  The air conditioning and lights also cut out,
and only sunlight illuminated the cabin.
d6285 1
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"What's the procedure for this?" Mercuriou asked.
d6287 1
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"There is none," Andrea replied.  "We don't have a procedure for this."
d6289 3
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"Everyone suit up!" called Husband from the flight deck.  "Suit up now!"
d6296 3
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cold.  Burns was standing in front of him, and next to him was Vic.
d6300 2
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"Don't bother," Burns said.
d6309 1
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"Wait a minute," Mercuriou said.  He looked around the shuttle cabin.
"We're not dead!"

"Yes, you are."

A ear-splitting crack punctuated the reply, like someone had taken a
d6318 4
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Then the shuttle was gone, and they were suspended in mid-air.  Above
was the dark of space, and above space a stupendous light.
d6323 1
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"Wait!" Alister exclaimed.  "If we're dead... then it was all for
@


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Burns preserved appearances by consuming another half hour to
'finally' finish the optical interface, then left.
"Forget lunch; let's shoot for
happy hour instead!" 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.
d219 1
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"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, punctuated by a single word
from the only other person present, waiting in the kitchen for a
teakettle to boil while slowly shaking his head in admiration.
d221 6
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"Burns."
d228 5
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From his perch on the couch, Mercuriou nodded in assent.  In his late
thirties and a shade under six feet tall, his cheekbones betrayed the
mixed features of his hybrid Romanian/Irish ancestry.  A white
T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes comprised the
undistinguished attire of Burns' roommate.
What differentiated him more were the
d239 2
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setbacks in his plans, and absolutely convinced that he
would ultimately win.
d246 17
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Victor Antonov, watching the teakettle in the kitchen, was
nearly ten years older, heavy set with a bristling
mustache that often covered a mischevious smile.  They had met in
college, when Mercuriou was an eighteen-year-old freshman in love with
classical literature and Vic was finishing medical school.  Marc had
briefly dated the future doctor's cousin. The courtship had foundered;
the friendship had lasted almost twenty years.
d327 1
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Mercuriou didn't answer.  He didn't have an answer.  Instead, he
nursed his tea and looked around.
a339 2
Mercuriou sat up.  This question he was prepared for.

@


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sentence, as the orbiter suddenly lost power, and all the cockit
d6318 2
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The shuttle was gone, and they were suspended in mid-air.  Above was
the dark of space, and above space a stupendous light.
@


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/* I'LL KEEP THIS NOVEL ABOUT REAL PEOPLE */
/* I'LL NOT GET LOST IN IVORY TOWERS */
/* I'LL KEEP THIS BOOK REAL */

I'LL KEEP THIS BOOK HONEST
NOT A MAZE OR A FRAUD
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MAN I REMIND OF ITS ERRORS
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within that system; but it was too badly flawed because it denied
black men freedom.  Finally, one of the greatest Presidents this
country has ever produced took a stand for liberty and freed the
slaves.
d8988 5
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[ Hell, if we're going to do something, fuck it, let's fly to Mars! ]

d4034 4
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Now it was Burns's turn to wonder if this was profound or merely
seemed so.
d4093 1
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T + 188 days
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T + 302
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The latest news updates from Earth had brought news of a pipeline
explosion in Nigeria that had killed hundreds scavenging gasoline from
an illegally tapped pipeline.

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"I see that I'm not the only one here who's read _Decline_and_Fall_,"
Mercuriou answered a thoughtful pause.
d4383 2
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Mars!"

MAYBE THIS IS WHERE MERCURIOU COMPLEMPLATES PLANTING A U.S. FLAG
UPSIDE-DOWN IN THE SOIL
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T + 699 days
d5021 8
a5028 8
since repudiated that practice.  Before that repudiation, 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 largely accepted by Protestant churches."
d5034 1
a5034 1
little differently, in a parable.  Let's look at Matthew 21:28:"
d5146 8
a5153 19
"Well, 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.  It
was God's ultimate stamp of approval.  So we should take his teachings
seriously."


T + 705 days

Mercuriou: "We don't run this ship.  Burns runs this ship.  This ship
is just running on auto-pilot now."

Andrea thought about this for a moment.

"Well, we better make sure we know everything we can about how that
auto-pilot works."
 

T + 714 days
d5160 1
a5160 3
"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked Andrea one day.

Andrea pushed away the laptop she was working on.
a5173 2
Andrea nodded an affirmative response.

d5180 2
a5181 1
"What do you have to do to be saved?  Everyone says something different."
d5191 2
a5192 11
to figure it out in practice."

"What about the Old Testament; do you read that?"

"Sometimes.  There are deeply profound insights in the Old Testament,
but it can't be taken completely at face value.  Christ flat-out
rejected many of the Old Testament teachings, such as the stoning
statues.  Perhaps like the entire Bible, it's a mixed bag; parts
of it are inspired by God, and parts of it are the errors of men.
other parts of it were put there by
men, and that makes it hard to understand."
d5417 3
a5419 3
included, can dictate to anyone.  We all have to look to God to find
these answers.  I'm just pointing out that Christ seemed to take a dim
view of most people's ability to do that.
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"Since I'm the only one here with experience piloting a 747, I figure
d4538 2
a4539 2
required flying the 747 in atmospheric flight.  Only Burns had ever
flown a 747.  Furthermore, the thin Martian air required a much higher
d4546 1
a4546 1
Disaster on Mars.  Burns attempts to land the 747, but they hadn't
d4591 1
a4591 1
the 747, Burns heard a load pop.
d4665 1
a4665 1
crystal-clear and dramatic vision of the last seconds of the 747, seen
d4671 1
a4671 1
The monitor still showed the 747, now overload with a grid of hundreds
d4690 9
a4698 9
the engines triggered a massive atmospheric disturbance, and absolutely
nothing in any of our Martian atmospheric models predicts anything
like it.  There were a lot of things we were afraid could go wrong
with the vehicle but this wasn't one of them.  Incidently, our
spectroscope analysis showed water vapor in the engine's wake,
which isn't produced by ten-thirty-three and isn't in the Martian
atmosphere, so we're wondering if something down there 
in the reaction byproducts triggered additional reactions in
the Martian atmosphere, but this is all just educated guesswork."
d4720 3
d4745 1
a4745 1
Alister made her first command decision, but said nothing and instead
d4758 1
a4758 9
a bulls-eye on the 747's crash site."

The resupply module was launched the same way all the others had been.
Nearly a hundred of the silicon carbide engines Burns had
mass-produced in Mexico had been themselves packed ten at a time into
cargo modules and launched.  The EVA to place the engines
on the fuel modules had been performed.  One of them had
been manuefered and attached to an empty, cleaned fuel module
docked to bay one.
d4760 6
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"We can't assemble the cargo modules without the 747," Alister interjected.
d4892 1
a4892 1
Without the 747,  all they could do was line up all the modules
d4967 3
a4969 5
you may _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  How do think we felt
after _Challenger_?  You made a mistake, but now it's time to go on."

Mercuriou nodded and said "OK", but wasn't really sure himself if he
could do it.
d5032 3
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the name 'Jesus', no matter how sincerely or piously done, is not a
substitute for actually doing what God wants.  Christ told us the same
thing, a little differently, in a parable.  Let's look at Matthew
21:28:"
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said a lot of things that needed to be said, and you've managed to
find a platform where those things actually got heard.  Now, did you
need to steal a billion dollars to do that?  I doubt it.  I suspect
you could have found another way.  This is why I don't buy the
Christians who say you have to fight 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."
d5326 1
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"Maybe it's not the best time," Yeats repeated her observation.
d5413 32
a5469 1
"Maybe they're just incompetent," Alister interjected.
a5470 1
"Incompotent?" Mercuriou answered.  Yeats, too, raised a puzzled eye.
a5476 14
"No, really, maybe people just don't know the difference between right
and wrong.  Maybe they can't choose good leaders because they don't
know how."

Mercuriou said nothing, but the expression that ran across his face
told him to be in accord with the young man's words.  Andrea broke
the silence.

"It's very hard to tell the difference between right and wrong,
Alister.  That's why Christianity is so important.  It gives us very
important guideposts to help make those decisions."

"That's why religion is so important, Alister.  It gives us just about
the only guideposts we've got for finding that difference."
d5514 1
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human ingenuity, Captain.  Men even flew to Mars in a 747."
d5521 8
a5528 6
completely preclude figuring out that murder is wrong, at least in
some cases.  In other cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting
that they _have_to_kill_ for the sake of their 'freedom'.  You'll find
people who _do_ believe in God clinging to capitalism.  That's how
primitive we are.  Two thousand years ago we were told
_Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_ and half of us still don't believe
d5530 1
a5530 1
what it means."
d5549 1
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Mercuriou: I'm not arguing Adam Smith's logic; I'm arguing his
d5552 1
a5552 1
Mercuriou now produced a tablet computer and began reading from it.
d5566 1
a5566 1
   benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
d5573 1
a5573 1
Yates: Does he mention God?  Is this what we're taught by Christ?
d5803 12
a5814 5
entrenched.  They're not going to just change.  My best guess is that
its people'll just rip it apart from within.  It keeps getting more
and more violent, and the only solution the democrats have is to keep
cracking down harder and getting tougher.  Eventually the violence of
its own people will destroy it.  That's my best guess."
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ideas, and that genius is that rare ability to venture deep into the
dim recesses of ideaspace to retrieve the 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 of these geniuses buried his
discovery in the pages of a novel.  The other held it up to the sun
for all the world to see its blazing red light that terrible September
morning.

"Another Timothy McVeigh or something.  The country is so hated.  I
thought about it; hell, you can say a lot about me, Andrea, that I'm a
thief and all that, but I never did anything like this."
d5222 13
a5234 15
terrorists had hijacked four American airlines.  Coincidently, or
perhaps not, all were Boings.  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.
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.  Within hours, the buildings fell.
Burns would have then made a quick calculation based on the potential
energy of a given mass at a given height along with the published
weight of construction materials used in the skyscrapers to estimate
the energy released by their collapse at ten kilotons of TNT - the
size of a small atomic bomb.  Bankers, mail men, fire fighters, bus
boys brokers, firemen, CEOs, bus boys,
 - all lost their lives that terrible
morning.
d5236 1
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Within days, the nation mobilized.  Medical teams sprung into action,
d5239 6
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alive in the tons of rubble.  At Andrea's suggestion, Mercuriou issued
a statement of condolence, expressing his "deapest reget", and stating
that it grieved him as nearly as much the death of his "dear friend
Burns".  The entire crew followed suit.  Asked via videomail by the
press about his comparison with Burns, he replied that though he
deeply felt the loss in New York, he was sure the family's victims
would concer that no one feels a loss more acutely than that of a
loved one.  The media largely accepted this.

Within weeks, the President attacked Afghanistan after correctly
finguring Osama bin Ladin as the culprit.  The Captain began objecting
to the President's behavior, stating publically than an orderly extradition
procedure should be followed rather than an invasion.  Andrea Yeats
said that all parties should try to resolve their problems peacefully,
though she ruefully noted that the Muslems would do good to accept
Christ, and ruffled feathers by suggesting that the terrorists,
misguided though they may have been, were probably the only people
that morning who got on the airplanes because they were trying to do
God's will.

Within months, most of the old animosities had resurfaced.  The
Captain was still openly critical of the western democratic
establishment in general, and the President in particular.
Dr. Yeats became far more prominent, and far more controversial, by
her repeated advice to end the war, moarn over the dead, then ask
ourselves why so many people hated the country and decide to give our
lives over to God to do something about it.

While the political prong of the twin assult had failed, the economic
prong had succeeded beyond belief.  Considering not only the twin
towers of the World Trade Center, but the smaller buildings destroyed,
or ravaged with all their windows blown out, plus the entire
multi-block area that had been shut down for months, the center of New
York City's financial district had been devastated.
d5251 1
a5251 1
defeated the United States in a soccer match, and that all of their
d5261 6
a5266 1
a transmission to Earth.
d5272 1
a5272 1
"I just think maybe you should wait a while longer."
d5283 6
a5288 2

T + 734 days
d5291 6
a5296 10
out.  The old Mercuriou was back, the Mercuriou that hadn't
faced disaster on Mars, the Mercuriou that hadn't listened
to Andrea Yeats for the last two years.

"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 listening to this program would love to learn to fly
but _it's_too_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  They took
advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one thing that will make
a5300 7
All of his opponents were on the program, arranged on the TV screen in
a montage of talking heads. [CA] Ecks was speechless, unable to decide
if Mercuriou was defending the terrorists or attacking the
capitalists.  Wye, red-faced with rage, sputtered nonsense.  Only Zee
remained stony and impassive, and it was he who answered the space
captain now.

d5631 2
a5632 3

Zee: This isn't Christianity!  Christians are good, law-abiding
citizens, not a bunch of thieves and dope heads!
d5670 2
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Yates: I'll take hop heads any day over a bunch of militants who think
that 'turning the other cheek' applies to everyone but them!
d5681 1
a5681 1
sacrifice them on the alter of your piety?
d5684 4
a5687 3
fate.  For those who aren't willing to accept that fate, they have the
freedom to live under any other system of government they please -
yours, for example.
d5689 1
a5689 1
Zee: How?  You're determined to make your own government!
d5692 3
a5694 3
from the freedom to travel, coupled with a variety among nations.
People so terrified of these murderers and rapists that they want your
prison state can have it - it's just an airplane ride away!
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They can "love it or leave it!"
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background.  Tonight, he on television again, facing off against
Jeffrey Zee, a state governor widely expected to run for president in
the upcoming national election.
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"Captain, you are a criminal and a thief!"
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Mercuriou stammered.  For the first time since launching himself
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magazine on the planet, he appeared flustered.  Zee kept going.
d8430 9
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hundred years.  The civil war shook democracy to its core, oh, it
survived, but the most serious questions raised by slavery have never
really been answered.  If it took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to
end slavery, how much can this system of government really be worth?
And if it takes the same thing to end capitalism?  How many more
'successes' like the civil war can this country afford?"
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willing to completely ignore its utter immorality!
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Mercurio: How are you going to stop me?

Wye: We can stop you, captain, trust me, we can stop you.

Mercurio: How?  You going to crack down?  Get tough?  That's what it's
going to take!
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Wye: We will enforce our laws, captain, we will enforce our laws.  I'd
like to know what's going to be so different once you achieve this
great goal of throwing off our hated government.
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a5593 1
jail cell.  Next, I intend to open the borders.  Freedom will be for
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people are unlikely to steal from a baker who has a free loaf of bread
for them whenever they are hungry.
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T + 1033 days

"So what are you reading now?"

"_Faust_, in German.  Another book I've only read in translation."

"What's it about?"

"Well, _Faust_ is the story of a man who sells his soul to the
devil to get his youth back."

"Did you start reading all this stuff in college?"

"No, I started reading all this stuff in high school.  My parents
bought me a set of about fifty books called 'Great Book of the Western
World'.  It had been assembled by this univeristy professor named
Mortimer Adler who believed in liberal education, that by reading the
works of great authors you can peer into the human soul.  It was in
college, I started reading all this stuff in the native languages -
'Great Books' was all in translation."

"So what makes a great book?"

"Well, for starters it should be well written, though there have been
some spectacularly poorly written great books.  The real criteria,
more than anything else, is that it has to be part of what Adler
called the 'Great Conversation', carried out over centuries, from one
age to the next, by men and women discussing the 'Great Ideas' -
things like love, war, religion, government.  Each author, in his own
time, had read those before him and then added something of his own to
the conversation."

"But don't people talk about those kinds of things all the time?
There's all kinds of books written about religion and politics."

"Yes, but a truly great book has to add something new to the
conversation; it can't just regurgitate old ideas.  And there's a
definite, almost snobby intellectual bias to Adler, but then you read
something like _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintence_ and you get a
whole different perspective on the Great Books program.  My only real
problem with it was that it was all in translation."

"What's wrong with reading stuff in translation?"

"Well first of all, some of the translations, especially the Great
Books translations of the ancient Greeks, were absolutely horrible.
All the sexual double-entendres were lost.  I've heard they've
improved.  But then you take something like _this_, I mean, _Faust_ is
almost untranslatable - it's an epic poem, and poetry is very hard to
translate."

"But you can translate the ideas, right, that's what important, isn't
it?"

"Yes, but there is also beauty in language, too.  Take the Gettysburg
Address.  'We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not
hallow this ground.'  I mean, is this poetry or prose?  Lincoln didn't
just communicate the ideas, he did it with such beauty and power that
the words _endure_ - and they carry the ideas with them.  That's what
makes a great author, Alister, not just that they write down their
ideas, but that they so craft the language to practically compel you
to listen."


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"Look we've made it this far without any serious problems."
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"Yeah, but all the really critical stuff's been well tested up until
now.  Think about it.  We test-fired all the rocket engines before
using any of them.  We burned extra fuel to keep the aerodynamic
stresses on the 747 within its normal flight tolerances.  We
brought spare fuel canisters in case the supply tanks didn't
work."

"And we didn't really need any of those things.  Look, the
bottom line is that we said we were going to Mars, and now
we're here and we have to land."
d4342 6
a4347 5
"Why do you have to land?"  Andrea interjected.  The NASA engineer had
floated into the room unnoticed during their debate.  "Why can't you
just go back to Earth?  You've already accomplished more than any
other space mission to date.  _Mars_Explorer_ will go down along with with
Gagarin's flight and Apollo 11.  So what that we didn't land..."
d4349 2
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"We have to land!" the captain shouted.  Alister and Vic stopped work
two modules away and moved closer to try to overhear more of the
conversation.

"If we don't land," he continued, "they'll say we failed, and then the
capitalists will just come back two years from now and make the first
landing on Mars; hell, they'll probably 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!"
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MAYBE THIS IS WHERE MERCURIOU COMPLEMPLATES PLANTING A U.S. FLAG
UPSIDE-DOWN IN THE SOIL

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"Don't you?  Haven't you?" she challenged him.  "How many millions did
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Most cable TV systems now carried the _Mars_Explorer_ video feed for at least
part of the day, and the video bar "Live - Mars Orbit" had become a
standard fixture on many a television.
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T + 701 days
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"One of my favorite parts of the Gospels is where 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."
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"And I haven't done the will of God," Mercuriou stated in a flat tone.
d5067 5
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"Well, I guess people used to believe the Earth is flat.  You can
beleive whatever you want; the fact is that the Earth is round.  And
I'm absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazarath was the most
spiritually advanced being to ever live on Earth.  So we should take
his teachings seriously."
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T + 701 days <**>
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9/11/2001 - T + 729
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they we're what one member of the crew expected.
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players were dressed as airline pilots.  In Afghanistan, in Iraq, or
perhaps in Khartoum, Osama bin Laden was smiling.
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"What would Vic have thought about all this?" Alister asked after dinner.
d5375 5
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Andrea answered first. "Vic probably would have said that we're too
primitive as a species to possess a technology as advanced as jet
aircraft.  He was always advocating a return to simpler times."

"Do you beleive we're too advanced for jet aircraft?"  There was no
trace of sarcasm in Alister's voice.  He had already 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, and was genuinely wondering
about jet aircraft.
d5415 5
a5419 7
people who _do_ believe in God clinging to this belief that you impose
all these intellectual property restrictions on this technology, then
absolutely insisting that this is consistent with the Christian
gospel.  That's how primitive we are.  Two thousand years ago we were
told _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_ and half of us still don't
beleive that it was God speaking and the other half still can't
understand what it means."
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Meanwhile, the first crops from the ship's vegetable garden ripened,
just as the supply of military rations was growing noticably short.
Vic set about devising a high-protein diet plan, and soy beans, which
had grown quite readily in zero-g, topped his list.  The doctor
prepared his first batch in the Burns-devised vegetable steamer, which
superheated a pressurized canister of water before releasing it into
the chamber containing the soy beans.  As it left the canister, the
water, already heated beyond its conventional boiling point, burst
into steam with a loud hizzing that attracted the attention of the
young South African in the next module.
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"I rather like them steamed," Vic replied.
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"I don't know about this, mate," the programmer quibbled as he
a4076 2
Vic ignored the question.

d4091 1
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side module, where she had been calibrating instrumentation for an
upcoming survey run.
a4094 1
"Guess those Pavlov chains worked out after all!"
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T + 231 days
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In retrospect, the first crops harvested from the garden had marked a
turning point in the flight of the _Mars_Explorer_.  With the stress of the
initial months behind them, the crew of the _Mars_Explorer_ had settled into
a leisurely routine.  Captain Mercuriou was slowly rereading
Plutarch's _Lives_of_the_Nobel_Gretians_and_Romans_, this time in the
original Latin; Vic undertook a careful breeding program to develop
strains of important food crops (and marijuana) specifically adapted
for growth in zero-gee; Burns and Andrea were working on their mission
plan for a Mars landing; and his spare time Alister was learning to
play the guitar.

"Hmmph!" Marc verbalized this particular evening while everyone was
gathered in the B-core.  He was reading from a detached LCD panel
while Alister practiced his scales, Burns and Andrea worked on some
computer program, and Vic was listening to a rock album on headphones
in the light haze of a marijuana joint he had recently passed around.

"Sparta must have been an amazing place to live," the Captain
speculated, as Vic removed his headphones.  "You have to wonder if
Marx knew anything of its history.  I don't know, but Sparta has got
to be one of the greatest socialist success stories ever."
d4110 6
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"Were they Communists?" Alister asked, setting aside his instrument
and shaking his left hand.
d4128 10
a4137 2
"The determination of mankind to train their children to hate and kill
_is_ amazing," Andrea interjected.
d4140 3
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Marc speculated with a mischevious grin, as Vic began to chuckle.
"Maybe you can prescribe a set of rules for us to raise our children
to be Christians instead of warriors."
d4163 1
a4163 2
to the Arian beliefs, well...  You're not the only one here who's read
_Decline_and_Fall_."
d4165 2
a4166 1
"No, I see not," Mercuriou answered a thoughtful pause.
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"Yes," Vic answered, "but a large part of Christianity was all 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."

"Hmmm," Marc replied thoughtfully, "yes, a large part of any religion
is about propping up the existing social order."

"What amazes me about Western civilization", Vic continued, "is this
notion that the individual somehow owes something to the state, or at
least to the society.  If anything, the Native Americans believed that
society had a responsibility to the individual to raise him to be
independent.  This modern morality is that people have some kind of
obligation to work.  That's gotten embedded into the religion along
with all this other stuff that justifies the government.  It's all
part of propping up an industrialized society."
d4183 64
a4246 18
_for_the_society_ is what I'm talking about.  Again, take the Native
American Indians, for example.  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, therefore, was perfectly voluntary.  If anyone didn't
want to be there, they could just get up and leave.  Murders, armed
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.  Thus, the individual is raised
to work for the society, and the society has taught the individual
that they are morally obligated to work.  Inevitably, this morality
has worked its way into the religion as well."
d4258 13
a4270 19
scream you down as a Communist and all the while they're surrounded by
a society based on nothing but forced labor."

"Christianity isn't based on forced labor," Andrea noted after a pause.

"Could have fooled me."

"You need to distinguish true Christianity from, how did Vic put it,
bastardized Christianity?"

The ship's doctor nodded in assent.

"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."
d4278 1
a4278 1
"That's funny, Marc, because I don't think I took anything from
d6538 4
d6543 3
a6545 1
6/24/2001 - T + 650
d6547 1
a8278 52
T + 21 days

"Well, most human societies have been like this, but not all."

Despite all the attention heaped on the Merceriou and his wildly
anti-democratic views, there were other crew members on the spaceship,
and now Vic was taking his turn at the mic.  Senator Wye was the other
guest on the program.

"I think the American Indians were the best example of an alternative.
They raised their children to recognize wild edibles, to make fire by
rubbing sticks together, to build a bow and arrows from natural
materials that you'd find lying around a forest.  By the time they
were fifteen years old, they could literally walk out into the woods
and take care of themselves.  So you couldn't have a government, at
least not in form you know it.  Government is based on coersion.  How
can you coerce people who can just walk out into the woods if they get
ticked off?  This is why murder and other violent crimes were almost
unknown in these 'primitive' societies.  This is why the federal
government couldn't have been nearly so coercive two hundred years
ago.  Anyone who didn't like it could just pack up and move west."

"So we should give up our technology and go back to living like
Indians?" Wye asked sarcastically.

"It might not be a bad idea.  The human race is too primitive for
all this technology.  You'd probably be better off living in the
woods; happier, too."

"Funny, I don't see you living in the woods right now, Doctor."

Vic chuckled.  Wye didn't.  Neither did Captain Merceriou, watching
the broadcast with the rest of the crew from alongside the
camera, just outside its field of view.

"All things in moderation, congressman, all things in moderation.
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, and that exasperates the problems of society.  The
fact is, 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
society and each other, the more oppressive society becomes.  There's
just no way around this, unless a hundred million people are going to
wake up one day and suddenly decide to change their human nature, to
abandon greed for generosity, force for persuasion, and that's just
not going to happen."
a8316 29
The moderator cut in before Wye could get more than a word off.

"OK, captain, but we're interviewing Dr. Antonov now.  Doctor, what's
your opinion on democracy?"

Vic had now righted himself in the camera's view, and paused a moment,
thinking and licking his lips, before responding.  To the surprise of
many viewers, everyone else on the program waited, too.

"As I said, I think all government, all society, really, is coercive.
The larger and more inter-dependent a society is, the more coercive it
is.  I don't think the issue is so much democracy but
industrialization, and I don't think you can design a system of
government to fix a society that isolates people from nature, raises
them so they don't have a clue how to feed themselves without a
Safeway, teaches them all this science and mathematics, sends them
running around in cars and airplanes but neglects to teach them how to
live in harmony with nature, how to quiet their soul, how to look into
the depths of their being and find out who they really are, and what our
genuine vision of ourselves really is."

MAYBE A LITTLE MORE HERE?

"Want to take a crack at it?" Mercuriou asked Alister after the
broadcast was concluded, indicating the camera with an arm gesture.

The South African emphatically shook his head 'no'.  Burns, who had
gone right back to work on a computer console even before the
conclusion of the interview, never looked up.
@


1.207
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d3858 12
a3869 1
T + 21 days
d3871 5
a3875 1
"Well, most human societies have been like this, but not all."
d3877 5
a3881 4
Despite all the attention heaped on the Merceriou and his wildly
anti-democratic views, there were other crew members on the spaceship,
and now Vic was taking his turn at the mic.  Senator Wye was the other
guest on the program.
d3883 1
a3883 12
"I think the American Indians were the best example of an alternative.
They raised their children to recognize wild edibles, to make fire by
rubbing sticks together, to build a bow and arrows from natural
materials that you'd find lying around a forest.  By the time they
were fifteen years old, they could literally walk out into the woods
and take care of themselves.  So you couldn't have a government, at
least not in form you know it.  Government is based on coersion.  How
can you coerce people who can just walk out into the woods if they get
ticked off?  This is why murder and other violent crimes were almost
unknown in these 'primitive' societies.  This is why the federal
government couldn't have been nearly so coercive two hundred years
ago.  Anyone who didn't like it could just pack up and move west."
d3885 2
a3886 2
"So we should give up our technology and go back to living like
Indians?" Wye asked sarcastically.
d3888 1
a3888 3
"It might not be a bad idea.  The human race is too primitive for
all this technology.  You'd probably be better off living in the
woods; happier, too."
d3890 1
a3890 1
"Funny, I don't see you living in the woods right now, Doctor."
d3892 1
a3892 3
Vic chuckled.  Wye didn't.  Neither did Captain Merceriou, watching
the broadcast with the rest of the crew from alongside the
camera, just outside its field of view.
d3894 1
a3894 17
"All things in moderation, congressman, all things in moderation.
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, and that exasperates the problems of society.  The
fact is, 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
society and each other, the more oppressive society becomes.  There's
just no way around this, unless a hundred million people are going to
wake up one day and suddenly decide to change their human nature, to
abandon greed for generosity, force for persuasion, and that's just
not going to happen."
d3896 1
a3896 7
"Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it has happened.  It's
called democracy.  Maybe you've been living in the woods too long to
have noticed that the entire operation of our government is based on
persuasion.  That's why every four years men contest to become
president, and the way they do that is through giving speechs, running
advertisements, talking to voters, and the whole point is to persuade,
Doctor, persuade, not force, people to vote for them."
d3898 1
a3898 3
Mercuriou could take no more.  He propelled himself into the camera's
field of view, bumping into Vic and sending him clutching for a
strap to neutralize his momentum.
d3900 1
a3900 2
"You sound like a fucking communist!" he snarled at the camera, while
in Washington the moderator winced as the broadcast profanity.
d3902 7
a3908 21
"Humanity_has_abandoned_greed_and_force_and_this_great_event_goes_by
the_name_of_democracy!" he continued in a sarcastic drawl.  "Well, if
your government is so based on persuation, then why do you have the
second highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet?  Only the
great _people's_government_ in Russia imprisons a larger percentage of
its citizens than the great _people's_government_ of America, and I'm
sure the _people's_government_ of China isn't far behind.  Why, every
time you turn on C.O.P.S, do you see the police chasing after
'criminals', half of whom have done nothing more than fire up a joint,
gang-tackling them, and dragging them off to jail?  Why are you
screaming for war on your own people and 'zero tolerance' for your own
children?  The only people that the democrats persuade are the
majority.  Everyone else is ruled through threat and fear.  The
majority act real nice and polite to each other, then as soon they
find out that you're a druggie, or a copyright violator, or just don't
want to work for their bastard leaders, they scream for blood and
elect all these men who talk about cracking down and getting tough,
and how wonderful a world it is where anybody can start a business and
ruthlessly try to compete in this brutual capitalist system.  The
majority are perfectly willing to resort to force; they do it
_every_single_day_."
d3910 2
a3911 1
The moderator cut in before Wye could get more than a word off.
d3913 1
a3913 2
"OK, captain, but we're interviewing Dr. Antonov now.  Doctor, what's
your opinion on democracy?"
d3915 4
a3918 3
Vic had now righted himself in the camera's view, and paused a moment,
thinking and licking his lips, before responding.  To the surprise of
many viewers, everyone else on the program waited, too.
d3920 1
a3920 11
"As I said, I think all government, all society, really, is coercive.
The larger and more inter-dependent a society is, the more coercive it
is.  I don't think the issue is so much democracy but
industrialization, and I don't think you can design a system of
government to fix a society that isolates people from nature, raises
them so they don't have a clue how to feed themselves without a
Safeway, teaches them all this science and mathematics, sends them
running around in cars and airplanes but neglects to teach them how to
live in harmony with nature, how to quiet their soul, how to look into
the depths of their being and find out who they really are, and what our
genuine vision of ourselves really is."
d3922 3
a3924 1
MAYBE A LITTLE MORE HERE?
d3926 3
a3928 2
"Want to take a crack at it?" Mercuriou asked Alister after the
broadcast was concluded, indicating the camera with an arm gesture.
d3930 2
a3931 3
The South African emphatically shook his head 'no'.  Burns, who had
gone right back to work on a computer console even before the
conclusion of the interview, never looked up.
d3933 7
d3941 1
a3941 1
T + 33 days
d3943 4
a3946 7
After her one ill-fated attempt to butt in, Andrea had let Mercuriou
have the debates to himself.  One thing was for sure, though, and that
was that the crew of the _Mars_Explorer_, loved or hated, had become media
darlings, and Yeats was one of the big 'gets' for a TV interview.
Rather than returning to Mercuriou's format, Andrea decided to accept
an offer for a one-on-one interview from a prominent female journalist
with a reputation for objectivity.
d3948 1
a3948 2
"Captain Mercurio says the problem is democracy, that it's another
communism.  Do you agree?"
d3950 1
a3950 1
The NASA engineer thought for a moment before answering.
d3952 1
a3952 5
"Not really.  The problem is human nature.  Democracy is just another
political system.  In some ways it's better than others, in some ways
worse.  Ultimately, the solutions to our problems are spiritual and
not political.  Unfortunately, democracy tends to accentuate a lot of
problems, because you can't just go blame it off on some dictator."
d3954 5
a3958 1
"How does democracy accentuate problems?"
d3960 2
a3961 5
"Well, the problems have always been there.  Democracy shows us that
the problems aren't caused because people don't have political
representation.  Now people do have political representation, and a
lot of the problems are still here.  So, just giving political power
to the masses of people doesn't magically solve your problems."
d3963 1
a3963 4
"Dr. Yeats, you mentioned a moment ago that democracy is better than
some political systems, worse than others, or something to that
effect.  If I'm not reading too much into your words, can you give us
an example of a superior political system?"
d3965 1
a3965 6
"Well, like I said, our problems are spiritual more than political,
and thus we need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.  Now
take a monarch like King Arthur or King Solomon; you can have a good
king, genuinely interested in caring for his people, so yes, a good,
generous, tolerant monarchy would be superior to a self-serving and
violent democracy."
d3967 2
a3968 1
"So, do you advocate monarchy as a system of government?"
d3970 1
a3970 17
"I don't advocate anything as a system of government.  I advocate
Christianity as a system for people to live their lives.  Monarchy is
like any other system of government, you might get a good king for a
while, but eventually you'll get a bad one, so it's no answer.  If you
go back to the Old Testament, the book of First Samuel, I think, you
find the people actually _demanding_ a king!  We have this idea today
that a king is somehow imposed on people against their will, but in
those days it was the commonly accepted form of government.  And
Samuel basically told those people that they didn't need a king, that
all they needed was to follow the will of God, but they didn't want to
hear it.  So they got their king, it was Saul, and Samuel told them
again that if they and their king followed the will of God, things
would work out well for them, but if they didn't, there would be
problems.  It's a lot the same today.  People don't need a king, and
they don't need a democracy.  They need to follow the will of God, but
of course you've got half of them screaming that militant capitalism
_is_ the will of God, so there you go."
d3972 13
a3984 4
"So, doctor, I'm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say
that you advocate Christianity rather than any system of government.
For example, what do you say to Captain Mercurio's very vocal
criticisms of western society?"
d3986 13
a3998 1
The astronaut paused before responding.
d4000 2
a4001 7
"I think he makes a lot of good points, but this has been human
society since the dawn of time.  Take Saint Anthony of the Desert, for
example.  God appeared to him in a vision and told him to flee from
men, so he went to live in the desert, and founded the Christian
monastic tradition.  This was during the Roman Empire, when Christians
were thrown to the lions, so these problems have been around for a
while."
a4002 2
"Haven't we come a long ways from that?  We don't throw Christians to
the lions anymore."
d4004 1
a4004 4
"No, we don't, thank God, but it's still tough to live as Christians.
Generally, the people who rise to the top in human society do so
by abandoning Christian values, so living as a Christian generally
means that you're going to get a lot of doors slammed shut on you."
d4006 2
a4007 1
"Could you elaborate on that?  How do people not live as Christians?"
d4009 9
a4017 6
"Well, look around.  Christ gave us two great commandments, to love
God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And
he elaborated on them, and lived them in his own life.  I think the
second commandment is more obvious than the first; we look around and
see how we don't love each other as Christ taught, that's more obvious
that how we fail God."
d4019 1
a4019 2
"Could you be more specific; I'm not trying to be dense, but
why don't you think a Christian can rise to the top in our society?"
d4021 6
a4026 4
"Well, consider what Christ said.  He taught us to give to all those
who beg from us; that if someone asked to borrow from us we should
give without expecting anything in return.  If you do that, if you
give to all, you often end up with nothing, at least nothing material."
d4028 3
a4030 3
"Capitan Mercuriou has talked about making books and dictionaries
freely available and has been accused of theft.  Do you support
intellectual property rights?"
d4032 12
a4043 11
"Well, I think it's somewhat of a mute issue.  Christ said that if a
man steals your coat, you should give him your cloak as well - you
love your enemies, and not just in an abstract sense, either, you
really try to do good for your enemies.  So if someone steals your
intellectual property, the Christian response is the same as to any
other theft - you make sure the thieves have got the latest and most
up-to-date versions of your books or software.  When you take that
kind of an attitude, I think you quickly reach a point where you just
say that you'll publish all this information anyway, I mean, why would
you give to a thief, but withhold from someone who just asks
politely?"
d4045 2
a4046 1
"So do you advocate a welfare system of some kind?"
a4047 13
"Well, no, not if I understand your question, because welfare to me
implies some kind of government operation.  Christ didn't tell us to
give our money to the government to run welfare, he didn't tell us to
give our money to the church so it could fund charities, he told us,
he spoke to us as individuals, he said _you_, give to all those who
beg of _you_.  So, if you see someone standing by the road begging,
you stop and give them a dollar or two, if you see someone asking for
a ride, you pull over and ask them where they're going, if you see
someone sleeping in a park, you say 'hey, I've got a spare room, you
can come stay with me', or whatever.  And people don't want to do
that.  If they see a beggar, they keep driving, they choose leaders
that always tell us not to pick up hitchhikers, the guy in the park,
well, that's what the homeless shelter is for."
d4049 1
a4049 1
"But isn't it dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?"
d4051 1
a4051 6
"Yeah", Andrea replied, sucking in her breath, "picking up hitckhikers
is dangerous.  But we remember the story of the good samartain, we
remember that we're called to love our neighbors, and we don't let one
bad experience turn us against all hitchhikers."  She uttered the last
phrase as though a robot, it was her voice, she was preaching to
herself, but she didn't really beleive it.
d4053 2
a4054 7
"It's more dangerous not to pick them up.  It's dangerous because then
we're violating the commandments that Christ gave us to live by; we're
acting out of fear and not love.  And the reason someone, well a lot
of people, actually, like Captain Mercurio, really dislike democracy
is because people don't choose leaders who say, look, you should stop
and pick these people up, they choose leaders who say, no, don't do
that, think of how dangerous it is, put your own safety first."
a4055 2
"You mentioned homeless shelters, in a somewhat negative way.  Do you
not support homeless shelters?"
d4057 1
a4057 5
"Well, I've been in a few, many years ago, before I had a steady job
with NASA.  The problem with homeless shelters is that people think
because there's a homeless shelter, well, the problem's taken care
of, they don't have to do anything, but again, Christ tells us that
we should..."
d4059 10
a4068 3
"But can't people take advantage of that?  I mean, won't some people
just take and take and take without working or really doing anything
productive?"
d4070 2
a4071 13
"Sure, a lot of people will, in a lot of different ways.  Christianity
is about being taken advantage of, when you love unconditionally, when
you give unconditionally, when you forgive unconditionally, people
will just take and take and take, and most people, understandably,
don't want that, and that's why they really don't live as Christians.
They give up to a point and then they say no more.  But one of
Christ's stories was about a woman who came to the temple in Jerusalem
to give a donation.  There were all these other people who gave all
these big donations, and this old woman gave just two bits.  Jesus
told his diciples that she went away redeemed rather than the others,
because she had given all she had, while the others had just given
their surplus.  So it's not about how much you give, it's about you're
willingness to give all."
d4073 1
a4073 4
"Well, that raises a good point, that's been made by people like
Warren Buffett.  I mean, can't you do a lot more good in the world by
working hard, so then you'll have the money to spend on charities that
can really make a difference?"
d4075 3
a4077 8
"Well, now we come back to the first commandment, the one about loving
God.  The point isn't to do as much good as we can in the world, the
point is to live in harmony with God.  That's really what's going on
here, ultimately we're all spiritual beings, first and foremost, so
how much good we can do in the world is really secondary if we're not
living in harmony with God, so that's why the woman who just gives a
little goes away redeemed, because she's the one who's living in
harmony with God."
d4079 2
a4080 1
"What does it mean to live in harmony with God, how do we do that?"
d4082 1
a4082 9
"That's what Christ taught us.  That's what his Gospel teachings are
all about.  I mean, Christ could have chosen to be a political leader,
he was tempted to do that by the Devil, he could have liberated the
Jewish people from the Roman Empire, heck, he could have become the
Roman Emperor, he could have freed the slaves two thousand years ago,
he could have done a lot more 'good' in the world if he'd been
tougher.  But what he was trying to teach us is that living in harmony
with God, loving God, loving each other as sons and daughters of God,
is more important that all the 'good' you do."
d4084 1
a4084 2
"I don't think I understand, completely.  Isn't the 'good' we do, I
mean, isn't that what living in harmony with God is about?"
d4086 1
a4086 14
"No, not really, it's just an effect.  Christ taught us that faith in
God is the most important thing, and that our works come from our
faith.  Our good deads, our works, they are the outward expression of
our inward faith, but it's the faith that's the most important thing.
So you can do all kind of good works, but if the faith isn't there, it
doesn't amount for much.  On the other hand, if you have faith, then
it will be expressed in your works, because you'll always be looking
for ways to help people, to give to people, to forgive people, because
you love people, or at least try to.  I guess it's kinda like what
Marc, what Captain Mercurio did to defraud his investors, he created
some kind of robot that could cook dinner, but it didn't work the way
he said, because it actually had a person operating it.  Good works
are like that, it's not the outward appearance that's important, it's
what's going on behind the scenes."
d4088 2
a4089 1
"What do you think of the Christian right?"
d4091 6
a4096 20
"Well, the Christian right seems to be much more a political movement
than a spiritual one.  To listen to them talk, you'd think the
Christian gospel was mainly about sex, drugs, and alcohol.  Yet if you
look at the gospel, you find basically nothing about drugs and
alcohol, and only a little about sex.  Christ instead hammers
constantly on love, forgiveness, generosity.  Chirst say 'give to all
those who beg of you'.  He told one of his followers to sell all his
worldly possesions and give the money to the poor.  Go ahead - try it.
Sell all your worldly possessions, give the money to the poor, and see
how people treat you then.  The Christian right almost completely
ignores this.  They rail about sex, but are strangely silent about
the neighborhood merchant who puts a price tag on everything in his
store and is standing there behind the cash register to take your
money before you walk out the door.  And then you look at what they
really propose.  So much of it involves more and more government
regulation.  They want the government to ban abortions.  Look, I don't
support abortion, but having the government 'get tough' with abortion
clinics isn't the answer.  They're tough on crime.  Fine.  Christ said
love your enemies.  Why don't you see them agitating for decent
treatment of prisoners in jails?"
d4098 4
a4101 3
"You mentioned the treatment of prisoners.  The United States,
in particular, has all manner of regulations designed to ensure
humane treatment of prisoners.  How are they inadequate?"
d4103 1
a4103 15
"Well, I've never spent more than a night in jail, but if you look at
the videotapes of how prisons are run, they look to me like military
boot camps.  The prisoners are told when to get up, marched through
dining halls, assigned to work projects, ordered here and there.
Maybe more significantly, the prisons are seen as something between a
threat and a punishment.  They're there to create fear in people; you
obey the laws or else you go to jail.  In my mind, just about the only
reason to imprison someone is because they're dangerous to other
people and need to be isolated.  And once they've been isolated,
there's no reason to go beyond that.  Just give them an apartment in a
guarded complex, the level of security being dependent on how
dangerous they are.  What rational reason is there for anything else?
So much of how our prisons are run is based on anger and hatred.
People don't love their enemies; they hate them, and they want to make
them suffer, so that's why they want their prisons to be 'tough'."
d4105 1
a4105 4
"OK, we've only got a few minutes left, let me change the subject, at
least slightly.  You're a scientist, or at least an engineer, so what
do you say to people who claim that there's no scientific proof from
the existance of God, so it must be just a myth?"
a4106 9
"You know, I've been asked that question before and here's my answer:
Scientific proof is based on experiment.  Now, just because something
is factual doesn't mean we can design a experiment to test it.  For
example, you might as well ask if there is life elsewhere in the
universe.  Few people today would suggest that it's unscientific to
speculate thus, but any kind of experiment to exhaustively search the
universe for life is totally impractical.  So the question of
extraterrestrial life, while in no way unscientific in itself, admits
no realistic experiment, and thus no realistic scientific proof!"
d4108 1
a4108 12
"Now let's return to the question of God.  There is an experiment you
can perform to find out if God is real - you can die.  You can put a
gun to your head and pull the trigger, and you'll find out real quick
if there is life after death.  But, like searching the universe for
alien life, this experiment is somewhat unrealistic.  Most of us don't
want to perform that experiment just to satisfy our academic
curiosity.  Yet the fact remains that we will all die some day, and
then we'll know.  So my answer is that the existence of God and the
question of life after death is no more unscientific than speculating
about extraterrestrials, and to people who refuse to accept that I say
just wait - the day will come where you're going to find out all about
God."
d4110 10
a4119 3
"Well, thank you for joining us this evening.  My guest had been
Dr. Andrea Yeats, astronaut, philospher, and Christian.  We'll be back
in a minute with my final thought."
d4121 5
a4125 3
The entire crew had watched the broadcast, floating on the other
side of the TV camera.  After the program ended, they were
fairly quiet for a while, the captain in particular.
d4127 4
a4130 1
"You did really good, I was quite proud of you," he finally said.
d4132 2
a4133 5
Andrea's television interview aired four days later, to a large
audience.  It provoked widespread public response, evidenced by a
deluge of e-mails whose subject lines ranged the spectrum from "May
God bless you and your crew" and "Thank you, you are a genuine saint"
to "Christianity COMMANDS Capitalism" and "This is __HERESY__!!!".
d4135 5
a4139 1
"Live from Los Angeles" - name of the program?
d4141 2
d4144 1
a4144 1
T + 54 days
d4146 7
a4152 19
After almost two months in space, the constant TV interviews had died
down, the ship had assumed a stable configuration, and the _Mars_Explorer_
crew had settled into a kind of routine.  The 747's crowded crew
compartment was the hub of activity, with the remainder of the ship
docked to its upward-facing airlock.  The first module, docked
directly to the 747, had become basically an extension of the
aircraft, where the crew tended to take their meals and gather for
all-hands briefings.  Past the first module was a docking nexus, with
four modules extending out from its sides, and other module mated
above.  These four modules had become the crew quarters.  Alister and
Burns shared one, Vic had another.  Andrea, as the only woman
aboard, had an entire module all to herself, as did the Captain.  Next
came Module 2, primarilly used for storage of immediately needed
items, such as a supply of food rations, with enough open space in the
middle to allow easy passage to the next docking nexus, with four more
modules faning out from it.  Two were basically engineering workshops,
packed with a variety of tools Burns had brought up from Earth, a
third Vic had converted into the ship's sick bay, and the fourth was a
library, loaded mainly with Burns' various technical books.
d4154 1
a4154 1
CREW QUARTERS SHOULD BE A LITTLE FARTHER "UP"
d4156 5
a4160 7
Beyond the second module, the side modules were taken up with a mix of
greenhouse modules, of which there were twelve, and storage modules,
containing both supplies carried from Earth and the crew's refuse and
waste, which the Captain and Burns had forbid throwing overboard.
Though it would be some time before they figured how to convert their
waste into fertilizer for the plants, they knew that everything had to
be recycled if they were to make it to the red planet and back.
d4162 7
a4168 9
Past the greenhouse modules were the tank modules of fuel, oxidizer,
and water, attached to the sides of more docking nexuses,
interconnected by storage modules so packed with supplies that it was
almost impossible to move through them.  The crew hardly ever ventured
that far into the spaceship, having organized all of their valuable
supplies close to the 747 and relegated things like the dishwasher to
the more distant modules.  In all, there were 14 modules arranged in a
line, with 13 docking nexuses interconnecting them and with another 52
modules attached to the various docking ports.
d4170 5
a4174 6
They still had about a dozen of the rocket engines from the cargo
modules' second stages, attached, with their fuel tanks, to the ends
of the side modules jutting out from the docking nexuses.  Under
Burns' direction, three of the cargo modules were converted to act as
Orbital Transfer Vehicles, which could hold two or three people,
maneuver, and fire their single rocket engines.
d4176 1
a4176 8
Mercuriou had banned smoking in A-core, which had by now been
designated _Mars_Explorer_' bridge, so Burns now spent several hours a day in
B-core with a laptop computer propped against his crossed knee and a
marijuana joint in his left hand.  By the time Andrea opened the
pressure door and propelled herself in, the joint had burnt out and
was floating a meter above Burns' head.  The arid smell of marijuana
smoke hung in the air, not yet cleared out by the charcoal filters
humming in the background.
d4178 4
a4181 5
"Burns," Andrea started to say, but the ship's chief engineer put a
finger to his lips.  He was wearing one of his favorite T-shirts,
solid black except for a single word across the front, in neon-green
letters formed from a series of wide horizontal lines, like you might
see on a TV screen: MUTE.
d4183 2
a4184 5
Andrea waited, irate.  She didn't support the War on Drugs,
considering it another perfect example of how violently un-Christian
her society was, but it disturbed her that Burns worked on critical
software while intoxicated.  Finally he saved what he was working on,
pushed the laptop away, and looked up.
d4186 8
a4193 1
"Dr. Andrea Yeats," declared he, reveling in the the drug-induced haze.
d4195 2
a4196 3
Fastened to a sofa chair by a restraining strap, the NASA engineer watched
the laptop drift away from Burns, collide with a cushion he had aimed
it for, and rebound gently before coming to a halt.
d4198 20
a4217 1
"You always work stoned?" she asked.
d4219 3
a4221 1
"Not always, but right now a lot."
d4223 1
a4223 1
"Try every day."
d4225 6
a4230 1
Burns shrugged.
d4232 1
a4232 1
"I don't work stoned, why do you need to work stoned?"
d4234 1
a4234 1
"Because I'm bored."
d4236 2
a4237 1
"Bored?"
d4239 1
a4239 7
"Yes, this work is boring!  When I'm bored, it's easier to work
stoned.  After a while, it catches up with you, and you can't get
anything done because you're just so sick of looking at it, sober _or_
stoned.  That's the problem with being smart.  The smarter you get,
the more you can do, and the fewer other people there are who can help
do it.  Eventually, you get so smart that you can do almost anything,
and nothing actually gets done."
d4241 7
a4247 1
Andrea paused for a minute to think about this.
d4249 5
a4253 1
"What are you working on?" she finally asked.
d4255 2
a4256 4
"I'm running landing simulations for Mars, for about the
million-and-oneth time.  I'm going over the payload manifest _again_,
and trust me I've already gone over it sober several times, too.  I'm
looking at failure modes _again_ on a re-orbit attempt."
a4257 1
"Well, maybe I can help you out."
d4259 1
a4259 3
"Be my guest!" the one engineer exclaimed and motioned the other
towards the laptop.  Andrea didn't move.  Burns slowly started
laughing.
d4261 6
a4266 3
"Don't worry, doctor, I won't let you do all the work," he drawled
with the air of man who'd just maneuvered his way out of an unpleasant
task.  "You didn't come in here for that."
d4268 2
a4269 2
"Actaully, I wanted to ask you about the captain.  You've known him
a long time?"
d4271 4
a4274 6
Burns nodded.  "Since college," he replied.  "We'd roomed together
since our freshman year.  I met him looking for a place to live, and
both of us for the same reason.  We'd been admitted to the university
but didn't apply for housing until that deadline had passed.  We ended
up answering an ad from this medical student named Vic Antonov," he
laughed.  "We had a lot of great parties."
d4276 2
a4277 1
"What was he like?"
d4279 2
a4280 4
"Marc?"  Burns was quiet for a minute.  "He's a lot different now than
he was in college.  Back then, all he wanted was a joint, a beer and a
Latin dictionary and he was happy.  Now, he's a lot more...  driven,"
he concluded with a shrug.
d4282 2
a4283 1
"How did he get 'driven'?"
d4285 4
a4288 1
"I guess he did what he had to do to get by."
d4290 2
a4291 1
"He had to steal a billion dollars?"
d4293 2
a4294 5
"If he wanted to fly to Mars, he did," Burns replied quickly, then
slowed his speech.  "He learned to be tough, I guess."  Burns now
paused completely for a moment.  "The kid I knew in college wouldn't
have got us here... of course, the kid I _was_ in college wouldn't
have got here, either!"
d4296 1
a4296 2
Andrea was silent, then finally blurted out the question she had
been struggling to answer since almost their first day in orbit.
d4298 6
a4303 1
"Why did you agree to this?"
d4305 3
a4307 15
Burns stretched out and started laughing.  "Because I wanted to go to
Mars!"  he finally exclaimed.  "What did you say when he asked you -
'let me think about it for a few days'?"

Andrea smiled.  Maybe their reasons weren't so different after all.
At the time of the launch, events had happened so quickly that she
hadn't really thought through what Mercurio was proposing or what she
had accepted / gotten into.  All she had seen was an opportunity to
fly into space and the simple justification that there were some
people who seemed like they could use her help.  In fact, she had
almost assumed that they would quickly need her help to get back home.
In truth / fact, she was amazed by how little real help they had
needed, and over time had developed a deep respect for the ship's
chief engineer.  Its captain she was still trying to figure out / Its
captain was still a mystery to her.
a4308 1
"So, why is Mercurio captain and not you?" she now bluntly asked.
d4310 1
a4310 1
Burns thought for a minute.
d4312 1
a4312 2
"Well, it was his idea to fly to Mars, not mine.  And I don't want
to be captain, not really.  But there's more to it than that."
d4314 6
a4319 1
Patiently, Andrea waited in silence until Burns went on.
d4321 3
a4323 17
"Marc and I always got along well in college.  I could explain pretty
much all the math stuff anybody was studying and he, for his part,
could understand it.  On the other hand, he had some great ideas, and
one of the best was his Greek reading tool, and could really help him
with all the technical details.  And I found out something later on -
he can lead, he can manage, whatever you want to call it."

"Every job I had after college, I was either overwealmed with work, or
bored out my mind.  Usually both at the same time.  Then I thought
back on the Greek dictionary project.  All I had to do was design it.
Marc hired two comp-sci programmers with his own coin to program it
and I was just there to fill in the niches when needed.  I made a
better team with my college roommate than with any of those dot-coms,
and mainly because Marc only asked me to do a little.  He got two
other comp-sci students to do most of the programming on this thing; I
just had to design it, and could code or not code whatever part I felt
like."
d4325 5
a4329 47
"When Marc proposed this thing, it seemed ambitious as hell, but he
knows how to get things done.  He asked me what I needed from him, and
he told me what he needed from me.  He's done a really good job of
making sure I don't get overwealmed.  I still can't beleive it.  Even
though this thing is so big, it's almost the easiest thing I've ever
done.  A lot easier than some really simplier projects where I just
didn't get the things I needed to get them done.  I've just planned it
out, showed/explained all the plans to Marc, and he's figured out how
to get someone else to do 90% of it, and you better believe that a big
part of that was figuring out how steal a billion dollars.  I just do
about 10% of the work, and _usually_ the most interesting part
anyway... but not today," he concluded with a sigh.

#if HUMPH

"What do you mean, can you give me an example?" Andrea asked.

"Well, consider when we developed that fuel for NASA.  I told Marc we
could really use a new fuel, and that programs like _Gaussian_ might
let us design one, but you know I didn't (have to) write a single line
of code?  Oh, I had to do the router hack so we get some money to get
started, but then he just hired a bunch of programmers, bought the
software, sat me down with them to explain what we needed, and they
went and did all the mundane stuff.  And then he hired a bunch of
chemists to test it out, and got them to equip a chem lab.  I could do
as much or as little as the testing as I wanted.  And then he hired a
bunch of chemical engineers to design the manufacturing plant.  After
I designed the rocket engines, he hired a bunch of Mexicans to
actually run the factory to build them, and made sure they were smart
Mexicans, not just a bunch of guys who would slap something together
half-ass.  When it was time to equip the mission, I just came up with
a list of things we needed, and he went and got almost all of them.
And still understood everything enough to come back and ask me, well,
shouldn't we take pure strains of these crops in case the hybrids
don't grow well in space?  That's Marc.  He's the best boss I've ever
worked for, and a good friend, too."

#endif

"What do think of his politics?"

Burns shrugged.  "Who knows?  If you ask him straight up, he'll admit
that it's just his opinion and he might be wrong.  He's got one thing
right - most of the work we do is bullshit.  Who wants to write
another stupid routing protocol?  I just don't give a shit anymore
what 'the customer' wants!  Hell, if we're going to do something, fuck
it, let's fly to Mars!"
d4331 3
d4335 5
a4339 1
T + 60 days
d4341 2
a4342 2
"What are you, some kind of reporter now?  You gonna go around this
ship trying to draw everybody's life history out of them?"
d4344 5
a4348 9
Vic was peering at a television camera relaying an image from B-13,
one of the hydroponic pods.  He did a lot of work remotely, partly
because it avoiding having to go all the way down the cargo chain just
to do a transplant, partly because the robotics software Alister had
stolen from the Japanese enabled a lot of the work to be automated
anyway, and partly because his experience with hydroponics taught him
to keep all the pods sealed, to contain any fungal or virual outbreak
to a single pod.  Today, he was training a neural net to pick cherry
tomatoes with a robot hand.
d4350 3
a4352 1
Andrea thought for a moment before answering his question.
d4354 1
a4354 6
"I'm no reporter, but I usually have the opportunity to get to know a
crew before we're blasted into orbit together.  I've already spent
more time in space with you guys than with any other astronauts, and I
barely know anything about you!  Take your medical degree, for
example, I mean why aren't you using it?  Sounds to me like until this
gig came along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot."
d4356 3
a4358 3
The doctor sighed and tried to run the recognizer program again, but
again it labeled half the leaves on the plant as tomatoes.  Vic threw
his hands up in exasperation and pushed away from the computer.
d4360 4
a4363 2
"I don't know how this damn thing works!  What the hell do I know
about neural nets and Pavlov chains?!"
d4365 2
a4366 2
"You mean Markov chains; let me take a look," Andrea said, and took
over at the keyboard.
a4367 2
Vic watched from behind as she started reviewing all the settings
on the arcane Japanese system.
d4369 1
a4369 12
"I went to medicial school because I wanted to help people; learn to
heal their injuries, ease their pain, that kind of thing.  Mainly what
you learn is how to look things up in a book, recommend expensive
procedures done by for-profit companies just across the street from
your for-profit hospital, scribble out prescriptions for pricy
medicines, and pay your medical school loans.  And you know what the
worst thing was?  I thought medical school would be full of idealistic
young men and women determined to advance the frontiers of an age-old
and honorable profession.  Instead, most of my classmates just wanted
to know what on the next test so they could pass their class, get
their degree, and move on to the next step towards their
million-dollar beach house."
d4371 2
a4372 15
"Please grip about socialized medicine.  Hell, our medicine already is
socialized; it's just capitalist socialism instead of communist
socialism.  Doctors don't make the decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and
hospital administrators and pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom
line is still the same.  It's still some screwed up system that
everyone is a little cog in.  You can buck it.  But just like John
Cougar Mellancamp said, 'whenever I fight the system, the system
always wins'.  You fight the system, nobody'll hire you because you
won't churn out the billable hours, you very well may lose your
hospital privileges 'cause you don't have some 'group' you're part of,
if you just ask people to pay what they can afford, you'll get a
pittance, and on top of it all you'll still have medical school loans
to pay off, and they're astronomical because the medical schools
expect that you'll do like everybody else and make a killing, so they
want a nice little piece of the pie, too."
d4374 5
a4378 3
"And as far as sitting up in the hills growing pot," he concluded, "it
happens to be something I'm pretty good at, it beats sitting in some
stuffy office building, and looks like it just might get us to Mars!"
d4380 4
d4385 3
a4387 1
T + 80 days
d4389 2
a4390 1
"This is just the kind of thing I'm talking about."
d4392 2
a4393 2
Mercuriou was reading the latest news dispatches from Earth.  Two
giant oil companies had merged to form an even larger oil company.
d4395 4
d4400 2
a4401 1
T + 188 days
d4403 5
a4407 10
Meanwhile, the first crops from the ship's vegetable garden ripened,
just as the supply of military rations was growing noticably short.
Vic set about devising a high-protein diet plan, and soy beans, which
had grown quite readily in zero-g, topped his list.  The doctor
prepared his first batch in the Burns-devised vegetable steamer, which
superheated a pressurized canister of water before releasing it into
the chamber containing the soy beans.  As it left the canister, the
water, already heated beyond its conventional boiling point, burst
into steam with a loud hizzing that attracted the attention of the
young South African in the next module.
d4409 2
a4410 2
"Soy beans?" Alister questioned, imagining the pressed blocks of
tofu he had habitually passed by in the supermarket.
d4412 2
a4413 1
"I rather like them steamed," Vic replied.
d4415 2
a4416 3
"I don't know about this, mate," the programmer quibbled as he
inspected some of the freshly picked raw beans.  "I'll eat them,
though," he quickly added.
d4418 3
a4420 2
"Ever been to a sushi restaurant?" Vic asked, with a raised eyebrow
that indicated he thought he knew something his friend didn't.
a4421 1
"Sure, I love sushi!  Where's the tuna hand roll?"
d4423 1
a4423 1
Vic ignored the question.
d4425 6
a4430 1
"Ever had those green beans they serve as appetizers?"
d4432 3
a4434 2
"Yeah," Alister replied, glancing back down at the soy pods in his
hand.  "That's what these are?"
d4436 3
a4438 6
The doctor nodded affirmatively as he opened the steamer and let some
of the cooked soy beans, along with an ample quantity of steam, float
out into the air.  The aroma of freshly steamed vegatables permeated
the air and quickly brought work to a standstill on a spaceship where
plastic-wrapped spaghetti pouches and freeze dried peaches had been
the norm for months.
d4440 10
a4449 4
"What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated in with Burns
from one direction, almost simultaneously as Andrea entered from a
side module, where she had been calibrating instrumentation for an
upcoming survey run.
d4451 3
a4453 1
"Are these from the garden?" she asked.  "Great!"
d4455 1
a4455 1
"Guess those Pavlov chains worked out after all!"
d4457 3
d4461 1
a4461 1
T + 231 days
d4463 4
a4466 10
In retrospect, the first crops harvested from the garden had marked a
turning point in the flight of the _Mars_Explorer_.  With the stress of the
initial months behind them, the crew of the _Mars_Explorer_ had settled into
a leisurely routine.  Captain Mercuriou was slowly rereading
Plutarch's _Lives_of_the_Nobel_Gretians_and_Romans_, this time in the
original Latin; Vic undertook a careful breeding program to develop
strains of important food crops (and marijuana) specifically adapted
for growth in zero-gee; Burns and Andrea were working on their mission
plan for a Mars landing; and his spare time Alister was learning to
play the guitar.
d4468 2
a4469 5
"Hmmph!" Marc verbalized this particular evening while everyone was
gathered in the B-core.  He was reading from a detached LCD panel
while Alister practiced his scales, Burns and Andrea worked on some
computer program, and Vic was listening to a rock album on headphones
in the light haze of a marijuana joint he had recently passed around.
d4471 6
a4476 4
"Sparta must have been an amazing place to live," the Captain
speculated, as Vic removed his headphones.  "You have to wonder if
Marx knew anything of its history.  I don't know, but Sparta has got
to be one of the greatest socialist success stories ever."
d4478 2
a4479 2
"Were they Communists?" Alister asked, setting aside his instrument
and shaking his left hand.
d4481 3
a4483 5
"Not exactly," Marc replied.  "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."
d4485 2
a4486 2
"That's insane!" the youth replied.  "Why on Earth wouldn't they
feed their own children?"
d4488 1
a4488 1
"Lycurgus wanted a nation of warriors... and he got it."
a4489 2
"The determination of mankind to train their children to hate and kill
_is_ amazing," Andrea interjected.
d4491 1
a4491 4
"Well, maybe you can be our twentieth-first-century Lycurgus, Doctor,"
Marc speculated with a mischevious grin, as Vic began to chuckle.
"Maybe you can prescribe a set of rules for us to raise our children
to be Christians instead of warriors."
d4493 8
a4500 1
"I think Jesus already gave us those rules far better than I could."
d4502 3
a4504 5
"The problem is that people don't live by those rules," Vic noted.
"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."
d4506 5
a4510 7
"I don't know about that," the Captain retorted.  "William Gibson
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."
d4512 2
a4513 5
"Gibson had some other explainations, too, you know," Andrea noted.
"Like the intolerance of the Catholic Church for all those Arians it
declared heritics.  And since so many of the barbarian tribes adhered
to the Arian beliefs, well...  You're not the only one here who's read
_Decline_and_Fall_."
d4515 1
a4515 1
"No, I see not," Mercuriou answered a thoughtful pause.
d4517 7
a4523 4
"Yes," Vic answered, "but a large part of Christianity was all 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."
d4525 6
a4530 2
"Hmmm," Marc replied thoughtfully, "yes, a large part of any religion
is about propping up the existing social order."
d4532 12
a4543 8
"What amazes me about Western civilization", Vic continued, "is this
notion that the individual somehow owes something to the state, or at
least to the society.  If anything, the Native Americans believed that
society had a responsibility to the individual to raise him to be
independent.  This modern morality is that people have some kind of
obligation to work.  That's gotten embedded into the religion along
with all this other stuff that justifies the government.  It's all
part of propping up an industrialized society."
d4545 3
a4547 2
"But people have to work to live, right?"  Alister wondered.  "I mean,
people have always had to eat, right?"
d4549 1
a4549 20
"Yes and no," the doctor replied.  "Yes, people have always had to
work to eat, but this notion that people have to work
_for_the_society_ is what I'm talking about.  Again, take the Native
American Indians, for example.  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, therefore, was perfectly voluntary.  If anyone didn't
want to be there, they could just get up and leave.  Murders, armed
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.  Thus, the individual is raised
to work for the society, and the society has taught the individual
that they are morally obligated to work.  Inevitably, this morality
has worked its way into the religion as well."
d4551 4
a4554 3
"And the philosophers keep talking about freedom," Marc added, "but
how can you have freedom in a world where everyone is raised to
be dependent on society?"
d4556 3
a4558 1
"Exactly."
d4560 3
a4562 6
"So the philosophers have turned to politics to try and find their
freedom there.  Their latest 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 they don't have freedom, they'll
scream you down as a Communist and all the while they're surrounded by
a society based on nothing but forced labor."
d4564 4
a4567 1
"Christianity isn't based on forced labor," Andrea noted after a pause.
d4569 3
a4571 1
"Could have fooled me."
d4573 4
a4576 2
"You need to distinguish true Christianity from, how did Vic put it,
bastardized Christianity?"
d4578 2
a4579 1
The ship's doctor nodded in assent.
d4581 2
a4582 7
"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."
d4584 6
a4589 5
"That sounds good, Andrea," Marc slowly replied, "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 from them."
d4591 2
a4592 2
"That's funny, Marc, because I don't think I took anything from
anyone.  Faith in God got _me_ here."
d4594 4
d4599 4
a4602 1
T + 407 days
d4604 1
a4604 5
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.  The
crowd, high on liquor and pot, sweat and sex, moved and vibed with the
lasted rock/rap hit.
d4606 5
a4610 2
	games are addictive
	games are insane
d4612 2
a4613 4
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.
a4614 2
	games waste your time
	games waste your brain
d4616 1
a4616 2
"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.
d4618 1
a4618 2
	books are the ticket
	books are the tool
d4620 4
a4623 4
"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!"
d4625 1
a4625 2
	books ain't for nerds
	books ain't for fools
d4627 9
a4635 2
"What the hell are you doing!?" Mercuriou shouted, "You're supposed to
be looking for Andrea Yeats!"
d4637 1
a4637 1
"Wha... what?" Alister blubbered as he jolted awake.
d4639 5
a4643 6
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.
d4645 10
a4654 3
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._
d4656 4
d4661 1
a4661 1
T + 424 days
d4663 3
a4665 1
"Look we've made it this far without any serious problems."
d4667 3
a4669 6
"Yeah, but all the really critical stuff's been well tested up until
now.  Think about it.  We test-fired all the rocket engines before
using any of them.  We burned extra fuel to keep the aerodynamic
stresses on the 747 within its normal flight tolerances.  We
brought spare fuel canisters in case the supply tanks didn't
work."
d4671 2
a4672 3
"And we didn't really need any of those things.  Look, the
bottom line is that we said we were going to Mars, and now
we're here and we have to land."
d4674 1
a4674 6
"Why do you have to land?"  Andrea interjected.  The NASA engineer had
floated into the room unnoticed during their debate.  "Why can't you
just go back to Earth?  You've already accomplished more than any
other space mission to date.  _Mars_Explorer_ will go down along with with
Gagarin's flight and Salyut 1.  So what that they hadn't gotten to
Armstrong's moon landing..."
d4676 2
a4677 3
"We have to land!" the captain shouted.  Alister and Vic stopped work
two modules away and moved closer to try to overhear more of the
conversation.
d4679 1
a4679 5
"If we don't land," he continued, "they'll say we failed, and then the
capitalists will just come back two years from now and make the first
landing on Mars; hell, they'll probably 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!"
d4681 4
a4684 2
"So let them!" Andrea shot back, drawing only a snort in reply.  "Why
do you have to risk everything just to win your private little war?"
d4686 11
a4696 5
"Well, maybe you find this hard to understand from your cushy NASA
perch," Marcellus continued, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "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."
d4698 5
a4702 3
"Don't you?  Haven't you?" she challenged him.  "How many millions did
_you_ steal, Marc?  How many toes did you step on?  Don't tell me you
haven't become ruthless!"
d4704 1
a4704 1
They locked eyes.
d4706 1
a4706 4
"We are landing this plane on Mars," Mercurio stated slowly and
firmly, in a no-nonsense command tone of voice.  "That has been the
goal of this mission from day one.  We take the risks as they come.
We have a mission plan and we are going to carry it out."
d4708 1
a4708 4
"OK, if we're going to do that..." Burns started, then stopped as
Andrea flung herself through the hatchway, muttering something
about "just like NASA" as she zoomed away through the spacecraft.
Mercuriou watched her go.
d4710 2
a4711 2
"If you learn to live with disappointment," he noted, "she'll never
leave you for another man."
d4713 7
a4720 1
T + 637 days
a4721 2
MAYBE THIS IS WHERE MERCURIOU COMPLEMPLATES PLANTING A U.S. FLAG
UPSIDE-DOWN IN THE SOIL
d4723 1
a4723 5
"We saw this with the _Challenger_ accident," Burns was saying.  More
than a million people were watching the crew conference on television.
Most cable TV systems now carried the _Mars_Explorer_ video feed for at least
part of the day, and the video bar "Live - Mars Orbit" had become a
standard fixture on many a television.
d4725 1
a4725 4
"The first indications of the problem were visual, but nobody was
looking at those particular cameras during the launch.  And although
we've got cameras we can operate remotely, the fact remains that a
manned presence in orbit is still by far our best observation option."
d4727 1
a4727 3
"So someone has to stay behind," Merceriou stated.  It wasn't
a surprise; landing options had been discussed even before
construction had began.
d4729 3
a4731 2
"Since I'm the only one here with experience piloting a 747, I figure
I have to go," Burns said.
d4733 1
a4733 2
Mercuriou spoke again, after a pause.  "I think the command function,
so to speak, has to remain in orbit, so I'll stay here."
d4735 2
a4736 4
"Alister should stay, too," Burns continued.  "I think it's important
for one of the engineers to remain in orbit, and he knows more about
the overall setup of the spaceship than anyone but me, well, maybe
Andrea, too, at this point."
d4738 1
a4738 2
The South African was staring silently at the bulkhead in front of
him.  "Sorry, kid," Burns apologized.  Alister nodded.
d4740 1
a4740 5
"I'll stay," Andrea volunteered.  "Alister can go, if he wants, but I
think I've got a pretty good idea of how the ship is run that Marc and
I can handle things here."  She had remained silent up until this
point in the conversation, mainly because her opposition to the
entire landing attempt was by now well known to the crew.
d4742 1
a4742 2
"You'll probably need help with the refueling, if nothing else," Vic
told Burns.  "If Alister doesn't go, I will."
d4744 1
a4744 2
"So," Mercuriou summarized, "Burns goes, Andrea and I stay, and either
Vic or Alister goes, and the other one stays."
d4746 1
a4746 2
"Let Alister go," Vic continued.  "He's young.  Give him the chance to
walk on Mars."
d4748 2
a4749 3
"No," Merceriou stated, after a pause.  "Andrea knows a lot about the
ship, that's true, but I won't have both the engineers on the ground."
Now it was his turn to apologize to Alister.  "Sorry, kid."
d4751 1
d4753 1
a4753 1
T + 639 days
a4754 6
"Anything could go wrong.  You're not landing on a runway; your tires
could blow out; you could even crash.  You could be unable to refuel
for some reason.  We have absolutely no ground support _whatsoever_.
We've never even _attempted_ a reentry in this vehicle, and it certainly
wasn't designed for it.  And we have no rescue option should
_anything_ go wrong."
d4756 1
a4756 3
For the last time, Andrea was trying to convince Merceriou to cancel
the landing attempt.  The meeting was in the captain's quarters; only
Burns, Yeats, and Merceriou were present.
d4758 1
a4758 3
"There was no rescue option on Apollo, either," the captain noted.
"When they had problems on Apollo 13, they just had to work it out,
and that's what we'll have to do if we have problems here."
d4760 4
a4763 10
"Apollo was risky.  Three astronauts had already died in Apollo 1;
they were in this crazed moon race with the Russians trying to prove
that communism wasn't some great advanced new society, a lot like this
crazy venture which is half about trying to prove that capitalism and
democracy aren't all they're cracked up to be, and _still_, Apollo was
a better design."  Merceriou started to shake his head, but Andrea
wouldn't be stopped.  "The entire vehicle was designed from the start
with spaceflight in mind; they had tested the command module on
Apollos 7 and 8; they had tested the lunar module on Apollos 9 and
10."
d4765 1
a4765 3
"The moon does make a lot more sense than Mars," Burns observed.
"Heck, the astroid belt makes a lot more sense than Mars.  We've
only..."
d4767 1
a4767 1
Mercuriou cut him off, his temper short.
d4769 1
a4769 3
"We're not in lunar orbit, this isn't a mission to the asteriod belt,
this is a mission to Mars, that's where we are, and that's where we're
going."
d4771 1
a4771 1
Burns broke the silence that followed.
d4773 4
a4776 4
"I'm just trying to give you an objective engineering assessment, Marc.
We're picked a hard target.  The moon's got one-sixth Earth gravity
and no atmosphere.  Nobody's ever attempt to land on another planet
before.  We're definitely pushing the envelope in a big way."
d4778 1
a4778 2
"Bottom line, will this work or not - objective engineering
assessment?"
d4780 3
a4782 6
"I can't read into a crystal ball, Marc.  Yes, for all it's
disadvantages, I think the vehicle is as sound as Apollo, 'cause
Apollo had big disadvantages too.  Spaceflight is _dangerous_.  More
than anything else, as I've told you from the beginning, we should
have more than one ship.  Three ships worked for Christopher Columbus,
and it's hard to argue with the results from _that_ mission."
d4784 3
a4786 2
"So you think we should go back and get two more ships?"  A twinge
of sarcasm had now crept into the captain's voice.
a4787 3
Burns sniffed.  "Ideally, we should never had left Earth orbit without
more ships.  Maybe it would've made more sense to wait to see if we
couldn't get someone else to come with us."
d4789 1
a4789 2
Mercuriou drifted backwards, stared at the posters on the
wall of his cabin and slowly shook his head.
d4791 13
a4803 1
"We didn't come all this way to turn back.  We're landing on Mars."
d4805 2
d4808 3
a4810 1
T + 650 days
d4812 8
a4819 8
The bottom line was that any reentry attempt, even without a landing,
required flying the 747 in atmospheric flight.  Only Burns had ever
flown a 747.  Furthermore, the thin Martian air required a much higher
airspeed and possibly presented handling challenges to the pilot.
Only Burns, it seemed, could make a reentry attempt, and after the
incident in the asteroid belt, the Captain decided against sending
Alister with him.  Finally, it was decided that he would pilot the
aircraft alone.
d4821 3
a4823 3
Disaster on Mars.  Burns attempts to land the 747, but they hadn't
gotten everything figured quite right.  The wings snap off during
reentry and the whole thing goes up in a fireball.  Burns dies.
a4824 5
The wings of the aircraft had been designed to flex, yet the carbon
coating was rigid.  Burns and Alister had correctly calculated the
aerodynamic forces from the reentry, and the dense layer of carbon
was strong enough to withstand those forces, yet hairline cracks
began to creep into the carbon during reentry.
d4826 1
a4826 2
Burns' first warning was a loud crack that sounded like a firecracker
or gunshot.
d4828 2
a4829 1
"What was that?" he wondered aloud.
d4831 4
a4834 7
The answer came less than a second later, as the left wing tore away
from the fuselage and slammed into the tail before falling away
towards the red planet below.  Liquid hydrogen gushed from the jagged
hole in the plane's left side as it swerved into an uncontrollable
spin.  The right wing crumbled under the new stresses, but before much
more could happen one of the remaining engines ignited the leaking
hydrogen and the entire aircraft disappeared into a ball of flame.
d4836 2
a4837 4
In orbit, the Icarus crew were first stunned by the sudden loss of
telemetry, then watched speechless as the aircraft flamed red on black
against the planet surface below, then disintegrated into hundreds of
tiny meteors that streaked silently into the Martian dawn.
d4839 2
a4840 1
-----
d4842 1
a4842 12
The carbon coating itself was strong enough to withstand the
forces of reentry and thick enough to act as an effective heatshield.
The coverings on the wheelwells was a different story.  Removing
them to test them, then replacing them and recovering them had
introduced cracks and fissures along their edges, where they
joined to the main body of the spaceplane.  Now, during reentry,
the superheated gases began working into these cracks around
the edges.  Finally, one of the coverings detached completely,
broke off in a single piece, and let the superheated gas pass
through to the aluminum airplane skin beneath.  In less than
a second, a hole the size of the wheelwell had burn completely
through the plane.
d4844 2
a4845 3
From orbit, the _Mars_Explorer_ crew saw a red dot appear on the left
wing of the spaceplane about a minute into reentry.  On board
the 747, Burns heard a load pop.
d4847 3
a4849 1
"What was that?" he wondered aloud.
a4850 4
Alarms started going off in the cockpit.  The puncture had
passed right through the wing's fuel tank and ignited the
fuel, which now poured out the hole in the top of the wing
in a geyser of flame.
d4852 1
a4852 3
"Looks like something on the left wing," Mercurio noted, looking over
at the computer telemetry coming from the spaceplane.  "You might have
lost part of the heatshield."
d4854 4
a4857 3
Even before he finished speaking, the same thing happened to the
wheelwell covering on the right wing and a second geyser of
flame erupted from it.
d4859 1
a4859 4
"I've got flames coming out of the right wing now," Burns observed
from the right-hand pilot's seat, looking over his shoulder.  "We
might be losing the heatshield," he speculated as a knot formed
tighter in his stomach.
d4861 2
a4862 3
There was nothing he could do at the moment about the heatshield, but
as great as that concern was, he also had to worry about the fuel in
the wing tanks.  Without sufficient fuel, he couldn't return to orbit.
d4864 1
a4864 4
"I'm aborting reentry," he declared as he made a snap decision.
Starting the engines for a return to orbit would be dangerous,
but if he lost much of the fuel, it'd be a moot point, since he'd
lack the fuel to return to orbit.
d4866 1
a4866 2
In orbit, Andrea suddenly realized why the two failure points
seems so symmetrically positioned on the wings.
d4868 1
a4868 2
"It's the wheelwells," she declared, and the rest of the crew
turned towards her.  "The wheelweels are failing."
d4870 4
a4873 6
Before anyone could say another word, or do anything, the third
wheelweel, almost directly beneath the cockpit, failed.  A torrent of
flame erupted into the cockpit from below.  Clad in his spacesuit,
Burns was swept out into the Mach 13 flowstream.  The acceleration
alone probably killed him instantly, even before his spacesuit was
consumed by the raging flames that engulfed the crew compartment.
d4875 3
a4877 2
Vic watched the fireball erupt like a tank commander watching
an armor piercing round headed straight for his turret.
d4879 1
a4879 4
_Well_, _this_is_it_, he thought.  A calm peace enveloped his soul.
_Now_I_get_the_answer_key_for_the_test._ An image of Andrea Yeats
flashed through his mind and a strangly Christian phrase came to mind.
_Father,_into_your_hands_I_commend_my_spirit._
d4881 3
a4883 4
From orbit, the crew watched a third speck of red appear at the
front of the plane, neatly centered, just short of the nose.
At the same moment, all the telemetry ceased, as the cockpit
computers were destroyed by the flames from the breach.
d4885 2
a4886 1
"Burns?" Mercurio asked a dead com link.  "Burns?"
d4888 4
a4891 5
Without control computers to balance manuevering thrusters and control
surfaces, the spaceplane lost its equilibrium, pitched back and began
to yaw.  The aerodynamic forces of the hypersonic airflow overwealmed
the now unstable spaceplane.  The left wing snapped off the
fuselage, and slammed into the tail...
d4893 3
a4895 2
A half-hour time lag in communications left both NASA and the rest of
Earth as passive observers of the dramatic events.
d4897 7
d4905 1
a4905 1
T + 651 days
d4907 1
a4907 1
"OK, now this is what Alister recorded on the high-speed film."
d4909 1
a4909 4
Kyle's face disappeared and the video transmission changed into a
crystal-clear and dramatic vision of the last seconds of the 747, seen
from almost directly above, being buffeted in slow motion by wind
gusts.
d4911 6
a4916 1
"We've been able to enhance it now to clearly show the eddies."
d4918 2
a4919 9
The monitor still showed the 747, now overload with a grid of hundreds
of tiny pressure vectors.  They clearly showed very strong vortexs
coming off the running engines, enlarging and growing instead of
contracting, all turning counterclockwise and forming into a massive
counterclockwise disturbance that engulfed the aircraft.  Just as it
began to break up, NASA Houston cut back onto the monitor.  Kyle was
sitting in his accustomed place behind a long desk with computer
monitors strung out in front of it and white-shirted engineers both
standing and seated behind.
d4921 3
a4923 1
Kyle's face cut back onto the monitor.
d4925 2
a4926 5
Andrea squirmed.  She wanted to see the final breakup in slow
motion, but she could get that later from Alister.  More than
anything, she wanted to interject and ask Kyle to show the
rest of the film, but the 30-minute communications time lag
prevented it.
d4928 1
a4928 10
"Andrea, we don't have any idea what happened other than it looks like
the engines triggered a massive atmospheric disturbance, and absolutely
nothing in any of our Martian atmospheric models predicts anything
like it.  There were a lot of things we were afraid could go wrong
with the vehicle but this wasn't one of them.  Incidently, our
spectroscope analysis showed water vapor in the engine's wake,
which isn't produced by ten-thirty-three and isn't in the Martian
atmosphere, so we're wondering if something down there 
in the reaction byproducts triggered additional reactions in
the Martian atmosphere, but this is all just educated guesswork."
a4929 4
"And we still don't think the crash was survivable, so I really
have to advise against your resupply plan.  I know you want
to do it, and so do I, but I'm looking at it from the angle
of maybe needing those supplies to get the three of you home."
d4931 1
a4931 1
"That's all for now."
d4933 6
a4938 3
The transmission ended and was replaced by the usual screen cluster on
the projector - a diagram of their orbit position, their coordinates
in three different reference frames, a clock in universal time.
d4940 7
a4946 3
The two astronauts were silent.  Mercuriou could have been viewing the
transmission as well from his cabin, but there was no immediate way to
tell.
d4948 2
a4949 2
Alister said nothing, but stared at Andrea, almost dumbly awaiting
instructions.
d4951 2
a4952 1
"The resupply module?" she asked.
d4954 1
a4954 2
"It's got everything on our primary checklist, and a couple of things
from our secondary, too."
d4956 2
a4957 1
"Let's see."
d4959 1
a4959 4
Alister scribbled an instruction on his tablet and the checklist
appeared in a window on Andrea's. _Kyle_will_want_to_see_this_.
She scribbled another instruction on her machine and a copy
of the file began its 10,000,000 km (check this) journey.
a4960 11
She knew everything on both lists, having helped compose them, and
skipped the primary checklist, since Alister said it was loaded.  That
meant they had oxygen, water, first aid equipment, radio equipment,
rescue balls, both large - a good-sized, circular tent when inflated,
and small - two men in spacesuits could just fit into one, and a small
quanity of the remaining military rations.  It was the secondary
checklist she was more concerned with, and not all of it, but only the
part that contained things more valuable, more irreplacible.  They had
begun to form in her mind a third checklist even.  None of them were
packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Mars_Explorer_ would then be left
with only two.
d4962 1
a4962 3
Alister made her first command decision, but said nothing and instead
excused herself from the bridge and entered the captain's quarters,
closing the hatch behind her.
d4964 6
a4969 1
Less than sixty seconds later she was back.
d4971 1
a4971 1
"What'd he say?" Alister asked.
d4973 19
a4991 1
"He said that I'm in command, that I should do whatever I want."
d4993 2
a4994 1
"OK."
d4996 5
a5000 2
"Remove the spacesuits from the resupply module and launch it.  I want
a bulls-eye on the 747's crash site."
a5001 7
The resupply module was launched the same way all the others had been.
Nearly a hundred of the silicon carbide engines Burns had
mass-produced in Mexico had been themselves packed ten at a time into
cargo modules and launched.  The EVA to place the engines
on the fuel modules had been performed.  One of them had
been manuefered and attached to an empty, cleaned fuel module
docked to bay one.
d5003 1
d5005 2
d5008 1
a5008 1
T + 652 days
d5010 3
a5012 1
"I'm placing you under a suicide watch."
d5014 1
a5014 1
"You're doing what?"
d5016 4
a5019 3
Mercuriou turned away from the window and confronted his first officer.
Secretly, Andrea was glad to see this reaction, much more so than
quiet resignation, but this she tried not to show.
d5021 1
a5021 1
"You heard me."
d5023 1
a5023 2
The Captain emitted a "Humph", "So what's this suicide watch supposed
to be?  You've got a police guard in mind?"
d5025 5
a5029 1
"Me.  I'm the police guard.  I'm not leaving you out of my sight."
d5031 1
a5031 1
Merceriou took this in slowly.
d5033 1
a5033 1
"OK," he shrugged at last and turned back to the window.
d5035 1
a5035 1
"I've been trying to think of some kind of memorial service for Burns."
d5037 1
a5037 1
After a pause, he nodded.
d5039 5
a5043 2
"I've thought of sending something down to Mars, like burning up a capsule
in the atmosphere, but I don't know if we want to use the fuel."
d5045 1
a5045 1
"Why not?"  Mercuriou said.  "We've got plenty of it."
d5047 9
a5055 1
"Yes, we do." Andrea replied.
d5057 1
d5059 7
a5065 1
T + 653 days
a5066 1
The is another staff meeting.  The Captain was present, but silent.
d5068 1
a5068 4
"We can't assemble the cargo modules without the 747," Alister interjected.
"At least, we can't yet.  I need to run some simulations.  We've got
the cargo modules from the asteroid belt that we rigged to push things
around, but I've got to figure how to get them lined up in a row."
d5070 5
a5074 1
"How do we do that?" Andrea asked.
d5076 2
a5077 1
"I don't know."
d5079 4
a5082 1
The room fell silent.
d5084 1
a5084 1
"I guess I've got to think about it for a while."
d5086 1
a5086 4
"Well, we've got NASA monitoring all of this.  Kyle," she asked the
video camera, "could you give us some help putting the cargo modules
together?  We'll send you copies of the simulation software, and I
think you've already got the manifests."
d5088 6
a5093 1
"We've also got to have some kind of memorial service."
d5095 1
a5095 3
Turning back to Alister, she tried reassure him.  "Don't worry, we've
got a lot of people back home who will help us, and I've got more
hours of spaceflight logged than anyone else here."
d5097 2
a5098 3
Alister furrowed his eyebrows.  It was the first time he had thought
about it, but Dr. Andrea Yeats would for many years hold the record
for most lifetime hours of spaceflight.
d5100 2
d5103 2
a5104 1
T + 654 days
d5106 1
a5106 13
The Captain stopped participating in staff meetings.  He respected
Andrea's 'suicide watch' by remaining in the room, but Alister and the
women from NASA 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 hour-long time lag required for the signal to reach
her, then for her response to return to Earth.  They arranged an
elaborate system of communications, transmitting each other a sumary
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.
d5108 1
a5108 2
"Oh, and thought you might want to see this," Kyle announced towards
the end of his 0800 transmission, the first of the morning.
d5110 12
a5121 3
He held a popular American newsstand tabloid to the camera.
Alister's face dominated the front, which asked 'Can the kid get
them home?'
d5123 3
a5125 8
"Just to let you know the details, there's a panel of 'experts',
telling what Vic and Burns' last moments must have been like, how
you're all on your own now to do all these critical orbital
calculations, and, oh yeah, that apparently some of Nostradomes's
quatrains refered to the _Mars_Explorer_ - something about "the great bird
crippled in the night" - looks like the death of your brilliant chief
engineer is only the first of many woes to befall you guys, and that
none of you will ever make it back to Earth alive."
d5127 19
a5145 3
"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!"
d5147 11
d5159 10
a5168 1
T + 657 days
d5170 7
a5176 2
"It's been a week now since we have lost our friends," Mercuriou
stated.  Everyone else was silent.
d5178 6
a5183 4
"We have no graves to dig, we have no bodies to bury.
 We have our memories, and we have their dreams.
 We have hope; we have loss.
 We have the past, and we have the future."
d5185 8
a5192 2
It became that the captain was extemporizing, trying to find a way
to finish.  Andrea finished for him.
a5193 2
"We have the hope of seeing them again."
 
d5195 1
a5195 1
T + 658 days
d5197 1
a5197 2
Alister begins maneuvering the cargo modules.  He can get them home,
but the trip's going to take a lot longer than anyone had planned on.
d5199 2
a5200 3
Without the 747,  all they could do was line up all the modules
in more or a less a row, with one rocket engine in the very rear,
and spend days under light thrust to make a burn.
d5202 1
d5204 1
a5204 1
T + 690 days
d5206 1
a5206 4
Mercuriou paused at the sickbay hatch.  Nobody had opened it since
Vic's death.  He keyed the lock, opened the hatch and pulled himself
through.  Yeats followed behind as the captain began looking for the
ibuprofin tablets.
d5208 1
a5208 1
"So what are you thinking?" she said after a moment.
d5210 3
a5212 2
He answered with a snort as he retrieved the bottle.  "You don't want
to know what I'm thinking."
d5214 2
a5215 1
"Yes, I do."
a5216 1
He looked up at her.  "This part of your suicide watch?"
a5217 1
"No, I really want to know what you're thinking."
d5219 1
a5219 4
He looked back down at the capsules in his hand, dry swallowed two and
shoved the rest back into the container.  Then he floated still and
was silent for a while.  Encompassing sickbay with a wave of his arm,
he answered.
d5221 4
a5224 3
"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."
d5226 9
a5234 1
"We all knew it was dangerous..." she started to answer.
d5236 6
a5241 3
"No.  You were right.  I've cut so many corners on this thing, this
mission, I might as well have reached out and killed them myself.
I... I just don't...  I just should never have come."
d5243 5
a5247 2
Andrea lowered her voice, moved closer, and took Marcelius Mercurio by
the arm.
d5249 7
a5255 4
"Look, let me tell you something I've never really told anyone.  I've
been on two space shuttle launches, and watched a dozen more from
Mission Control.  And every time, I mean _every_time_ they say 'Go at
throttle up'..."  Her voice drifted off and she choked back tears.
d5257 1
a5257 3
"You know why Challenger blew up?  The engineers knew it was too cold
to launch.  But the managers thought, well, maybe we can let it slid a
bit this time, it's always worked before, no big deal."
d5259 2
a5260 7
"Everyone cuts corners," she continued.  "People cut corners driving
their cars - 'oh, I'm not that tired, I'll be OK to drive' - people
cut corners at work - 'it'll be OK, we need to get it out by the
deadline' - people cut corners at home - 'Johny'll have another ball
game next week, I'll make that one'.  People cut corners all the time
- it's a fact of life," she emphasized as he shook his head and pulled
away.
d5262 4
a5265 1
"Not when people's lives are at stake," he answered.
d5267 1
a5267 1
"So you're a perfectionist," she stated in a matter-of-fact tone.
d5269 10
a5278 1
"You're damn right I'm a perfectionist," he shot back.
d5280 1
a5280 6
"And they died because you weren't perfect.  Your plan wasn't perfect,
your ship wasn't perfect, and you weren't perfect."  He looked her
right in the eye.  "But _I_ knew your plan wasn't perfect, and I came
anyway.  And they knew it wasn't perfect, and they still followed
you."  Now he looked down and away.  "And we both know _you_'re not
perfect... but you're here for a reason, Marc.  Just remember that."
d5282 1
a5282 2
"Look, I guess you can forgive me... I just don't know if I can forgive
myself.  I mean..." his voice drifted off.
d5284 4
a5287 3
"It's over.  It may take you a long time to forgive yourself; heck,
you may _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  How do think we felt
after _Challenger_?  You made a mistake, but now it's time to go on."
d5289 7
a5295 2
Mercuriou nodded and said "OK", but wasn't really sure himself if he
could do it.
d5297 1
a5297 1
"And it's a bit easier since we've only one place to go."
d5299 12
d5312 9
a5320 1
T + 695 days
d5322 1
a5322 6
"OK, we've got OMS-17 now," Alister announced.  He, along with the
Andrea and Mercuriou, were suited up and strapped in.  Alister was
operating the computer that controlled the big-screen display.  The
others had their own computers, and Andrea was glancing back and forth
between the big screen and the checklist on own.  Mercuriou was
watching Alister on the display as he checked the computer settings.
d5324 1
a5324 7
"OMS-17 is a 37.42 mega-newton burn at 374 by 1 solar at 13:42 on T +
695.  Today _is_ T + 695.  Current time is 13:37 Universal.  Ship's
inertial attitute is 371 by 3 solar, but that... will rotate into 374
by 1 solar, check.  Ship's solar attitude is also 371 by 3 solar.
OMS-17 has a tappered entry and step cut-off, check.  It is 17 minutes
and 13 seconds in duration, check.  And it will put us on a course
back to Earth..."
d5326 1
a5326 2
He looked back at Mercuriou, who nodded.  As they waited for the
engines to fire, Mercuriou gazed out the window at Mars.
d5328 2
a5329 2
"'He was never to return to the city of his triumphs and defeats',"
he muttered aloud.
d5331 3
a5333 1
"What's that?" Andrea asked.
d5335 3
a5337 2
"Oh, nothing, just something from a book I read."  He motioned to the
sands of the red planet.
d5339 3
a5341 1
"Yeah," she said, discerning his thoughts.
d5343 2
a5345 1
T + 701 days
a5346 6
"One of my favorite parts of the Gospels is where 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."
d5348 1
a5348 1
"And I haven't done the will of God," Mercuriou stated in a flat tone.
d5350 1
a5350 19
"I don't know about that.  You've made your mistakes, but you've also
said a lot of things that needed to be said, and you've managed to
find a platform where those things actually got heard.  Now, did you
need to steal a billion dollars to do that?  I doubt it.  I suspect
you could have found another way.  This is why I don't buy the
Christians who say you have to fight 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."
d5352 3
a5354 2
"But if you don't believe in Jesus?"  Alister asked.  "Who's going to
listen then?"
d5356 6
a5361 5
"Well, I guess people used to believe the Earth is flat.  You can
beleive whatever you want; the fact is that the Earth is round.  And
I'm absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazarath was the most
spiritually advanced being to ever live on Earth.  So we should take
his teachings seriously."
d5363 1
d5365 7
a5371 1
T + 705 days
d5373 1
a5373 2
Mercuriou: "We don't run this ship.  Burns runs this ship.  This ship
is just running on auto-pilot now."
d5375 3
a5377 1
Andrea thought about this for a moment.
d5379 2
a5380 3
"Well, we better make sure we know everything we can about how that
auto-pilot works."
 
d5382 6
a5387 1
T + 714 days
d5389 1
a5389 4
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 _Mars_Explorer_ crew deleted it along with
the rest of their junk mail.  Apparently Alister did not.
d5391 13
a5403 1
"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked Andrea one day.
a5404 1
Andrea pushed away the laptop she was working on.
d5406 1
a5406 5
"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."
d5408 2
a5409 1
"It isn't?"
d5411 4
a5414 1
"What happens at the end of the book?"
d5416 6
a5421 1
"There's like a thousand years of peace, right?"
d5423 2
a5424 1
Andrea nodded an affirmative response.
d5426 8
a5433 5
"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."
a5434 1
"What do you have to do to be saved?  Everyone says something different."
d5436 1
a5436 9
"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."
d5438 1
a5438 1
"What about the Old Testament; do you read that?"
d5440 7
a5446 7
"Sometimes.  There are deeply profound insights in the Old Testament,
but it can't be taken completely at face value.  Christ flat-out
rejected many of the Old Testament teachings, such as the stoning
statues.  Perhaps like the entire Bible, it's a mixed bag; parts
of it are inspired by God, and parts of it are the errors of men.
other parts of it were put there by
men, and that makes it hard to understand."
d5448 2
d5451 11
a5461 1
T + 729 days
d5463 5
a5467 5
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 shook her head.
d5469 9
a5477 2
"You'd think that after two and a half years in space, you'd have learned
how to open a wine bottle without spilling it everywhere."
d5479 9
a5487 4
"What I've learned," the Captain answered, as he spun across the
compartment and swallowed one of the larger floating drops, "is that
if you spill wine in space, it's a lot easier to clean up than on
Earth!"
d5489 1
a5489 1
"Alister, the picnic's starting!"  Andrea called out.
d5491 8
a5498 1
"I'll be there in a minute," came the reply from the next module.
d5500 1
a5500 6
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 Andrea had stood on
tradition.
d5502 9
a5510 1
"Cheers."
d5512 10
a5521 2
They clinked glasses and laughed together as the Captain spilled wine
all over his face as he tried to drink it.  Andrea grabbed a towel.
d5523 3
a5525 2
"You guys better come in here!" Alister yelled, then got up and
propelled himself through the hatchway.
a5526 2
"Well, m-maybe you want to come in here," he stammered as he watched
Andrea trying to clean the wine from Mercuriou's face.
d5528 1
a5528 1
"What's up?" the grinning Captain asked.
d5530 1
a5530 1
"Somebody just smashed an airplane into the World Trade Center!"
d5532 1
a5532 12
Burns once told Mercuriou that there are no great men, only great
ideas, and that genius is that rare ability to venture deep into the
dim recesses of ideaspace to retrieve the 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 of these geniuses buried his
discovery in the pages of a novel.  The other held it up to the sun
for all the world to see its blazing red light that terrible September
morning.
d5534 1
a5534 3
"Another Timothy McVeigh or something.  The country is so hated.  I
thought about it; hell, you can say a lot about me, Andrea, that I'm a
thief and all that, but I never did anything like this."
d5536 2
a5537 19
The picnic was forgotten.  At 1431 GMT, September 11, 2001, after
first the event on Earth and then a radio transmission lag of exactly
3 minutes 17 seconds, the silent crew of three watched the second
tower collapse.  In the days ahead, it would be revealed that Islamic
terrorists had hijacked four American airlines.  Coincidently, or
perhaps not, all were Boings.  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.
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.  Within hours, the buildings fell.
Burns would have then made a quick calculation based on the potential
energy of a given mass at a given height along with the published
weight of construction materials used in the skyscrapers to estimate
the energy released by their collapse at ten kilotons of TNT - the
size of a small atomic bomb.  Bankers, mail men, fire fighters, bus
boys brokers, firemen, CEOs, bus boys,
 - all lost their lives that terrible
morning.
d5539 1
a5539 11
Within days, 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.  At Andrea's suggestion, Mercuriou issued
a statement of condolence, expressing his "deapest reget", and stating
that it grieved him as nearly as much the death of his "dear friend
Burns".  The entire crew followed suit.  Asked via videomail by the
press about his comparison with Burns, he replied that though he
deeply felt the loss in New York, he was sure the family's victims
would concer that no one feels a loss more acutely than that of a
loved one.  The media largely accepted this.
d5541 7
a5547 10
Within weeks, the President attacked Afghanistan after correctly
finguring Osama bin Ladin as the culprit.  The Captain began objecting
to the President's behavior, stating publically than an orderly extradition
procedure should be followed rather than an invasion.  Andrea Yeats
said that all parties should try to resolve their problems peacefully,
though she ruefully noted that the Muslems would do good to accept
Christ, and ruffled feathers by suggesting that the terrorists,
misguided though they may have been, were probably the only people
that morning who got on the airplanes because they were trying to do
God's will.
d5549 1
a5549 7
Within months, most of the old animosities had resurfaced.  The
Captain was still openly critical of the western democratic
establishment in general, and the President in particular.
Dr. Yeats became far more prominent, and far more controversial, by
her repeated advice to end the war, moarn over the dead, then ask
ourselves why so many people hated the country and decide to give our
lives over to God to do something about it.
d5551 8
a5558 6
While the political prong of the twin assult had failed, the economic
prong had succeeded beyond belief.  Considering not only the twin
towers of the World Trade Center, but the smaller buildings destroyed,
or ravaged with all their windows blown out, plus the entire
multi-block area that had been shut down for months, the center of New
York City's financial district had been devastated.
d5560 2
a5561 8
In Maryland, a youth's dream earlier that year had prophesied disaster
for the United States and war in the Middle East.  In Texas, a
fifth-grader had told his teacher the day before that World War III
was going to start tomorrow, and that the United States was going to
lose.  In Afghanistan, an Islamic militant had a dream that his nation
defeated the United States in a soccer match, and that all of their
players were dressed as airline pilots.  In Afghanistan, in Iraq, or
perhaps in Khartoum, Osama bin Laden was smiling.
d5563 6
d5570 1
a5570 1
T + 733 days
d5572 9
a5580 1
"Maybe you shouldn't go on TV right now."
d5582 8
a5589 2
Mercuriou said nothing.  He was busy preparing the video equipment for
a transmission to Earth.
a5590 1
"Maybe it's not the best time," Yeats repeated her observation.
d5592 1
a5592 1
"Why?  Because the country's been hurt too bad to hear the truth?"
d5594 3
a5596 1
"I just think maybe you should wait a while longer."
d5598 3
a5600 1
Mercuriou stopped himself and thought about this carefully.
d5602 3
a5604 3
"Look, it's like claxons going off in a cockpit.  Brrrmpf!  Brrrmpf!
Brrrmpf! Whoop, whoop, pull up!  Whoop, whoop, pull up!  And if the
co-pilot just stays meek and silent, then the plane's going to crash!"
d5606 3
a5608 2
"No.  You said it yourself, Andrea.  The Word.  It has to be heard.
Turn on the camera, Alister.  Turn it on."
d5610 13
d5624 12
a5636 1
T + 734 days
d5638 1
a5638 4
"Took advantage of freedom!?"  Mercuriou practically spit the words
out.  The old Mercuriou was back, the Mercuriou that hadn't
faced disaster on Mars, the Mercuriou that hadn't listened
to Andrea Yeats for the last two years.
d5640 1
a5640 9
"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 listening to this program would love to learn to fly
but _it's_too_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  They took
advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one thing that will make
people say 'yes' in a society that says 'no', 'No', 'NO' - money!
They took advantage of the fact that Osama bin Laden is a
_multimillionare_!"
d5642 1
a5642 6
All of his opponents were on the program, arranged on the TV screen in
a montage of talking heads. [CA] Ecks was speechless, unable to decide
if Mercuriou was defending the terrorists or attacking the
capitalists.  Wye, red-faced with rage, sputtered nonsense.  Only Zee
remained stony and impassive, and it was he who answered the space
captain now.
d5644 1
a5644 5
"Yes, captain, they took advantage of capitalism, they took advantage
of democracy, they took advantage of freedom.  They came here, lived
in this country, supped the abundent fruits of our liberty, then
turned on her like a cur lashing out at the hand that feeds her. [CA]
They took our freedom and used it to murder three thousand people!"
d5646 1
a5646 7
"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,
too.  I mean, 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 isn't that who was in the World Trade Center?"
d5648 1
a5648 1
A new voice joined the debate.
d5650 10
a5659 2
"Certainly not all of them.  The attack was completely
indiscriminate."
d5661 1
a5661 4
"Completely indiscriminate!  Completely indiscriminate!  The attack
was directly focused on the biggest symbol of capitalism on this
planet!  I mean, those people in there were _the_true_beleivers_!
They were the _capitalists_!"
d5663 6
a5668 1
"I'm sure there were window washers there, too."
d5670 1
a5670 10
"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 twin
towers represented the majority of the people of the United States.  I
mean, this kind of crap!" he gestured to the television monitor.  "All
we keep hearing about is this is what the majority wants, this is the
voice of the majority, the majority, the majority, like they're the
only ones that count!  Well, _the_majority_ of the people in those
towers was _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."
d5672 4
a5675 1
"It doesn't make a difference."
d5677 2
a5678 1
"It doesn't make a difference!?!  And on God's earth, why, woman, why?"
d5680 2
a5681 4
Earth-bound television viewers were witnessing a bizarre display.
Ecks, Wye and Zee had fallen silent, while Merceriou carried on an
animated discussion with the unseen Andrea Yeats.  Only her voice
could be heard from off screen.
d5683 2
a5684 7
"Because you _forgive_your_enemies_, as I've only tried to tell you
about a thousand times [CA]," Andrea was becoming irate.  "You don't
smash airplanes into their skyscrapers because they imposed some
global capitalist system on you, you don't steal a billion dollars to
get what you want, and you don't go off invading foreign countries
because they don't turn terrorist leaders over to you when you bark
out your dictats."
d5686 1
a5686 1
Mercuriou was silent for a moment.
a5687 12
"There's a lot of young men dying in that country right now because
they're going to do what they've been told all their life, that their
country is under attack, and it's their duty to defend it, and
everything our boys have been told and believe!  And this guy, this
president, he doesn't declare war, he doesn't attempt some extridition
process, he doesn't try to get a security council resolution, he just
declares, 'if you're not with us, you're against us', and just barks
out this order to hand over bin Laden!  I mean, the same stupid thing
that started World War I!  And where was all the screaming then, that
Austria had been attacked by _terrorists_, _TERRORISTS_ I tell you,
and their allies - Russia, France, English, and THE UNITED STATES were
supporting _TERRORISM_!!!"
d5689 1
a5689 9
"My God!" he exclaimed.  "Can they really not figure it out?!  Can
they really not see that capitalism is one of the most depraved
/ utterly immoral
philosphies that has even been proposed for men to live?!  Can they
really believe all their own propaganda and think this thing is some
kind of utopia?  I mean, which is worse: fascism, based on just
conquering your neighbors; communism, based on overthrowing your
government in some revolution; or capitalism, based on just doing for
yourself and letting some _invisible_hand_ take care of the rest?"
d5691 1
a5691 1
"Maybe they're just incompetent," Alister interjected.
d5693 3
a5695 1
"Incompotent?" Mercuriou answered.  Yeats, too, raised a puzzled eye.
d5697 4
a5700 1
"Yeah, like me trying to fly this spaceship.  Incompetent."
d5702 1
a5702 2
The crew broke out in laughter as his self-defacing humor.  Encouraged,
he went on.
d5704 1
a5704 3
"No, really, maybe people just don't know the difference between right
and wrong.  Maybe they can't choose good leaders because they don't
know how."
a5705 3
Mercuriou said nothing, but the expression that ran across his face
told him to be in accord with the young man's words.  Andrea broke
the silence.
a5706 3
"It's very hard to tell the difference between right and wrong,
Alister.  That's why Christianity is so important.  It gives us very
important guideposts to help make those decisions."
d5708 1
a5708 2
"That's why religion is so important, Alister.  It gives us just about
the only guideposts we've got for finding that difference."
d5710 5
d5716 3
d5720 2
a5721 1
T + 770 days
d5723 2
a5724 1
"What would Vic have thought about all this?" Alister asked after dinner.
d5726 2
a5727 3
Andrea answered first. "Vic probably would have said that we're too
primitive as a species to possess a technology as advanced as jet
aircraft.  He was always advocating a return to simpler times."
d5729 1
a5729 6
"Do you beleive we're too advanced for jet aircraft?"  There was no
trace of sarcasm in Alister's voice.  He had already 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, and was genuinely wondering
about jet aircraft.
d5731 1
a5731 1
Andrea took a deep breath before answering.
d5733 3
a5735 7
"I believe technology is neutral.  It's a tool; just a different kind
of tool, a knowledge-based tool.  Tools aren't good or evil; it's what
men choose to do with them that makes them good or evil.  No, that's
not quite right, the tool isn't made good or evil, it's the choice
itself that forms good and evil.  I agree with Vic to the extent that
we're really too primitive to even evaluate good and evil.  I mean, a
significant segment of mankind still beleives that God doesn't exist."
d5737 2
a5738 1
Alister frowned, puzzled.  "You think that makes us primitive?"
d5740 18
a5757 3
"Sure," Andrea replied.  "A lot of people once beleived that the Earth
was stationary and the Sun revolved around it.  Do you think that
people with that belief are too primitive for manned spaceflight?"
d5759 2
a5760 2
"Manned spaceflight would be basically impossible with that belief
set," Mercuriou answered.
d5762 6
a5767 6
"Don't be so sure," Andrea answered.  "Men sailed around the globe
without even accurate timepieces to measure longitude.  Planck
formulated the core of quantum mechanics based on the amount of light
given off by a block of metal as you heat it.  The first computers
were built with _vacuum_tubes_, not transistors.  Don't underestimate
human ingenuity, Captain.  Men even flew to Mars in a 747."
d5769 1
a5769 1
Merciriou was forced to grin, and Andrea continued.
d5771 2
a5772 13
"The point is that such a belief set is a severe handicap to manned
spaceflight, but doesn't exclude it completely.  Likewise, atheism is
a severe handicap to making moral value judgements, but doesn't
completely preclude figuring out that murder is wrong, at least in
some cases.  In other cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting
that they _have_to_kill_ for the sake of their 'freedom'.  You'll find
people who _do_ believe in God clinging to this belief that you impose
all these intellectual property restrictions on this technology, then
absolutely insisting that this is consistent with the Christian
gospel.  That's how primitive we are.  Two thousand years ago we were
told _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_ and half of us still don't
beleive that it was God speaking and the other half still can't
understand what it means."
d5774 3
d5778 2
a5779 1
T + 904 days
d5781 1
a5781 2
"What's going to happen to the United States, Captain?" Alister asked.
"I mean, is it another Soviet Union, really?"
d5783 2
a5784 4
Mercurio was silent for a minute.  Only the hum of the air conditioner
could be heard.  The young chemist had blurt out the question that
millions of people had wondered at times, and much more recently since
September 11.
d5786 1
a5786 6
"Well, I don't for sure; I don't have a crystal ball or anything.  I
don't think it's going to change; the country seems absolutely
committed to capitalism, and it _is_ absolutely committed to
democracy."  He threw up his arms in an air of desperation, like a man
watching a ship full of drowning people helplessly from the shore.
"Hell, I hope I'm wrong.  I hope they can work out their problems."
d5788 2
a5789 2
"But you don't think they will."  Andrea's response was more a
statement than a question, but the captain shook his head in response.
d5791 1
a5791 8
"No," he answered softly, then took a deep breath and exhaled.
"They've got as serious a problem with capitalism as they once had
with slavery.  The entire society is based on it; it's absolutely
entrenched.  They're not going to just change.  My best guess is that
its people'll just rip it apart from within.  It keeps getting more
and more violent, and the only solution the democrats have is to keep
cracking down harder and getting tougher.  Eventually the violence of
its own people will destroy it.  That's my best guess."
d5793 6
d5800 1
a5800 1
T + 974 days
d5802 2
a5803 1
"Do you support the War on Terror?"
d5805 2
a5806 7
Andrea: "I don't support any war.  Christ taught us to forgive our enemies,
and that's exactly what we should do.  In one sense, it shouldn't
be that hard since the men who actually carried out the attacks
died along with everyone else.  It's time to bury the dead,
mourn over the victims, clean up the rubble, and really ask
ourselves why our country is so hated that people would do
this to us.  And that answer is pretty clear, I think."
d5808 4
a5811 2
"Dr. Yeats, what is the answer?  What do you think the U.S. should do
next?"
d5813 3
a5815 11
"I think we decide to really help the people of the world instead of
just talking constantly about (money and) politics.  Let's take all
this technology, publish everything we know about how it works, make
all that information freely available on the Internet, help third
world countries develop their own microchip manufacuring facilities,
their own chemical plants, their own robotic factories, etc.  Of
course, that means giving up our 'competitive advantage' that we hear
so much about.  It means helping people feed themselves, helping them
educate themselves, helping them build their own infrastructure,
instead of constantly talking about freedom while we pursue our own
selfish ends."
d5817 4
a5820 5
"What about the heroism of the hijackers?  What about the heroism of
the young men who were willing to give their lives because they
beleived that they were acting in their people's best interest?
There were probably the only people who got on those planes that
morning because they were trying to do the will of God."
d5822 1
a5822 9
"Why aren't they heros?  We hear constantly about the heros who are
bombing Afghanistan; why are they heros and these men aren't?  I mean,
they were willing to sacrifice their lives for some greater good;
isn't that heroism?  What difference does it make whether the evil
they were trying to fight was capitalism or terrorism, or whether it
really is evil, or if they just beleive it in their minds, or if
terrorism is really heroic, or if war on terrorism is really heoric?
Isn't heroism about giving of yourself for someone else, and even
if it's misguided, isn't it still worthy of our respect?"
d5824 1
a5824 9
Mercurio: "I don't think we need all these security restrictions.
First of all, most of them wouldn't have stopped the terrorists
on 9-11.  They didn't have guns, or bombs, or chemicals of any kind.
And, frankly, a knife is so easy to conceal; I mean, you can take
a sharpened stone that won't trigger a single metal detector,
jam it into the sole of your shoe or something; it'd be so easy to
get knifes on board the airplanes.  I doubt you even need weapons
of any kind.  A half dozen men well trained in martial arts is
probably good enough."
d5826 1
a5826 1
"So how can we stop future attacks?"
d5828 3
a5830 8
"There aren't going to be any future attacks, not like this.  We saw
that in Pennsylanvia.  It took about an hour for the rules to change.
It used to be, if someone hijacked an airplane, you just put up your
hands and said, 'OK, where you want to go?  Claim your responsibility.
Make your demands.'  Now, that's all changed.  The passengers and crew
won't let hijackers take over a plane again.  They'll crash it first.
So there just aren't going to be any more attacks like this one.
That's why they used four planes; they knew it was a one-shot deal."
d5832 1
a5832 1
"So we should just do nothing and let the terrorists win?"
d5834 3
a5836 9
"First of all, a lot of what can be done has been done.  Like I said,
there aren't going to be any more 9-11 style attacks with airplanes.
Next, there isn't a whole lot you can do.  Especially if these anthrax
letters are the next in a series of attacks.  If each attack is
radically different from the last, if each one exploits a different
avenue of attack, really, what can you do?  Maybe hope your intelligence
people can penetrate the organization or at least figure out how
they coordinate and communiate, that's about it.  Everything else
is just reacting to the last attack."
d5838 2
a5839 10
"This notion that they exploited the freedom of our society is absurd.
They exploited capitalism, and they were able to exploit it because
they were backed by a multi-millionaire.  If they didn't have
thousands of dollars in funding, would the great 'free' society have
trained them on how to fly these jets?  Would the airlines have just
let them fly for nothing while they were scouting them out?  Would
they have even been let on the planes that morning if they hadn't
swipped through a credit card first?  Money is how capitalism controls
people, and if the terrorists hadn't had money, the 'free' society
would have slammed every door shut in their faces."
d5841 2
a5842 3
Mercurio cut him off.  "They would never have been let on those planes
without money.  They would never have been let on those planes.  They
didn't exploit freedom... they exploited capitalism!"
d5844 2
d5847 2
a5848 1
T + 1033 days
d5850 7
a5856 1
"So what are you reading now?"
d5858 3
a5860 1
"_Faust_, in German.  Another book I've only read in translation."
d5862 4
a5865 1
"What's it about?"
d5867 5
a5871 2
"Well, _Faust_ is the story of a man who sells his soul to the
devil to get his youth back."
d5873 1
a5873 1
"Did you start reading all this stuff in college?"
d5875 1
a5875 7
"No, I started reading all this stuff in high school.  My parents
bought me a set of about fifty books called 'Great Book of the Western
World'.  It had been assembled by this univeristy professor named
Mortimer Adler who believed in liberal education, that by reading the
works of great authors you can peer into the human soul.  It was in
college, I started reading all this stuff in the native languages -
'Great Books' was all in translation."
d5877 3
a5879 1
"So what makes a great book?"
d5881 1
a5881 8
"Well, for starters it should be well written, though there have been
some spectacularly poorly written great books.  The real criteria,
more than anything else, is that it has to be part of what Adler
called the 'Great Conversation', carried out over centuries, from one
age to the next, by men and women discussing the 'Great Ideas' -
things like love, war, religion, government.  Each author, in his own
time, had read those before him and then added something of his own to
the conversation."
d5883 1
a5883 2
"But don't people talk about those kinds of things all the time?
There's all kinds of books written about religion and politics."
d5885 5
a5889 6
"Yes, but a truly great book has to add something new to the
conversation; it can't just regurgitate old ideas.  And there's a
definite, almost snobby intellectual bias to Adler, but then you read
something like _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintence_ and you get a
whole different perspective on the Great Books program.  My only real
problem with it was that it was all in translation."
d5891 1
a5891 1
"What's wrong with reading stuff in translation?"
d5893 1
a5893 6
"Well first of all, some of the translations, especially the Great
Books translations of the ancient Greeks, were absolutely horrible.
All the sexual double-entendres were lost.  I've heard they've
improved.  But then you take something like _this_, I mean, _Faust_ is
almost untranslatable - it's an epic poem, and poetry is very hard to
translate."
d5895 4
a5898 2
"But you can translate the ideas, right, that's what important, isn't
it?"
d5900 1
a5900 8
"Yes, but there is also beauty in language, too.  Take the Gettysburg
Address.  'We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not
hallow this ground.'  I mean, is this poetry or prose?  Lincoln didn't
just communicate the ideas, he did it with such beauty and power that
the words _endure_ - and they carry the ideas with them.  That's what
makes a great author, Alister, not just that they write down their
ideas, but that they so craft the language to practically compel you
to listen."
a5902 1
T + 1094 days
d5904 1
a5904 3
Big government was in.  A national newsmagazine aired a segment
featuring an interview with a woman who said, "I just assumed if there
was a problem, there'd be a law in place to deal with it."
d5906 1
a5906 3
"Now why would you assume that?"  Mercuriou asked the TV screen
as he watched the program.  "Why would you assume that for _every_
problem we've got, the solution is another law?"
d5908 1
a5908 3
"I know people who don't wear their seatbelts," Andrea said.  Car
safety was the topic of the broadcast.  "They prefer to say a prayer
when they get in the car instead of putting on their seatbelts."
d5910 6
a5915 3
"Exactly!" Mercuriou exclaimed.  "Now who the hell is the great
_majority_ to tell someone that they can't do that; that they
can't decide for themselves to wear that seatbelt or not?"
d5917 1
a5917 13
"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _they've_got_no_other_solutions_.
The only way they know how to deal with _any_ problem they've got is
more laws, more rules, more regulations.  It's inconsivable to them to
find real solutions to their problems!  They choose absolute garbage
for their leaders, and then when they've got problems, and you better
beleive that a society run by capitalists, or communists, or fascists
is going to have problems, their 'solutions' are always the same - get
tough.  They can't figure out that they need to choose good leaders in
the first place, and that the answer to every problem isn't some new
law."
d5919 1
a5919 12
"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _democracy_defines_right_and_wrong_!
These people have no conception of how to behave except what is
defined by the government!  What's right is what's legal, what's wrong
is what's illegal, and there's nothing else!  There's no point at
which the majority can conceive that something that is wrong wouldn't
be prohibited by a law!  It's just completely beyond these people that
the force of government should be used to absolute minimum and that
people have to ask themselves what is right and wrong!  Democracy
makes all these decisions for you!"
d5921 1
d5923 1
a5923 1
T + 1253 days
d5925 1
a5925 1
"Five."
d5927 4
a5930 1
"Four."
d5932 2
a5933 1
"Three."
d5935 2
a5936 1
"Two."
d5938 2
a5939 1
"One."
d5941 1
a5941 10
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.
d5943 3
a5945 1
"Orbital interface in five, four, three, two, one, Earth orbit."
d5947 1
a5947 6
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.
d5949 2
a5950 1
"ECO in five; four; three; two; one; Engine Cutoff."
d5952 3
a5954 4
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.
d5956 3
a5958 2
"Perfect burn," Alister declared, as he broke out into a wide grin and
let out a whoop.  "I almost expected a disaster."  (did you really?)
d5960 1
a5960 2
"Sometimes you make it back alive, Alister," Andrea declared as she
unbuckled.  "I've done it twice already."
d5962 4
a5965 2
"There's South Africa!" the young man whooped, pointing out the
window.
d5967 1
a5967 1
"There's South Africa!"
d5969 2
d5972 3
a5974 1
T + 1257 days
d5976 9
a5984 1
"Hey, look what I found!"
d5986 2
a5987 3
The crew was preparing to depart the ship, moving all their personal
possesions, as well as anything they wanted to return with, into the
OTV.
d5989 2
a5990 4
Alister launched himself into A-core wearing a black T-shirt
emblazzened in front with a likeness of Albert Einstein, holding a
marijuana joint in one hand, its smoke forming the letters "E=mc2"
near his head.
a5991 1
"That's one of Burns', isn't it?" asked Mercuriou.
d5993 3
a5995 1
"Yeah, I found it in the electronics lab."
d5997 1
d5999 1
d6001 1
a6001 1
T + 1262 days
d6003 3
a6005 5
In the next few days, the crew had moved all their personal
belongings, along with anything they wanted to return with into OTV 2,
secured everything else they were leaving on the ship, and finally
fired the OTV's one rocket to drop towards a rendevous with the
partially completed International Space Station.
d6007 5
a6011 3
Mercuriou looked back towards his crew, grined, then opened the
pressure door.  For the first time in almost three and a half years,
they set eyes on someone else.  It wasn't who they expected.
d6013 6
a6018 2
"Dr. Andrea Yeats!" exclaimed the booming, heavily accented voice
of an overweight Russian cosmonaut.
d6020 3
a6022 2
"Borzov!  They didn't tell me you were still here!  Why didn't Kyle
tell me?"  Andrea broke out in amazed laughter.
d6024 1
a6024 2
"I wouldn't let him!" the Russian snorted.  "_Still_ here!  Yes,
the whole time I've been up here waiting for you."
d6026 1
a6026 1
"Have you really?"
d6028 2
a6029 1
"No, Andrea, of course not."  Everyone broke up laughing.
d6031 1
a6031 3
"But I was here when you launched, and I've come back up just to greet
you!  Captain, I would have sent you off with a bottle of Russia's
finest if you had only stopped by!"
d6033 1
a6033 2
Mercuriou found himself somewhat awkwardly clasped by a simultaneous
bearhug and handshake.
d6035 3
a6037 1
"Thank you, spaseba..."
d6039 1
a6039 1
"Ah, you speak some Russian, oyeng xoropho!"
d6041 1
a6041 11
_Columbia_ was the space shuttle slatted to return the _Mars_Explorer_ crew.
They had docked the day before on the tail end of a scientific
mission.  Plus the space station's standard three-man crew, the head
count in orbit now balloned to thirteen.  (no one thought this number
significant) After an exchange of gifts and introductions, a dinner
followed.  The _Mars_Explorer_ crew, after an almost completely vegetarian
diet, tore into the space station's freeze-dried meats, while the
shuttle and space station astronauts showed a marked preferenced for
the fresh vegetables from _Mars_Explorer_.  Afterwards, Borzov predictably
produced two bottles of "Russia's finest" and began passing vodka
shots around.
d6043 1
a6043 2
"So, Captain," the cosmonaut asked, "what do you think will happen to
you back on Earth?"
d6045 1
a6045 2
The space station fell quiet, at least as quiet as all the machinery
running would allow.
d6047 1
a6047 6
"Well, I don't know," drawled the intoxicated Mercuriou.  9/11 was the
only other time on the mission he'd been even mildly inebriated.  "I
suppose there'll be some kind of big civil trial, for all the money.
Probably there'll be a criminal trial first, we broke a lot of
computer crime laws.  I don't know.  Maybe some prison time.  Who
knows?"
d6049 1
a6049 1
"There's another way down, you know."
d6051 1
a6051 2
Borzov, despite having drunk more than three times any of the others,
didn't seem particularly drunk.
d6053 5
a6057 3
"Seriously, captain, _Columbia_ is not the only way off this station.
There are many in Russia who have heard your words against capitalism.
There is also a Soyuz capsule attached here, too."
d6059 6
a6064 2
A different kind of quiet settled over the space station.  Andrea broke
the spell.
d6066 3
a6068 1
"Communism dies hard, eh, Vladymir?"
d6070 1
a6070 2
"Communism _is_ dead, nawsha tovarisha, but not everyone is my country
believes capitalism is the best thing for Russia."
d6072 1
a6072 1
"And democracy?"
d6074 2
a6075 2
Borzov shrugged.  "We're defined more by our limitations than by our
abilities, my dear, as I have tried to tell you many times."
d6077 9
a6085 1
"Defined by our limitations?" Alister asked.
d6087 4
a6090 6
"Yes, young man.  Defined by our limitations.  Our friend Andrea talks
a lot about religion, doesn't she?  All these people who talk about
religion, talk about giving to all who beg of them, talk about
forgiving their enemies, and then go to work for the capitalists on
Monday morning, why?  Because they are
_defined_by_their_limitations_."
d6092 1
a6092 1
Borzov let his words sink in, then continued.
d6094 1
a6094 2
"Captain, would you say your mission has been defined more by your
abilities or more by your limitations?"
d6096 1
a6096 2
"Limitations, definitely," Mercuriou answered quietly, but without
hesitation.
d6098 1
a6098 4
"You see!  _Defined_by_our_limitations_, young Alister Compton!
Andrea here believes men can walk on water!" Borzov exclaimed, perhaps
extracting a small vengeance for Andrea's remark about communism.  "So
why, my dear, do we need ships?"
d6100 1
a6100 3
Andrea answered slowly.  "We can't walk on water because our faith in
God isn't strong enough, I think that's the only answer really
consistent with the Gospel."
d6102 1
a6102 4
"A limitation of faith!"  Borzov exclaimed.  "Or perhaps her
limitation is her inability to accept that the world
_is_completely_deterministic_ and _there_is_no_God_!"  and that
_anything_heavier_than_water_sinks_!"
d6104 1
a6104 1
"People can overcome their limitations, Vladymir."
d6106 1
a6106 1
"That's part of how they define us, Andreaysha!"
d6108 1
a6108 1
"Booker Washington."
d6110 1
a6110 3
A puzzled look crossed Borzov's face.  His English was not perfect,
and he had not understand this last remark from the _Mars_Explorer_
captain.
d6112 1
a6112 1
"I'm sorry?..."
d6114 1
a6114 3
"Booker Washington," Mercuriou repeated.  "He said that we should
judge men not by what they've achieved, but by what they've overcome
to achieve it."
d6116 1
a6116 2
"Ah," Borzov comprehended.  "One of your great authors.  And was
'Booker Washington' defined by _his_ limitations?"
d6118 1
a6118 2
"Absolutely," replied Mercuriou after a moment of thought.  "He could
never accept how bitterly race has divided my country."
d6120 1
a6120 2
The silence that followed this remark was broken by Ilan Ramon,
an Israeli air force cournel turned _Columbia_ payload specialist.
d6122 1
a6122 2
"I'll tell you what I think'll happen if you go back home", he
interjected.  The other astronauts turned to face him.
d6124 1
a6124 7
"Captain, I haven't hung on your every word, like the people in your
country, but I've spent enough time among Americans while training for
this mission to tell you there are basically three kinds of reactions
to you.  Some people just think you're nuts and dismiss everything you
say as the words of a lunatic.  Others listen; they don't believe
everything, but they do listen.  And some hate you so passionately you
may not be able to walk down the street without a police escort."
d6126 3
a6128 3
"Personally, I think you're the biggest thief I've ever met in my
life.  They'll probably give you jail time.  I think you expect it,
and I think you deserve it."
d6130 1
a6130 4
Mercuriou nodded.  "Thank you," he answered Borzov, after a pause.
"SHPASEBO. BOLSHOIUS SHPASEBO.  But I'll take the shuttle.  Col. Ramon
is right.  I am a thief, and maybe I'll get some clemency, and maybe I
won't, but I'd just rather go home now."
d6132 1
a6132 5
"You might want to consider putting _him_ on that Soyuz," Ramon
continued, indicating Alister.  "From what I've heard, he had a good
bit to do with your hacks; he might end up on trial, too.  At the very
least, your police will want to question him extensively about Burns'
methods.  And he's not even from your country."
d6134 1
a6134 1
Marc stared at Alister, then nodded slightly before looking to Borzov.
d6136 1
a6136 1
"Can he take the Soyuz?  What are the terms?"
d6138 1
a6138 3
"Yes, we've talked about him.  We'll let him go to any country that'll
take him, but that might be a problem.  He could end up stuck in
Russia if South Africa decides to extridite him to the U.S."
d6140 1
a6140 1
"And if the government changes in Moscow?" Andrea asked.
d6142 4
a6145 1
Borzov roared out a deep-bellied laugh.
d6147 3
a6149 2
"My dear, how many times have I told you, _governments_are_always_
_changing_in_Moscow_!"
d6151 1
a6151 2
"Go home, son," the Israeli advised.  "People like young pilots to be
their national heros, trust me, I know.  Go home."
d6153 1
a6153 1
Alister looked back and forth at his two crewmates.
d6155 1
a6155 1
"Whatever you want to do is fine with me," Mercuriou told him.
d6157 4
a6160 4
"I'll take my chances with my own people, then," Alister finally
stated then continued slowly.  "I'll take the Russian Soyuz and then
hand myself over to the South African embassy in Moscow.  If they
extridite, they extridite."
d6162 1
a6162 1
"OK, then that's what we'll do."
d6164 1
d6166 4
d6171 2
a6172 1
T + 1265 days
d6174 1
a6174 1
"That's everything?"  Alister asked.
d6176 2
a6177 1
"Pretty much," Andrea called up from _Columbia_'s mid-deck.
d6179 3
a6181 6
Borzov had been blustering, at least somewhat.  He had no desire
to use the escape Soyuz, and had talked Alister into staying
on the space station, or at least the docked OTV module, until
another Soyuz had been sent up.  Almost all of the gear had
been transferred now to _Columbia_, leaving only Alister's
personal effects and some food on the OTV.
d6183 1
a6183 1
Mercuriou turned to Borzov.
d6185 1
a6185 1
"Feel free to move the OTV if it's in your way."
d6187 2
a6188 1
"How do you say it?" the Russian answered, "'The keys are in the ignition'?"
d6190 4
a6193 1
Mercuriou nodded.  Andrea had come back up out of _Columbia_.
d6195 4
a6198 1
"Everybody else is on board.  I guess this is goodbye."
d6200 1
a6200 4
Alister practically broke down in tears.  Andrea did break down,
and hugged the young man strongly.  Mercuriou did almost the
same, with a bearhug more comfortable than Borzov's and less
intimate than Yeats'.  They shook hands.
d6202 3
a6204 2
"I can't believe this.  I mean, I guess I knew this day would come,
but I just can't believe this is goodbye."
d6206 1
a6206 2
Alister looked from him back to Andrea during these last moments
together, then asked an obvious question.
d6208 1
a6208 2
"Do you think we'll ever come back to _Mars_Explorer_, I mean, it's still up
there, do you think there'll be a follow-up mission?
d6210 1
a6210 1
Andrea answered first.
d6212 2
a6213 3
"A follow-up?  No, not for me; for you, maybe, you're young enough.
I've abandoned space flight once in my life, and I'm abandoning it
again.  Vic was right.  Our problems are here on Earth."
d6215 1
a6215 1
Mercuriou nodded slowly.
d6217 4
a6220 2
"Yeah, I'll see you on Earth, man, but I think I'm done for space
travel, too."
d6222 3
a6224 3
"But I thought we were going to jumpstart space travel!  Develop this
new fuel!  Get mankind into space!  Grow crops!  Make clothes!  Mine
the asteroid belt!"
a6225 3
RHETORIC appeared on the college blackboard [in Mercuriou's mind],
then evaporated before the stark reality of his two best friends dead.
_Maybe_I_should_have_taken_a_course_called_"Honesty"_instead.
d6227 1
a6227 1
[ Mercuriou answered now, slowly. ]
d6229 5
a6233 4
"No, that was just my sales pitch.  My real reason was... it was a
stunt.  It was biggest stage I could think of to get myself heard.
And Andrea kept telling me I had already done that, that my most
important mission goal had been achieved, but I wouldn't listen."
a6234 1
Alister fell quiet.
d6236 1
a6236 2
"So what was the point then, that it was all for nothing, and this is
the end?"
d6238 1
a6238 3
"No, think about it, Alister," the captain answered slowly but with
conviction.  His thoughts drifted back to college.  _Rhetoric._
_Maybe_they_should_have_required_a_class_in_honesty_instead._
d6240 1
a6240 9
"This nerve we've struck with people, the
stuff we've talked about - freedom, democracy, religion, God,
the role of the individual in society, money, power - this is
the stuff Socrates debated in Athens,
the stuff Plato and Aristotle wrote about, St. Matthew and Thomas
Aquinas, this is the soul of our species.  Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Leo
Tolstoy, and none of them had all the answers.  I mean, if this is the
stuff _they_ talked about _then_, and it's the same stuff _we're_
talking about _now_..."
d6242 1
a6242 2
The captain's voice trailed off.  Behind him, _Columbia_ gleamed in
the razor-sharp sun of low-Earth orbit.
d6244 1
a6244 2
"There is no beginning.  There is no end.  This is the Great
Conversation."
d6246 1
d6248 2
a6249 3
======================================================================
======================================================================
======================================================================
d6251 1
a6251 1
			   ===== NOTES =====
d6253 2
a6254 1
T - 691 days <****>
d6256 2
a6257 1
"The hack"
d6259 1
a6259 3
strong setting, Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom; strong plot, a
blow-by-blow of a major hack; moderate character development, we see a
bit of Burns - his technical skill, his drug use, his deceitfulness
d6261 2
a6262 5
The college hack described here was an amalgam of two different hacks
- the news server hack done by friends of mine, and the student
workstation hack that I did.  I finally ditched my own hack and used
my friends exclusively - this is just a one-paragraph intro, not a
thesis.
d6264 1
a6264 6
The company is basically Cisco, the only Silicon Valley operation I
got to see from the inside, but I think the description here is
sufficiently general that it could be any one of dozens of high-tech
startups.  Its name is a hats-off to my friend Terry Slattery and
Chesapeake Computer Consultants, which in its hey-day was one of
Cisco's top training partners (and my first corporate employer).
d6266 2
a6267 3
"'Red' Briwom" is also a tip of the hat to Rob Widmer, Terry's first
employee (I was his second).  I respect Rob's "staying power with the
boring tedium the finicky machines impose on their masters."
a6268 1
T - 370 days <****>
d6270 1
a6270 1
"A tough reception"
d6272 1
a6272 2
Mercuriou visits Vic.  Description of the hydroponic farm - has to
be a more extensive operation than just marijuana
d6274 1
a6274 1
T - 355 days <*****>
d6276 5
a6280 1
Vic's vision quest
d6282 2
a6283 3
The site exists as described, but it is not in New Mexico.  It
is on the Baja Peninsula, in Sierra Laguna Biosphere Reserve,
close to the town of Santiago, Mexico.
d6285 1
a6285 1
Don't ask me how Orion got into a _summer_ sky, I don't know, either.
d6287 2
a6288 1
T - 350 days <****>
d6290 1
a6290 1
"The crapshot"
d6292 1
a6292 1
John Pople.  Gaussian.  Vic joins up.
a6293 1
isn't it usually a "house with an attached garage"?
d6295 1
a6295 1
T - 313 days <***>
d6297 1
a6297 1
Press conference announcing the new fuel
d6299 1
a6299 5
Moderate plot, at least its moving forward (the chapshoot paid off);
weak setting, but something I learned from Tom Clancy is that you can
use the ability to explain technical details to create setting, here
and in about a hundred other places in the novel; moderate character
development - we meet Andrea Yeats for the first time!
d6301 1
a6301 6
I found out after this book was mostly written that Andrea Yeats is
the name of the Texas women who drowned her four kids in a bathtub.
Coincidently, her husband worked for NASA.  I'm not changed the name -
her identify is too deeply ingrained in my mind.  Or maybe it's not
coincidence - maybe God's trying to tell me something about was this
character espouses (I hope not)...
d6303 1
a6303 3
"Kyle" was originally "Lou" but my friend Kyle Hourihan demanded one
the characters be named after him, so I lent his moniker to this minor
character.
d6305 2
a6306 1
T - 312 days <****>
a6307 1
"The Franciscan Frier"
d6309 1
a6309 2
strong setting - a inner-city soup kitchen; slow plot (but who cares);
strong character development - we learn a lot about Andrea here.
d6311 1
a6311 9
Brother Dunstan is a amalgram of two religious I know - one is a
California-based Franciscan in culinary school (probably graduated by
now) that proposed basically this idea for a "Franciscan restaurant"
as a class project (and what a great idea it is), though I "cooked up"
its name myself; the other is my good friend, the Benedictine Dunstan
Robaduex, who lends this character his name.  The Benedictines don't
make it into this novel (sorry guys), but any fraternity couldn't good
far wrong by patterning its house management after the Benedictines
and its work ethic after the Franciscans.
a6312 4
Dunston only appears this one time, but he's probably my most
important minor character.  St. Francis has been such an influence in
my life; it's so important to me to showcase the Franciscan movement
in such a compelling scene (one of my favorites in the novel).
d6314 1
a6314 1
T - 138 days <****>
d6316 1
a6316 1
Alister's hack
a6317 1
T - 137 days <****>
d6319 1
a6319 1
Alister's meeting with Mercuriou and Burns - they cut him in
d6321 3
a6323 1
T - 131 days <****>
d6325 1
a6325 1
Alister's tour of the production facility
d6327 1
a6327 1
T - 93 days <**>
d6329 1
a6329 1
description of Burn's reworked 747
d6331 2
a6332 1
they name it Icarus
d6334 1
a6334 1
T - 17 days <***>
d6336 2
a6337 1
we meet Andrea for the first time.  Kyle dispatches her to look into all this
d6339 1
a6339 1
T - 2 days <**>
d6341 2
a6342 1
Andrea picking up a hitchhiker
d6344 1
a6344 1
T - 1 day <***>
d6346 1
a6346 1
Andrea hitchhiking.  picked up by Merceriou and Alister and locked up
d6348 4
a6351 1
Launch Day <***>
d6353 1
a6353 1
Andrea esacpes and warns NASA.  Merceriou decides to launch
d6355 1
a6355 3
We see his company name here for it's one and only time.  "TenTech",
in addition to its obvious play on N-1033, was inspired by "TempTech",
one of my mother's old accounting clients (an HVAC contractor).
d6357 1
a6357 1
T + 1 day <***>
d6359 1
a6359 1
Mercuriou's first press conference
d6361 1
a6361 1
T + 3 days <****>
d6363 1
a6363 1
ship's library
d6365 1
a6365 1
the air leak
d6367 1
a6367 1
T + 4 days <***>
d6369 1
a6369 4
Mercuriou's first media appearance.  Asked to justify his theft.  Retorts
that in a capitalist society you had to have a business plan to justify
your returns and that, as he has none, could not expect to get funding.
Justifies theft from capitalists - the "most selfish people in the world".
d6371 1
a6371 3
But he's broken the rules - rules made collectively, through a democractic
process.  Answers that democracy is simply the rule of the majority and
compares U.S. to Soviet Union - "it's same kind of trash that runs it".
d6373 1
a6373 1
"By all means, doctor... jump in anytime you please!"
d6375 1
a6375 1
T + 5 days <***>
d6377 1
a6377 1
Mercuriou vs congressman Richard Ecks.
d6379 1
a6379 4
Ecks justifies capitalism as having produced the highest standard of
living on the planet.  Mercuriou answers that communism also produced
a higher standard of living and asks rhetorically if you want Sputniks
or freedom
d6381 1
a6381 1
Ecks invokes democracy and freedom to justify the society.
d6383 1
a6383 1
Mercuriou gives an example of how capitalism 'works' - the reading program.
d6385 1
a6385 4
[I wrote this program, only it works for Spanish rather than Greek.
Unlike our hero, I didn't even bother to try and publish it, for all
the same reasons.  It sits on my computer disk, waiting for a freely
available Spanish-English dictionary.]
d6387 1
a6387 2
Ecks says he was guilty - he stole someone else's intellectual property;
tells Mercuriou he's got a 'problem with authority'
d6389 5
a6393 1
Little bit here about the secrecy of capitalism
d6395 2
a6396 2
Ecks - "who the hell are you to tell someone else what they can and can't
do with their property?!?!"
d6398 10
a6407 3
Mercuriou says we could build a twenty-first century library of Alexandria,
but our leaders want an 'information economy' where knowledge is one
more commodity to be bought and sold.
a6408 1
T + 6 days <***>
d6410 1
a6410 1
Mercurious vs senator David Wye.
d6412 1
a6412 226
Wye starts right off with democracy, and Mercuriou asks if
communism/KGB/gulags would be justified by elections.

Wye answers that we don't have KGB/gulags and Mercuriou counters with
the War on Drugs - "isn't it funny how in all of these great
_people_'s societies, the biggest enemy of all always ends up being
_your_own_people_?"

Wye cuts to the Constitution, and we have a big discussion over it.
At the end, Wye loses, and tries to trump Mercuriou by answering that
all the unconstitutional powers are supported by "the overwealming
majority of the people of this country."

Mercuriou - still would like to see additional powers codified in Const.

Wye again answers that that's what the majority of people want, and
Mercuriou slams populist government in general - look at the police
slamming people to the ground and draging them off in handcuffs.

Criminals!  Wye says,  Criminals!

Mercuriou tries to lept out of his chair!  He's one of those criminals!

We've got freedom!  Wye says

The issue is what people have chosen to do with their freedom, Mercuriou
says.

Andrea's attempt to butt in.

Andrea Yeats tries to interrupt with 'morality'.  Wye asks who's
going to tell people what they can and can't do with their freedom.
Obviously, the Bible.  Wye says we've got freedom of religion,
invokes the Salem Witch Trials, and the interview breaks up.

A small scene between Andrea and Mercuriou - 'right and wrong are
subject to a vote'  Andrea says seperation of church and state
is a chimera


T + 7 days <***>

Govenor Zee.  Mercuriou gets in trouble when he starts talking
about morality (imagine that).  Andrea to the rescue.  Gates could
decide to be a Christian, instead he's decided to be philanthroper.

Andrea demolishes pop morality.


T + 8 days <**>

Mercuriou vs. Governor Zee

MAYBE CHANGE THIS TO BE MORE A HISTORY LECTURE

"the majority don't want good leaders"

Zee tries to claim Communism wasn't populist, and Mercuriou retorts.

"The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe."

Zee says "you'll be telling us the Germans elected Hitler".  Mercuriou
disects Fascism and shows its populist nature.

"Democracy is another communism."

Zee: "democracy may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better
than just about anything else out there."

back to the abolition of slavery.  Zee claims democracy is a "legitamite
system of government" and Mercuriou disects this.

A little bit about Napoleon.

Mercuriou summerizes - "the broken record of democracy for the last
two hundred years." 'put the people in control'

reaction - "you tell 'em Marc",  "let the bastard die up there"

FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKS
This T-shirt isn't original.  A friend of mine has one.


T + 16 days <***>

decision to move out of LEO to higher orbit

T + 21 days <***>

Vic appears on TV.  We get a snapshot of his views - the back-to-earth,
hardcore environmentalist, American Indian perspective.  Mercuriou
breaks in when the TV opponent declares that human society has
abandoned greed/force/human nature and "it's called democracy".
Back to Dr. Antonov - all society is coercive.

Alister, Yeats and Burns all reject the opportunity to grandstand
for the cameras

T + 33 days <***>

Andrea's press conference.  She presents a positive philosophy
(as opposed to her negative criticisms of T + 7)

do you advocate a welfare system?  isn't picking up hitchhikers dangerous.

You bet.


T + 54 days <****>

Description of the stable module configuration now achieved.

MUTE: This T-shirt is original.  I've never seen one as described.

Andrea asks Burns about Merciruou.

The problem with being smart.

We find out why Burns answers to Mecuriou - Merciriou does the
management.


T + 60 days <****>

Andrea and Vic.  why he went to medical school.


T + 188 days <***>

Soy beans and sushi.


T + 231 days <****>

Plutarch. Sparta.  Vic challenges Andrea to prescribe rules to be
Christians.  'Primitive' societies.  Modern societies based on
dependancy and forced labor.  The bastardization of Christianity.

Andrea: faith in God got _her_ there.

T + 424 days <***>

discussion of landing

"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you for
another man."

T + 637 days <***>

"Live from Mars orbit"
crew conference

T + 639 days <***>

Andrea, Merceriou, and Burns.  Andrea argues against the landing.
Merceriou goes ahead.

T + 650 days <***>

the landing attempt

interestingly enough, in this chronology, if you plug in all the dates
to figure out when "T + 650" was, Mars was on the wrong side of the
solar system!  (see, i actually did think of trying to propose a
realistic series of orbit transfer burns, but gave up)

T + 651 days <***>

"remove the spacesuits and launch it"

crew conference.  

T + 652 days <***>

suicide watch

T + 653 days <***>

talking to NASA

T + 654 days <***>

"Can the kid get them home?"

I guess they better all die.  Who am I to argue with Nostradamous?

T + 657 days <**>

memorial service

T + 658 days <*>

Alister begins maneuvering the cargo modules.

T + 690 days <***>

Mercuriou and Andrea - everybody cuts corners.

T + 695 days <**>

OMS-17

Do these numbers add up?  Does a 17 minute, 37.42 mega-newton burn
give something roughly the mass of the spaceship about a tenth-gee
acceleration?  I have no idea!  Does a five-minute wait in a six-hour
orbit change your orientation by about one degree?  No, it should be
about 5.

The quote is from Deutscher's 'The Prophet Unarmed', part two of his
three-part biography of Trotsky:

	Nearly thirty years had passed from the moment when the young
	Trotsky saw the towers and the walls of Moscow for the first
	time.  He was then being transported from a jail in Odessa
	to a place of exile in Siberia; and it was from behind the bars
	of a prison van that he had his first glimpse of the 'village
	of the Tsars', the future 'capital of the Communist International'.
	It was from behind such bars also that he now had his last
	glimpse of Moscow, for he was never to return to the city of
	his triumphs and defeats.  He entered it a persecuted
	revolutionary; and so he left it.


T + 701 days <**>

need this to buffer between OMS-17 and 9/11
d6516 1
d8228 501
@


1.206
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d15 3
a18 1
/* I'LL KEEP THIS NOVEL ABOUT REAL PEOPLE */
d20 1
a20 1
I'LL NOT GET LOST IN IVORY TOWERS
d23 2
a24 2
I'll PRAY GOD INSPIRE THIS WORK
I'll REMIND MAN OF ITS ERRORS
d51 2
a52 1
Chesapeake Computer Corporation -
d90 1
a90 1
his resume, the background check.
d102 3
a104 3
"Top of the morning, Burns," or
"Big talk today, Burns," or
"Got a cable loose, there, Burns," or
d133 1
a133 1
bits on a hard drive.  Such a virus is particularly
d165 1
a165 1
"Well, write your own timesheet, but I'm hitting the bay.  Sure you
d177 1
a177 1
"No, thanks," Burns replied without a hint of deceit in his voice.
d192 2
a193 2
phone call from someone who had already hung up by the time he got
there.  Burns had contemplated taking a shot of J.D. that morning to
d197 1
a197 1
Nothing did.  He dashed across the room as the door closed.
d216 2
a217 2
Buoyed
by an air of invincibility, Burns floated back out to the
d285 1
a285 1
a dollar a pop and half the planet can't
d292 3
a294 3
"Well, now we've got money," he concluded cynically, producing a wad
of fifty-dollar bills and fanning them on the table like a deck of
poker cards, then picked one up and examined it with the air of a
d305 1
a305 1
and bitter.
d307 4
a310 2
He paused, and now switched his tone of voice to that of a teenager
stammering to explain a 2 A.M. party to his parents.
d2657 1
a2657 1
course its nuclear properties, despite the fact that _Icarus_ carried
d3745 3
a3747 2
absence.  It was his first appearance outside his quarters in a week.
Mercuriou silently assimilated his statement.
d3776 2
a3777 3
"I'm not sure, Marc.  It's just real clear to me now that my presence
here is pretty superfluous.  You're not going to need a doctor, and
your not going to need the hydroponics."
d3779 1
a3779 2
"So...what? we're just going to give up after a year when our food
runs out and go home?"
d3789 4
a3792 7
know... I've gotten _centered_, Marc, I don't know how else to explain
it, I've gotten centered, and I understand now that that decision was
totally mine, and that my presence here doesn't really affect anyone
but me.  You don't need me... oh yes as a friend, but not for anything
technical... and that's why you asked me to come, right?"

Slowly, Mercuriou nodded.
d3794 1
d3796 1
d3798 1
a3798 1
T + 16 days
d3800 1
a3800 2
"All the cargo modules are in place, we're still taking meteor hits
in the forward compartments, but they're the empty fuel tanks."
d3802 1
a3802 5
"The wings are still vulnerable," Andrea pointed out.  "The 'meteor
wake' of the cargo modules covers us here, and the body of the 747,
but it doesn't cover the wings."  Burns was nodding.  The Captain
listened, and said nothing.  The entire crew was silent for about
10 seconds.
d3806 2
a3807 2
"Sure," Mercuriou answered, "that's what I'm waiting for, anybody to
talk.  Say whatever you want."
d3809 2
a3810 7
"Well," Alister said after clearing his through, "if we move out of
Low Earth Orbit, I mean, that's what we're taking about, right?"
There were nods around the cabin.  "That puts us out of range of the
space shuttle!?"  Alister voice trailed off at the end.  The last two
weeks had passed in a sureal blur.  He still found it fantastic that
he was actually flying in space, and now they actually wanted to move
beyond range of the _space_shuttle_?!
d3815 1
a3815 1
The Captain was ephastically shaking his head, no, No, NO!
d3830 2
a3831 2
"You going turn traitor on me now, Burns?" he asked with a snicker
in his voice.
d3835 3
a3837 3
"Hey, you're the boss, but I'm just saying what she says makes a lot
of sense!  I've told you from the beginning that we should have
three identical vehicles to try this."
d3840 1
a3840 2
we're just five little nobodies at the mercy of the masses and their
governments."
d3843 5
a3847 1
calmly, clearly.  "Switzerland might let us land."
a3848 2
Again there was a silence of several seconds, but this time Mercuriou
broke it.
d3850 6
a3855 1
"Take us out of orbit."
d3983 1
a3983 1
was that the crew of the _Icarus_, loved or hated, had become media
d4293 1
a4293 1
down, the ship had assumed a stable configuration, and the _Icarus_
d4340 1
a4340 1
designated _Icarus_' bridge, so Burns now spent several hours a day in
d4604 7
d4666 2
a4667 2
turning point in the flight of the _Icarus_.  With the stress of the
initial months behind them, the crew of the _Icarus_ had settled into
d4882 1
a4882 1
other space mission to date.  _Icarus_ will go down along with with
d4932 1
a4932 1
Most cable TV systems now carried the _Icarus_ video feed for at least
d5101 1
a5101 1
From orbit, the _Icarus_ crew saw a red dot appear on the left
d5251 1
a5251 1
packed except one - a pair of spacesuits.  _Icarus_ would then be left
d5372 1
a5372 1
quatrains refered to the _Icarus_ - something about "the great bird
d5574 1
a5574 1
from fundamentalists.  Most of the _Icarus_ crew deleted it along with
d6300 1
a6300 1
_Columbia_ was the space shuttle slatted to return the _Icarus_ crew.
d6305 1
a6305 1
followed.  The _Icarus_ crew, after an almost completely vegetarian
d6308 1
a6308 1
the fresh vegetables from _Icarus_.  Afterwards, Borzov predictably
d6385 1
a6385 1
and he had not understand this last remark from the _Icarus_
d6494 1
a6494 1
"Do you think we'll ever come back to _Icarus_, I mean, it's still up
d7067 7
d7135 1
a7135 1
decided by NASA if her role on the _Icarus_ is as an offical
d7149 1
a7149 1
how Dr. Yeats came to be on board the _Icarus_, and whether this
d7773 1
a7773 1
_Icarus_ mission had become.  Her opponent was a minister in a major
d8091 1
a8091 1
for her in spaceflight.  At some point in the _Icarus_ mission, she
@


1.205
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d16 2
a17 1
I'LL KEEP THIS NOVEL ABOUT REAL PEOPLE
d3700 1
a3700 1
T + 8 days
d3702 10
a3711 1
"The majority don't want good leaders."
d3713 2
a3714 10
"The majority don't want good leaders," the astronaut repeated,
floating weightless on the screens of 10 million people watching the
live program.  "They want garbage leaders.  They want the most selfish
bastards you'd ever want to meet, with this nightmare capitalist
system based on the most vicious traits of mankind to be jammed down
everyone's throats.  And this time, nobody can say it isn't really a
democracy, that one man took over the government, that the dissidents
were 'disappeared', that we don't have freedom of speech or freedom of
the press.  Nobody can claim that this isn't really what the majority
of people want."
d3716 2
a3717 2
"So you actually do think the majority of the American people support
their government?" the moderator asked.
d3719 3
a3721 13
"Yes, and that's really the problem - populist government - this
stupid idea that you can put the masses of people in charge of
society.  It was talked about by philophers in the eigthteenth
century, brought to power in Europe and the Americas by a string of
revolutions in the nineteenth, and brought to fuition in the twentieth
century.  What it produced was fascism, communism, and capitalism -
three of the most depraved societies that have every been seen on the
face of this planet.  Fascism, based on brutal, viscious, racial
competition; communism, based on brutal, viscious, class competition;
and capitalism, based on brutal, viscious individual competition.
Now, tell me, what do all of these things have in common... other than
the fact that millions upon millions upon millions of people went
chasing off after every one of them?"
d3723 1
a3723 1
Mercuriou went on without waiting for an answer.
d3725 10
a3734 77
"You want to understand communism, read the last page of the Communist
Manifesto, where Marx and Engles talk about letting the world tremble
in fear of a communist revolution.  _That_'s communism - stick AK-47s
in the hands of the peasants and let the world tremble in fear!
That's what _millions_ of people wanted - expropriate the expropriators
and let everyone tremble in fear!"

"And communism was one of the biggest populist movements of the
twentieth century!  Practically every country in existance had some
kind of communist insurgancy!  They took over half this planet!
Millions upon millions of people _believed_ in communism!  To claim
that the communists were some tiny bunch of dictators flies in the
face of history!  Take Vietnam - why were all those 15-year-olds
hauling AK-47s around the Mekong Delta if the communists were just
some tiny cliche holed up in the Kremlin?!  Take China - Mao Tse Sung,
the Long March, the defeat of Chang Kai Chech, heck, look at Russia
itself!  Then how did they win their Civil War in Russia?  The Whites
had all the old czarist military officers, they had foreign aid from
the United States and Great Britian, the Reds were isolated and on
their own, yet still they managed to win that war!  How did they did
that if nobody supported them?  If communism wasn't populist, then why
did forty percent of the Russian electorate vote for Zyuganov in 1996?
Forty percent!  And this is part of an ongoing trend that has seen the
Communist Party consistently drawing a third of the vote in Russia
elections!  Now what possible explanation is there for this except
that millions upon millions of Russians _to_this_day_ support
communism?!"

Mercuriou paused briefly before continuing in a calmer voice.

"The problem with communism wasn't their economic system, it wasn't
the structure of their elections, it wasn't their lack of
constituional guarentees.  The problem with communism was that their
leaders were a bunch of trash with some nightmare system to be jammed
down everyone's throats, and _millions_of_people_supported_them_!
They were a lot like the people who run democracy today!"

"The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe.  Walk into
one of these stores anywhere in the Western world without a credit
card or a twenty dollar bill in hand.  Ask for a plate of food.  See
what you walk out with.  The fact is that the majority of people are
crude, selfish, and violent.  That's why communism came to power in
these backwards countries - if the people have nothing, tell them to
expropriate the exproriators at gunpoint - it sounds great!  Now in
the more developed nations, the majority have a lot more material
possessions, expropriating the expropriators doesn't sound nearly as
good, better to just build some brutal society where those who have
can keep it and don't lift a finger for anyone else.  The bottom line
is that the majority of people are selfish - both capitalism and
communism play to that, just on different sides of the coin."

"It was the same thing with fascism, after the Germans basically
elected the Nazis in 1932, with a plurality of over thirteen million
votes!  They got enough votes to make Hermann Goering president of the
Reischtag, enough votes to defeat Von Papen's government on a vote of
no-confidence, enough votes to create a situtation where Adolf Hitler
was basically the only viable choice for German chancellor.  Generally
speaking, that means they won the election!  You hear these apologists
for democracy try to blame Hindenburg for what happened, try to say
the German industrialists pushed him to appoint Hitler, or that his
son was whispering in his ear, what about the thirteen and a half
million people who voted Nazi in '32?!  Did they have anything to do
with Hinderburg's decision?  Thirteen and a half million!  There isn't
a city on this planet with thirteen and a half million people in it!
And this in a nation of only about eighty million total!  Yes, Hitler
proceeded to build a dictatorship, but a dictatorship with the support
of millions upon millions of people!  And don't try to say that the
Germans didn't knew what they were getting.  Read the first chapter,
the first page, of _Mein_Kampf_!  The part where Hitler talks about
'the moral right of armed conquest'!  That book was a best-seller in
Germany!  That's what those people voted for - 'the moral right of
armed conquest'!  People supported the Nazis for basically the same
reason people supported the communists and the same reason people
today support the capitalists - because they were brutal as hell, and
that's what works in the 'real world' and that's all these millions
and millions of people 'know'!  That's populist government!  That's
democracy!"
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"It's another communism.  Another big pile of books and theories that
sound real good on paper, and in practice has produced some of the
most depraved societies that's every been seen on the face of this
planet.  Everybody runs around yelling about how 'the people' support
it!  Of course they support it - they're the majority!  Democracy
isn't about putting 'the people' in control, it's about putting
one group of people in control - the majority!  Now, why should
one group of people rule everyone else's lives just because there's
more of them than anybody else?  Why shouldn't the factory workers
run society - they're the ones who have to break their backs for
industrialization, right?  Why shouldn't we generically engineer
some 'super race' of men, and put them in control, huh?  I mean,
they'd be stronger, smarter, healthier, superior to us in every
way, so shouldn't they be the ones to rule?  Let's face it - communism
and fascism make at least as much sense as democracy does, which
is to say that they're all equally absurd!"
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NEED TO BACK THIS UP MORE
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"And then we've got the granddaddy of them all, at least as far as
European democracy is concerned - the French Revolution!  The great
French republic, who leaders preached liberty, fraternity, and
equality... and guillotines in the public squares of Paris to chop off
the heads of the noblemen!  Europe's first democracy - and every one
of those thugs was elected - Coulton, Saint Just, Robespierre, and of
course, finally, Napoleon.  And don't let anyone tell you that
Bonaparte wasn't elected, because he could have won any election he
ever stood for.  He came to power in a democracy and was one of the
most popular leaders in French history."
d3745 5
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MORE ABOUT FRANCE ... 1848
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"Meanwhile, while all this is going on in Europe, we've got the great
American 'experiment', based on all men possessing certain inaliable
rights... unless your skin was black, of course, because if capitalism
is the issue that has dominated the last hundred years of American
history, then, really, slavery was the issue that dominated the first
hundred years.  The civil war shook democracy to its core, oh, it
survived, but the most serious questions raised by slavery have never
really been answered.  If it took the bloodiest war in U.S. history to
end slavery, how much can this system of government really be worth?
And if it takes the same thing to end capitalism?  How many more
'successes' like the civil war can this country afford?"
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AT THIS POINT, WE HAVE TO HAVE MADE THE CASE AGAINST CAPITALISM A SLAM-DUNK
d3757 1
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MEXICO AND THE AMERICAN INDIANS
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"Basically, the only legimitate form of government is democracy,
right?  Everything else is illegimiate, and if your government is
illegimiate, you basically have no rights, there is no international
law for you, so better buddy up with the U.S. or you might find the
SEALs airdropping on your international airport one morning."
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"It's the same with all these populist governments. Communism was one
of the biggest mass populist movements of the twentieth centry.
How did it manage to take
over half this planet?

This is the sick truth about
populist government.  The masses of people are selfish and violent.
That's why they chose people like the communists and the fascists and
the capitalists to be their leaders!"



"This has been the broken record of democracy for the last two hundred
years.  It just keeps repeating the same lyrics - 'put the people in
control', 'put the people in control', 'put the people in control'!
All these people talk about these grandeose ideas of liberty and
freedom, and then choose absolute garbage for their leaders, and build
societies based on the basest and most vicious traits of mankind.
This time around it's the capitalists - the most selfish sons of
bitches you'd ever want to meet, and the majority support these bums
every step of the way.  And of course they can't spend enough money to
build the most lethal killing machines this planet has ever seen.
This is what the majority of people want - militant capitalists, about
the most selfish men you'd ever want to meet, and they're going to get
tough with anybody who won't follow all these laws.  Real good
leaders."

Mercurio stopped.  He had been lecturing the TV camera non-stop for
almost half an hour.  A tense silence fell over the television
program.  Across the country, millions of people in their homes
murmorred amongst themselves, at least those who were still watching.
"I don't want to hear any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Marc!"  "That
bastard deserves to die up there!"  "I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is
this what people think about us?"
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In New York, the broadcast was nearing it's end.  There would be
plenty more opportunities for debate.
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"Captain, what are your plans?  How long can you stay in orbit?"
d3777 1
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Mercurio rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over the
compartment.  Finally, he pulled out the T-shirt he was looking for,
brushed away a pair of jeans that had drifted in front of the TV
camera and spread the black T-shirt out so it dominated the view field
of the camera.  It read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.
d3779 1
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"We're going to Mars!"
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T + 10 days
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"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.  There are certainly plenty of people who want to hear
your message, captain, but how are they supposed to get up here?"

Mercuriou and his first officer were meeting in private for the first
time.  He held up his hand.

"Call me Marc."

She nodded.

"OK, I'll concede to your 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.  The whole planet is ruled by one nightmare political
system or another."

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

"Why not?"

"Because sometimes _all_ of your options are unacceptable.  Then it
becomes very easy to pick the most attractive one and gloss over its
defects."

Mercuriou paused and studied her.

"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 I want to take a close look at the asteroid belt.  There are
probably more minable mineral resources there on the entire Earth.
With the automation we've got, if we can set up a manufacturing plant
there, we can make more ships like this one.  We've already built one,
so we know how to do it.  We can establish a colony there and send
ships back to Earth to bring more people."
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you just give everything away, you'll be put out of business.
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Mercuriou: Why do you think I became a theif? I've 'learned my
lesson'!  I've figured how to 'get things done' in the 'real world'!
I've learned to 'compete'!  You crow on about rewarding people for
their hard work!  Why doesn't everyone get rewarded for their hard
work?  Why do only the most selfish people get rewarded?  Why do you
have to become either a capitalist or a thief to get this kind of
opportunity?
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decide to put it online like you suggest, they have that power, it's
called _freedom_.
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Ecks: Well, nothing more than to reiterate that freedom is the basis
of capitalism.  Captain Mercuriou's ideas sound very noble and
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Mercuriou: Freedom for whom, senator, freedom for whom?  Freedom for
the two million people sitting in your jail cells?

Wye: So now you're trying to compare us with fascists!

Mercuriou: The basic premise is the same.  The solution to our
problems is to build all these super-weapons, arm ourselves to the
teeth, have a war against our own people, send armed men busting into
their homes, make people so terrified of what will be done to them
that they'll be too afraid not to just fall in line and do what
they're told when the great majority barks out its orders.  Isn't it
funny how in all of these great _people's_ societies the biggest enemy
of all always ends up being _your_own_people_?

Wye: Fascist Germany was a dictatorship, captain; its government
_wasn't_ responsive to its people; THAT'S HOW WE GOT THE HOLOCAUST!!

Mercuriou: It was DEMOCRACY that brought Hitler to power, senator!
Germany had not one, but two national elections in 1932, and the Nazi
party won a plurality in both of them!  Hitler was the leader of the
largest political party in the country and the obvious choice for
chancellor!

Wye: This is outrageous!



Mercuriou: After the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw the truth about
democracy.  The U.S. was left as the world's only superpower, and
could really have done something to make all this talk about liberty
and freedom real.  Instead, they built a wall across their southern
border, declared war on their own people for what they smoked, and
decided to keep all their technology secret and controlled so they
could make billions off it for themselves, and told the rest of the
world to 'compete'.  That's when we really saw the truth about
democracy.



Mercuriou: Drug addiction, alcoholism, thirty thousand suicides a
year, clinical depression at near epidemic proportions... and it's all
because of some guys sitting on their couches smoking dope, right?
Couldn't have anything to do with your leaders, ehh?  Couldn't be
because you're raised from childhood to be a little cog in this
capitalist system, that you're basically forced to work because the
capitalists control everything, and the people you're forced to work
for are the most selfish bums you'd ever want to meet in your life.
Couldn't have anything to do with your problems, right?  Couldn't be
_the_people_in_charge_of_your_society_ that are responsible for any of
this?



Mercuriou: Yet people believe that if they've got money in their
hands, they've got freedom.  They absolutely insist that they _aren't_
living off the clerk stocking the shelfs at Safeway, only because they
sit behind some desk pushing paper and some corporation cuts them a
check every other Friday.




Mercuriou: OK, now let's take a look at the history of democracy!

Wye: Fine, let's look at it's history.  Let's start with freeing the slaves!

Mercuriou: In the bloodiest war in American history.  I mean, let's
face it - the Lincoln government had got to be the most disastrous
administration in American history!  Do you ever think that maybe if
he was told by God what was going to happen he might have just say,
'I'll just sit this one out... let someone else be president this
year'?

Wye: Most disasterous!  Lincoln was one of the countries greatest
presidents!

Mercuriou: OK, fine.  But you have to admit that 'freeing the slaves'
is was least a push.  Not to even go into civil rights, but clearly we
can't afford too many 'successes' like the Civil War!

Mercuriou: What else was happening to democracy in the nineteenth
century?  We had this thing called 'Manifest Destiny', remember?
Hitler had something similar called 'Liebingstrum', but I digress.
The point...

Wye: What the hell are you muttering about?

Mercuriou: The point is that 'Manifest Density' meant we were going to
rule this continent from sea to shining sea.  The two main groups of
people in the way were the American Indians and the Mexicans.
American Indian civilization was basically wiped off the face of this
planet.  The _best_ you can say is it was pushed back into
reservations on some of our most worthless land we've got.  The
Mexicans were invaded, conjuered, and California, New Mexico, Arizona,
Utah was taken from them.  President Polk's war, remember?  Henry
David Thorugh wouldn't pay his ten-dollar tax because he was so
opposed to it?

Mercuriou: This is democracy, or at least American democracy.  In
Europe, it gets even better!  In 1848, the French once again overthrow
their monarchy!  The king flees the country, and they proclaim another
Republic!  They produce a constitution that looks on paper like the
most democratic in Europe!  It provides for an elected President and
universal sufferage - all males can vote, and at the time a
revolutionary concept, and I mean revolutionary!  There was exactly
one election under this new constitution [check this] and guess who
won?  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew!  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, who
within five years proclaims France an empire and himself Emperor
Napoleon III!  Now this is pretty good.  Should silence anyone with
any idea that Napoleon Bonaparte wasn't one of the most popular
leaders in French history, and that he came to power in a democracy.

Wye: So I guess democracy is some evil monster imposed on this planet?

Mercuriou: Something like that.  I think _populist_government_ is a
disaster, and things like democracy show it.  I think things like
Communism and Fascim show it, too!

[now we do russian and germany]

Wye: And now we come to capitalism, I suppose?

Mercuriou: That's right.  We come to capitalism.  It isn't an
encouraging track record.




Wye: Look here, I don't know what you're trying to say...

Mercuriou: Well then let me be crystal clear, Senator.  I don't think
your 'participatory government' is worth a hill of beans [CA].  The
majority of people - not all the people, mind you, just one group of
people - make all the decisions.  Everybody else gets to 'participate'
about the same way you could 'participate' in Russia!



Mercuriou: Well, senator, I'll agree with you that this is a
democracy, but I don't think that changes things much.  Let's say
Russia had had freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and free
and open elections every two or four years, and they had still elected
the communists, and still supported the KGB, and still shipped their
citizens off to gulags.  Would that have changed things all that much,
just that they had elections?

Wye: No sir, the people of these country don't support the KGB, and we
don't ship our citizens off to gulags!

Mercuriou: Oh, but you do.  Haven't you heard about 'zero tolerance'?
Haven't you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?
It has got to be one of the most violent programs on television, and
it's all real!  Remember who you're talking to, senator - a drug user!
Don't expect me to sit here and crow on about freedom while this whole
society is hell-bent on a war against me and everyone else like me.
You do ship your citizens off to jail, and while you may not torture
them, and your prisons may not be as cold as the ones in Siberia, the
fact remains that fear of the police is just as readily used in this
society as in those others.

Wye: I don't think you can compare the DEA with the KGB.





Mercuriou: The majority care about three things: getting rich, getting
tough, and getting laid.





Moderator: So what do you really think of democracy?

Mercuriou: I think it's another communism.

Wye: Democracy is not another communism!  We have freedom in this country!

Mercuriou: Really?  Go tell all the people who smoke pot that they've
got freedom.  Democracy isn't about freedom; it's about putting one
particular group of people in control - the majority.



Mercuriou: Well what about the people in jails?  Do they choose their
own leaders?  Or the people who want to copy music around the
Internet?  How about drug users?  Is that why we have a War on Drugs,
because they choose their own leaders, too?








Mercuriou: You know, I am so sick of hearing about people's 'rights'!
Whenever I hear that word, the next thing I start figuring is 'who's
getting screwed'.  People talk about their 'rights' when they want to
jam somebody else's face in the mud.  Your bum leaders want to build
this 'information economy', where knowledge is just one more commodity
to bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
kept secret.  They talk about their 'rights'!  They've got the 'right'
to keep that information secret, just the great people's government in
Russia did!  And copying books online is illegal for the same reason
that photocopiers and fax machines were illegal in the Soviet Union,
or at least heavily controlled - The potential of the technology
represents too great a threat to the system's ability to control
people's lives.





d3451 8
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"The issue is morality!"
d3460 1
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Perhaps because of his attitude, or perhaps because of his altitude,
perhaps because of the media attention heaped on him, perhaps because
of his position in orbit, completely beyond the reach of any
terrestrial authority, or perhaps simply because of what he said,
Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of nearly every American political
leaders, regardless of party affiliation or personal background.  At
any rate, haven taken the conversation with Yeats to heart, he was
back on television, facing off against Jeff Zee, one of the country's
most prominent politicians, a state governor widely expected to run
for president in the upcoming national election.

"I agree completely, Captain, the issue is morality!  You are a criminal
and a thief!"
d3464 4
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"Well, let's make it the issue, shall we?  All this stuff you trumpet
sounds great, but talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  How
are you so much better than all these terrible capitalists you
lamblast?  You're the worst kind of capitalist - you've stolen
millions, billions of dollars to stroke your own pet project!"

Mercuriou paused and took a deep breath.
d3471 4
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"You can?!  OK, captain, try this on for size - is betraying the trust
of your colleages to implant some computer virus in their network
right or wrong?"

"Well..."

"How about cheating a state lottery system to the tune of a couple
million dollars - right or wrong?"
d3478 5
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"That's right!  You needed money, captain - that's why most people go
to work in the morning!  That's why all these evil capitalists don't
just publish all their books on the Internet - because the authors
need money to write them, money to print them, money to put food on
the table in front of their children!"
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Mercuriou stammered.  For the first time since the launch had
propelled him not only into orbit but also onto the front page of
every news magazine on the planet, he appeared flustered in front of
the T.V. camera.  Zee kept going.
d3506 1
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think all that money comes from for the charities?"
d3513 8
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how they should spend their money.  That would amount to little more
than theft.  Instead, the businessman collects revenue from his
customers, uses those revenues to pay the expenses of the business,
and then returns the surplus both to the employees in the form of
their paychecks and to the investors in the form of dividends.  It is
then up to the employees and investors how to spend _their_money_.  If
they wish to give to charities, they can do so.  Furthermore, the
businessman has a moral responsibility to operate his business
responsibly, because it _isn't_his_money_."
d3524 4
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		NEED A LITTLE MORE HERE

d3532 2
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found it impossible to respond.  Salvation came from an unexpected
source.

Salvation came from above, or at least from the airlock nearest
Mercuriou's head, since there is no 'up' or 'down' in space.

"OK, Governor, that's enough."  Andrea Yeats again entered the
camera's view.  "You talk a good game, and Captain Mercuriou is no
holy man, but the people of the United States haven't exactly
embrassed Christianity, either."


"OK, Zee, that's enough."  Andrea Yeats again pushed her way into the
camera's view.  "You've made your points.  Now you can answer his."

"Points?  He has no points.  He's a criminal."

"He's said a lot about capitalism, I think."

"He's said nothing.  The rantings of a thief trying to justify his
theft."

"And you've talked a lot about morality, but you haven't answered for
your own."
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"Answer, to him, for morality?"

"Fine, then you can answer to me, because I've got no problem
discussing the real issue here - morality.  _Captain_ Mercuriou is
both right and wrong.  He is right that capitalism is _immoral_.  He
is also wrong in his own actions, which are also _immoral_.  It's a
classic case of two wrongs not making a right."
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depraved."
d3564 6
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"Govenor, if that's what you want to believe, fine.  But there are
plenty of people out there who stand behind those counters and won't
lift a finger for anyone unless they're getting something out of it
for themselves."
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universities, established endowment funds such as the Carrnige
d3576 3
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"Carrnige built his empire too long ago for us to remember all the
backs he broke.  Take Mr. Gates, he's a better example, a big
philanthropher."
d3582 1
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"If he was so generous, he would publish his source code.  It would be
the moral thing to do."
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"And who, pray tell, dictates this morality?  Marcelius Mercuriou?"
d3586 1
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"Well, God, or in this case, Jesus."
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"Jesus?"
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away redeemed.  Now think about this.  Did he then say, 'Look at how
much good can be done with all the rich man's money'?  'Look how many
people can be helped'?  'What can you do with two bits'?  'The old
woman might as well have not even gone'?  No.  He tells us the old
woman goes away redemed because she have _everything_ she's got!
She's told 'give to all those who beg of you' and does!  That's
_moral_ behavior!"
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"I don't think so, either, and I've been counting.  So if you want to
believe he's gone and put all these ideas in my head, be my guest."
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Zee paused to inhale and contemplate the video image of the space
captain and the NASA engineer.
d3624 2
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"You know, governor, there's a time-honored debate tactic called
attacking the messenger."

Zee laughed.  Andrea smiled.  Alister exclaimed, "Point for the
doctor!"  Mercuriou remained impassive.
d3627 3
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"OK, Doctor Yeats, so what are you trying to say?  That Christian
morality is based on giving away all our worldly possessions?"
d3632 3
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often _does_ require us to give away all our worldly possessions.
After all, Christ say 'give to all those who beg of you'.
It's not _based_ on that, though.  It's based on love - unconditional
love, for not only God, but all of mankind as well.  Often that
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Zee stared at the screen.  "You can't be serious."
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his stereo to the thief, ehh?"

"That's right."

"A little self-contradictory, isn't it?"
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a Christian if wanted to, he could give all his source code away if he
wanted to, it's up to him!"
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"You're dogging the question, sir.  We've all seen his choice."
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"The path to salvation is narrow, governor, and those who find it few.
The path to damnation is wide, and those who find it many.  Most
people sing their hymns on Sunday and then go work those jobs on
Monday because they need the money, live in a society where they can't
live without it, and have no intention of just giving it all away to
anyone who asks."
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... the next day ...
(I think Andrea has to say this)

"Every murder ever committed in human history was perpetrated by a
murderer who had freedom!  Every rape, every theft!  Every slave was
enchained by the _freedom_ of his master, yes _freedom_!  I'm
so sick of listening to you people crow on about 'freedom'!
Freedom in the absence of morality is the single most destructive
force this planet has _ever_ seen!"


---------

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Mercuriou's next opponent in the video Colosseum was David Wye, a
U.S. senator, who defended capitalism as the will of the people.
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_choose_their_own_leaders_!  Hell, I'll take 'participatory
government' any day!  You participate, and I'll make all the
decisions!  What do you say?
d3347 7
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Wye: This is what the majority of the people of this country want!
d3414 7
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Mercuriou: The majority!  That _is_ what it all comes down to!  The
majority rules; everybody else does what they're told.  And then you
talk about 'freedom'!  Senator, turn on the T.V!  Don't you see the
police slamming people to the ground and dragging them off in
handcuffs!  That's your 'freedom'!
d3422 9
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Wye: Criminals!  People who break our laws!
d3432 1
a3432 7
Mercuriou: Senator, _I'm_one_of_those_criminals_!  Because I smoke
marijuana!  Because I copy books and software from 'C' drive to 'D'
drive!  Because I don't concede to this God damned democracy that it
can control every aspect of my life!  And then you sit there are talk
about 'freedom'!  What freedom?  The freedom to invade people's homes
with guns because there's a hundred million of you and only ten
million of them?
a3433 2
Wye: We do have freedom in this country!  We have freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, free elections!
a3434 8
Mercuriou: The issue isn't how much freedom this 'majority' has got.
It's what they've chosen to do with it!  They've chosen to build a
society based on some of the most vicious traits of mankind; they've
chosen the most selfish bastards as their leaders; they've chosen to
arm themselves to the teeth, build some nightmare society based on
greed, declare war against millions of their own people because they
won't just do what their told when the great free democracy barks out
its orders, and then jam it down their throats at gunpoint!
a3435 1
Wye: We have to have laws, captain!
d3438 2
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Mercuriou: You make it sound like a utopia!  Why do you have the
largest per capita incarceration rate on this planet, if everyone
thinks it's so wonderful?
d3452 2
d3455 5
a3459 3
Mercuriou: You've got the freedom to be selfish, but not to be
generous.  You've got the freedom to work, but not to live.  You've
got the freedom to speak, but not to act.
d3461 1
a3462 2
Mercuriou: Capitalism or communism?  It's like asking someone to
choose between the Hydra and the Medussa!
a3476 6
Mercuriou: Well I call it the Paradox of Freedom: how do you give
freedom to both the Nazis and the Jews?




a3562 6
Wye: Well, I've got a web update for you, captain.  The people of this
planet have decided on democracy, and we're not going back.

Mercuriou: 'The people of this planet'; you guys don't even fool
around with 'the people of this nation' anymore, you're onto global
democracy!
a3599 9
Mercuriou: I do.  The basic premise is the same.  The solution to our
problems is to have a war against our own people, to send armed men
busting into the homes of people who have done absolutely nothing to
harm anyone, to make people so terrified of what will be done to them
that they'll be too afraid not to just fall in line and do what
they're told when the great majority barks out its orders.  Isn't it
funny how in all of these great _people's_ societies the biggest enemy
of all always ends up being _your_own_people_?

a3629 5
"Simply put, in this country we have freedom.  This country is run by
its people, through their elected representatives, and the capitalists
don't simply 'own' the government.  If we have capitalism, it's
because the people choose it."  The speaker was David Wye, a
U.S. senator.  Mercuriou was once again in a televised debate.
d3636 12
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Whenever I hear that word 'rights', the next thing I start figuring is
'who's getting screwed'.  People always talk about their 'rights' when
they want to jam somebody else's face in the mud.  Your bum leaders
want to build an 'information economy', where knowledge is just one
more commodity to bought and sold, and the only way people will pay
for it is if it's kept secret.  They talk about their 'rights'!
They've got the 'right' to keep that information secret, just the
great people's government in Russia did!  And copying books online is
illegal for the same reason that photocopiers and fax machines were
illegal in the Soviet Union, or at least heavily controlled - The
potential of the technology represents too great a threat to the
system's ability to control people's lives.

a3648 2
Wye: To reject majority rule is to reject the most basic, the most
foundational principle of republican government!
a3649 1
Mercuriou: A principle based on what?  Wishful thinking?
d3677 1
a3677 1
millions of dollars to stroke your own pet project!"
d3697 2
a3698 2
need money to write them, money to print them, money to put food in
front of their children!"
d4143 40
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Mercuriou flushed red, clenched his teeth, and smacked his fist into
his palm before he blew.

"Dr. Yeats, _as_usual_, _EXACTLY_ where we don't want her to be!"

d2783 9
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him, Mercuriou was hardly paying attention as he connected together
the pants and body of his spacesuit, which he rapidly put on.
d2796 1
a2796 5
stuck in there?"

He shoved the spacesuit's gloves into his helment, then holding them
both with one hand, shoved off with the other towards the airlock,
curtly telling Burns to open it up.
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he keyed the control sequence on the computer panel to his left.
d2829 1
a2829 2
Just then, Merceriou opened the door and propelled himself into the
module, still holding his helmet and gloves in one hand.
d2834 2
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"Excuse me... sir," she interrupted as she reached for his helmet and
pulled one of his gloves out of it.  Turning back to the puncture, she
d2999 32
a3030 2
behind the TV camera.  After it was concluded, Yeats took Mercuriou
aside.
d3032 1
a3032 2
"You know, before this is all over, I might jump in there and say a
few things myself."
d3034 1
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"By all means, Dr. Yeats, be my guest!"  Mercuriou exclaimed with a
flourish.  "Jump in anytime you please!"
d3036 4
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Alister spoke first.
@


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T - 17 days
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Kyle nodded in assent and admiration.  He knew this as well, but only
because he had first calculated the quantity of nitric acid required
to produce a kilogram of nitroglycerine, looked up the energy released
by a kilogram of nitroglycerine and compared that to the energy
consumed by a shuttle launch.  Andrea had performed basically the same
estimate in her head.  He had come to her for a reason.
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"Kyle, would you like a nice cool glass of lemonade?  I just finished
squeezing the lemons."
d1666 2
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"I only has a few limes in it; I ran out.  Use Equal if it's not sweet
enough for you; it dissolves in cold water better than sugar."
d1688 3
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quagmire.  She hated dealing with capitalists.  She would have no real
authority.  Still, Kyle was her best friend, and we were taught to
_give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_us.
d1696 4
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"Great!" Kyle beamed.  "I've got everything set up.  Use your old I.D;
you'll be a special consultant.  I'll advance you all the expenses, and
I'll make sure they know you're coming.  Just go out there and see
what you can figure out."
@


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capitalization was over $5 billion.  The trades triggered losses that
exceeded the firm's available trading capital by nearly $2 billion.
d1550 9
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"This could be a precursor of the Y2K bug," said Somebody Else.
"These are the kinds of serious problems malfunctioning computers can
create."
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"Do we have a name for the ship?" Alister wondered aloud.
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a1596 1
The four would-be astronauts looked back and forth amonst themselves.
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"We could name it after some hero from ancient mythology," the captain
suggested, "somebody like Odysseus who took over on some great voyage,
or Daedalus, who built wax wings to escape a unjust imprisonment."
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"I was thinking of calling it _The_Asylum_," Vic said.  Mercuriou
grinned.
d1602 1
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"A nice little double-entendre, there, I suppose?"
d1604 1
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Alister's idea was _The_Revolution_, but it was Burn's practical
suggestion that finally won: _Mars_Voyager_.
d1606 1
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"By the way, did you see this?" Mercuriou asked Burns as they walked
back to the warehouse.  He handed him a two-day-old copy of a major
financial newspaper.  It was folded back to page four, which contained
a brief announcement that the government investigation into the
bankruptcy of Keystone Securities had been expanded into a criminal
probe.  Little more was known publicly, except that outraged investors
and politicians were demanding to know how such a 'bug' could have
passed undetected.
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"This could be serious," the engineer concluded as his returned the
newspaper.
d1610 1
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"Oh, it _is_ serious.  There's a countdown clock running on this
launch, just like with NASA's, T minus whatever-the-hell, only we
don't know what time it is.  At some point, that clock goes to zero,
and we better be ready to launch when it does."
@


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border, declared war on their own people, and decided to keep all
their technology secret and controlled so they could make billions off
it for themselves.  That's when we really saw the truth about
a3530 12

"Simply put, in this country we have freedom.  This country is run by
its people, through their elected representatives, and the capitalists
don't simply 'own' the government.  If we have capitalism, it's
because the people choose it."  The speaker was David Wye, a
U.S. senator.  Mercuriou was once again in a televised debate.

"The people!" Mercuriou sneered.  "Which people, Senator, surely not
all the people!"

Wye: Yes, _the_people_!

a3535 3
Wye: We have a participatory democracy, Captain!  Those people can
petition their government to change those laws, and if enough people
support them, the laws _will_ change!
a3536 5
Mercuriou: But that's not what you said!  You didn't say the people
could _participate_ in their government!  You said the people could
_choose_their_own_leaders_!  Hell, I'll take 'participatory
government' any day!  You participate, and I'll make all the
decisions!  What do you say?
d3538 5
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Wye: Well, that would be a dictatorship, Captain.  The bottom line is
that this is what the majority of the people of this country want!

Mercuriou: The majority!  That _is_ what it all comes down to!  The
majority rules; everybody else does what they're told.  And then you
talk about 'freedom'!  Senator, turn on the T.V!  Don't you see the
police slamming people to the ground and dragging them off in
handcuffs!  That's your 'freedom'!

Wye: Criminals!  People who break our laws!

Mercuriou: Senator, _I'm_one_of_those_criminals_!  Because I smoke
marijuana!  Because I copy computer software from 'C' drive to 'D'
drive!  Because I don't concede to this God damned democracy that it
can control every aspect of my life, no matter how private, that it
can literally tell me what I can and can't put into my own body!  And
then you sit there are talk about 'freedom'!  What freedom?  The
freedom to regulate every aspect of people's lives?  The freedom to
invade into people's homes with guns because a hundred million people
support you?

Wye: We do have freedom in this country!  We have freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, free elections!

Mercuriou: The issue isn't how much freedom this 'majority' has got.
It's what they've chosen to do with it!  They've chosen to build a
society based on some of the most vicious traits of mankind; they've
chosen the most selfish bastards as their leaders; they've chosen to
arm themselves to the teeth, build some nightmare society, declare war
against millions of their own people because they won't just do what
their told when the great free democracy barks out its orders, and
then jam it down their throats at gunpoint!
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it didn't matter.  They've been shipping it for about six months now."
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Mercuriou didn't answer.  He hadn't expected the question and didn't
have an answer.  Instead, he nursed his tea and looked around.
d537 1
a537 2
realize _This_is_how_long_a_day_really_is_.
_This_is_what_you_waste_seven_times_a_week_.
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in his own home, surrounded by the family he thought were strangers.
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a660 1
demanded that their math eventually predict something real.
@


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@
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Wye: OK, sir, we have a Constitution...

Mercuriou: So did the Russians; so did the Russians...

Wye: Our Constitution is enforced!  Our Constitution restrains the
power of our government...

Mercuriou: Really?  Let's take a look.

Wye: Oh, please...

Mercuriou: No, let's take a look!  You've made this absurd claim that
our government is restrained by its Constitution; let's get the thing
out and take a look at it!

Wye: OK, fine!  Let's get a copy of the Constitution and look at it!"

Mercuriou: Let's start with the powers of Congress.  Now, congressman,
stop me if at any point you hear anything about regulating the use of
drugs, or radio communications, or agriculture, or the environment.

Mercuriou: Article one, section eight.  The Congress shall have Power
to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the
debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare... to
borrow Money on the credit of the United States, to regulate Commerce
with foreign Nations and among the several states, to establish a
uniform rule of Naturalization..."

Wye: All right, all right, first of all, many of these problems didn't
exist two hundred years ago, there was no drug abuse, no radio, the
environment wasn't an issue...

Mercuriou: So we should just ignore our Constitution whenever some new
problem comes up; it only applies to our old problems?

Wye: You want to go through the Constitution section by section?  How
about Ammendment One, Freedom of Speech; Ammendment Two, the Right to
Bear Arms; the guarantees of due process, the election procedures,
this is absurd!

Mercuriou: Fine!  Let's keep going, now!  Don't forget the tenth
Ammendment, how's it read?

Mercuriou: The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
States respectively, or to the people.

Mercuriou: OK!  So here it is clearly stated that the federal
government _does_not_ have any of these additional powers!  _No_ power
to regulate communications, of radio or any other form!  _No_ power to
regulate drug use!  _No_ power to regulate firearms!

Wye: Look, there are sound legal arguments behind all of these laws...

Mercuriou: So what, only a lawyer can understand the Constitution?

Wye: No, you don't need to be a lawyer to understand the Constitution,
but this notion that half the federal government is unconstitutional
is simply absurd!

Mercuriou: It says it right here that the government _does_not_ have
these powers!
_The_powers_not_delegated_to_the_United_States_by_the_Constitution ...
_are_reserved_to_the_States_.  It says it right there - if the
Constitution doesn't expressly give a power to the federal government,
it doesn't have that power.  Now, what good's a law when you pick and
choose what parts of it you want to obey?  Fine, so you obey parts of
the Constitution, but what about the other parts?  This is like me
blowing down the highway at ninety miles an hour, and when the cop
pulls me over saying, 'oh, but officer, I came to a full and complete
stop at all the red lights'!

Moderator: Senator, Captain Mercurio certainly isn't the first person
to accuse the Federal Government of circuventing the Constitution.  Is
there nothing to any of these claims?

Wye: No, and I'll tell you why.  All these things the anti-government
people gripe about - gun control, the drug war, the environmental
laws, the FCC - all of them are supported by the overwealming majority
of the people of this country.

Mercuriou: I'll agree with that, but I'd still like to see these
additional powers codified in Constitutional Ammendments, and I'll
tell you why.  One of the big accusations people made against Soviet
Russia was that their government didn't obey their Constitution, that
it was tiny little bunch of communists who had taken over the
government, that it wasn't really what people wanted, that if they had
only had 'freedom' everything would have been so different.  Now, I
don't want anybody being able to come around a hundred years from now
and try to say that the U.S. wasn't really a democracy, that the
people didn't really want these things, that some bunch of politicians
took over the government, that if only the Constitution had been
enforced, then everything would have been so different.  This
government, this majority, talks so much about law and order, is so
determined to make all these rules for everyone else to obey, I'd just
like to see them have to obey the rules that were laid down for them.
It's a bit of a side issue, but I'd really like a precedent
established that the powers of the government are limited by the
Constitution.

Wye: The government is limited by its Constitution.  That's one of the
fundamental principles of American government.

Mercuriou: How can you sit there and say that!  How can you read the
Bill of Rights, read the Ninth and Tenth Ammendments, then sit there
and say that!  I can't even call it a lie!  It just flys in the face
of the English language!

Wye: Again, Captain, it comes back to self-government.  The bottom
line is that this is what the majority of the people want!  And what
they want is freedom!
d3503 4
a3506 4
majority isn't restricted by their constitution, constitutions are
only for communist dictatorships!  And then you talk about 'freedom'!
Senator, turn on the T.V!  Don't you see the police slamming people to
the ground and dragging them off in handcuffs!
d3512 10
a3521 11
drive!  Because I don't concede to this God-damned, filthy, cursed
democracy that it can control every aspect of my life, no matter how
private, that it can literally tell me what I can and can't put into
my own body!  And then you sit there are talk about 'freedom', you
bastard politician!  What freedom?  The freedom to regulate every
aspect of people's lives?  The freedom to bust into people's homes
with guns because a hundred million people support you?

Wye: We do have freedom in this country!" Wye practically screamed
back at the camera in retort.  "We have freedom of speech, freedom of
the press, free elections!
d8601 23
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----- [ T + 6 days ]

"You've got the freedom to be selfish, but not to be generous.  You've
got the freedom to work, but not to live.  You've got the freedom to
speak, but not to act."

d7627 2
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"Propaganda is like sacarin; it can substitute for leadership in
everything but..."

----- [ T + 6 days ]

"Capitalism or communism?  It's like asking someone to choose
between the Hydra and the Medussa!"
a7637 10
---- [ T + 8 days ]

"After the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw the truth about democracy.
The U.S. was left as the world's only superpower, and could really
have done something to make all this talk about liberty and freedom
real.  Instead, they built a wall across their southern border,
declared war on their own people, and decided to keep all their
technology secret and controlled so they could make billions off it
for themselves.  That's when we really saw the truth about democracy."

a7671 25
----

The paradox of freedom: how do you give freedom to both the Nazis and the Jews?

----

"Drug addiction, alcoholism, thirty thousand suicides a year, clinical
depression at near epidemic proportions... and it's all because of
some guys sitting on their couches smoking dope, right?  Couldn't have
anything to do with your leaders, ehh?  Couldn't be because you're
raised from childhood to be a little cog in this capitalist system,
that you're basically forced to work because the capitalists control
everything, and the people you're forced to work for are the most
selfish bums you'd ever want to meet in your life.  Couldn't have
anything to do with your problems, right?  Couldn't be
_the_people_in_charge_of_your_society_ that are responsible for any
of this?"

----

"Yet people believe that if they've got money in their hands,
they've got freedom.  They absolutely insist that they _aren't_
living off the clerk stocking the shelfs at Safeway, only because
they sit behind some desk pushing paper and some corporation
cuts them a check every other Friday."
d7949 1
a7949 1
---- [ T + 6 days ]
a8117 80
"OK, now let's take a look at the history of democracy!"

"Fine, let's look at it's history.  Let's start with freeing the slaves!"

"In the bloodiest war in American history.  I mean, let's face it -
the Lincoln government had got to be the most disastrous
administration in American history!  Do you ever think that maybe if
he was told by God what was going to happen he might have just say,
'I'll just sit this one out... let someone else be president this
year'"?

"Most disasterous!  Lincoln was one of the countries greatest presidents!"

"OK, fine.  But you have to admit that 'freeing the slaves' is was
least a push.  Not to even go into civil rights, but clearly we can't
afford too many 'successes' like the Civil War!"

"What else was happening to democracy in the nineteenth century?  We
had this thing called 'Manifest Destiny', remember?  Hitler had
something similar called 'Liebingstrum', but I digress.  The point..."

"What the hell are you muttering about?"

"The point is that 'Manifest Density' meant we were going to rule this
continent from sea to shining sea.  The two main groups of people in
the way were the American Indians and the Mexicans.  American Indian
civilization was basically wiped off the face of this planet.  The
_best_ you can say is it was pushed back into reservations on some of
our most worthless land we've got.  The Mexicans were invaded,
conjuered, and California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah was taken from
them.  President Polk's war, remember?  Henry David Thorugh wouldn't
pay his ten-dollar tax because he was so opposed to it?"

"This is democracy, or at least American democracy.  In Europe, it
gets even better!  In 1848, the French once again overthrow their
monarchy!  The king flees the country, and they proclaim another
Republic!  They produce a constitution that looks on paper like the
most democratic in Europe!  It provides for an elected President and
universal sufferage - all males can vote, and at the time a
revolutionary concept, and I mean revolutionary!  There was exactly
one election under this new constitution [check this] and guess who
won?  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew!  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, who
within five years proclaims France an empire and himself Emperor
Napoleon III!  Now this is pretty good.  Should silence anyone with
any idea that Napoleon Bonaparte wasn't one of the most popular
leaders in French history, and that he came to power in a democracy."

"So I guess democracy is some evil monster imposed on this planet?"

"Something like that.  I think _populist_government_ is a disaster,
and things like democracy show it.  I think things like Communism
and Fascim show it, too!"

[now we do russian and germany]

"And now we come to capitalism, I suppose?"

"That's right.  We come to capitalism.  It isn't an encouraging track
record."

"Well, I've got a web update for you, captain.  The people of this
planet have decided on democracy, and we're not going back."


----

"So what do you really think of democracy?"

Mercuriou paused.

"I think it's another communism."

It was more than X could take.

"Democracy is not another communism!  We have freedom in this country!"

"Really?  Go tell all the people who smoke pot that they've got
freedom.  Democracy isn't about freedom; it's about putting one
particular group of people in control - the majority."

d8391 1
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=========

"Look here, I don't know what you're trying to say..." Wye sputtered.

"Well then let me be crystal clear, Senator.  I don't think your
'participatory government' is worth a hill of beans [CA].  The
majority of people - not all the people, mind you, just one group of
people - make all the decisions.  Everybody else gets to 'participate'
about the same way you could 'participate' in Russia!"

...

"Well, senator, I'll agree with you that this is a democracy, but I
don't think that changes things much.  Let's say Russia had had
freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and free and open
elections every two or four years, and they had still elected the
communists, and still supported the KGB, and still shipped their
citizens off to gulags.  Would that have changed things all that much,
just that they had elections?"

"No sir, the people of these country don't support the KGB, and we
don't ship our citizens off to gulags!"

"Oh, but you do.  Haven't you heard about 'zero tolerance'?  Haven't
you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?  It has
got to be one of the most violent programs on television, and it's all
real!  Remember who you're talking to, senator - a drug user!  Don't
expect me to sit here and crow on about freedom while this whole
society is hell-bent on a war against me and everyone else like me.
You do ship your citizens off to jail, and while you may not torture
them, and your prisons may not be as cold as the ones in Siberia, the
fact remains that fear of the police is just as readily used in this
society as in those others."

"I don't think you can compare the DEA with the KGB."

"I do.  The basic premise is the same.  The solution to our problems
is to have a war against our own people, to send armed men busting
into the homes of people who have done absolutely nothing to harm
anyone, to make people so terrified of what will be done to them that
they'll be too afraid not to just fall in line and do what they're
told when the great majority barks out its orders.  Isn't it funny how
in all of these great _people's_ societies the biggest enemy of all
always ends up being _your_own_people_?"



[Maybe more in here about the FCC and the problems of radio networking.]




a8581 4
Capt. M:

The majority care about three things: getting rich, getting tough,
and getting laid.
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@
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populated by collapable tables and chairs where two men were preparing
for lunch.  An erasable whiteboard near the door proclaimed "Today's
Specials" in pre-printed type and below, handwritten with a faded
black marker, "The Usual".
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"Oh, he's probably in the kitchen, then," came the reply, and he
a3279 5
Those countries were
dictatorships.  This country is run by its people, through their
elected representatives, and the capitalists don't simply 'own' the
government, and they don't always get their way."

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"Simply put, in this country we have freedom.  If we have capitalism,
it's because the people choose it."  The speaker was David Wye, a
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"Yes, _all_ the people!"
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"Well what about all the people in jails?  Do they choose their own
leaders?  Or the people who want to copy music around the Internet?
How about drug users?  Is that why we have a War on Drugs, because
they choose their own leaders, too?"

"We have a participatory democracy, Captain!  Those people can
petition their government to change those laws, and if enough
people support them, the laws _will_ change!"
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"But that's not what you said!  You didn't say the people could
_participate_ in their government!  You said the people could
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decisions!  What do you say?"

"OK, sir, we have a Constitution..."

"So did the Russians; so did the Russians," Mercurio glibbly noted.

"Our Constitution is enforced!  Our Constitution restrains the power
of our government..."
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"Really?  Let's take a look."
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a3313 1
"Oh, please..."
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"No, let's take a look!  You've made this absurd claim that our government
is restrained by its Constitution; let's get the thing out and take a look
at it!"
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"OK, fine!" Wye interjected, determined not to be shown up.  "Let's
get a copy of the Constitution and look at it!"
d3320 1
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Mercurio was already ahead of him.  He had grabbed his laptop,
pulled up a copy of the American Constitution, and prepared to start
reading from it.
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"Let's start with the powers of Congress.  Now, congressman, stop me
if at any point you hear anything about regulating the use of drugs,
or radio communications, or agriculture, or the environment."
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Mercuriou began to read.
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"Article one, section eight.  The Congress shall have Power to lay and
collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and
provide for the common Defence and general Welfare... to borrow Money
on the credit of the United States, to regulate Commerce with foreign
Nations and among the several states, to establish a uniform rule of
Naturalization..."
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Wye soon interrupted.
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"All right, all right, first of all, many of these problems didn't exist
two hundred years ago, there was no drug abuse, no radio, the environment
wasn't an issue..."
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"So we should just ignore our Constitution whenever some new problem
comes up; it only applies to our old problems?"
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"You want to go through the Constitution section by section?  How
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this is absurd!"
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"Fine!  Let's keep going, now!  Don't forget the tenth
Ammendment, how's it read?"
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Mercuriou quoted the document word-for-word from his laptop.
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"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to
the people."  [italics]
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"OK!  So here it is clearly stated that the federal government
_does_not_ have any of these additional powers!  _No_ power to regulate
communications, of radio or any other form!  _No_ power to regulate drug
use!  _No_ power to regulate firearms!"
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Wye laughed, the forced laugh of a man caught somewhat off-guard by an
opponent better prepared than he.
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"Look, there are sound legal arguments behind all of these laws..."

"So what, only a lawyer can understand the Constitution?"

"No, you don't need to be a lawyer to understand the Constitution,
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is simply absurd!"
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"It says it right here that the government _does_not_ have these
powers!
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stop at all the red lights'!"
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"OK," the moderator interjected, trying to bring the discussion under
control.  "Senator, Captain Mercurio certainly isn't the first person
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there nothing to any of these claims?"

"No, and I'll tell you why," Wye replied.  "All these things the
anti-government people gripe about - gun control, the drug war, the
environmental laws, the FCC - all of them are supported by the
overwealming majority of the people of this country."

"I'll agree with that," the space captain replied, "but I'd still like
to see these additional powers codified in Constitutional Ammendments,
and I'll tell you why.  One of the big accusations people made against
Soviet Russia was that their government didn't obey their
Constitution, that it was tiny little bunch of communists who had
taken over the government, that it wasn't really what people wanted,
that if they had only had 'freedom' everything would have been so
different.  Now, I don't want anybody being able to come around a
hundred years from now and try to say that the U.S. wasn't really a
democracy, that the people didn't really want these things, that some
bunch of politicians took over the government, that if only the
Constitution had been enforced, then everything would have been so
different.  This government, this majority, talks so much about law
and order, is so determined to make all these rules for everyone else
to obey, I'd just like to see them have to obey the rules that were
laid down for them.  It's a bit of a side issue, but I'd really like a
precedent established that the powers of the government are limited by
the Constitution."

"The government is limited by its Constitution.  That's one of the
fundamental principles of American government."

"How can you sit there and say that!  How can you read the Bill of
Rights, read the Ninth and Tenth Ammendments, then sit there and say
that!  I can't even call it a lie!  It just flys in the face of the
English language!"

"Again, Captain, it comes back to self-government.  The bottom line is
that this is what the majority of the people want!  And what they want
is freedom!"

"The majority!"  Mercuriou spit the word out in disgust.  "That _is_
what it all comes down to!  The majority isn't restricted by their
constitution, constitutions are only for communist dictatorships!  And
then you talk about 'freedom'!  Senator, turn on the T.V!  Don't you
see the police slamming people to the ground and dragging them off in
handcuffs!"

"Criminals!  People who break our laws!"

Mercuriou would have lept out of his chair, but of course, he
had no chair.  He was floating free in the cabin of the 747,
so had to be content with a bizarre gestation of his arms
before firing back his retort.

"Senator, _I'm_one_of_those_criminals_!  Because I smoke marijuana!
Because I copy computer software from 'C' drive to 'D' drive!  Because
I don't concede to this God-damned, filthy, cursed democracy that it
can control every aspect of my life, no matter how private, that it
can literally tell me what I can and can't put into my own body!  And
then you sit there are talk about 'freedom', you bastard politician!
What freedom?  The freedom to regulate every aspect of people's
lives?  The freedom to bust into people's homes with guns because
a hundred million people support you?"

"We do have freedom in this country!" Wye practically screamed back at
the camera in retort.  "We have freedom of speech, freedom of the
press, free elections!"

"The issue isn't how much freedom this 'majority' has got.  It's what
they've chosen to do with it!  They've chosen to build a society based
on some of the most vicious traits of mankind; they've chosen the most
selfish bastards as their leaders; they've chosen to arm themselves to
the teeth, build some nightmare society, declare war against millions
of their own people because they won't just do what their told when
the great free democracy barks out its orders, and then jam it down
their throats at gunpoint!"

"Excuse me," came a female voice from just outside camera range, and
Andrea Yeats propelled herself into view.

"Excuse me, but I really don't think the issue is freedom.  The issue
is morality.  Freedom has to be used morally, and I think these
objections come down to morality, even though very few people like to
use that word.  Freedom is not an absolute good.  It can abused, and
the crux of the issue is that the majority of people have freedom, but
have abused it and used it immorally."

"Well, who's going to define this morality, Doctor Yeats," came the
sarcastic response from Earth.  "Who's going to tell people what they
can and can't do with their freedom?"
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"Morality is a function of religion, Senator.  As a Christian, I look
to the gospel of Christ to define morality."
a3453 70
"Well, that's fine for you, Doctor, but we've got freedom of religion
in this country!'

"Freedom of religion is fine up to a point, but somewhat unrealistic..."

"It's not unrealistic, Doctor Yeats, we've got it!  What you advocate
is something we abandoned centuries ago, that there should be some
prefered state religion!"

"Well, you've got to have a prefered religion..."

"_Got_to_have_a_prefered_religion!"  Interrupting, Wye echoed her words
with a sneer.  "Doctor Yeats, I hate to break this to you, but you're
about two hundred years behind the times!  Ever heard of the Salem
Witch Trials?"

The NASA engineer turned red and practically ripped the microphone off
her shirt before pushing away from the bulkhead behind her and fleeing
from the TV cameras without saying another word.  Mercuriou jumped
into the gap.

"OK, now you're back to picking on someone your own size!"

The televised confrontation ragged on another fifteen minutes, with
Senator Wye repeatedly asserting that the United States had freedom
because the majority of people supported the government, and Mercuriou
repeatedly charging that all the majority wanted to do with their
freedom was use it to oppress others.  Later, the captain found Andrea
Yeats back in C-3, working on a computerized radar system Burns
planned to install on the front of the spacecraft.

"So what where you talking about there?  You've got to have a hide of
steel to debate those bastards; it's a blood sport.  They're not
trying to have some intellectual debate; they'll stoop to any low to
get their sound bite and 'win'."

Yeats brushed back the long blond hair that was starting to
drift in front of her face.

"What I was trying to say was that you just can't have a human society
without some kind of shared standard of morality, and that's one of
the main functions of religion.  I mean, how can you judge right or
wrong?  You invariably end up with some kind of preferred religion;
complete freedom of religion is totally unrealistic.  Why can't
someone say that his religion allows human sacrifice, for example?
Where's your freedom of religion then?"

"I'll tell you what their prefered religion is - it's democracy!"
Mercuriou responded.  "The murderer can't make his human sacrifice
because the majority won't allow it!  I can't smoke pot because
the majority has decided to outlaw it!  Our ship's library
is illegal because that's what the majority has decided to call it!
Right and wrong are subject to a vote, now, Andrea."

"Well, we both know right and wrong are not subject to a vote.  I
think half of what religion is, heck, maybe 90% of what religion is is
giving us standards to judge right and wrong.  Murder isn't wrong
because it's illegal, it's wrong because it's immoral, and you can't
decide what's moral and immoral without religion.  So that's why I
think freedom of religion, or more precisely seperation of religion
from public life, is a chimera.  You can have freedom to go to
whatever church you want, but you can't have a society without some
kind of shared norm of morality, and that means a shared, what I
called a preferred, religion."

Mercuriou was silent as he thought about this for a minute.

"You know, you've got a good point there, Doctor - morality!  Maybe
it's something I don't talk enough about.  These people crow on to no
end about 'freedom', but they don't want to talk about morality!"
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"You know, I am so sick of hearing about people's 'rights'!  Whenever
I hear that word 'rights', the next thing I start figuring is 'who's
getting screwed'."  Ecks started to cut in, but Mercuriou wouldn't let
him.  "People always talk about their 'rights' when they want to jam
somebody else's face in the mud.  Your bum leaders want to build an
'information economy', where knowledge is just one more commodity to
bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
kept secret."  Now the space captain morphed sarcastic.  "They talk
about their 'rights'!  They've got the 'right' to keep that
information secret, just the great people's government in Russia did!
And copying books online is illegal for the same reason that
photocopiers and fax machines were illegal in the Soviet Union, or at
least heavily controlled - " Now he slowed dramatically to make this
point.  "The potential of the technology represents too great a threat
to the system's ability to control people's lives."
a8564 2
Andrea had always felt it was a typical message from God: simple,
powerful, and very easy to misunderstand.
d8602 98
@


1.193
log
@the puncture
@
text
@d2993 9
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"The fact is that capitalism has produced a society with the highest
standard of living that has ever been seen on this planet," he was
saying.  "People are well-fed, well-housed, generally content with
their jobs, with a surplus of leisure time and disposible income.  And
yet these psuedo-socialists insist on slamming capitalism at every
turn because they can't stand the idea of people working hard and
getting rewarded for that hard work.  And now this man comes along,
this criminal, who has taken advantage of our society, stolen from our
businesses, lied, cheated; he comes on this program with the nerve to
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history?"
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Mercurio retorted without waiting for the host to invite him.

"That's quite a nice speech.  The communists also had their speeches.
They loved to go off about how they had put the first man in space,
and how they had brought tractors and steel factories to this
backwards, feudal country, and how everyone was guaranteed an
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great societies was run by a bunch of garbage leaders with some
screwball system based on the most viscious traits of mankind, and
captialism is no exception.  Its leaders are about the most selfish
sons of bitches you'd ever want to meet in your life, and the simple
truth is that you either work for these bastards or you starve.  So if
you want want Zeppelins, or Sputniks, or Microsoft Windows, and these
material things are more important to you than your freedom, then
should pick whichever one of these brutal philosophies most appeal to
you and go sign up."

"Capitalism may not be perfect," the legislator fired back, "and this
society may not be perfect, but what sets us apart from communism and
fascism is our commitment to democracy and freedom.  Those countries
were dictatorships.  This country is run by its people, through their
elected representatives, and the capitalists don't simply 'own' the
government, and they don't always get their way."

"You make it sound like a utopia!  Why do you have the second-largest
per capita incarceration rate on this planet, if everyone
thinks it's so wonderful?"

"Well, there's always the criminal element who thinks they can
side-step everyone else, isn't there, 'Captain'?  The fact is that
capitalism works.  It certainly works for all the decent, hard-working
people who have the opportunity to better themselves instead of being
stuck in a rice paddy somewhere!"

"You mean it works for all the selfish creeps who are willing to claw
over everyone else to 'better themselves', or more precisely to have a
nice house, a couple nice cars, and take their vacation on Maui..."

"There's nothing wrong with having a nice house, Captain, so
long as you're honest in how you pay for it."

"OK, I'm going to give you a perfect example of how capitalism
'works', Congressman.  Fifteen years ago, I and a college friend of
mine developed a computer program to aid people in reading Greek
literature; I majored in classical languages.  This was before the
World Wide Web, but basically this was a rudimentary hypertext system.
You could load any Greek text into the program, and it would display
it on the screen.  If you came across a word you didn't understand,
you could click on it with the mouse, the program would look it up in
a Greek-English dictionary and display the entry at the bottom of the
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stopping at every other word and looking it up in a different book."

"We put a lot of work into it, Congressman; we made sure that it could
handle all the irregular verb forms; we developed several different
user interfaces, for Machintosh and Windows and UNIX.  We put a copy
up on the Internet.  We started telling a lot of people in the
classics community about it and started getting some really good
feedback.  We had plans to develop a Latin version, too.  Then came
along the publishers of the dictionary - the capitalists."

"See, we had just taken a Greek-English dictionary that we had on one
of the computers at the university and incorporated it into the
program.  When we put the program up on the network, we of course
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infringement."
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"Now the funny thing was, they were willing to cut a deal, of course.
If we took the program down off the network, changed it into a
for-profit product and paid them a royalty on every copy we sold, we
could use their dictionary!  But we couldn't use it just to let people
download the program for free.  I decided to fight.  I still believed
in the great free democracy back them.  I was naive enough to think
that without the money for a lawyer, I could represent myself in
court.  After a year-long legal battle that I lost, I ended up with a
court judgement against me for four hundred thousand dollars in
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product, and was decent enough to want to see it available to everyone
who wanted a copy.  I'm still waiting for that house, by that way."
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"Well, Captain, it sounds to me like you were guilty!"  the
congressman fired back.  "That sounds like a real noble cause, but the
bottom line is that you stole someone else's intellectual property and
published it without their permission.  You seem to have a problem
with authority."

"You're damn right I've got a problem with authority!  I've got a
problem with authority when the people in authority are just a bunch
of self-serving creeps!  Now why couldn't we have just put that
program up on the network?  What is so terrible about that?"

"Captain, again, the bottom line is that it wasn't your property.  The
publishers of that dictionary, whoever they are, could have chosen to
publish it for free, but it's their property and their choice.  I'm
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more, and they chose to sell it, and there's nothing wrong with that."
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"There's a hell of a lot wrong with it.  People should be generous,
not selfish, especially the _leaders_ of society.  That program, that
dictionary, and all the other ones like it should be freely available
on our computer networks!"

Ecks laughed out loud.

"And, of course, who's going to pay for those dictionaries, Captain,
the government, right?  Who's going to make all those evil capitalists
put those dictionaries on the Internet, the government, right?  It's
the same old tired story of socialism all over again."

"Look, I'm no great politician, and I can't lay out some big complex
scheme for paying those dictionaries, and I'm no great philospher
either, but I can tell you that a bunch of men who want all this
information kept secret so they can make money on it are a bunch of
trash leaders of a trash society!"

"I know, everyone who wants to make money is trash, everyone who just
wants a better life for themselves and their children is trash,
Captain!"

"No, Congressman, but a bunch of men determined to outlaw twenty-first
century public libraries before they're ever been created _are_ trash,
sir, they are!  This society isn't going to be remembered for all this
so-called freedom, let me assure you.  It's going to remembered for
its secrecy.  All the design information for
the computers, all the source code, all the circuit diagrams, all the
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nightmare system."
a3256 54
"My chief engineer once proposed a telephone system based totally on a
wireless network - all the phones interoperate over digital radio
links using a routing protocol to figure how you hop from phone to
phone to phone to get your call through.  This is the kind of
technology you want - technology that's decentralized, that doesn't
require a massive infrastructure, that's open and non-proprietary so
that anyone can build a telephone to interoperate with the system.
But the capitalists don't want this.  They want a telephone system
that's centralized and controlled, so that there's a switch on every
single phone line and if you don't pay your bill at the end of the
month, your service gets disconnected.  They want centralized,
controlled technology, because that's how you get money out of people.
If the phones just work on some open protocol, if you can't switch the
service off from some centralized location, then you can't make money
off of it, so that means you go nowhere in this society - no
engineers, no circuit boards, no manufacturing plants.  Capitalism is
totally rigged against exactly the kind of technological change this
planet so desperately needs."

"They talk about 'freedom', 'freedom', and the only freedom they're
really interested in is their own!  It's not about making money, it's
about how you treat people, and the capitalists treat people like
dirt!"

"They don't treat..." the Congressman started, but never finished,
as he was interrupted by the now incensed space captain.

"Shut up, you capitalist son-of-a-bitch, shut up!  You no good
bastard, you sit there with your jacket and tie on and try to defend a
bunch of bums that won't lift a finger for anyone unless they're
getting something out of it for themselves!  What is so terrible about
public libraries?  What is so terrible about information being free?
What is so terrible about taking these books and putting them up on
our networks for anyone to read and use?  You crow on about rewarding
people for their hard work!  Why doesn't everyone get rewarded for
their hard work?  Why do only the most selfish people get rewarded?"

"Who the hell are you to tell someone else what they can and can't do
with their property?!?!" Ecks fired back, now furious himself.  "How
dare you, how dare you, you socialist crook, you shameless thief, how
dare you tell someone who's sweated tears and blood that they have to
give everything away for free?!  How dare you?!!?"

A moment of silence fell on the program before Mercuriou answered
in a calmer voice.

"I'll dare right now, I'll dare to tell you that we could build a
twenty-first century library of Alexandria, that we could take every
book in every library on this planet, scan it, and put it up on that
network, but that's not what our leaders want.  They want an
"information economy", where knowledge is just one more commodity to
bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
kept secret.  That's the sick truth about your 'global capitalist
economic system'.  That's what you get when you have a democracy!"
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a7000 2
PUT IN AN 'INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY VIOLATION' HERE

a7458 15
-----  Mercuriou - [T + 5 days]

andrea in space

"Well, we keep hearing about what if you can't produce enought?"

"Well, the software industry at least has shown us what a lie that one
is.  There's no cost to produce.  They could stick all their stuff on
the Interent, source code and all, for next to nothing.  Just set up
and maintain a web presence.  On the other hand, there's a huge amount
of extra effort that goes into putting all these controls and
restrictions in place to get money.  Who knows about other fields
of industry, but clearly in the software industry, the cost
of production would be a lot less without capitalism!"

a7563 27
---- [ T + 5 days ]

"Well, that's a hobby."

"A hobby?"

"A hobby.  Something you do in your spare time.  A job is what you
do to put food on the table."

"OK, so let me get this straight.  A job is whatever you do that
produces food, and anything else is a hobby.  You forgot to add that
this 'job' involves dumping the forty hours a week for the best years
of your life into working for some system run by the most selfish
bastards you'd ever want to meet in your life."

---- [ T + 5 days ]

"These people that just don't want to work..."

"For the capitalist system!  For the capitalist system!  You always
like to leave that part out!  You carry on like everyone who opposed
this society is a lazy bum who wants to sit around drinking beer and
watching Nascar races all day long!"

"That's right!  For you and your nightmare system and your
ruthless capitalist leaders, you're damn right I don't want to work!"

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------ [ T + 5 days ]

#if 1

"And who's going to pay for it, Captain, who's going to pay for it?"

#elsif 2

"Well, that sounds very noble, Captain, but in the real world, if you
just give everything away, you'll be put out of business."

"That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of capitalism right there - you be
a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you won't
work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the street
and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they walk past
and call you a bum who doesn't want to work... And they're right,
'cause I don't want to work - not for them and not for their brutal
system!"

#elsif 3

"And who's going to pay for it, Captain, who's going to pay for this
library of Alexandria once we just give all these books away for
free?"

"Maybe the capitalists could pay for it, Congressman, they've
certainly got the money."

"I know, I know, take from the rich and give to the poor.  We've heard
all this before!  It's been rejected by the people."

"Again, Congressman, I don't have some big plan to figure how to pay
for it, but I know that our leaders aren't even trying.  They're
determined that it won't happen.  They're determined that all this
information will be controlled, just like everything else in a
capitalist society.  Everything is controlled by the capitalist
system."

#endif


a7645 23
---- [ T + 5 days ]

"As far as I'm concerned, you're just a bum who doesn't want to work!"

Mercuriou laughed.

"Sure, that's why I'm sitting up here in orbit, that's how we
developed this fuel technology, that's why the dictionary publisher
wanted to market the Greek reading aid - we're just lazy bums who
don't want to work!"

"It's just propaganda!  In Russia, anyone who opposed communism was a
counter-revolutionary; in Germany, anyone who opposed fascism was a
Jew; here, anyone who opposes capitalism is a bum who doesn't want to
work.  Notice how you don't want to discuss capitalism; notice how
quickly the discussion gets turned into a personal assault on Marc
Mercuriou's personal work ethic; you don't want to discuss capitalism,
you want to turn the whole thing into a personal character attack, and
this is one of the hallmarks of propaganda - turn the discussion away
from the real issues, make it into a personal character assault on
your opponent, put him on the defensive."


d7867 12
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to be a pianist, just play the piano every day.  If I got behind in a
college class, I'd sit down and put an hour a day into it and be
caught up in no time - and I'd time that hour with a watch.  You put
an hour a day into anything, and you're going to get good at it, but
most people just drift through life.  They have no passion.  Or maybe
their passion is being socially accepted, or making money, or getting
laid.  For whatever reason, they do just enough to get by, and then
they look at someone who has passion, who's just driven to do
something, and they think, 'man, that guy's a genius; I wish I could
be like him.'
a7901 79
"The difference between capitalism and those other system is
_individual_freedom_.  You can be a capitalist if you choose, you can
be social worker if you choose, you can be an author, you can be a
doctor; it's nothing imposed by the government."

"Well, that's great to hear, Congressman, because I want to be a
librarian!  I got a couple thousand books here in my ship's library,
all electronic, and I've been thinking about putting them up on the
Internet!"

"Stolen books," the congressman dryly noted.  "We've all heard about
your 'library', captain."

"Stolen books!" the astronaut practically spit the words back.  "You
mean stolen 'intellectual property', don't you?"

"It's the same thing.  Theft is theft."

"No, congressman, it's not the same thing.  Theft is physically taking
something that belongs to someone else.  A book, a physical book _can_
be stolen and we stole plenty, you better believe it, but the
information it contains can not."

"Well, we've pretty decisively rejected that idea in this society.
Information _does_ have value, captain, as you very well know,
and it _can_ be stolen, as so much of your entire 'mission' shows."

"That's right, and it just gauls the hell out of you that someone
could steal everything they need to fly into space!  Not just the
information, but the billions and billions of little dollar signs in
your computers that tell your robot workers, 'ok, you can give this
guy anything he asks for', right?"

"'Captain', the fact remains that you are a thief, OK?  A glorified,
glamorized, attension-grabbing thief.  The people who have written
those books have the right to decide what happens to their work, and I
keep telling you, because we have _free_dom!"

"You know, I am so sick of hearing about people's 'rights'!  Whenever
I hear that word 'rights', the next thing I start figuring is 'who's
getting screwed'."  Ecks started to cut in, but Mercuriou wouldn't let
him.  "People always talk about their 'rights' when they want to jam
somebody else's face in the mud.  Your bum leaders want to build an
'information economy', where knowledge is just one more commodity to
bought and sold, and the only way people will pay for it is if it's
kept secret."  Now the space captain morphed sarcastic.  "They talk
about their 'rights'!  They've got the 'right' to keep that
information secret, just the great people's government in Russia did!
And copying books online is illegal for the same reason that
photocopiers and fax machines were illegal in the Soviet Union, or at
least heavily controlled - " Now he slowed dramatically to make this
point.  "The potential of the technology represents too great a threat
to the system's ability to control people's lives."

Ecks waited a bit longer, then returned to a common theme.

"Captain, again, those people have the right to decide what happens to
_their_ work, simply because it is _their_ work.  The authors, they
could decide to put it online like you suggest, they have that
_freedom_."

"Just because you have freedom doesn't turn wrong into right..."

Now it was Ecks' turn to bust in laughing.

"Yes, Captain, it doesn't turn wrong into right, you are still a
_thief_!"

Mercuriou reddened and angered.

"That's right, that what you've got to be to make it in capitalism.
One way or another.  You've got to learn to be a ruthless,
self-serving, money-grubbing bum.  And whether you steal to do it, or
just ride roughshod over the rest of humanity with some nightmare
system."



----
a8061 8
---- [ LAUNCH DAY ]

during the discussion with Andrea on Launch Day:

Andrea took a deep breath and bit her tongue.

"Captain Mercuriou," she began again in a level tone of voice,

@


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"But you had a working product.  Couldn't you get all the venture
capital funding you needed?"
d2550 1
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"We didn't have a working product at first," Mercuriou noted.  "We had
nothing.  Two smart guys who thought you could design a rocket fuel
with a computer.  That's it.  No computers.  No staff.  No software.
No lab.  Nothing.  Now how do you get that venture capital funding?
d2558 5
a2562 5
for themselves, and then you fight like hell just to keep 51% of the
company.  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."
d2573 39
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"We need an OTV.  OK, we don't absolutely need one, but trying to
assemble the cargo modules into a chain with the 747..." Burns let
his voice trail off.  Andrea nodded in assent.

"OK, so you need to EVA to get an OTV?"

"Right.  We've got engines, a lot of them, actually, in cargo modules.
We need to open one of those modules, remove one of the engines, and
attach it to the rear of a fuel module.  All of the modules have
maneuvering jets powered by nitrogen gas, which is a by-product of the
ten-thirty-three fuel cell reaction, along with oxygen and carbon.
But to really push things around in orbit, we need an rocket engine."

So, the first week in orbit consisted almost entirely of orbital
operations, as Burns docked with one cargo module after another,
slowing refueling the 747 from the 30,000 L capacity of each module.
Along the way, he also assembled the cargo modules in a long chain
attached to the docking ring on the nose of the 747, which became
like a tugboat pushing a cargo barge around Earth orbit.

The _Icarus_ began her third full day in orbit amid a jumble of cargo
modules.  More were stacked up in a parking orbit 50 to 200 kilometers
behind the craft, and yet more sat in low Earth orbit, their computers
awaiting radio instructions to boost them into higher orbits.  The
docking procedures were going slowly.  This wasn't entirely
unexpected, but it wasn't exactly welcome, either.  Among other
things, it left the craft vulnerable to meteor strikes, and
there was a lot of debris floating around in low earth orbit.

Andrea Yeats was studying the _Icarus_ with the fervor of an ardent
disciple finally admitted to the priest's high holy sanctum.  Alone
among the crew, she didn't have any assigned duties, and today had
squirreled herself away into the ship's electronics lab, a cargo
module filled with boxed equipment that had been docked the day before
and then left alone.  The boxes she left untouched; her interest was
fixated on a tablet computer connected via the ship's wireless local
network.  After skimming through the thousands of documents related to
the ship's design, all the result of Burns' prodigious mind, she then
found her way into the ship's library.
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electronic, and totally illegal.  Every major publisher of technical
books in the English language had been targeted by Burns' super-hack,
and the few books of which Alister couldn't spirit off electronic
copies from the publishers' computers were purchased and shipped to
Site Y, where their bindings were sawed off, the pages were
systematically scanned, and the resulting digital images transmitted
back electronically.  Without lauching more than a few pounds of
books, most of these for nostalgic value, such as Burns' 1956 first
edition of Adrian Albert's _Fundamental_Concepts_of_Higher_Algebra_,
the _Icarus_ crew enjoyed easy access to major reference works on
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iron, and nearly a dozen on carbon and its various compounds.  The
ship's custom navigation software was littered with references that
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were also books on antenna theory, orbital mechanics, and hydroponics,
plant diseases, plant pathology,
as well as Mercuriou's hand-picked collection of (foreign) ancient Greek and
Latin authors, both in translation and in the original tongues.
d2646 14
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and trigonometric manipulations of orbital mechanics into a
high-school exercise.  To say Andrea was impressed would be a vast
understatement.  The three-pound computer tablet in her hand offered
the same information that would fill a small, elite university
library.  The legal penalties for acquiring and possessing it added up
to more than eighty years of prison time.
to hundreds of years of prison time.

"We've got a pressure drop," Alister announced from the copilot's
seat, as an amber alert window popped up on the computer screen to his
right.  Burns and Mercuriou, both in the rear of the 747, propelled
themselves to the door of the cockpit.
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"That's not much," Mercuriou observed.
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"Should we go to Zed?" the captain inquired of his engineer.
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"I think so."

"OK, everybody, we're going to Condition Zed," Mercuriou called into
the microphone clipped to his shirt.  In the cockpit, Alister selected
a command sequence on his computer as Burns pulled himself into the
pilot's seat.  A audible alarm began to sound throughout the ship, and
the hydraulic doors separating the different modules hissed shut.
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a2681 3
on the cargo module she was in.  She was at the far end of the module,
full of lab equipment, and didn't have time to reach the door before
it shut.
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"Condition Zed, Dr. Yeats, we're closing the airtight doors," Mercuriou
answered through the com system.  "Vic, where are you?"
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"Make sure you've got a spacesuit in there," the captain directed.
"Dr. Yeats, where are you?"

"Well, I'm in the D-4 module with the electronics equipment," she
answered.

"Right there," Burns pointed to one of the forward cargo modules on
the display screen.

"Do you have a spacesuit there?" the captain wondered aloud. Burns
shook his head no.
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"I don't think so," she answered in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
"There doesn't seem to be anything in here but oscilloscopes and
silicon wafers."

"I'm OK, I've got my suit here," Vic answered from the sickbay module.

Meanwhile, the news networks on Earth began to realize that
something was happening on the spacecraft.  They began cutting
into their programming with "Breaking News" alerts.
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a2704 18
"C-4 is right here," Burns informed the captain, indicating a cargo
module directly adjacent to the one Andrea Yeats was in.  "Probably a
meteor strike.  We're not fully assembled yet, so right now C-4 is in
front."

The plan for the spaceship was to put the unpressurized storage
modules in the front, where damage would be minimal from a meteor
strike, but the assembly was only partially complete, and the
pressurized C-4 module, slated for a chemistry lab, was currently in
front - directly in the path of incoming meteors.

"We probably want to get her out of there," the captain said in an
undertone, refering to Yeats' exposed position.

"Yep," Burns agreed, "she's probably OK, but she doesn't have a
spacesuit, and the only way out is through node 4.  We're assuming
that it's a meteor strike, too.  If not, if it's a pressure seal
problem and we lose node 4, then she'll be cut off."
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a2709 2
at least got a spacesuit for you, then we'll check on the problem in
C-4."
d2719 2
a2720 3
and into node 4, a small spherical space with about as much interior
space as a small automobile.  Burns opened the door to A-4, which lead
back towards the main part of the ship.
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a2724 1
displayed on the control in the node.  87 kilopascals.  She knew as a
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Mercuriou flushed red, clenched his teeth, and smacked his fist
into his palm before finally verbalizing his frustration.
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"First of all," she informed Burns as she passed into the center of
the node, "no matter how much reserve oxygen you've got now, this is
the beginning of the mission, so trust me, it's not enough.  And
second," she continued, removing her water bottle from her belt, "it's
a lot easier to find the problem with air in here then with a vacuum."
Carefully, she squeezed the water bottle and released a drop of nearly
stationary fluid into the air, then watched to see where it went.
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"Aren't you going to prep?" Alister asked, watching him from the
cockpit.
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Meanwhile, on Earth, all of the major television networks had by now
interrupted their coverage and were carrying live the video feed from
the spaceship.  On one network, a former astronaut, who now took a
"consulting fee" of two thousand dollars per appearance, speculated
that the situation was developing quickly and could become potentially
serious, with the NASA astronaut trapped and unconscious in the
depressurizing module.  Another network contented itself with a
"science correspondent" holding up an (incorrect) model of the
spaceship and trying to explain where the astronauts were and what was
occuring.  In Washington, the President halted a cabinet meeting to
watch the unfolding events in space.

Meanwhile, Andrea released the harnesses on several large packing
crates and moved them aside to follow the trail of the water droplets.
A wave of fear swept over her.  _You_have_no_spacesuit._ Calming
herself, she said a silent prayer, _Father,_watch_out_for_me_in_here._
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second when you opened the door to C-4, but now it's dropping again."
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a2788 1
"Opening B-2," Burns dryly noted as he continued to open pressure
d2792 2
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how to maneuver in zero-gee, but more because his irate mood grew even
more heated the further along he went.

"Opening A-3."

"What are we at Condition Zed for if we're opening all of these
doors?"  Alister asked him.  Burns shrugged in response, contenting
himself with silently closing the doors behind the captain after the
video monitors showed that he had passed.

Meanwhile, Andrea was thinking.  The hole was almost certainly caused
by a micro-meteor strike, and that meant it was almost certainly on
the side of the module facing forward.
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pulled one of his gloves out of it.  Turning back to the puncture
hole, she slapped the glove against it.
d2814 3
a2816 5
"That'll hold until we can patch it permanently," she announced,
then crossed her arms over her chest.
then put her hands on her hips.
then put her left hand on her hip
while still holding a wall strip with her right.
d2820 2
a2821 3
Red-faced, Merceriou stared at her for several seconds, then taking
his helmet and one remaining glove, left the cargo module and headed
back to the bridge without saying another word.
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Alister weaved and bobbed with a twenty-year-old blond 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.
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"Let's take a shower!" he yelled over the music.  She shot him a
shocked 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, it'd just be fun!"
a8272 1
rape scene
a8273 2
launch date
exactly how Andrea gets on the ship
a8688 6
Launch day.

"Why drink and drive when you can bake and fly?"

======

@


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@
text
@d5092 2
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nearby and squeezing it in a tight embrace, he dozed back to sleep,
thinking, _Man,_she_was_HOT._
@


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Among the many high-ticket items the _Icarus_ crew had purchased with
their stolen millions was a set of satellite telephones.  These were
similar to ordinary cellular telephones, but were designed to operate
in remote regions of the Earth lacking cell phone coverage.  Thus,
instead of using cells ten miles wide and switching the phone calls
from one cell to another as the mobile user moved between them, as an
ordinary cellular system would do, the satellite system used cells two
hundred miles high, based on satellites in low earth orbit, and
switched calls from one satellite to another as they moved through
their orbits in a carefully choreographed pattern.  Burns had studied
the system closely to make sure it would still work if not only the
cells, but the telephone itself was moving in an orbital pattern.

One of the first items on the ship's long on-orbit checklist was to
verify the proper operation of these phones, after which Mercuriou
made the first phone call.  It was to the news bureau of a major
d2523 6
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signal.  Since the _Icarus_ was equipped with a microwave antenna
array designed to track moving satellites, and the television network
had no such equipment readily available, they finally agreed to use an
existing television satellite in geostationary orbit as a relay, which
provided about twenty minutes of video capability each time the
_Icarus_ passed around its two-hour orbit.  As soon as the
network received the first images of men floating in zero-gee in the
cabin of a heavily modified 747, they knew they had their scoop, and
carried the interview live, conducted by the anchor of their nightly
national news program.  Thus, the world got it's first dose of Captain
Marcelius Mercuriou.
d2552 15
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nothing.  One really smart guy who thought you could design a rocket
fuel with a computer.  That's it.  No computers.  No staff.  No
software.  No lab.  Nothing.  Now how do you get that venture capital
funding?  I'll tell you how.  You sell your soul to the capitalists.
You convince them, and I mean really sell them, that you're one of
them, that you believe in their nightmare philosophy of greed, you
agree to bring on their 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 these people will do nothing
unless they can see how they'll get a big killing back out it, and
unless you can really bring something more than your good ideas to the
table, you'll fight like hell just to keep 51% of the company.  And if
you tell them the truth, that once you invent this thing that their
dear precious money paid for, you're going to publish everything
you've got about how it works, they'll drop you like a hot
potato. [CA] 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 say,
an original source of financing."
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---- [ T - 1 day ]

Alister jammed his head in time with a beat from a new pop hit,
"games".

		"games"

	games are addictive
	games are insane
	games waste your time
	games waste your brain

	books are addictive
	books drug you, too / books are drugs, too / books hook you, too
	books take your time
	books take your brain

	books are the ticket / books are like weapons
	books are the tool / books are like tools
	books ain't for nerds
	books ain't for fools

	games are like virri
	that sap at your brain
	books are like poems
	that lull sweet refrains
	that lull to sweat dreams / sweet lullaby refrain

	games gloryify violence
	games gloryify pain
	books promote knowledge
	books promote gain

	games gloryify conflict,
	fighting, and gain
	books promote knowledge,
	reason, and ...

	books make great weapons / but books become weapons
	sometimes war is a game / when war is proclaimed / when war passions inflame
	lose books or lose war
	or lose the end-game / or we'll all go insane

	yet books become weapons
	war passions inflame / when passions inflame
	lose books or lose war
	or lose the end-game

	yet books become weapons
	when war is proclaimed
	so lose books or lose war
	or lose the endgame



Mercuriou yanked the headphones off.  He had appeared out of nowhere.

"What are you doing?  You're supposed to be looking for Andrea Yeats."

"What are you doing?  You're supposed to be fixing the engines."

"What are you doing?  You're supposed to be taking out the garbage."

"What?!"  Alister sqwalked as he strugged awake.


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"We are not aborting this mission!"
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"Doctor, let me assure you, we don't need your help.  NASA aren't the
only people capable of launching a manned mission, as they're
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that keyed a radio controlled detonator and in the distance they could
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"Launch cargo!" he told Alister.  From underground silos on the mesa
below, a rocket thundered aloft, then another, and another.
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from a computer monitor.  Behind them, Vic and Mercuriou argued over
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"Nine acquired LEO; thirty-four launching."
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"Everything's going fine on automatic.  We're ready to take her up."
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them that the U.S.  government was carefully tracking the situation,
@


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@andrea meets mercuriou
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would win.
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Mercuriou, continued his prepared explaination.
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Andrea woke early in the darkened room and lay still until she heard
voices down the hallway.  During her contemplation, she resolved upon
a plan, which consisted in little more than trying to extract any
possible concession from her jailers which would allow her to get to a
phone and call Kyle.  Siting up against the wall, 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.  He
turned on the light.

"Good morning.  I brought you some breakfast," he said as cheerily as
he could muster. He put a bottle of water and a military ration down
on the floor next to the door.
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pushing her hair back.
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"Look, I've covered in filth; I haven't bathed in four days; I'd like
to at least splash some water on my face."
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and she knew exactly what she wanted to do.  First, she turned on the
water facuet, and immediately started searching for a way out.  The
room had no windows, which she quickly ascertained, but was covered
with a ceiling of drop panels.  Climbing onto the sink table, she
could reach the ceiling and push one of the ceiling panels aside.  The
wall continued straight up to another ceiling several feet above the
panels.
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immediately to the other side of the room.  Entering a stall, she
climbed on the back of a toilet and pushed another panel aside.  On
this side, the wall ended just above the drop panels and offered an
escape route into the adjacent room.  Andrea grabbed the top of the
bathroom stall and clamored up to the ceiling.  She grabbed hold of a
large, circular pipe above the panel ceiling and climbed up above the
ceiling and onto the top of the wall.
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four feet above the top of the wall.  Plumbing pipes, electrical
conduits, and some large air ducts crisscrossed the concrete ceiling,
some bolted to it, many of the smaller ones, including the one she had
pulled herself up with, suspended from wires.  In the dim light, she
could make out the course of the wall she was standing on down to
where it met the hallway.  She could easily have inched down the top
of the wall and jumped through the drop ceiling into the hallway where
Alister was waiting for her.  Instead, she laid down on the wall,
reached over to the other side, and pulled aside one of the ceiling
panels in the adjourning room.
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desk covered with books and papers.  She held on to the same pipe she
had used to pull herself up, swung her legs over the opening in the
ceiling, and dropped down.  The wires supporting the pipe broke loose
under her weight, and the pipe dropped down onto the wall and ceiling
with a crash.  Andrea hung on amid a cloud of dust and debris that
fell on her from above.  Dangling three feet over the floor, she
kicked the chair aside and dropped down onto the carpet.  Outside,
there were voices in the hallway.
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pump design was completely novel, and all the text was in both English
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papers before her.  She began flipping through the other papers on the
desk, quickly finding one in particular that caught her interest.  It
read as follows:



Each Shuttle SRB

1,300,000 lbs at launch
1,100,000 lbs propellant
192,000 lbs inert
3,300,000 lbs launch thrust
2 min burn time
~ 50,000 lb/sec propellant burn


Shuttle (on landing) - 230,000 lbs max


Space shuttle main engine

178,000 L/min liquid hydrogen
64,000 L/min liquid oxygen
1,734,803 N at sea level (each)
ET - 2 million liters
     29,900 kilograms empty
     751,000 kilograms full
1,035 gallons (3,900 liters) per second (17-inch diameter feed lines)
8.5 minutes burn time


forced CVI (chemical vapor infiltration)
   3M Nextel fiber
   start with pressed sheets of ceramic fibers in graphic holder
   methyl trichlorosilane (MTS) -> silicon carbide + HCl
   others than SiC = BN, carbon, a-Si3N4
   SiC sublimes ~ 2700 deg C
   1100 deg C - depositation
Handbook of Selected Properties of Air- and Water-reative Materials
   MTS - p. 172

$5 million for a used 747

Clayton tanker truck - 30,000 L    ~ 40 ft length

90% Hydrogen peroxide / JP-4
  297 sec Isp (theoretical)

possible 95% efficiency?

one test
  130 sec Isp (theoretical)
  52 sec Isp (measured)


ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4) - oxidizer - 69.6 percent by weight
aluminium - fuel - 16 percent
iron oxide - catalyst - 0.4 percent
polymer - binder - 12.04 percent
epoxy curing agent - 1.96 percent
high thrust at ignition and reduced thrust during max dyn pressure via shape
  11-point star perforation in forward segment
  double-truncated cone perforation in each aft segment
nozzle - 7-to-79 expansion ratio
  hydraulic gimbaled for thrust vector control (8 deg)
four hold down posts; top nut contains NASA standard detonators (NSDs)
  NSDs blown during launch sequence; lights booster charge, lights propellant
redundant 



Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines; Huzel and Huang


orbital speed - Mach 26 - 8 km/s


New 747   $200 million
  6,025 cu ft cargo space
  216,840 L max fuel
  operating empty weight = 394,088 lb
various engines - CF6-80C2B1 59,000 lb thrust (weight = 9,570 lb x 4)
   "The Engine Handbook"


Simple liquid fueled rocket - 275 sec spec impulse
  for 59,000 lb thrust  59,000/275 = 214 lb/sec (total propellant flow rate)
  for four engines ~ 1000 lb/sec
  1000 lbs water ~ 120 gallons ~ 500 liters
  433 seconds operating time (216,840 L)
  6,025 cu ft = 45,000 gallons = 180,000 L
  216,840 + 180,000 L ~= 400,000 L
  400,000 L = 800 sec operating time = 13 min


Her mouth went dry as she recognized a number of space shuttle
parameters, including the composition of the solid fuel boosters and
the basic engine thrust budget.  Kyle had thought they might be
selling fuel illegally, but that didn't fit.  She thought back to the
conversation she'd overheard yesterday.  _They_aren't_selling_fuel;
_they're_hoarding_it.  _And_they_need_spacesuits_for_something._ And
now the rocket design and the launch budget...  Her contemplation was
cut short by Mercuriou's loud voice from the hallway.
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could see that the sun had been up several hours.  Additionally,
a2200 2
"My God, girl, where are you?  I'm worried sick about you!"

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"What?!"  Her boss was incredulous.  "But they found your car near
Denver!"
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"They're planning a launch!" she yelled as the irate captain sprinted
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The phone was ringing as he returned to the control room.  It was
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disclaiming any knowledge of her, Mercuriou finally just hung
up the phone.  His crew was gathered around, silent.
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"His caller I.D. showed that the call came from here.  He said
he was calling the police."
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"Well, we go on.  Burns, what happens if we launch?"
d2233 1
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"When?"
d2235 2
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"Well, just for argument's sake, right now."
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The engineer made a pained expression with his face and thought for a
minute.
d2240 3
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"Well, it all depends on our launch vehicles.  Certainly the 747 is
ready to go, it just needs to be fueled and a few more supplies put on
board.  The real question is the cargo rockets.  We've designed a lot
of redundancy into their payloads in case there are launch failures.
If we launch with what we've got now, we lose a lot of that
redundancy.  If all the cargo modules make it to orbit, we're O.K, but
there's a lot less room for error.  Also, we'll be short on fuel.
We've planned the launch schedule around our producation capacity for
N-1033, and we'll come up short.  I doubt we'll be able to land on
Mars, at least not with the fuel we've got."
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a2258 26
"Can anybody think of anything we need to have, putting aside
redundancy, anything we absolutely need for this mission that we've
haven't got loaded yet?"

Nobody said anything for a minute.  Finally, Vic spoke up.

"Well, we've got checklists, right?"

  [start fueling the 747]

"Sure," Burns replied, and turned back to his computer terminal to
begin pulling up the lists.  Each of the crewmen now went through the
checklists they had prepared for their specific specialties.  Vic
checked again the list of medical and horticultural supplies.  Alister
and Burns went through the engineering and scientific payloads.
Mercuriou checked the food, water, gas and fuel manifests.

By the time there were done, an alarm went off indicating that the
front gate was being opened, and Alister pulled up a video feed on his
computer terminal that showed three police cars at the gate and
several policemen who had just cut the chain off the gate.

"Blow the bridge," Mercuriou said calmly.  Alister keyed a radio
controlled detonator and in the distance they could hear the sound of
explosives destroying a bridge over a ravine between them and the
police.
d2262 1
a2262 1
"No," Mercuriou agreed, then turned to Burns.  "OK, it's launch day."
d2264 2
d2267 2
d2270 2
a2271 1
----
d2273 2
a2274 1
"What should we do with the NASA engineer?" Bryan asked.
d2276 1
a2276 5
Mercurio thought for a moment.  The supply rockets were launching
every five minutes and the 747 was completely fueled.  Burns
was getting ready to switch the supply rockets' launch sequences
to automatic, from which point there would be no way to stop
them from the ground.
d2278 1
a2278 4
"We can let her go now, I think," the Captain concluded.  He walked
with Bryan to the locked supply closet where Andrea Yeats had been
held for the last three days, and opened the door.  She had heard
them coming and was standing by the wall, waiting for them.
d2280 9
a2288 5
"Well, Doctor, you can go now," Mercurio announced.  "Sorry for
your detention, but it was necessary at the time."

He walked back to the room where Burns was monitoring the
supply rockets.  Yeats followed him at a short distance.
d2290 14
a2303 2
"The launch sequence is on automatic," Burns announced as they entered
the room.
d2305 2
a2306 7
There was very little to pack up.  Everything needed in orbit had already
been loaded into either the supply rockets or the 747.  The control
equipment on Earth, mostly ordinary computers, was all duplicate,
courtesy of the mega-bucks from their mega-hack.


"Look, if you're heading into space, you need an experienced astronaut."
d2309 2
a2310 7
only people capable of launching a manned mission.  We're more than
capable ourselves."

Andrea paused for a moment and adjusted her approach.  "Fine, you don't
_need_ me.  You can _use_ my help.  You can _use_ an experienced
astronaut, or do you think that someone with two shuttle missions
under her belt would be useless to you?"
d2312 1
a2312 2
Mercurio stopped walking and waved Burns to keep going.  Instead,
the engineer stopped and listened.
d2314 1
a2314 1
"Look, you don't even know what our mission is."
d2316 2
a2317 1
"OK, so, why don't you tell me."
d2319 1
a2319 7
Mercurio started laughing, and put his hand against the wall to brace
himself.  The NASA engineer was dead serious.  Finally, he stopped
laughing and looked back at her.

"We're going to Mars."

Now it was Yeats' turn to grin.
d2323 2
a2324 39
The two looked at each other and laughed together.  The situation was
absolutely absurd.

"Look, I don't even have a spacesuit for you."  Burns threw Mercuriou
a surprised look.  He statement wasn't entirely true.

"I don't need one," she shot back.

"Doctor, my policy is that everyone on this mission has a spacesuit."

"So?  I thought NASA's biggest problem was that we're locked in to our
policies and procedures."

Mercurio turned back down the hallway and began walking again.  Yeats
continued to follow as the Captain continued to voice objections.

"We're not coming back here for a long time.  This isn't a decision
to make on the spur of the moment."

Yeats was silent for only moment.  For the first time since Kyle Becker
had walked into her garden, it all clicked.  The screwed up
manufacturing budget.  The massive and irregular expenditures.
_They're_trying_a_Mars_launch_.  And for the first time since she
picked up a hitchhiker two days agos, actually wanted to laugh.
_THIS_I_have_GOT_to_see_.  Anyway, if they made it to Mars, she wanted
to be there, and if they didn't, they'd _really_ need her help.

"Let me make my own decisions, Captain.  I want to be part of your
mission."  /  "I can make my own decisions, in my own way, Captain."

Mercurio looked back at her, grimaced and shook his head, but said
nothing.  He walked out the back door and climbed into the driver's
seat of one of the Jeeps parked there, setting his suit's power unit
behind.  Yeats sat in the passenger seat without being invited and
they drove in silence towards the runway and the spaceplane, Mercurio
wondering how to get rid of her, Yeats composing herself by saying a
silent prayer: "Lord, let me put my life here in your hands.  Let this
man make the decision to do your will, and I will accept it.  Let me
put my faith in you to provide for my life and its needs."
d2326 1
a2326 4
Finally, they reached the 747 and climbed onto it from an accessway
built from the ground to the rear of its left wing, then up a ladder
to its roof.  Then they went up another ladder to the airlock hatch on
top of the bubble and entered the spaceplane via the airlock.
d2328 1
a2328 5
"Dr. Yeats wants to come with us," Mercurio announced to the surprised
crew.  They looked at her and each other with an air of bewilderment,
then finally back to the Captain.  Mercurio addressed himself to Burns,
who had turned around in the pilot's seat and was looking back
into the cabin.
d2330 4
a2333 1
"Any technical reasons she can't go?"
d2335 5
a2339 11
The engineer though for several minutes.  Their year's supply of food
would be cut down to about eight months with her addition, but the
rations wouldn't be enough to sustain them in any event.  It would
just give them less of a margin for error for getting the greenhouses
working.  The weight wasn't an issue on the 747, since almost
everything was loaded into the cargo modules, another one of which
launched as the Captain waited for an answer.  The roar of the rocket
(launching) less than five miles away briefly drown out any
conversation.  Alister, who had turned back to the engineer's station
in the rear of the cockpit, broke the silence by announcing that
the launch sequence was going as planned.
d2341 8
a2348 1
"Well?" Mercurio prompted Burns.
d2350 2
a2351 2
"I guess not; I can't think of any reason why not; not any technical
reasons, that is."
d2353 3
a2355 9
Mercurio turned back to the NASA engineer, standing behind him.  He
opened his mouth, trying to tell her to get lost, but just closed it
again after no words came out.  On the one hand, he was reluctant to
make such a momentous decision so suddenly.  On the other hand, he
knew / his gut told him that if they could work together, an
experienced astronaut would be an invaluable addition to the crew.
Perhaps his gut also told him something about this remarkable woman.
Finally, in a completely uncharacteristic moment of aquiesance, he
just waved his hand nonchalantly.
d2357 1
a2357 1
"Fine, you can go."
d2359 2
a2360 4
Vic got out of his chair and began taking off his spacesuit as
Mercurio climbed back out of the airlock to throw the ladders
down to the ground.  Andrea was arguing with Vic as he returned
and closed the airlock behind him.
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a2362 1
"Look, you're putting on this spacesuit."
d2364 1
a2364 1
"No, you wear your spacesuit, I'm fine without one."
d2366 1
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"Young lady," he replied with a air of chiverly, "I am this ship's
doctor, and I am giving you a medical order.  You will put on this
spacesuit, now."
d2368 1
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As Mercurio looked on, Andrea gave up.
d2370 1
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"Fine," she said, and began suiting up as Mercurio walked forward
and sat in the 747 captain's chair next to Burns.
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"Is this a good idea?" the engineer asked.
d2376 1
a2376 1
"I don't know," the Captain answered.
d2378 1
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"Isn't it dangerous for Vic to not be wearing a spacesuit during
launch?" Alister asked.
d2380 1
a2380 2
"Yeah, but if he needs it during launch, we're all in trouble," Burns
replied.
d2382 3
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Mercurio shook his head again, as he finished attaching his spacesuit
supply lines to air hoses running to his seat along the floor, put his
helmet on and sealed it.  For some reason, he just couldn't turn down
the assertive but pleasant woman (from NASA).  He turned his attention
to the final pre-launch checklist with Burns and Alister.
d2386 2
a2387 1
"GPS?"
d2389 1
a2389 1
"On... position locked."
d2391 2
a2392 1
"Fuel values?"
d2394 1
a2394 1
"Open."
d2396 1
a2396 1
"Atmospheric seals?"
d2398 7
a2404 72
"Closed."

"OK, everyone ready to go?" the Captain asked, using the question in
lue of a com check.

"We're ready," Burns confirmed, "Alister?"

"I'm ready."

"Ship's doctor ready for takeoff!" Vic jauntily proclaimed from
his seat in the passenger section behind the cockpit.

"Dr. Yeats?" the Captain dramatically inquired, after a moment of silence.

"Ready," the veteran astronaut proclaimed.  She hadn't answered at
once because she had been double-checking the connections on the
(somewhat) unfamiliar Russian spacesuit.

"Let's go!" the Captain proclaimed, and Burns hit the engine start
button on his touchscreen panel.  Far to their rear, electronically
controlled values opened to let N-1033 flow into the rocket engines.
100 milliseconds after opening the values, the engine control computer
fired a spark gap that ignited the fuel.  The engines belched fire
with a roar.

"Start one, two, four... three start... all engines good start!"
Alister declared from the engineer's position behind Burns.  The 747
lurched forward, straining against its brakes, as the police officers
gathered outside backed away from the heat.

Burns released the brakes and the plane shot forward, down the runway
and away from the stunned policemen standing near the abandoned
gentryway.  Quickly it gathered speed.

"100 knots," Alister proclamed.

Mercurio surveyed the brightly colored computer displays in front
of him.  With Burns piloting the plane, he had little to do, but
had made sure he was familiar with all the craft's systems.  The
engines were firing at their minimum force, about half power,
but it was still more thrust than generated by conventional
747 engines, and the crew was pushed back into their seats
by nearly three gees of acceleration.

"150 knots... V-1!" Alister declared.

The plane was now hurtling down the otherwise unused runway on top the
mesa.  They had reached and passed the speed where any takeoff abort
would be possible.  They were commited at least to a liftoff.

"200 knots... V-R!" came Alister's cry.

Burns eased back on the control yoke, one of the few parts of the
original 747 left unmodified, and the giant plane soared upwards
into the sky.  Some of the observers on the ground watched with
their months agap, deafened by the roaring rocket engines and
stunned by the sight of a jumbo jet belching rocket exhaust.

"Gear up," Burns ordered calmly.

"Gear up," the Captain acknowledged, as he pushed the button to raise
the landing gear.  Burns retracted the wing flaps and guided the plane
spaceward.  Unlike any conventional takeoff, he didn't level off at
10,000 feet, or 20,000 feet, or 30,000 feet, nor did the force of
acceleration notably decline until he 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 he
climbed above most of the atmosphere before beginning a true orbital
insertion.  After about a minute of flight, they passed 100,000 feet.
The conventional control surfaces were becoming unusable due to the
rarified atmosphere.  Burns took his right hand off the control yoke
and placed it on a joystick to his right.
d2409 1
a2409 1
button and watching several indicators turn green / change color.
d2411 8
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The rocket engines, mounted in hydraulically mobile mountings, now
swiveled at Burns' command.  He nudged forward on the joystick, the
engines pivoted downwards and the aircraft turned towards the
horizontal.  Two minutes into launch, they now passed 200,000 feet.
The sky was completely black.  As the aircraft turned down to about a
thirty percent angle with the horizon, the Earth rose into the view of
the pilots.  It's curvature was obvious.  An entire range of the Rocky
Mountains lay streched out beneath them, abutting the salt flats from
where they had launched.

"Increase to full power," Burns instructed.

"Full power," Alister acknowledged.

The engines, like neglected children throwing an attention tantrum,
doubled their thrust and pushed the crew further back into their
seats.  Bladders in the legs of their spacesuits inflated with air to
push blood upwards in their bodies and ensure they remained conscious,
now with more than five gees of thrust pressing against them.  Andrea
had never experienced a launch quite like this.  Space shuttle
launches were carefully profiled never to expose the crew to more than
three gees of acceleration.  Vic blacked out, the first unexpected
consequence of Andrea's presence.
d2427 2
a2428 2
He didn't believe in autopilots, and hadn't had the time to program
one, anyway.
d2432 1
a2432 1
spacecraft along it.  Almost all of the engine force was now directed
d2434 42
a2475 59
into launch, the 747 was eighty miles high and the GPS indicator
showed their speed at 10 km/s.  Burns continued firing the engines
until nearly two thirds of the ship's fuel had been exhausted.  He
then cut off the engines and let the ship coast in free-fall for
another half an hour.  Now well over a hundred miles in altitude, the
ship continued to climb.  On the radar display, the pilots could see
the clump of cargo modules they were approaching from below.  Finally,
Burns fired the engines again to stabilize the orbit just as they
reached the cargo modules.  A hundred and twenty miles in altitude,
the ship was in a ninety-minute Low Earth Orbit in the midst of over
hundred free-floating cargo modules.

Once in orbit, the crew got right to work.  They had to.  Most of
their fuel and supplies were in the cargo modules, which were built
around a three-part design.  The first stage boosted the module to
orbital height and speed, though with a perigee still in the
atmosphere.  After detaching the first stage, the second stage fired
briefly at apogee to raise the module to a circular orbit, while the
first stage dropped back into the atmosphere and burned up.  Atop the
second stage was the cargo module itself, equiped with a laptop
computer using a radio communications link and a fuel cell fed
from supply lines of N-1033 and peroxide.

The cargo modules, launched five minutes apart over the course of
several hours, were now spread out all over Low Earth Orbit, while the
747 with the crew onboard was in a six-hour orbit hundreds of miles
above.  This was deliberate.  Since the cargo modules were themselves
hundreds of miles apart, rendezvousing with each of them in LEO would
have required many complex engine burns.  Instead, and considering
that their ultimate goal was Mars, Burns had elected to put the 747
into a higher orbit, then wait for each cargo module to come into a
favorable alignment, fire its rocket engine remotely, and put it in a
transfer orbit that would bring it to them.  This enabled the crew to
bring each cargo module to them, roughly one per hour, over the course
of the next several days.

On Earth, confusion reigned.  CNN, the American 24-hour news network,
had 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 how serious
the situation was.  The President abandoned a trip to the midwest
and turned Air Force One back towards Washington, D.C.
Somehow, amid all the ballyho, the 747 had been lost
completely and effectively disappeared into high Earth orbit.

Five hours after the 747's launch, Burns fired the rocket engine of
the first cargo module and put it into its transfer orbit.  NORAD
detected the course change and reported it to the Pentagon within
minutes, who immediately passed this information on to an emergency
session of the National Security Council.  By the time the third cargo
module had been put into transfer orbit, the Air Force was convinced
that the engine burns were lifting the modules into higher orbits, not
deorbiting them as some kind of attack.  They computed the rendezvous
point, aimed their imaging telescopes at that point, and were shocked
to find themselves looking at a 747.
d2482 1
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"What the hell do I have a CIA for if I've got to find out from CNN
d2485 10
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That evening, the President addressed a nervous / rapt but unshaken
nation, informing them of basically what their news networks had been
reporting for hours.  Aside from reassuring them that the U.S.
government was carefully tracking the situation, the only new
information he provided was NORAD's assessment that the cargo modules
were being moved to higher orbits and therefore probably weren't part
of an attack.  From his home in Houston, Kyle Becker watched the press
conference alone and in silence.  Andrea Yeats was never mentioned.
d8868 25
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The T-shirt featured a marijuana pipe and a baseball, and its caption
read: "I HIT better than I PITCH".
@


1.183
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1794 4
a1797 3
would-be rapists.  The cars sped past her on the Interstate highway as
she waved her thumb by her side.  After all the rides she had given
out, wasn't somebody going to stop for her?
d1808 1
a1808 1
really looked like you needed help."
d1824 1
a1824 1
and saying nothing.  Finally, she got out at the exit that led to the
d1829 6
a1834 5
crag looming to one side and a dirt road leading off to the horizon.
As she remembered from the directions, the site was another ten miles
down this road.  It was just past nine o'clock in the morning, and
even if nobody came along to give her a ride, she figured that she had
water and could walk the distance by noon.
a1847 2
"Did I fail you in some way?"

d1851 6
a1856 6
"Is this some kind of test?"

Finally, emotionally exhausted, she fell down on her knees in the
middle of the roadway and cried steadily for several minutes.
Sitting cross-legged, she drank the rest of her water and took
stock of her situation.  _This_is_stupid_, she thought.
d1858 2
a1859 1
_police_.  _What_if_he_rapes_someone_else_?
d1863 2
a1864 2
"I'm trying real hard to forgive that man, but what if I can
stop another rape?  I don't know what to do..."
d1866 1
a1866 1
After another boat of tears, she decided to head back to the town,
d1872 1
a1872 1
a Jeep appeared at its center, drove up to where she was sitting and
d1875 1
a1875 1
Two men were seated in the Jeep, both dressed for the desert summer in
d1900 1
a1900 4
"Well, there's a lot more to a production run than cranking out
samples in a laboratory.  A factory..."

"Well, then make it yourself!  We can pay for the spacesuits in cash!"
d1902 1
a1902 3
"No, no, we've got it licked, we just need more time."

"Look, you want NASA to find out we're selling you anything?"
d1913 4
a1916 6
buttons on it.  Meanwhile, Andrea slowly digested what she had heard
and began to wonder about who her benefactors were.

"Burns called," the passenger said more to himself than anyone else as
he looked at the phone's display and pushed some more buttons, finally
connecting another call.
d1928 1
a1928 2
"I'm sorry," he said, addressing her now for the first time, "we
weren't really introduced..."
d1936 3
a1938 3
just under Mercuriou's cheekbones, then spread across the rest of his
face in a split second.  He clenched his teath and turned back around
in his chair.
d1940 1
a1940 1
"I'll get back to you," he told Burns in a clipped voice, then severed
d1945 1
a1945 1
"Turn around," Marc quietly told Alister.
d1949 2
a1950 3
"You're not going anywhere," Mercuriou interrupted her, unclipping his
seatbelt, turned fully around in his chair, and reaching back to put
one hand on the seatback near the NASA engineer's shoulder.
d1952 4
a1955 2
Alister brought the Jeep to a stop, then looked back with a pained
expression on his face.
d1957 1
a1957 1
"Turn around," Marc repeated, "Go back."
d1960 23
a1982 24
three-point turn on the broad roadway and headed back the way they had
come.  Past the rocky crag, past where Andrea had broken down while
praying to God, all the way in silence, all the way back to a locked
gate that Alister stopped long enough to get out, open, then drive
through and pause to lock again behind him.  [they've got money - the
lock's electronic] Almost another mile further on, he pulled into a
complex of buildings and parked in front of one.  All three got out of
the car and walked in.  Andrea followed the other two, partly out of
curiosity, partly because there was simply no place else to go.  She
hadn't seen another vehicle until they were in the parking lot, and
even there were only three other cars besides the Jeep.

They walked into a large room whose walls were lined with computers on
tables and whose center was a jumble of boxes and packing material.
Vic was packing one of the boxes, and Burns looked up from a computer
as they came in.

"The man who called from NASA was named Kyle Becker.  Apparently this
engineer, Dr. Yeats, had a reservation at the Hampton Inns in town,
but the hotel says she never checked in, and..."

His voice drifted off as Andrea entered the room behind the other two.
Vic stopped what he was doing and looked up.  An awkward pause
ensued.
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"Doctor Yeats," Mercuriou began slowly, pausing and measuring his 
words, "during the ride here... I was trying to decide... exactly..."
d1991 1
a1991 1
sentance.
d1999 5
a2003 4
explain how he had picked up a hitchhiker, or how Mercuriou had
continued his imprudent cellphone conversation, or how they discovered the
true identity of their passenger.  Finally, after a second or two, he
just shrugged and closed his mouth without saying a word.
d2007 1
a2007 1
"I beleive the common expression is that I 'know too much'."
d2009 1
a2009 1
"Um-hum," Marc responded and nodded in agreement before turning
d2012 2
a2013 2
"The old server room, with all the boxes in it, can you rig the door
so it can't be opened from the inside without a card key?"
d2017 2
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"Yeah, 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..."

"Fine.  Do it.  Vic, you and Alister move all the boxes out of there."

The other three men looked slowly at one another.  None of them liked
what they were being asked to do, but Burns got up and lead the other
two from the room, leaving Andrea and Marc to eye each other in
silence, she sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, he perched
on a tabletop.  Ten minutes later, the South African returned to
announce that the room was ready.  Mercuriou escorted the NASA
engineer down a hallway and around a corner to twenty-by-thirty foot
room.  Entering, Andrea turned back to face him.

"Isn't this where I get some fancy explanation of what you're up to?"
d2020 3
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"No," he answered, then closed the door behind him, insured that
it was locked, and began to walk away.
d2024 1
a2024 1
"Mr. Mercuriou, I'm sure we can discuss..."
d2026 2
a2027 2
Her captor spun on his heals, keyed the lock, and yanked the door open
before she could finish the sentence.
d2029 1
a2029 1
"_Captain_ Mercuriou, it's _Captain_ Mercuriou!"
d2031 1
a2031 1
Then he was gone.
d2033 5
a2037 1
... description of Andrea's cell and her reaction ...
d2039 10
a2048 4
Back in the main room, a spirited discussion now ensued over the
events of the morning.  Alister was reluctant to be party to
a kidnapping and imprisonment, while Vic wryly noted that
Dr. Yeats could seriously jeopardize their plans.
d2050 1
a2050 3
"Nothing's going to happen to her," Marc assured Alister.  "We've just
got to figure out how to stall things for what... another three
weeks?"
d2052 2
a2053 7
"Yeah, just about that," Burns agreed.  "Maybe a month.  If there's no
hitches, two or three weeks."

"OK, OK," Marc concluded, raising a hand to silence any more
objections.  "Look, let me just call this guy Becker back.  There's
nothing unusual in inquiring about someone who was supposed to visit
here anyway."
d2055 1
a2055 5
Marc telephoned the NASA supervisor and after informing him that
Dr. Yeats hadn't shown up yet for her visit, spoke to him for several
minutes.  After hanging up the phone, Marc turned back to face the
other three man, who had been watching and listening silently during
the entire conversation.
d2057 3
a2059 17
"We're fine.  The police found her car abandoned seventy miles from
Denver."  Vic raised an eyebrow.  Denver was several hundred miles
away.

"Car?"  Alister asked.  "What car?  She didn't have a car.  Wait,
she said something about her car being stolen."

"I don't know," Marc answered.  "The police suspect foul play, but
they don't think she's anywhere around here.  They're searching the
Denver area, and think she might have been abducted along the
Interstate somewhere."

"There shouldn't be a problem," he summarized.  "We've got plenty of
food for her; she obviously isn't hurt.  We'll just keep her here for a
few weeks until we can get the launch off, then let her go."

"I don't like it, Marc," Vic said.  "We've basically kidnapped her."
d2061 1
a2061 2
"I don't like it either," Marc admitted.  "Does anybody have any
alternate suggestions?"  There were none.
d2063 1
a2063 8
"It's not about her; it's about us.  We sooner we get our work done,
the sooner she goes free."


Later that evening, with nothing else to do, Andrea turned off the
light in the small room and laid down to sleep.

ANDREA'S PRAYER
d2238 2
a2239 2
the basic engine thrust budget.  Kyle had thought they might be selling
fuel illegally, but that didn't fit.  She thought back to the
d2241 3
a2243 3
_they're_hoarding_it.  And now the rocket design and the launch
budget...  Her contemplation was cut short by Mercuriou's loud voice
from the hallway.
d9094 2
a9095 33




"Oh, it _is_ serious.  They'll eventually catch up with us."
Mercuriou leaned forward on his desk, and tapping his
forefinger against the clock there.  "There's a countdown clock
running on this launch, just like with NASA's, T minus
whatever-the-hell, only we don't know what time it is.  At some point,
that clock goes to zero, and we better be ready to launch when it
does."




"By the way, did you see this?"

Mercuriou handed Burns a two-day-old copy of a major financial
newspaper.  It was folded back to page four, which contained a brief
announcement that the government investigation into the bankruptcy of
one Keystone Securities had been expanded into a criminal affair.  All
that was publicly known was that the investment firm had gone bankrupt
after a computer malfunction had frittered away more than a billion
dollars worth of securities in a single weekend of frenzied automated
trading.  Outraged investors were demanding to know how such a 'bug'
could have passed undetected, and industry analysts speculated that
Keystone would become a test case of corporate liability for computer
errors.  Burns read the story while Mercuriou thought over the problem
with Alister.

"This could be serious," the engineer concluded as his returned the
newspaper.

@


1.182
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1774 2
a1775 2
discovered that he lacked the stamina to keep pace with the former
astronaut, gave up, and returned to claim the car.
d1809 4
a1812 4
Andrea looked down at herself.  Her jeans were ripped from where they
had snagged on the barbed wire, her right side was covered in dirt
from when she had fallen, her hair was matted with dried sweat, and
she had slept in her cloths.
@


1.181
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1771 5
a1775 6
for leverage as she clambered up and over the barbed wire.  Her jeans
ripped on the barbs, and she fell to the ground on the other side, but
she got over before 'Howard' reached the fence.  He made it over too
and tried to persue, but soon discovered that he lacked the stamina to
keep pace with the former astronaut, gave up, and returned to claim
the car.
d1778 8
a1785 9
for perhaps five more.  Winded, she glanced behind her several times
and saw nobody, but it was now quite dark.  Finally, she stopped,
dropped to the ground, and lay like a soldier, belly-down, watching
for any sign of pursuit.  There was none.  She could see the moving
lights of the Interstate, and farther away, the stationary lights of
houses on a distant hilltop.  After twenty minutes or so, still
watching intently around her, she stood up, walked to a nearby tree,
sat down at its base, cried, calmed, prayed, and finally slept until
dawn.
@


1.180
log
@'howard stern'
@
text
@d1713 1
a1713 1
"Say, you got anything to eat in here?" was all he could muster.
d1715 4
a1718 5
"No, not really," Andrea answered, slightly nonplussed by what she
thought was a rude question.  _I_never_ask._ "It's a rental," she
added by way of explaination.  Maybe he was really hungry.
_I'm_letting_this_guy_off_at_the_next_onramp_, she suddenly
decided.  _I've_give_him_some_money_for_food._
d1724 2
a1725 2
"I'm letting you off here.  I'll give you a twenty; you can some food
in one of these restaurants here."
d1747 1
a1747 1
seemed no way to unlock it.  By the time she realized that Howard had
d1751 1
a1751 1
While she was fooling with the door, Howard had grabbed her handbag
d1757 1
a1757 1
lamp came on, Howard pulled off the freeway at a minor interchange.
d1759 1
a1759 1
asphalt road passing under a highway bridge to the left.  Howard
d1769 1
a1769 1
fence that ran alongside it.  Howard was out of the car and coming
d1773 2
a1774 2
she got over just as Howard reached the fence.  He made it over and
tried to persue, but soon discovered that he lacked the stamina to
d1782 6
a1787 5
for any sign of pursuit.  There was none.  Far in the distance, she
could see the moving lights of the Interstate.  After twenty minutes
or so, still watching intently around her, she stood up, walked to a
nearby tree, sat down at its base, cried, calmed, prayed, and finally
slept until dawn.
d1806 1
a1806 1
"I'm fine, I just had some a little bad luck, that's all."
@


1.179
log
@andrea's last meeting with kyle
@
text
@d1703 3
a1705 3
Andrea forced a grin.  Something about the way he replied - the tone
of his voice, maybe - she didn't like.  She fired back with a slight
varient on one of her favorite jokes.
d1721 6
a1726 1
...
d1728 1
a1728 14
"Can I have my purse back?"  Andrea could hardly believe she had asked
the question.  She had gone from terrified to violated in a New York
minute. [CA] _My_God_, _that_was_so_stupid._
_Who_care_about_a_dumb_purse?_

Yet 'Howard' grabbed her purse, ripped it open, then threw it out the
window after discovering it contained no money or credit cards.

She
has to be fairly close to "Site Y" at this point.  I guess he takes
her cell phone, too.  She tries briefly to wave down a passing car,
but fails.  Her hitchiking experience tells her to wait for dawn so
people can see her.  Finds a nice spot off the road, or under an
overpass, and sleeps.
d1730 58
a1787 1
BUT DOES SHE GET RAPED?
d1794 5
a1798 4
that you forgive your enemies, and that included rapists.  The
cars sped past her on the Interstate highway as she waved her
thumb by her side.  After all the rides she had given out,
wasn't somebody going to stop for her?
d1802 26
a1827 11
door and climbed in.  The car was old but comfortable, with an Indian
dream catcher hanging from the rear view mirror, a feathered arrow
sitting on the dashboard, and an eccentric collection of cassette
tapes in a compartment just under the ashtray.  Elsie, her driver, was
half-Indian herself and returning home from a visit to her daughter in
Albuquerque.  Andrea rode with her from almost an hour, enjoying a
tape of Caribbean island music while chatting amicably, thinking
little and saying nothing about her ordeal.  Finally, she got out at
the exit that lead to the TenTech facility, thanked her new
friend, who pressed a liter of water into her hands before saying
goodbye, and watched her drive off.
d1914 1
a1914 1
"Thanks."
d1939 2
a1940 5
Andrea fumbled in her pocket and first thing that came to her
hand was her government I.D.  She pulled it out and thrust it
towards him.

"Andrea Yeats, National Aeronautics and Space Administration."
@


1.178
log
@naming the ship
@
text
@d1579 2
a1580 2
Alister's idea was _The_Revolution_, but Burn's suggestion finally
won: _Mars_Voyager_.
d1605 3
a1607 5
Kneeling down by the Deer Tounge lettuce she was transplanting,
Dr. Andrea Yeats, electrical engineer, one-time space shuttle
astronaut and now private gardener, continued to read the
sheaf of papers in silence.  Standing over her, Kyle
Becker continued to talk on, half to himself.
d1610 2
a1611 1
comes out of the man's mouth anymore."
d1613 2
a1614 3
Picking up her spade and gloves, Yeats stood and started walking down
the garden row, past the XXX (lettuce) and back towards the main
house.
d1618 1
a1618 1
"Absolutely none," Becker answered.  "We've tested ten-thirty-three
d1621 1
a1621 1
Brooklyn Bridge.  We've actually got the goods in hand, heck, we've
d1624 23
a1646 26
Yeats continued to read and walk.  Following, Becker ruminating on.

"They're not trying to get any money out of us, either.  They've got
the contract, and we've paid them a little, they've ramped up to make
massive quantities of ten-thirty-three, but we just haven't seen any
of it.  I've thought they might be selling it overseas, but I can't
figure why or how.  They evade all of our inquiries.  They always
claim to be having production problems, and that they need more time."

"Production problems," Andrea echoed, continuing to look at the
papers.  "No way.  Not with the quantities of nitric acid they're
consuming.  They've already been shipped enough to fuel three
conventional shuttle launches."

Becker nodded in assent and admiration.  He knew this as well, but
only because he had first calculated the quantity of nitric acid
required to produce a a kilogram of nitroglycerine, looked up the
energy released by a kilogram of nitroglycerine and compared that to
the energy consumed by a shuttle launch.  Yeats had performed
basically the same estimate in her head.  He had come to her
for a reason.

Leaving the gardening tools on a table by an outside sink, Andrea led
the way inside, where her elderly mother was coming out of the
kitchen.  Eighty-six and sharp as a wit, she carried a tray with a
large pitcher and glasses on it.
d1651 1
a1651 2
"That sounds great, Mrs. Yeats," the NASA manager replied, as the two
of them sat down at the dining room table.
d1653 2
a1654 2
"Use Equal if it's not sweet enough for you; it dissolves in cold
water better than sugar."
d1656 2
a1657 2
"It's fine, ma'am," he replied, sipping from the glass.  "A little on
the tart side, but that's just the way I like it."
d1675 2
a1676 1
quagmire.  Still, Kyle was her best friend, and we were taught to
d1683 4
a1686 2
"Great!  I've got everything set up.  You'll be a special consultant;
you can use your NASA I.D; I'll advance you all the expenses.
d1693 3
a1695 3
Andrea glanced over at the hitchhiker as the rental cruised
down the Interstate.  She had picked him up at the 
last onramp.
d1703 3
a1705 2
Andrea grinned.  She fired back with a slight varient on one of her
favorite jokes.
d1707 2
a1708 2
"I used to listen to your show every morning... until my roommate
left for work."
d1710 2
a1711 1
She glanced over at her passenger.  Not even a smile.
d1715 5
a1719 3
"No, not really," Andrea answered, slightly non-plussed [?] by what
she thought was a rude question.  _I_never_ask._ "It's a rental," she
added by way of explaination. [CA] Maybe he was really hungry.
@


1.177
log
@added press release
@
text
@d1418 5
a1422 3
Burns continued straight ahead, towards a black rocket engine mounted
horizontally and aimed away from the complex, across the empty expanse
of scrub brush.
d1424 2
a1425 2
"This is the firing stand.  We test each rocket after it's finished.
We just fired this one this morning."
d1547 6
a1552 11
Burns started by dropping the aircraft's engines out of its nacelles
and replacing them with rockets.  He had carefully designed the rocket
engines so that four of them could lift a 747 into orbit, while a solo
engine could lift a significant mass in an unmanned cargo module.
Next, he converted the entire main body of the aircraft to hold
N-1033, leaving just the bubble on top the plane pressurized for the
crew.  At the rear of the bubble he fashioned an airlock, opening
directly upward.  On top the airlock hatch he placed a hydraulic
mating adapter, and another one on the nose of the aircraft.  He'd
reworked the plane's plumbing system, too.  Most of the work had been
done by illegal immigrants working under Burns' supervision.
d1555 2
a1556 3
base of the aircraft, parked behind the warehouse when the rocket
engines had been assembled.  Burns had just declared the 747 ready for
spaceflight.
d1559 1
a1559 1
of equipment in them, but the 747 is fueled and ready to go."
d1561 4
a1564 3
Mercuriou was practically ecstatic.  For the first time in more
than two years, he finally felt he had a real option for the day
the feds came knocking on his door.
d1570 20
a1589 1
"I think our captain has an idea for that," Vic stated.
d1591 2
a1592 20
Mercuriou cleared his throat.

"You've heard the story of Icarus?"

"Some greek hero?" Alister guessed.

"The son of Daedalus," Mercuriou explained.  "Father and son were
imprisoned on an island by an evil king, so the father built wax wings
for them to escape, but Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings
melted, and he fell to the sea and died."

"Great," Burns reacted.  "That's just what want - fall to the sea and
die!"  He bust out laughing.

"We're not going to fall to the sea and die," Mercuriou replied.
"But there's no other Greek character that so defines what we're
trying to do - escape the prison of this world."

"I think it meshes rather nicely with the insanity of this whole
venture," Vic wryly noted, the grin barely visable under the mustache.
d1594 4
a1597 1
"OK, then _Icarus_ it is."
@


1.176
log
@Mercuriou's speech to Alister
@
text
@d1324 3
a1326 2
against the far wall.  About five latinos, busy working on one piece
of equipment or another, ignored the two Caucasians as they entered.
d1435 4
a1438 4
"As far as I know, this is the only rocket design that does.  See,
one of the problems with liquid-fueled rocket engines is that you need
to inject the fuel under pressure.  That implies a pump of some kind,
and the rocket exhaust is the obvious thing to power it with.  Most
d1459 1
a1459 1
"A lot of the early rocket designs used copper, beleive it or not."
d1465 2
a1466 2
pipes and pump either water or liquid oxygen or something through 'em
fast enough to keep the metal walls cool enough so they don't melt."
d1470 5
a1474 4
"No shit.  And then there was the turbo pump design - they used metal
blades, and _they_ had to be cooled, so you ended up putting little
holes through middle of the blades so you could run cooling fluid
through the turbine fan...  It gets to be a real pain."
d1478 4
a1481 5
design, continuing on about how he had used an array of 256 computers
to simulate the heat transfer properties of the engine in order to
design its mounting arrangement.  Apparently the silicon carbide could
get quite hot.  The young South African had basically tuned out of the
conversation, but realized at that moment that the pot-smoking
a1482 2
Finally Mercuriou walked up, his facial features hidden
behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
d1484 47
a1530 1
"So what do you think?  You in?"
d1535 1
a1535 1
Burns suggested a 747 for a manned launch vehicle, and Mercurio had
@


1.175
log
@Alister finds the hack
@
text
@d1050 1
a1050 1
T - 138 days
d1079 1
a1079 1
that Burns or Mercuriou periodically used a computer that no one else
d1107 1
a1107 1
office's plate glass windows.  The steel gray ocean beyond frothed and
d1109 1
a1109 1
engineers dubbed "sea scatter", before morphing into an indistinct
d1114 2
a1115 7
Unbeknownst to Alister, Burns also had a completely seperate computer
monitoring the connections to 'genie'.  Although the login sessions
were encrypted, they could at least be tracked and logged.  Each
morning, Burns ran a program that verified that the login records
matched the packet traces recorded on the network.  In addition, there
were accounting records that recorded the beginning and end of every
program, and they were duplicated on the other computer.
d1126 3
a1128 11
Mercuriou concluded, leaning back in his chair and watching a rain
storm pelt the plate glass windows behind his desk.  Burns nodded.
Mercuriou sniffed, then chuckled, then finally broke out in an awkward
guffaw.

"You think this is funny?" Burns asked.

"I think it's hilarious," Mercuriou replied, swiveling around in his
chair.  "Our whole operation is made possible by your super-hack of
Chesapeake, and now along comes this twenty-year-old kid who hacks
_your_ network!"
d1130 1
a1130 1
Burns grinned at the thought.
d1132 10
a1141 1
"By the way, did you see this?"
d1143 2
a1144 12
Mercuriou handed Burns a two-day-old copy of a major financial
newspaper.  It was folded back to page four, which contained a brief
announcement that the government investigation into the bankruptcy of
one Keystone Securities had been expanded into a criminal affair.  All
that was publicly known was that the investment firm had gone bankrupt
after a computer malfunction had frittered away more than a billion
dollars worth of securities in a single weekend of frenzied automated
trading.  Outraged investors were demanding to know how such a 'bug'
could have passed undetected, and industry analysts speculated that
Keystone would become a test case of corporate liability for computer
errors.  Burns read the story while Mercuriou thought over the problem
with Alister.
d1146 2
a1147 2
"This could be serious," the engineer concluded as his returned the
newspaper.
d1149 1
a1149 7
"Oh, it _is_ serious.  They'll eventually catch up with us."
Mercuriou leaned forward on his desk, and tapping his
forefinger against the clock there.  "There's a countdown clock
running on this launch, just like with NASA's, T minus
whatever-the-hell, only we don't know what time it is.  At some point,
that clock goes to zero, and we better be ready to launch when it
does."
d1151 1
a1151 20
"It's not going to be today," Burns replied.  "We don't even have all
the engines finished yet, and as you very well know, we don't have
enough ten-thirty-three."

"Well, we better get them finished, we better get all the payload we
need down to Site Y, we better make sure that as soon as we've got
enough ten-thirty-three then we've got a launch capability."

Burns shifted testily on the couch.  Mercuriou was preaching
the choir, and the engineer didn't like being told what he
very well knew.

"That's all fine," he answered, "but despite offloading the
ten-thirty-three production, we've still got way more work than hands
to do it."

"OK," Mercuriou continued, more thoughfully, "you keep telling me you
need more help, and one of the big things I _haven't_ be able to
provide you is help with all these computer hacks you want done.  Now
can Alister do that for you?"
d1154 1
a1154 1
thought.  He had known Alister for almost six months (check
d1157 2
a1158 2
"He's sharp, real sharp.  One of the best technicians I've got, and
yeah, it looks like he can hack, too.  The real question is,
d1161 1
a1161 1
Alister is called into the office.
d1163 1
a1163 2
"Close the door," Mercuriou directed and the young man complied.
Burns began speaking as soon as the door closed.
d1165 2
a1166 12
"There was an unlogged connection to 'dumper' from your workstation
last night at 9:43 PM.  It was encrypted of course, but it looks like
it lasted almost an hour.  Know anything about it?"

Alister's face flushed red.  He had been avoiding Burns all day,
feeling uncomfortable ever since his un-authorized excursion of the
night before.  There seemed little point in trying to deny the
obvious.  Card key records of entry and exit from the building would
place him in the office last night at that time, and his workstation's
own accounting records could probably be mined for evidence to support
the hack.  Anyway, it was curiosity that had driven Alister; he wasn't
a natural liar.
d1168 10
a1177 2
"Yeah, I've seen you type that password a few times and I wanted to
see what was on that machine."
d1183 3
a1185 2
Silently, Burns thought about when that could have happened.  Mecuriou
snickered.
d1189 1
a1189 1
Alister shrugged.  An awkward silence followed.
d1191 1
a1191 1
#if maybe
d1193 6
a1198 1
"It's like tomorrow's lottery numbers today"
d1200 7
a1206 14
#endif

"OK," Mercuriou cut it, "so you know there's some kind of hack going
on.  You may suspect that this is a front operation of some kind.
What you haven't figured out is the truth, let me assure you.  Sit
down."

Alister planted himself in one of the two vacant chairs in the office.
Mercuriou got up out of his and walked to one of the windows.
He was conscious that the success or failure of his entire plan
hung on his next words and actions.  His mind flashed back
to college, to one of his most energetic professors, scrawling
"RHETORIC" across the blackbord in foot-high block letters.  Turning
around from the window, he faced the young chemist.
d1211 5
a1215 4
Alister looked from one man to the other.  Sitting comfortably in the
Mercuriou's office, he couldn't imagine that the man in the swivel
chair was a space captain, or that the pot-smoking hacker reclining on
the coach was a chief engineer.
d1217 1
a1217 2
"Yeah, right," he replied as he got up out of his chair and started
for the door.  "And I'm Mother Theresa."
d1219 1
a1219 2
"This is no joke," Burns informed him.  Alister stopped halfway across
the room.  Both of the other men appeared absolutely serious.
d1223 1
a1223 1
"You saw the Kansas state Pick Five daily lottery drawing,"
d1226 1
a1226 2
space invarient under Lorentz transformations.  ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY,
the blackboard had read.
d1228 4
a1231 2
"Of course, you could have turned on the TV and seen the Kansas state
Pick Five daily lottery drawing," Mercuriou continued, walking forward
d1235 1
a1235 3
RHETORIC IS A PERFORMANCE ART.

"Except that you saw _tonight's_ Kansas state Pick Five daily lottery
d1240 1
a1240 1
"So, what, you've hacked a state lottery to pay for a Mars mission?"
d1243 2
a1244 2
lottery out there and might barely have the money to put a
communications satellite in orbit."
d1246 1
a1246 1
IMPRESS YOUR AUDIENCE.
d1248 2
a1249 2
Mercuriou waved his arm in a sweeping gesture that including the
desk, the chairs, the office, the computers.  The truth slowly
d1252 1
a1252 1
"You mean all this is stolen?  Hacked?"
d1258 2
d1264 1
a1264 1
society here and done whatever the hell we pleased." _SELL_THEM!_
d1266 36
a1301 1
Alister had made it back to his chair and sat down.
d1303 2
a1304 16
"Instead, we've decided to do something that'll make a difference, and
something that this man is uniquely qualified for," Mercuriou waved to
indicate Burns, then continued.  "We decided to see if we can't really
move this space technology forward, come up with a spacecraft fuel
that works, and works well, that will really let people do what Robert
Heinlein just dreamed about, quit piddling around in Low Earth Orbit,
and _fly_to_Mars_.  Learn to grow your own food in orbit!  Make your
own clothes!  Mine the asteroid belt for the minerals you need!
Design your own computer chips up there!"

LITTLE MORE HERE

"And _to_hell_ with whatever all these people back on Earth think.
That's what's we're about.  And that lottery you saw last night is
just the tip of the iceberg, trust me, you have _no_idea_ how big this
hack is."
d1306 1
a1306 1
Mercuriou turned his back and walked to the window.  _Challenge_them_
d1308 1
a1308 1
"OK," he continued in a low voice, "so it all sounds too wild to be
d1311 1
a1311 1
He turned and looked Alister straight in the eye.
d1313 1
a1313 1
"Take a look at our launch facility.  Then tell me I'm full of shit."
d9023 36
@


1.174
log
@andrea in Houston
@
text
@d1054 1
a1054 1
The stereo was cranked, the windows reverberating with the beat
d1059 16
a1074 18
"Bed-room!"

Alister Compton puzzled over the messages on the screen in front of
him.  He wasn't supposed to be in here, but the presence of a
mysterious computer on the network had first attracted and then
consumed the attension of the young chemist hired to research and
improve the simulation programs being used to develop Burns' new
rocket fuel.  Twenty years old, with matted blond hair, Alister had
left South Africa to study abroad and decided to stay and find a job
after graduating with a double degree in chemisty and physics.
Robotics Research was his first job after college.

He had taken the job because it had challenged him to hone his
knowledge of numerical simulation of quantum mechanical systems well
beyond what he had studied as an undergraduate.  Burns had hired him
not only because his academic background matched what he was looking
for, not only because he had graduated so quickly with a double
degree, but also because the young man had a natural aptitude working
d1077 5
a1081 5
Yet now that aptitude was begining to land the young South African in
trouble.  He had noticed that Burns or Mercuriou periodically used a
computer that was kept completely isolated from the rest of the
machines on their network.  His inquires about the machine had been
vaguely dismissed.
d1085 5
a1089 10
young chemist to watch him login to the 'dumper', as the computer was
called, and now Alister had used to password to enter the system
himself and began looking around it.  It contained dozens of files
written in assembly language, which was about as close as you could
get to the machine's underlying architecture without dealing directly
with the bits and bytes.  Alister rarely used assembly, and didn't
bother trying to understand the arcane instructions contained therein.
Instead, he looking at the machine's accounting records, which showed
one program used more than another other on the system.  Alister
ran the program.
d1094 1
a1094 1
Alister recognized it almost immediately.  It was a Keno game of the
d1098 1
a1098 1
the current date and time.  _What_the_hell!?!_
d1105 6
a1110 3
Mercuriou asked the question without turning around to face Burns.
Instead, he leaned back in his chair with his back to the engineer
and watched a rain storm pelt the office's plate glass windows.
d1115 1
a1115 1
monitoring the connections to "dumper".  Although the login sessions
d1252 1
a1252 1
commander; Burns is chief engineer."
d1267 5
a1271 5
"You saw the Kansas state Pick Five daily lottery drawing," Mercuriou
stated in a tone of voice Burns might have used to declare that
gravity manifested itself as curvature in a four-dimensional space
invarient under Lorentz transformations.  _Establish_credibility,_ the
blackboard had read.
d1276 3
a1278 1
close enough to impede on Alister's space.  _Performance_art_.
d1289 3
a1291 1
communications satellite in orbit."  _Impress_your_audience_
d1297 1
a1297 1
"You mean all this is stolen?  I mean hacked?"
d1299 1
a1299 2
"Stolen," Mercuriou answered.  "That's the right word.  All of it.
Every penny."
d6879 5
a6883 1
Mercuriou answered now, slowly.
d6900 2
a6901 1
stuff we've talked about - freedom, democracy, religion, God - this is
d6904 1
a6904 1
Aquinas, this is the soul of a species.  Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Leo
d6910 1
a6910 1
the razor-sharp sun.
@


1.173
log
@the beach house
@
text
@d862 1
d864 1
a864 1
T - 313 days
d866 1
a866 69
A round of applause greeted Burns as he stepped to the podium.
Mercuriou had just finished a glowing introduction for his college
friend, and a mixed audience of reporters and NASA employees
politely applauded the
chief technical officer of the latest high-tech startup with a big
invention.  NASA, the American space agency, had just awarded them a
major contract.

"Could you describe, in layman's terms," one reporter asked, "exactly
what N-1033 is and what makes it different from conventional rocket
fuels?"

"Sure," Burns answered, warming to the technical subject, and
launching into a well-rehearsed answer.  "First, let me answer the
first part of your question.  N-1033 is a very, _very_, large molecule
with a molecular weight just over 20,000.  To put that in context,
water has a molecular weight of 18, and table sugar has a molecular
weight of 342.  This doesn't mean that a beaker full of N-1033 is
exceptionally heavy, it just means that the molecules themselves are
very large, and thus very heavy, and it doesn't take as many of them
to fill that beaker."

Burns paused to select a computer graphic from the tablet in front of
him and display it on the projector screen behind him.  It showed a
three-dimensional model of his invention, a molecule of the rocket
fuel known as N-1033.

"Geometrically, N-1033 is a large, spherical cage of nitrogen modules
than form a shell around a core dominated by oxygen.  These
nitrogren-oxygen bonds release a great deal of energy when they break,
which is, in fact, exactly what makes nitroglycerine such a powerful
explosive.  It's the shell that protects the core and keeps
ten-thirty-three from simply exploding.  Furthermore, due to the
spherical shape of the molecule, it remains liquid at far lower
temperatures than you would expect for a molecule of this size.  In
fact, it's liquid at room temperature..."

Mercuriou, seated now in the front row between a NASA program director
and Burns' empty chair, tuned out the press conference as Burns droned
on about oxidizers and synthesis pathways.
_Now_the_real_work_begins_.  _We should be able to milk this for a
year or so._ _Not very long to put together a manned launch._

"Captain?" Burns interrupted.  "I mean, Marc, you want to answer that
question?"

A chuckle went threw the audience.  Some thought it amusing that
the CEO was called "Captain".

Marc walked to the podium and pulled Burns aside to 'consult' with him.

"What was the question?"

Burns grinned.

"They want to know again about our patent intentions."

Mercuriou nodded as he turned back around to address the audience.

"Not only are we not patenting N-1033, but we're publishing pretty
much everything we know about it, including the complete synthesis
pathway we use.  Of course, right now we're the only company that has
a production process, so it was fairly easy for us to win the NASA
contract, but I hope in the near future you'll see N-1033 being widely
manufactured and used."

"I frankly don't understand," one reporter asked.  "If you get a
process patent you'd be able to dominate the market for this fuel for
years to come.  Doesn't your company need the money?"
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"We have ample funding from private sources," Mercurio answered,
grinning.  "I guess you could just call it my humanitarian streak."
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T - 312 days
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"So what'd you think?"
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In the passenger seat as the car zoomed down Interstate 37, Andrea
Yeats thought for a minute before answering.
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"I wasn't all that impressed."
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"But he's publishing the whole sythesis pathway!  And he's
disclaiming all the patent right!  I thought you'd love it!"
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The driver, a key NASA manager...
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"Kyle, I just get sick of this guys who act real cool, and wear blue
jeans to work, and call everybody 'bro', and deep down inside they're
just a bunch of bastards.  Just you wait - I'll bet you they've got
some kind of angle on this.  The engineer seems to really know his
stuff, but the CEO strikes me a con artist."
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"Well, he's a capitalist, no doubt about it, but this stuff is no con,
we've tested it!  I'm telling 'ya, Andrea, you should get back in the
program.  This new fuel's gonna revolutionize spaceflight!"
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"That's OK, Kyle, my problems are here on Earth."
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Andrea had spent the night in Kyle's guest room, and when the NASA
manager left for work in the morning, Andrea rode with him.
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"You give me such a fright, a single woman, hitchhiking!"
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"You put your faith in God, Vic.  And you tie your hair
up under a cap and and lose the miniskirt!"
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Vic's relationship with Andrea Yeats was purely platonic, but the
thought of the ex-astronaut in a miniskirt brought a grin to his face.
He pulled up to a bus stop and got out with Andrea to open
the trunk and retrieve her bag.
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"OK, the city bus goes into Houston from here.  Sweatheart, find the
Greyhound station in the city."  He pulled five twenty-dollar bills
and handed them to her.  "Just humor me this once and take the bus
home!"
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"Thanks, Vic," Andrea said, giving him a hug.  "You're my best friend.
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Vic nodded and got back in the car before answering.
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"I love you too," he replied quietly.

"Call me when you get home!" he called out the window as he drove
away.
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It was ten o'clock, the morning rush was over, and Andrea climbed on a
mostly empty downtown express and gazed out the bus window as
Interstate highway gave way to mid-market chain restaurants,
landscaped malls, busy downtown streets and finally a downtown
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_.
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and more run-down sections of Houston. and found a hundred-year-old
Catholic church, Saint Andrew's, that occupied almost an entire city
block.  Built of stone and with metal bars on its windows, it could
have been mistaken for a prison except for the cross mounted on its
steeple.  Walking around back, she found a rear entrance, bearing a
colorful sign, "The Franciscan Fryer".
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populated by collapable tables and chairs with a half-dozen men
preparing the room for lunch.  An erasable whiteboard near the door
proclaimed "Today's Specials" in pre-printed type and below,
handwritten with a faded black marker, "The Usual".

"We don't start serving until eleven o'clock," a black man unfolding
chairs told her.

"Well, I'm just looking for Brother Dunstan," she replied.

"Oh, he's probably in the kitchen, then," he responded, and
motioned to the rear of the room, seperated from the kitchen
only by a long serving counter.

Behind the counter, she saw a port-bellied man in his late forties,
with balding hair and a worn apron covering the brown habit of a
Franciscan Friar, muttering to himself as he stirred a steaming kettle
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"Andrea!" exclaimed the chef, now looking out towards the door.
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"Thanks," she said and walked between the tables, past a serving line
just being setup and entered the kitchen.
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...

"Well, you know, I had somewhat different expectations for this place.
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
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"That was down on Market Street?"

[Does Houston have a Market Street?  I have no idea.]
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couldn't pay, well, we just couldn't afford the rent.  It was a nice
location, there, but we had to leave.  I prayed about it a lot, well I
worried about it 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, and you know, on Sundays now so many people stay
after church for lunch that it's really helped the church, you know,
their social life, and I get regular donations now from the
congregation, well I don't know what I would have done without it!"

Andrea watched the workers finish setting up the tables and chairs,
then shared lunch with Dunstan just as the first customers, mostly
homeless men, came in.  The food, especially considering its meager
pretensions, was excellent.  In addition to fresh baked bread, coffee
and orange Tang ("you know, a man in the congregation works for XXX
and they donate the Tang mix"), the lentils were made in a soup with
just enough tomatoes and onions to season it well, and the tuna salad,
replete with chopped Granny Smith apples and stuffed into the freshly
baked bread, was one of Dunstan's signature dishes.
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"No, I'm heading back to my family's place in Iowa today.  I just came
down to visit Kyle Becker, he had a new project with NASA, some
people have developed a new rocket fuel."
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"You know, I heard about that on the news!  They say it's quite
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Andrea shook her head vigorously.  "Not a chance."
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holders on each table.  It was blank, except for a quote from Matthew:
"When I was hungry, you fed me."  She put the four remaining twenty
dollar bills she had into the envelope, sealed it, and slipped it in
the drop box on her way out the door.  Taking a city bus to the
northern extremnities of Houston, she walked to Interstate 45, sat her
duffle bag down beside the onramp, and began waiting for a ride.
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@


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@revised up through vision quest
@
text
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systems.  For hundreds of years, scientists had sought the holy grail
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universe.  Like two teams of hunters closing on an elusive prey from
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quest, the physicists drilling down deeper and deeper into the
mysteries of the atom, the chemists measuring and categorizing dozens,
even hundreds of properties of the myriad array of chemical
substances.  In the early decades of the twentieth century, physicists
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could finally explain the layered construction of atoms and molecules,
but it remained for the development of the digital computer to
actually solve those equations for any but the simplest of atoms.  For
the first time, physics was beginning to correctly predict the
physical properties of matter that until then had only been understood
empirically by chemists.  The "holy grail" of quantum mechanics [CA],
perhaps the most stunningly successful physics theory of all time,
with one slight caveat - nobody knew how to solve its equations.
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side of the computer monitor with his hand.  Burns walked over behind
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college.  Emblazened across the top was the Generalized Stokes
Theorem in its most abstract form.   "It's not magic," read
the caption, "it's MATH 462."
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"No, really.  Ever seen that video of the Tacoma Narrows bridge
collapse?"

"No, I don't think so," the young man replied, the disgust still evident in
his voice.
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"Well, maybe it wasn't a big hit in South Africa, but if I saw it once
in high school, I saw it half a dozen times. [CA] The designers didn't
calculate the wind load right on this suspension bridge, and it
finally ripped itself to pieces in a light gale.  Now we've been
building bridges since Roman times, and still occasionally screw one
up and drop it in the river.  We've been building computers for less
than fifty years.  That's why the technology moves so quickly, because
it's so primitive.  All of it - _Gaussian_, _Windows_, _Mathematica_,
the web - fifty more years from now, people will look back on it like
we look at the Collesium today - how the hell is it still standing?!
How did they build it with just ropes and levers?!  How did they do
quantum mechanics with floating point numbers that don't even form a
mathematical group under addition?"

"It's just so _stupid_!  One bloody semicolon at the end and the whole
night's run wasted!  Why can't it just stop and wait instead of
deleting everything?!"

"Because we're trying to build the Empire State Building with pickaxes
and shovels!  We can stop and try to invent a steam engine, and while
we're at it invent voice recognition, personal robotics, on-demand
video and the car that drives itself.  Or we just plow ahead on the
one thing we really want to get done.  It's triage.  You've got ten
times more casualties than surgical staff.  You've got to pick your
battles real carefully, or you'll never get anything done; you'll
spend all your time rushing from one problem to another."
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"Hello, Burns!" the physician greeted his old college housemate with
an arm clasped around the shoulder and a handshake.

"Alister, meet my old college roommate..." "Hi."  "Don't look at
me; I can't stand the things."
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 "Marc told me all
about this, and I wanted to come see it for myself."

"This is it!", he exclaimed, waving his hand all around him.  "The
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His wave encompassed a late-twentieth-centry [physics] gamble for a chemistry
breakthrough of the first magnitude.  He sat again one wall in a
garage with an attached house, which he shared as an office with a
team of a half-dozen young programers.  They were armed with a
parallel-processing system of more than a thousand computer
processors, which required so much air-conditioning that it was housed
in a seperate location; this was only their programming site.
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cooling systems to keep them refrigerated well below freezing.  NASA,
for example, kept the space shuttle's rocket fuel stored in a
specially built underground tank, and only pumped it into the
shuttle's external tank the night before launch.  Worse, even the most
efficient liquid fuels had rather poor specific impulses, that crucial
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exerted on it by gravity, and also rather poor specific volumes,
resulting in the need for very large tanks to contain tons of propellants.
Solid fuel propellants performed better, which is why the space
shuttle used a pair of booster rockets to help propel it into space,
but with the severe drawback that they couldn't be simply throttled
back or turned off like liquid fuel propellants.  Burns wanted to
develop a liquid fuel that would remain liquid at room temperature,
eliminating the need for elaborate cooling systems, and that would
have a specific impulse and specific volume rivaling the best of the
solid propellants.
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explained, which was true.  After the computers predicted melting
point, boiling point, ionization energy, chemical potential,
thermodynamic constants, and a dozen other predictions that may or may
not be accurate, the next step was to actually create it.  Again, the
computers were asked to compute more and more predictions for the
possible byproducts and derivatives of the compound in question, then
reacted in simulation by more programs to find out if such-and-such a
combination producing such-and-such a result would actually proceed
forward in reasonable time at some specified temperature.  Since none
of the software was more than a few years old, really, and since it
crashed constantly, and produced bizarre predictions like its
continued, stubborn belief, much to Burns' great alarm and dismay,
that kerosene would react with hydrogen peroxide at a specific impulse
of 298 without the presence of a catalyst.  So the only way to find
out if any of the predictions were even remotely possible, they had to
test them, and Burns set up both a well-stocked chemistry lab and
eventually a small rocket engine on a firing range.

The three men retired to the main part of the house, or more precisely
to its kitchen.

"You pay for all this with your lottery winnings?"

Mercuriou shook his head as he answered.

"No, we have a new investor!  Ever heard of Keystone Securities?"

Antonov thought for a moment as he produced three large casserole
dishes he had brought in from the car and turned on the oven.

"Isn't that the brokerage firm that went bankrupt a few months ago?"
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"You know, I think you're right!"  Mercuriou wagged his finger and
exclaimed with a grin.  Antonov did not smile.
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"So, Doctor Vic, what have we got here?" Burns wondered, taking the
lid off one of the casseroles.
@


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@more tidbits
@
text
@d119 2
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inventor of the UNIX system, demonstrated that a compiler, which
converts source code into
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router manufactures wanting their custom software to take
advantage of their custom hardware.  Chesapeake.
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Burns slid his key card through the slotted black box.
A light turned green, a bolt clicked back,
and a line printer half a mile away rattled.
Burns slid his key card through a grove in the black plastic box
by the server room, waited to hear the bolt click,
pushed the door open and walked in.
keyed the server room door and walked in.
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'Red' Briwom specialized in diving
into stalled projects and getting them finished by pounding out code.
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"I've got to get this optical interface installed."
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On the one hand, an afternoon of sailing was a tempting proposition, and
Red had a thirty-six-foot Catalan.  On the other hand were the weeks
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plans on an encrypted hard drive; his roommate waiting back at the
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"No, thanks," Burns said without a hint of deceit in his voice.
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tricky install of a new high-speed optical interface in one of the
test machines.  Somehow, he just couldn't seem to get the settings
right.  Once set up, he emailed his roommate, "How about lunch?"
_I'm_in_the_server_room._ "Sounds fine," came the reply.
_Everything's_go!_
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out of the room, one to the restroom and another to retrieve a
power cable from his desk.  Burns sent another email, "Let's try
Bogart's."  Back in the apartment, Marc Mercuriou skimmed down his
list of local restaurants and the names they translated into in their
code language, then picked up the phone.  A minute later, the third
tech was called out to answer a phone call from someone who had
already hung up by the time he got there.  Burns had contemplated
taking a shot of J.D. that morning to steal himself for this moment,
but designed that he had to be absolutely sober in case _anything_
went wrong.
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Nothing went wrong.  He practicly sprinted across the room as soon as
the door closed.  The situation was almost ideal;
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custom-built cable that could briefly power a server's drive
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the routers are the network.  You
control the routers, you control the network.  You are the network.
You're God.  This thing's like super-hack."
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A silence fell, fell tense and sudden, punctuated by a single word
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temporary setbacks in his plans, and absolutely convinced that he
would ultimately win.
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the friendship had lasted for almost twenty years.
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pair of ceramic mugs.  _Not_Mars, he thought, _not_again_..
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He paused.  The explanation degenerating into a familiar tirade.
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conosuir sniffing a fine wine.  Vic stood in the doorway to the kitchen, staring directly
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and emotionless.
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stammering to explain a 2 A.M. return to his parents.
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At this Vic sighed, handed one of the mugs to his old friend and sat
down across from him.  The trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of
a single man.  A small siting room to the right of the door was
partitioned from the kitchen by a small counter.  Beyond the sink and
its clutter of dirty dishes, a sliding door lead to a small bathroom
and then to the only bedroom on the far end of trailer, where a gray
cat had disappeared as soon as a stranger had entered the abode.
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have an answer.  The doctor broke another awkward silence as
his curiosity got the best of him.
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Mercuriou shrugged.  This question he was prepared for.
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over by twelve-lane highways and built up by pre-fabs that looked like
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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.  They ran off a timer, which also
periodically turned on a pump that flooded the tubs with liquid
fertilizer from a child's toy plastic pool in the corner.  An air
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capitalist system right back down their throats." [CA]
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Mercuriou's brash bravado, but felt now like a father seeing his son
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around from one dumb thing to another while a court settlement ate all
his money and his best ideas sat as notes on a hard drive.
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watching the driveway Mercuriou's car had long since disappeared down.
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closed, wrapped in a light Indian blanket, Vic calmly awaited the dawn.  A
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One of his favorite spots for prayer and meditation, the desert canyon
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and scrub covered the surrounding land.  Amid patches of sandy beach,
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around for another hour or two before leaving.
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Vic 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
closed his eyes again, basking in the gentle warmth of a new born day.
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in his mind for the hundred-and-first time.  He drifted back over the
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_Marc_Mercuriou's_flying_to_Mars_.  Vic practically laughed out loud.
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say?  Mercuriou was involved, too.  A pair to draw to, those two were.
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believe.  With Burns involved, they probably really did control half
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Had the sun moved?  He wasn't sure.  _We_waste_so_much_time_.  Of
course, after a while, you realize that you wouldn't actually be
accomplishing any of those things, but rather filling the hours with
all the _distractions_ - television, food, drugs, games, books, sex,
talking, walking, driving, cleaning.  Out here, alone, you realize
_This_is_how_long_a_day_really_is_.  _This_is_what_you_waste_seven_times_a_week_.
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confined to an area no bigger than a jacuzzi.  Of course, the strict
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Buddhist drank no water after sunset.  Vic fasted and meditated
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the rushing arroyo was a luxury Vic indulged.  Emerging from the
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spoke in his head.  _Well_, _no_, he thought,
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Just not like his father, please God, not witless and lost
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_We're_all_going_to_die_, he thought.
_It's_how_we_live_that_defines_who_we_are_.
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another bath.  Hunger was present, but by now, his third day here, it
manifested itself more as fantasy than as a physical need.  Pia
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too well to suppose he was joking, too long to imagine he was insane,
and too...
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Or maybe not.  His encounter with Mercuriou had been shocking.  How
much he had changed!  [ But such was life. ]  They were like children
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_A_protest_march_.  _Soldiers_patrolling_a_street_.
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They had emerged from the nursery to find the house engulfed in
flames, and there was no way out.  Many gave themselves to the fire,
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great mystery!  All around him, the plants, the animals, the algae on
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consciousness!  What would an iguana know about Mars?  Yet both were
here, the iguana and the red planet, somewhere in the sky.
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_What_else_are_you_going_to_do?_, his own voice sneered back at him.
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_Did_the_fish_want_to_live_in_the_water?_
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Vic's train of thought shifted to the one time in his life he
had been in a slaugherhouse.  The hundreds of cattle passing
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_Herasy!__Herasy!__We_don't_choice_for_ourselves;_we_must_DO_THE_WILL_OF_GOD!_
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_I'm_sorry,_father.__I'm_not_a_kid_anymore._
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Vic felt depressed.  _If_I_were_up_there_,
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frogs trumpeted the night.  A rattlesnake slithered silently across
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emerge.
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demanded that all their math eventually predict something real.
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Thousands of ragging thermonuclear fires, tiny lights in their various
shapes and patterns, many subtly hued and interspersed with dim
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above passed slowly across the constellations and the occasional
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satellite transited overhead, clearly visible, still illuminated by
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a dramatic vision, though such things had been known to happen.  At
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priorities, a sense of a direction forward.  At worst, a torrent of
tears, disillusionment, and self-doubt that only time and prayer could
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death.  Death he could handle.  Death meant meeting God.
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were asleep, or trying to sleep, trying to catch what sleep they could
in the jet-lag abbreviated night.  In the dimly lit cockpit, the
pilots would be guiding the plane along a jetway, marked only by radio
beacons and coordinates on a chart, looking to a colored radar display
to see what was in front of them, and occasionally peering down into
the darkness below, maybe wondering if anyone was looking back up at
them...

Morning came.  Vic had fallen asleep again, and awoke before dawn.
Was there light?  Yes, the eastern sky was just beginning to brighten
and he could just make out the arroyo.  A day had past, another had
come, and Vic had made his decision.  He would not fear death; he
would not fear jail.  Nor would he keep living in a house trailer,
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stretched, then slowly rolled his blanket and started down the trail.
Though he was looking forward to the company of people again, he also
knew that he would miss this place.
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Halfway to the car, he looked back to the arroyo, regretting that he hadn't returned to
bathe.
@


1.170
log
@couple little nit-picks
@
text
@d207 1
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room with his laptop.  The hack had taken less than 15 seconds.
What would become one of the world's most infamous hacks
had taken less than 15 seconds.
"Let's shoot for
happy hour instead," he emailed Mercuriou, who read the message with a
wry smile that soon broke into a broad grin.
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It would be one of the world's most infamous hacks.
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'finally' finish the optical interface, then left.  Buoyed
by an air of invincibility, he floated back out to the
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conosuir.  Vic stood in the doorway to the kitchen, staring directly
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stammering to explain a 2 A.M. party to his parents.
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closed his eyes again.
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The sun creep higher and the desert began to heat.  Vic unfurled
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now and least have it for dinner.  Drive into town for the noodles,
tomatoes from the garden, cheese, he needed cheese.
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all the _distractions_ - television, food, drugs, games, books,
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_This_is_how_long_a_day_really_is_.
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wider leash.  He skipped down to the water, hopping from boulder to
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and the morning breeze imparted a definite chill, but in this place,
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Great Spirit.  Or perhaps he would go like some of his patients,
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flames, and there was no way out.  Many gave themselves to the fire;
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_What_else_are_you_going_to_do?__Live_in_a_trailer_and_grow_pot_
_in_the_mountains?_ Vic
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a dramatic vision, though such things had been known to happen.
Usually, these quests ended in a quiet determination, a clarification
of priorities, a sense of a direction forward.
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death.  Death he could handle.
d694 1
a694 1
water in the arroyo could be heard but not seen.  Dim outlines of
d719 1
a719 1
He looked back at the arroyo, regretting that he hadn't returned to
d2297 1
a2297 1
"What are you up to?" she asked him, but instead of answering,
@


1.169
log
@opening poem
@
text
@d86 1
a86 1
the background check non-existent.
d98 1
a98 1
"Top of the morning, there, Burns," or
d100 1
a100 1
"Got a cable loose, Burns," or
d107 1
a107 1
repressed his anxiety and logged in.
d109 1
a109 1
a hardware upgrade, would be shutdown in less than an hour.
d141 1
a141 1
Above an elevated floor that covered a haylon
d146 3
@


1.168
log
@ivory towers
@
text
@d20 3
a22 3
GOD I PRAY INSPIRE THIS WORK
MAN I REMIND OF ITS ERRORS
THIS BOOK IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
@


1.167
log
@first para; second scene
@
text
@d17 1
a17 1
I'LL NOT GET LOST IN "IVY TOWERS"
@


1.166
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d224 4
a227 3
"The routers run the network; hell the routers _are_ the network.  You
control the routers, you control the network.  I'm telling you,"
Mercuriou concluded, "this thing is like super-hack."
d229 2
a230 1
A silence fell over the house trailer, punctuated by a single word
@


1.165
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d23 1
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THE BODY OF THE WORK IS FICTION.
d9088 9
@


1.164
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d134 7
a140 1
Burns keyed the server room door and walked in.
d735 3
a737 1
empirically by chemists.
d792 6
a797 1
an arm clasped around the shoulder and a handshake.  "Marc told me all
d803 1
a803 1
His wave encompassed a twentieth-centry physics gamble for a chemistry
d816 1
a816 1
shuttle's external tank the night before launch.  Worse, even most
d820 1
a820 1
resulting in the need for very large tanks to contain the propellants.
d876 2
a877 1
friend, and an audience of mainly reporters politely applauded the
d901 9
a909 53
"Geometrically, N-1033 is a large, spherical cage of carbon modules
than form a shell around a core dominated by nitrogen and oxygen.
These nitrogren-oxygen bonds release a great deal of energy
when they break, which is, in fact, exactly what makes nitroglycerine
such a powerful explosive.  We use nitroglycerine in the manufacturing
process.  It's the carbon shell on the outside that protects the core
and keeps ten-thirty-three from simply exploding.  However, when you
raise the temperature several hundred degrees above room temperature,
the carbon shell _does_ break apart, and releases the fuel mixture
inside.  Furthermore, due to the spherical shape of the molecule, it
remains liquid at far lower temperatures than you would expect for a
molecule of this size.  In fact, it's liquid at room temperature, and
these are the properties that make it such a good fuel - it doesn't
require an oxidizer because it's already got oxygen in it; it has a
high specific impulse, which is the most important measure of the
efficiency of a rocket fuel; and it's liquid at room temperature and
thus doesn't require elaborate refrigeration techniques."

"Now, for the second part of your question, I've really already
answered part of it - what makes N-1033 different from conventional
rocket fuels is that the molecule is so large and complex, while
something like the space shuttle runs on liquid hydrogen and liquid
oxygen, which are two of the smallest and simplest molecules that exist.
But more than that, what makes ten-thirty-three, as we've gotten used
to calling it, so different is how it was designed, and I did use the
word _designed_.  We started off with a list of requirements for this
fuel, some basic design ideas that included a carbon shell with fuel
inside, but then used computer programs to simulate the equations of
quantum mechanics and thus try literally thousands of different
combinations to find one that would work.  We actually found many
possibilities that looked like they would work, that's why this one is
numbered ten-thirty-three, but all of the earlier molecules were
rejected for one reason or another."

#if NOT

"What kinds of reasons led to the rejections of those molecules?"

"Well, the single biggest reason was synthesis.  It isn't enough to
just have a computer telling you a molecule is stable, even if that's
true, and sometimes it isn't, but then you actually have to be able to
construct the molecule.  You do that the say way you construct any
chemical substance, which is by a series of chemical reactions that
produce a series of intermediaries and finally gives you the thing
you're after.  Such a series of reactions is called a
_synthesis_pathway_.  We used the computer programs again to predict
various possible synthesis pathways, and a lot of them turned out to
be implausible.  The single biggest thing that sets N-1033 apart from
N-1, or N-2, or N-1032, is that we were able to develop a twenty-three
step synthesis pathway starting with graphite and nitroglycerine that
ultimately produces N-1033."

#endif
d912 4
a915 2
and Burns' empty chair, had tuned out the press conference and was
deep in his own thoughts.  _Now_the_real_work_begins_.
d944 8
a951 1
Mercuriou grinned.
d953 2
a954 2
"We have ample funding from private sources.  I guess you could just
call it my humanitarian streak."
d956 1
a956 4
After the press conference was over, one of the NASA managers
from the front row walked to the back of the room and found
a woman wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a faded blue
T-shirt.
d958 2
a959 1
"So what'd you think?" he asked.
d961 1
a961 1
Andrea Yeats thought for a minute before answering.
d963 5
a967 2
"The engineer seems to really know his stuff, but the CEO strikes me a
con artist."
a974 3

T - 312 days

d1003 19
a1021 7
Andrea took the next bus to a downtown transfer station, then headed
into one of the older and more run-down sections of Houston and found
a hundred-year-old Catholic church, Saint Andrew's, that occupied
almost an entire city block.  Built of stone and with metal bars on
its windows, it could have been a prison except for the cross mounted
on its steeple.  Walking around back, she found a rear entrance,
bearing a colorful sign, "The Franciscan Fryer".
@


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@
text
@d6305 1
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--------
d7616 1
a7616 1
------
d7629 1
a7629 1
-----
d7698 1
a7698 1
----
d7710 1
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"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you
for another man."
d7716 3
a7718 1
-----
d7723 4
a7726 1
-----
d7731 1
a7731 1
-----
d7739 1
a7739 1
----
d7749 1
a7749 7
----

In the hills of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden wrung his hands together
and exclaimed in glee: "Now the whole Global Capitalist Economic
system will collapse!" ...

----
d7764 1
a7764 1
----
d7766 1
a7766 2
"Capitalism is one of the most utterly immoral philosophies that
has even been proposed for men to live their lifes."
d7768 4
a7771 3
----

"These people that just don't want to work..."
d7776 1
a7776 4
----


...
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------
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----
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----
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----
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-----
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-----
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-----
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----
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----
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----
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----
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----
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----
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----
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	war passions inflame
a8612 19
if I blow the budget
if I blow out the speakers
if I go down in flames
...
just remember my name


"World where I live"

That's the world where I live!


"Mr. Nobody"




----

d8645 1
a8645 1
----
d8711 1
d8713 1
a8713 1
---
d8715 1
a8715 2
when i was all messed up
and i heard opera in my head
d8717 1
a8717 1
a thunderous symbol crash
d8719 3
a8721 2
your love was a light bulb
hanging over my bed
d8723 4
a8726 1
Baby, baby, baby,
d8728 3
a8730 1
Baby, baby, baby,
d8732 2
a8733 1
Baby, baby, baby,
d8735 3
a8737 1
light my way
d8739 9
a8747 1
Baby, baby, baby
d8749 2
a8750 1
light my way.
d8752 2
d8824 1
a8824 1
---------
d8846 2
d9093 1
a9093 1
=========
@


1.162
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d7442 6
@


1.161
log
@Booker Washington
@
text
@d6798 4
a6801 4
"You see!  _Defined_by_our_limitations_, Alister Compton!  Andrea here
believes men can walk on water!" Borzov exclaimed, perhaps extracting
a small vengeance for Andrea's remark about communism.  "So why, my
dear, do we need ships?"
d6845 2
a6846 1
everything, but they do listen.  And some hate you so passionately..."
@


1.160
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d6005 54
a6185 1

a6395 54
T + 894 days

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 _Icarus_ crew deleted it along with
the rest of their junk mail.  Apparently Alister did not.

"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked Andrea one day.

Andrea pushed away the laptop she was working on.

"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."

"It isn't?"

"What happens at the end of the book?"

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

Andrea nodded an affirmative response.

"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."

"What do you have to do to be saved?  Everyone says something different."

"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."

"What about the Old Testament; do you read that?"

"Sometimes.  There are deeply profound insights in the Old Testament,
but it can't be taken completely at face value.  Christ flat-out
rejected many of the Old Testament teachings, such as the stoning
statues.  Perhaps like the entire Bible, it's a mixed bag; parts
of it are inspired by God, and parts of it are the errors of men.
other parts of it were put there by
men, and that makes it hard to understand."


d6520 1
a6520 1
"What are you reading now?"  Alister asked.
d6524 1
a6524 1
"What is it?"
d6546 3
a6548 2
things like love, war, God.  Each author, in his own time, had read
those before him and added something of his own to the conversation."
d6551 1
a6551 1
There's all kinds of books written about God."
d6578 2
a6579 2
ideas, but they craft the language and practically compel you to
listen."
d6812 22
d6838 1
a6838 1
interjected.
d6842 2
a6843 2
this mission to tell you there are basically two kinds of reactions to
you.  Some people just think you're nuts and dismiss everything you
d6845 4
a6848 2
everything, but they do listen.  Personally, I think you're a liar and
a thief.  You'll probably get some jail time.  I think you expect it,
d6866 3
a6868 3
"Yes, we've talked about that, too.  We'll let him go to any country
that'll take him, but that might be a problem.  He could end up stuck
in Russia if South Africa decides to extridite him to the U.S."
d6963 1
a6963 1
the stuff Socrates debated,
d7219 2
d7273 2
a7274 1
Andrea's press conference
d7315 4
a7318 2
discussion of landing "If you learn to live with disappointment,
she'll never leave you for another man."
d7409 8
a7440 8
T + 894 days <***>

Alister: do you think we're living in the end times?

"parts of it are inspired by God, and parts of it are the errors of men"
   maybe a little bit like this book?
   like its introduction said?

@


1.159
log
@rhetoric
@
text
@d1342 1
a1342 1
blackboard read.
d1371 1
a1371 1
"We could have moved to Arruba and spent the next ten years sipping
d1389 2
d4227 1
d4337 2
a4338 2
"The minute, nay, the second those wheels touch the ground, we're just
five little nobodies at the mercy of the masses and their
d4505 6
a4510 6
"Well, I don't know if there are any superior political systems.  Like
I said, our problems are spiritual more than political, and thus we
need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.  Now take a
monarch like King Arthur; you can have a good king, genuinely
interested in caring for his people, and yes, you can have a good
monarchy."
d4512 1
a4512 1
"Do you advocate monarchy as a system of government?"
d4518 6
a4523 6
go back to the Old Testament, first Samuel, I think, you find the
people actually _demanding_ a king!  We have this idea today that a
king is somehow imposed on people against their will, but in those
days it was the commonly accepted form of government.  And Samuel
basically told those people that they didn't need a king, that all
they needed was to follow the will of God, but they didn't want to
d4740 22
a4761 8
"You know, I was asked that question many years ago, and at the time I
couldn't really answer it, but I thought about for a while and here's
my answer: Scientific proof is based on experiment.  There is an
experiment you can perform to find out if God is real - you can die.
Most of us don't want to perform that experiment just to satisfy our
curiosity about God, but the fact remains that we will all die some
day, and then you'll know.  So my answer to those people is just to
wait - you're going to find out all about God some day."
d4764 2
a4765 2
Dr. Andrea Yeats, astronaut and Christian.  We'll be back in a minute
with my final thought."
d4779 2
d6175 3
a6177 3
a montage of talking heads. [CA]  Ecks was speechless, unable to decide if
Mercuriou was defending the terrorists or attacking his capitalist
constituents.  Wye, red-faced with rage, sputtered nonsense.  Only Zee
d6184 2
a6185 1
turned on her like a cur lashing out at the hand that feeds her." [CA]
d6187 7
d6195 1
a6195 1
T + 754 days
d6197 1
a6197 11
"Well, who you gonna attack?  The political leaders, the President?"
Mercuriou was all fired up after hearing the latest news broadcasts
from Earth.  "They'll just elect a new one and keep going, all hot to
avenge him, too.  I mean, 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 isn't that who was in the World Trade
Center?"

"Certainly not all of them, for starters.  The attack was completely
d6205 1
a6205 1
"I'm sure there were window washers there too, captain."
d6210 6
a6215 6
mean, this kind of crap!" he gestured to the now silent television
monitor.  "All we keep hearing about is this is what the majority
wants, this is the voice of the majority, the majority, the majority,
like they're the only ones that count!  Well, _the_majority_ of the
people in those towers were _capitalists_, they didn't come to work
that morning to help make the world a better place, they were
d6227 7
a6233 9
"Because you _forgive_your_enemies_, as I've tried to tell you about a
hundred times," Andrea was becoming irate.  "You don't smash airplanes
into their skyscrapers because they imposed some global capitalist
system on you, and you don't go off invading foreign countries because
they don't turn terrorist leaders over to you when you bark out your
dictats."

[hopefully, this is our first mention of Afganistan, and it shocks the
reader a bit]
a6249 8
"This is what they thought the _Icarus_ launch was.  This is why they
started screeming then about a chemical weapons attack.  'Terrorism in
space', ha!  They figured that someone else, someone mad as hell,
another Timothy McVae, another Theodore Kidinsky, another Osama bin
Laden, had launched some big bunch of anthrax or something into
space!  They're guilty as hell, the whole bunch of 'em, the whole
_majority_, and they're just waiting for the next blow to fall!"

a6262 2
[maybe this is the first time in the book Alister really has something to say]

d7026 1
a7026 1
"Kyle" was originally "Lou" but my friend Kyle Hourihan demanded on
d7253 1
a7341 6
"I love you" - probably premature

T + 692 days <**>

You can forgive me... I can't forgive myself.

d7390 1
a7390 1
T + 734 days <***>
a7393 2
T + 754 days <***>

d8768 3
d9056 7
@


1.158
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1336 1
a1336 1
"What I saw on that computer last night wasn't the space shuttle."
d1338 13
a1350 10
"You saw the Kansas state daily lottery drawing," Mercuriou stated in
a tone of voice Burns might have used to declare that gravity
manifested itself as curvature in a four-dimensional space
invarient under Lorentz transformations.

"Of course, you could have turned on the TV and saw the Kansas state
daily lottery drawing," Mercuriou continued, walking forward and
consciously dominating the space of the room, without approaching
close enough to impede on Alister's space.  "Except that you saw
_today's_ Kansas state daily lottery drawing."
d1358 1
a1358 6
communications satellite in orbit."

"What we need," Burns continued, "is this new fuel to work.  Flying to
Mars is a non-starter if we can't do that."

"So what do you need to hack the lottery for?"
d1364 1
a1364 1
"So all this is stolen? I mean hacked?"
d1369 1
a1369 2
Again only the rain could be heard.  Alister turned slowly back
towards his chair.
d1374 2
a1375 2
and let someone else run it.  We could have checked out this great
society here and done whatever the hell we pleased."
d1392 8
a1399 1
hack is.  So the question now is, are you in or are you out?"
d1401 1
a1401 2
"OK, so it all sounds too wild to be true.  Fine.  Take a look at our
launch facility.  Then tell me if you think I'm full of shit."
@


1.157
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a3131 8
[
Burns finally dealt with the problem by putting the damaged cargo
module, along with a few other empty ones, in front of the others.
The "ground sqwalk", as Mercuriou called the Earth-based media pundits,
began talk of a rescue mission and how much it will cost NASA, and
this is why we need more government regulation in aerospace-related
industry, etc, etc.
]
d3136 2
a3137 1
media, and at that moment the stunning private space launch was all
d3558 3
a3560 4
"Let's start with the powers of Congress.  Article one, section eight.
Now, congressman, stop me if at any point you hear anything about
regulating the use of drugs, or radio communications, or agriculture,
or the environment."
d3564 8
a3571 1
"... INSERT US CONSTITUION HERE ..."
d3595 3
a3597 3
_does_not_ have any of these additional powers!  No power to regulate
communications, of radio or any other form!  No power to regulate drug
use!  No power to regulate firearms!"
d3663 2
a3664 2
"The majority!"  Mercuriou spit the word out in disgust.  "That's what
it's all comes down to!  The majority isn't restricted by their
d3704 5
a3708 6
is morality.  Freedom has to be used morally, and I think the
objections of Captain Mercuriou and people like him come down to
morality, even though very few people like to use that word.  They
believe, and I tend to agree, that freedom can abused, and that the
majority of people have freedom, but have abused it and used it
immorally."
d3715 1
a3715 1
to the gospel to define morality."
d3717 2
a3718 1
"Well, we've got freedom of religion in this country, Doctor!"
d3724 1
a3724 1
prefered religion!"
d3728 4
a3731 4
"Got to have a prefered religion!"  Wye echoed her words with a sneer.
"Doctor Yeats, I hate to break this to you, but you're about two
hundred years behind the times!  Ever heard of the Salem Witch
Trials?"
d3794 10
a3803 10
Perhaps because of his attitude, perhaps because of the media
attention heaped on him, perhaps because of his position in orbit,
completely beyond the reach of any terrestrial authority, or perhaps
simply because of what he said, Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of
nearly every American political leaders, regardless of party
affiliation or personal background.  At any rate, haven taken the
conversation with Yeats to heart, he was back on television, facing
off against Jeff Zee, one of the country's most prominent politicians,
a state governor widely expected to run for president in the upcoming
national election.
d3840 2
a3841 2
"Or you steal a billion dollars and bankrupt a dozen companies along
the way, ehh?"
d3889 1
a3889 1
Salvation came from above, or at least from the airlock above
d4313 1
a4313 1
controlled environment where there are rescue options both in space
d4331 4
d4341 1
a4341 1
"Take us out of LEO."
d4944 9
a4952 5
bored out my mind.  Usually both at the same time.  I made a better
team with my college roommate than with any of those dot-coms, and
mainly because Marc only asked me to do a little.  He got two other
comp-sci students to do most of the programming on this thing; I just
had to design it, and could code or not code whatever part I felt like."
d4957 9
a4965 9
making sure I don't get overwealmed.  Even though this thing is so
big, it's almost the easiest thing I've ever done.  A lot easier than
some really simplier projects where I just didn't get the things I
needed to get them done.  I've just planned it out, showed/explained
all the plans to Marc, and he's figured out how to get someone else to
do 90% of it, and you better believe that a big part of that was
figuring out how steal a billion dollars.  I just do about 10% of the
work, and _usually_ the most interesting part anyway... but not
today," he concluded with a sigh.
d4998 3
a5000 2
another stupid routing protocol?  Hell, if we're going to do
something, fuck it, let's fly to Mars!"
d5032 1
a5032 1
about neural nets?!"
d5034 2
a5035 1
"Let me take a look," Andrea said, and took over at the keyboard.
d5100 3
a5102 1
"Sure, I love sushi, it's great!  Got any tuna hand roll in there?"
d5104 1
a5104 1
"Nope, but you ever had those green beans they serve as appetizers?"
d5123 2
d5147 2
a5148 2
Marx knew anything of its history.  I don't know, but Sparta has to be
one of the greatest socialist success stories ever."
d5191 2
a5192 2
to the Arian beliefs, it became a major source of conflict.  You're
not the only one here who's read _Decline_and_Fall_."
d5204 5
a5208 3
"What amazes me about Western civilization is this notion that the
individual somehow owes something to the state, or at least to the
society.  This modern morality that people have some kind of
d5210 2
a5211 2
with all this other stuff that justifies the government.  I guess it's
all part of propping up the society."
d5218 18
a5235 18
_for_the_society_ is what I'm talking about.  Take the Native American
Indians, for example.  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, therefore, was perfectly voluntary.  If anyone didn't want to
be there, they could just get up and leave.  Murders, armed 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.  Thus, the individual is raised to
work for the society, and the society has taught the individual that
they are morally obligated to work.  Inevitably, this morality has
worked its way into the religion as well."
d5239 1
a5239 1
be dependent on everyone else?"
d5243 6
a5248 6
"So the philosophers have turned to politics to try and find freedom
there.  Their latest 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 they don't have freedom, they'll scream you
down as a Communist and all the while they're surrounded by a society
based on nothing but forced labor."
d5273 2
a5274 2
"That's funny, Marc, because I didn't take anything from anyone.
Faith in God got _me_ here."
d5305 3
a5307 1
landing on Mars; hell, they'll probably use our technology to do it."
d5319 4
a5322 2
_you_ steal, captain?  How many toes did you step on?  Don't tell me
you haven't become ruthless!"
d5325 3
a5327 3
firmly, in a no-nonsense command tone of voice.  "That has been
the goal of this mission from day one.  We take the risks as they
come, but we have a mission plan and we're going to carry it out."
d5332 1
d5334 2
a5335 15
"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you
for another man," Mercuriou muttered under his breath.

THEY DON'T HAVE ENOUGH FUEL TO DO THIS, RIGHT?

"If we're going to do that," Burns continued, "I want to make at least
one test pass where we just reenter through the atmosphere, fly down
there without landing and come back up.  That way, we can take some
low-level photographs of the landing area to make sure there aren't
any nasty surprises waiting for us.  We might even want to survey
several landing areas before we pick one; we've got plenty of fuel
now.  We should move everything critical to the module stack, because
it'll stay in orbit and have to act as a command post."

"Sounds good.  Let's start getting ready."
d5416 3
a5418 6
with spaceflight in mind; they had tested the lunar module in Earth
orbit on Apollo 9; they had tested the lunar module in lunar orbit on
Apollo 10; and they might even have been able to race Apollo 12 as a
rescue mission if 11 had gotten stuck on the moon."

THERE WAS NO WAY TO RACE 12, RIGHT?
d5424 1
a5424 1
Mercuriou cut him off.
d5457 1
a5457 2
"We didn't come all this way to turn back now.  We're landing on
Mars."
d5791 2
a5792 1
on.  "When we get home, remind me to read you your obituary over coffee!"
d5823 4
a5826 8
The captain drifted into the compartment and the conversation stopped.

"Need anything, sir?" Bryan asked.

"No, I'm just going to the infirmatory for an ibuprofin."  He drifted
across and out through the hatch.  Andrea pulled out of the footholds
and followed him.  He was going through the tablets as she entered
the infirmatory, and hardly looked up to see who it was.
d5830 2
a5831 1
He answered with a snort.  "You don't want to know what I'm thinking."
d5841 2
a5842 1
was silent for a while before answering.
d5846 1
a5846 1
right?  I didn't think it would be my best friend."
d5858 3
a5860 4
been on three space shuttle launches, and watched a dozen more from
Mission Control.  And every time, I mean _every_time_ they say those
words 'Go at throttle up'..."  Her voice drifted off and she choked
back tears.
d5863 2
a5864 3
to launch.  But Ronald Reagan was giving a speech, and he wanted his
teacher in space, and the mission managers thought, well, maybe we
can let it slid a bit this time, no big deal."
d5867 6
a5872 6
their cars - 'oh, I didn't have that much to drink, I'll be OK to drive' -
people cut corners at work - 'it'll be OK, we need to get it out
by the deadline' - people cut corners at home - 'Johny'll have another
ball game next week, I'll make that one'.  People cut corners all the
time - it's a fact of life," she emphasized as he shook his head and
pulled away.
d5876 1
a5876 1
"You're a perfectionist," she stated in a matter-of-fact tone.
d5881 2
a5882 2
your software wasn't perfect, and you weren't perfect."  He looked her
right in the eye.  "But I knew your plan wasn't perfect, and I came
d5884 2
a5885 12
you."  Now he looked down and away.  "And I know _you_'re not
perfect... but I still love you."

Mercurio didn't say anything in response, nor did he look up.  Andrea
waited a moment longer, then returned to the smokers in the com shack.

"I can't beleive I just said that," she mumbled to herself.

"Said what?" Alister asked.


T + 692 days
d5891 2
a5892 2
you may _never_ forgive yourself, but it's over.  You made a mistake,
now it's time to go on, because there's no other place to go."
d5897 1
a5897 3
"It's a bit easier since we have basically one place to go - home.
We've got a trajectory plotted for Earth; we break orbit in three
days."
a5930 13
T + 700 days

"You give to others because that's how we were taught to live by Jesus."

Vic spoke first.  "What if you don't necessarily beleive in Jesus?"

"Well, I guess people used to believe the Earth is flat.  You can
beleive whatever you want; the fact is that the Earth is round.  And
I'm absolutely convinced that Jesus of Nazarath was the most
spiritually advanced being to ever live on Earth.  So we should take
his teachings seriously."


d5947 2
a5948 3
Christians who say you have to fight against evil.  First off,
it's un-Biblical - _resist_not_he_who_is_evil_.
Second, if there was ever
d5956 5
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in the beginning of John is this beautiful passage about him being the
Word.  The Word was with God, and the Word became man, and the Word is
the light of the world.  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."
d5962 8
d6030 1
a6030 1
diamond of Albert Einstein.  Tom Clancy was such a genius.  
d6316 1
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human ingenuity, Captain."
d6318 1
a6318 2
Merciriou was forced to grin, and Andrea continued.  "Men even flew to
Mars in a 747."
d6324 1
a6324 2
some cases.  
In other cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting
d6326 7
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people who _do_ believe in God clinging to this belief that it's moral
to impose all these copyright and patent and intellectual property
restrictions on this technology, that basically results in this
knowledge, and these tools based on it, being available only to those
with money, and then absolutely insisting that this is consistent with
the Christian gospel.  That's how primitive we are.  Two thousand
years ago we were told _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_ and half of
us still can't understand what that really means."
d6556 4
a6559 3
All the sexual double-entendres were lost.  Then you take something
like _this_, I mean, _Faust_ is almost untranslatable - it's an epic
poem, and poetry is very hard to translate."
d6569 3
a6571 2
makes a great author - not just that they write down their ideas, but
they craft the language and practically compel you to listen."
d6727 10
a6736 5
They had docked several days before with a reduced crew of four.  Plus
the space station's standard three-man crew, the head count in orbit
now balloned to ten.  After an exchange of gifts and introductions, a
dinner followed, after which Borzov predictably produced two bottles
of "Russia's finest" and began passing vodka shots around.
d6738 2
a6739 2
"So, Captain," the cosmonaut asked after a while, "what do you think
will happen to you back on Earth?"
d6744 1
a6744 1
"Well, I don't know," drawled the intoxicated Captain.  9/11 was the
d6751 1
a6751 1
"There's another way down."
d6770 1
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Borzov shrugged.  "We've defined more by our limitations than by our
d6775 3
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"Yes, young man.  Defined by our limitations.  Your first officer
talks a lot about religion, doesn't she?  All these people who talk
about religion, talk about giving to all who beg of them, talk about
d6801 2
a6802 1
_is_completely_deterministic_ and _there_is_no_God_!"
d7364 1
a7364 1
T + 700 days <**>
d7366 1
a7366 2
You give to others because that's how Jesus taught.  What if you don't
beleive in Jesus?  People once thought the Earth was flat.
d7368 1
a7368 1
T + 701 days
d7370 2
a7371 1
I suspect you could have found another way... like writing a book?
@


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@
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@d7934 6
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...
d7941 43
a7983 2
"So people who lived in the Soviet Union had a moral obligation to
obey their laws?  Because their leaders were consistuted by God?"
d7989 1
a7989 1
"Oh, no, you didn't say that.  You didn't say that our obligation to
d8004 2
a8005 1
"And how do we decide if a particular government is legitimate?"
d8009 2
a8010 1
"You find that in the Bible?"
d8019 4
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obligation to obey the laws of the government, and if you take Paul's
a8026 2
...because government authority is consituted by God!"

d8052 2
a8053 2
"No, people should concern themselves first and foremost with the laws
of God!  All the laws of man are secondary!"
d8059 10
a8068 9
flat, but that doesn't change the fact that it's round, or more
precisely an oblate spheroid."

Head buried in a laptop, Burns chuckled, the only indication that he
was listening at all.

"So if you only think men are obligated to obey the laws of God, and
you don't believe the Bible is literally true, so how are we supposed
to determine the law of God?"
d8083 20
a8102 2
economic and political theories that the Christian gospel, and that
most of their laws are convoluted, misguided, and unjust."
@


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@a2844 1

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nightmare system.  They talk about 'freedom', 'freedom', and the only
freedom they're really interested in is their own!  It's not about
making money, it's about how you treat people, and the capitalists
treat people like dirt!"
d3529 3
a3531 2
leaders?  How about drug users?  Is that why we have a War on Drugs,
because they choose their own leaders, too?"
d3537 1
a3537 6
"So not all the people, Senator, only those who have enough people
supporting them, right?"

"No, Captain, everyone can participate in our government!"

"But that's not how you started!  You didn't say the people could
d3540 1
a3540 1
government' any day.  You participate, and I'll make all the
a3542 49
"Look here, I don't know what you're trying to say..." Wye sputtered.

"Well then let me be crystal clear, Senator.  I don't think your
'participatory government' is worth a hill of beans [CA].  The
majority of people - not all the people, mind you, just one group of
people - make all the decisions.  Everybody else gets to 'participate'
about the same way you could 'participate' in Russia!"

...

"Well, senator, I'll agree with you that this is a democracy, but I
don't think that changes things much.  Let's say Russia had had
freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and free and open
elections every two or four years, and they had still elected the
communists, and still supported the KGB, and still shipped their
citizens off to gulags.  Would that have changed things all that much,
just that they had elections?"

"No sir, the people of these country don't support the KGB, and we
don't ship our citizens off to gulags!"

"Oh, but you do.  Haven't you heard about 'zero tolerance'?  Haven't
you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?  It has
got to be one of the most violent programs on television, and it's all
real!  Remember who you're talking to, senator - a drug user!  Don't
expect me to sit here and crow on about freedom while this whole
society is hell-bent on a war against me and everyone else like me.
You do ship your citizens off to jail, and while you may not torture
them, and your prisons may not be as cold as the ones in Siberia, the
fact remains that fear of the police is just as readily used in this
society as in those others."

"I don't think you can compare the DEA with the KGB."

"I do.  The basic premise is the same.  The solution to our problems
is to have a war against our own people, to send armed men busting
into the homes of people who have done absolutely nothing to harm
anyone, to make people so terrified of what will be done to them that
they'll be too afraid not to just fall in line and do what they're
told when the great majority barks out its orders.  Isn't it funny how
in all of these great _people's_ societies the biggest enemy of all
always ends up being _your_own_people_?"



[Maybe more in here about the FCC and the problems of radio networking.]



d3545 1
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"So did they; so did they," Mercurio glibbly noted.
d3568 5
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or the environment, or..."
d3586 1
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"Fine!  Fine!  Let's keep going, too!  Don't forget the tenth
d3671 1
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"Criminals!  Criminals!  People who break our laws!"
d3708 3
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believe, and I tend to agree, that the majority of people have
freedom, but have abused it and used it immorally."
d3713 2
a3714 2
response from Earth.  "Who's going to tell people what they can and
can't do with their freedom?"
d3716 2
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"Morality is a function of religion.  As a Christian, I look to the
Bible and its gospel teachings to define morality."
d3723 2
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"It's not unrealistic, Doctor, we've got it!  What you advocate is
something we abandoned centuries ago, that there should be some
d3772 10
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"Well, I don't beleive right and wrong are subject to a vote, and I
don't think you do, either.  I think half of what religion is, heck,
maybe 90% of what religion is is giving us standards to judge right
and wrong.  Murder isn't wrong because it's illegal, it's wrong
because it's immoral, and you can't decide what's moral and immoral
without religion.  So that's why I think freedom of religion, or more
precisely seperation of religion from public life, is a chimera.  You
can have freedom to go to whatever church you want, but you can't have
a society without some kind of shared norm of morality, and that means
a shared, what I called a preferred, religion."
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Mercuriou thought about this for a minute.
d3866 1
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"Well, it comes down to a simple principle, captain - morality.  It
d3890 3
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"Carrnige built his empire too long ago to remember whose backs he
walked on.  Take Mr. Gates, he's a better example, a big
d3953 2
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"If he was so generous, he would publish his source code."

"Excuse me!  Publish his source code!?"
d3956 1
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"That would be the moral thing to do."

"And who, pray tell, dictates this morality?  Captain Mercuriou?"
d3977 1
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just like you.  You know how many times he's used the word God?  I've
been counting, have you?"
d3981 2
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"I don't think so, either.  So if you want to believe he's gone and put
all these ideas in my head, be my guest."
d3984 2
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Zee paused to inhale and contemplate the video image of the NASA
engineer.
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It's not based on that, though.  It's based on love - unconditional
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T + 11 days
d4379 7
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In the last hundred years, well, two 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, and that exasperates the problems of society.  The fact is,
most human societies are based on coersion, on greed, on the
d4462 1
a4462 1
T + 13 days
a4756 59
T + 16 days

"All the cargo modules are in place, we're still taking meteor hits
in the forward compartments, but they're the empty fuel tanks."

"The wings are still vulnerable," Andrea pointed out.  "The 'meteor
wake' of the cargo modules covers us here, and the body of the 747,
but it doesn't cover the wings."  Burns was nodding.  The Captain
listened, and said nothing.  The entire crew was silent for about
10 seconds.

"Can I say something?" Alister asked.

"Sure," Mercuriou answered, "that's what I'm waiting for, anybody to
talk.  Say whatever you want."

"Well," Alister said after clearing his through, "if we move out of
LEO, I mean, that's what we're taking about, right?"  Again there were
nods around the cabin.  "That puts us out of range of the space
shuttle!?"  Alister voice trailed off at the end.  The last two
weeks had passed in a sureal blur.  He still found it
fantastic that he was actually flying in space, and now the commander
actually wanted to move beyond range of the _space_shuttle_?!

"That's a real good point," Andrea said gravely.  "Look, you've made
your point," she spoke now directly to Mercirou.  "Let's start looking
at re-entry scenarios.  We've got to test this craft..."  The Captain
was ephastically shaking his head, no, No, NO!

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

"Fine, you can go to Mars," Merceriou started to interrupt but Yeats
would not let him, "but first you've got to test this spacecraft in
a controlled environment where we've got rescue options both in
space and on the ground."

Again there was silence, but a deeper, tenser one.

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

Merceriou guffawled.

"You going turn traitor on me now, Burns?" he asked with a snicker
in his voice.

Burns answered with a laugh in his.

"Hey, you're the boss, but I'm just saying what she says makes a lot
of sense."

"We could contact a neutral country," Andrea continued to argue,
calmly, clearly.  "Switzerland might let us land."

Again there was a silence of several seconds, but this time Mercuriou
broke it.

"Take us out of LEO."


d4768 2
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above.  These four modules had become the crew quarters.  Bryan and
Burns shared one, Vic and Alister another.  Andrea, as the only woman
d4779 2
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"That sounds insane!?" the youth replied.  "Why on Earth wouldn't they
d5162 4
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"They talk about them all the time, but mostly it's just talk."
d5181 1
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"No, I see not," Mercuriou answered thoughtfully.
d5258 2
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"That's funny, 'cause I didn't take anything from anyone.  Faith in
God got _me_ here."
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"Why do you have to land?"  Andrea interjected.  The NASA engineer
had floated into the room unnoticed during their debate.  "Why can't
you just go back to Earth?  You've already accomplished more than
almost any other space mission.  This will go down along with
with Gagarin's flight and Armstrong's moon landing..."
d5290 1
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landing on Mars; heck, they'll probably use our technology to do it."
a5304 3
"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you
for another man."

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"I'm just trying to give you an objective engineering assessment.
d5561 2
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_Now_I_get_the_answer_key._  An Andrea Yeats flashed through
his mind and a strangly Christian phrase came to mind.
d5788 1
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on.  "That's just what I needed with my coffee!"
"When we get home, remind me to read you your obituary over coffee!"
"Remind me to read you your obituary over coffee someday!"
d7235 5
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T + 11 days <***>
d7250 1
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T + 13 days <***>
a7257 4
T + 16 days <***>

decision to move out of LEO to higher orbit

d7568 3
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her presence there threw a major kind in their plans, and you'd just
have to know Andrea to appreciate that she's not going to be coerced
by anyone to do anything she doesn't want to."
a7703 3

----

a7721 4


----

a7727 3

----

a7862 19
"Burns once proposed a telephone system based totally on a wireless
network - all the phones interoperate over digital radio links using a
routing protocol to figure how you hop from phone to phone to phone to
get your call through.  This is the kind of technology you want -
technology that's decentralized, that doesn't require a massive
infrastructure, that's open and non-proprietary so that anyone can
build a telephone to interoperate with the system.  But the
capitalists don't want this.  They want a telephone system that's
centralized and controlled, so that there's a switch on every single
phone line and if you don't pay your bill at the end of the month,
your service gets disconnected.  They want centralized, controlled
technology, because that's how you get money out of people.  If the
phones just work on some open protocol, if you can't switch the
service off from some centralized location, then you can't make money
off of it, so that means you go nowhere in this society - no
engineers, no circuit boards, no manufacturing plants.  Capitalism is
totally rigged against exactly the kind of technological change this
planet so desperately needs."

d7925 2
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Burns on genius:

"What is genius?  A lot of it is passion.  I've heard it said that we
use less than ten percent of our brain power, and I believe it.  When
I a teenager, I just loved math.  I read every math book I could get
my hands on.  Marc was like that with literature.  I figured it out
from watching him - you want to learn Greek, get a copy of the _Iliad_
and just plow your way through it; you want to learn Spanish, read
_Don_Quixote_ or something; you want to be a pianist, just play the
piano every day.  If I got behind in a college class, I'd sit down and
put an hour a day into it and be caught up in no time - and I'd time
that hour with a watch.  You put an hour a day into anything, and
you're going to get good at it, but most people just drift through
life.  They have no passion.  Or maybe their passion is being socially
accepted, or making money, or getting laid.  For whatever reason, they
do just enough to get by, and then they look at someone who has
passion, who's just driven to do something, and they think, 'man, that
guy's a genius; I wish I could be like him.'
d8098 1
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your library, captain."
d8182 1
a8182 1
thief steals your coat, give him your cloak as well'.  So to put that
a8219 2
----

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famed Little Cornnel), and within five years he had proclaimed himself
Emperor Napoleon III, but I digress.
d8481 1
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--------

Vic:

Just because the teachings are transmitted
doesn't mean they're understood.
Just because they're understood,
doesn't mean they're practiced.


d8944 53
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packed full with twenty-somethings who
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days when spam came in cans
and porn sites were on Gay Street, Brian Kernighan,
a respected American computer scientist,
had demonstrated that a compiler,
the program which converts source code into
@


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@a1126 121
T - 200 days

Burns was quite busy now with a whole host of design problems, few of
which he could task off to the subordinates they'd hired, and all
requiring detailed attention.  The mass production of N-1033, as part
of a legitimate contract with NASA, was one of the few things he could
task off, and Mercurio had in fact taken the entire N-1033 operation
off Burns' hands, hiring a team of chemical engineers to design the
tanks, piping, reaction chambers, and control equipment of a small
refinery required to mass produce a chemical product.  Since the
Captain dealt with NASA also exclusively himself, made sure he was
present everytime NASA representives were around, and carefully
segregated the designer from the operators of the chemical plant, he
was able to effectively lie about how much N-1033 NASA was actually
buying.  In fact, the company was massively over-producing the rocket
fuel, a detail known to less than half a dozen men despite the fact
that well over a hundred people were involved in the operation in one
way or another.  Mercurio had mastered the military concept of
"need-to-know", and in fact was as brilliant a manager as Burns was an
engineer.

Money was still a problem.  Financial statements could be fabricated,
and loans could cover short-term discrepancies, but the simple fact
remained that, even after a hefty markup, NASA wasn't paying for
anything close to the quantities of chemicals actually being consumed.
Somehow the costs had to be covered.  Burns had wanted to go back to
hacking, but Mercurio had flat out refused this proposal.  Burns'
talents were required elsewhere.  Instead, the Captain assigned Vic,
who had basically nothing to do at the moment, to scout the Internet
for likely targets.  Under conditions laid down by Burns and approved
by Mercurio, his assignment was basically to look but not touch.

For almost a month, Vic spent several hours each day looking but not
touching.  It wasn't boring work.  It's easy to spend hours surfing
the Internet, and Vic was surfing into company's internal networks,
monitoring their web usage, reading private emails, grabbing
passwords, watching supposedly secure logins.  Finally he settled in
to a Delaware-based banking firm called Keystone Securities.  With a
seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Keystone was a mid-sized
financial services broker that specialized in portfolio management for
corporate retirement funds, but was diversified into other banking
operations as well.  Vic's survey of their private financial
statements showed them with well over a billion dollars in assets,
mostly in the form of securities.  Furthermore, they were insured by
FDIC, the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which meant that
stealing from them would effectively be stealing from the
U.S. Government.  Mercurio wouldn't have OK'ed theft from retirees.
On the other hand, he had no problem with the Federal Government
unwittingly underwriting his operation.

The hack was made possible by Keystone's dependance on a IBM mainframe
computer for the majority of their electronic banking operations.
The brokers controlled the mainframe from PCs interconnected
on a private corporate network.  A firewall allowed the PC users
to access the Internet without allowing Internet access to
the private network.  Of course, this design depending on
correct operation of the firewall, manufactured by... Cisco.

The software on the PCs was designed to emulate type 3270 mainframe
terminals, and used unencrypted connections for communication with the
mainframe.  Since the connections were completely within the corporate
network, this wasn't regarded as a security risk by the designers.
Their concern was focused on preventing a breakin from the outside.
Nobody considered the possibility that a deliberate trapdoor might
have been placed among the millions of machine instructions that ran
the routers interconnecting the network.  Worse than the data
connections being unencrypted, they were also unsigned, lacking any
cryptographic signature that the mainframe might have used to ensure
that the terminal sessions originated from trusted computers.
Instead, Keystone's internal network depended entirely on password
protection, which Vic easily circuvented simply by asking the routers
to record the passwords as they went by.

Mercurio knew that a billion dollar hack, unlike their lottery
rip-off, wouldn't go unnoticed.  He delayed until the last minute,
spent every penny of every line of credit he could get his hands on,
made a master list of everything that still needed to be purchased,
and lined up the purchase orders in advance.  He had front
corporations set up in Europe and the Caribbean, with bank
accounts in Lichtenstein and the Bahamas.  He leased
a half-dozen plots of empty land in western U.S. states, selecting
them for both isolation from towns and easy highway access.

....

"Half their currency trading operation is based on arbitrage.  They
look for an eighth-point discrepancy between say, the price of gold
futures in Chicago and the price of gold in London.  It's a guaranteed
win if you can move fast enough to take advantage of it, and that's
why they're so heavily computerized.  The software makes almost all
the trading decisions.  Now, they've built their entire network out of
Chesapeake equipment, so we're in like Flint from that angle.  Also,
they develop all their own software, so we've already got their source
code.  We've got a targeted modification that, when triggered, will
make loosing trades.  Once we're done, we flip the switch again, and
the software goes back to behaving like normal."

"It does have the disadvantage of leaving evidence on the hard disk.
The hack should remain dormant, but will be there if somebody starts
looking hard enough."

....

Finally, on a Friday afternoon, they went in.  First, they had their
hacked routers cut all legitimate connections to the Keystone
mainframe.  Their network administrators knew something was amiss, but
focused at first at the apparent inability of users to login over a
network that appeared to otherwise be functioning normally.  Meanwhile,
the hackers instructed the mainframe to dump nearly every one of
Keystone's NASDAQ securities onto the market, then immediately began a
series of wire transfers to numbered bank accounts as the money from
the sales rolled in.  By midnight, when they returned the routers to
normal, Keystone Securities was effectively bankrupt.  The traders,
being told only that there were network problems, had mostly taken off
early.  The network administrators, puzzled at why the network had
malfunctioned, then equally puzzled as it mysteriously returned to
normal, shrugged their shoulders and went home.  It wasn't until
Saturday morning that the company's partners began to realize the
gravity of their situation.  They were bankrupt.


d3504 34
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Mercuriou thoought about this for a minute.
d6943 1
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a6945 1
Aquinas, this is the soul of our species.  Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Leo
d7013 1
a7013 1
T - 313 days <****>
a7055 4
T - 200 days <**>

billion dollar hack

d7078 4
a7097 16
T + 1.1 days <**>

first EVA

T + 1.2 days <*>

brief press conference over the EVA

T + 1.5 days <**>

the toilet

T + 2 days <**>

description of cargo modules and hydroponics

d7437 1
a7437 1
T + 1093 days <**>
a7604 43


------

"Because we've got other things we need the money for."

"Like what?"

"Like your tenderloin, so eat it," Burns cut in, reaching across the
table with his knife and tapping the South African's plate for emphasis.

"No!" the man stated emphatically, pushing the plate away from him.
"You guys are up to something, and it's not legal..."

"Keep your voice down," Mercurio growled.

"OK," Alister began again in a near whisper.  "Whatever you blokes
are up to, there's no way it's above board."

-----

A "red alert" simply meant that they were now within one month of
launch, a final countdown.  The plan called for almost all of their
operations to be shifted to the location know as Site Blue.  Mercurio
insisted that the equipment at Robotics Research be packed and shipped
within twenty-four hours.  Burn's kids worked through the night and
were gone by 7 A.M.  Mercurio left a simple, typewritten notice taped
to the door:

   From:  Marcelius Mercurio, CEO, Robotics Research, Ltd
   To:    Lawyers
          Financiers
          Bankers

   Gentlemen,

      Your services are no longer required.

-----


----

a7617 27
----

They sped across the desert mesa towards the last rocket, police cars
with screaming sirens right behind.  Both police and news helicopters
hovered overhead, and the images were now being carried live on
practically every TV station in the country, as well as some in
Europe.  Stopping the jeep at the base of the rocket, they jumped
into the cable car and started the winch.  The police cars pulled up
at the base and the cops ran to the base of the tower, but the car
was already out of reach.

"If you want to stick around when we fire this thing up, be my guest!"
Marc yelled down to them, motioning towards the mamouth ICBM they
were now inching up.  At the top, Marc and Brian walked across the
catwalk and climbed into the cockpit.  Marc pulled the hatch shut
behind them and sealed it.  They had checked the radio earlier, and
Marc now clicked it on and called Burns.  He knew they didn't have
time for long checklists.

"We're ready to go."

One of the cops said something on his radio, then they all got in
their cars and headed back towards the compound.  "This is out of our
league; call for the feds," one of them told his partner.  Halfway
across the mesa, the ground shook as the solid fuel ignited in the
rocket behind them.

a8109 97
-----

The federal detective showed Andrea his identification papers.

"Ever heard of Keystone Securities?"

She started to shake her head, then stopped.  "Isn't that
the company that went bankrupt?"

He nodded.

"There's some kind of investigation into that right?"

Again he nodded.

"You're part of it?"

For the third time, a nod in response, followed by an explaination.

"Keystone's operation was heavily computerized.  Their computers
malfunctioned and traded away a little over a billion dollars
in securities in less than a day."

"A bug?" Andrea wondered aloud.  The agent shook his head.

"A virus would be closer to the truth.  They were hacked, we're still
not exactly sure how, but we've found the critical section of code
that was modified in their trading system."

Andrea knitted her brow.

"Well, if that's true, then the transactions were illegal, right?"

Again the agent nodded.

"So why can't you just reverse them and get the money back, you
should even be able to track down who it went to."

The agent smiled.

"That's the beauty of this thing.  The transactions went to hundreds
of different accounts, spread over three major banks - WorldBank, Bank
Deutsch, and Allenby's of London."

[hopefully, none of these companies actually exist!]

"And?"

"And none of the banks have any record of the transactions!"

Again Andrea was puzzled.

"So the transactions never occured?"

"Oh, they occured.  The exchange recorded them, and the books won't
balance without them."

A silence pervaded the room for a minute.

"So how can there be no record of the transactions, I mean, I'm no
banking expert, but..."  She let her voice trail off.

"Dr. Yeats," the fed continued, "a detective far more famous than
I once said that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable..."

"...must be the truth," Yeats finished his sentence for him.  "I've
read Sherlock Holmes, too.  So what's your impossible, or improbable
truth, and how does it relate to N-1033?"

"The impossible truth, Dr. Yeats, the only possible way I can account
for the evidence I've got, is that not only was Keystone hacked, but
so was WorldBank, Bank Deutsch, and Allenby's.  All four computer
systems were party to this theft."  He paused for a moment to let this
set in.

"And the relationship to N-1033," he continued, "is simply this.  Do
you believe, from what you've read, that N-1033 could have been
developed without the source code to _Gaussian_?"

Andrea leaned back in her chair and thought for a moment.  Finally,
the conversation had turned to a subject she more or less understood.

"No," she said after a moment, "didn't they parallize the system
themselves?"  Kyle nodded.  "And their handling of the liquid state
dynamics... did the _Gaussian_ team do that for them?"

Kyle's response was negative.

"No, Andrea, they did it all themselves.  And the manufacturer says
they never provided them with the source code, in fact, that it's
their policy not to release source code to customers, they only get
binaries."

"In short, Dr. Yeats," the agent now concluded, "the most likely
way XXX got the source code to _Gaussian_ was a hack."

d8243 1
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country - 'touchable' scrawed in blood across Ground Zero.
a8367 7
The National Enquirer
published a cover story suggesting that


----


a8431 3
-----


a8549 11
This is Vic

now we're spuing this nitrogen-mix stuff all over the atmosphere.  If
Mercuriou gets his way, he'll only be the first.  We've got people
talking about N-1033 from Bangkok to Tartu.  Then we'll have 10-33 fumes
all over the atmosphere.  We'll destroy our own planet's atmosphere in
order to get ourselves into space.  We'll _make_ ourselves a
space-faring race by destroying our planet!  It's insane!

----

@


1.150
log
@spelled Brian Kernighan's name right
@
text
@d734 4
a737 1
him.
d1357 2
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Mercuriou leaned forward on his desk.  "There's a countdown clock
d1689 2
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a1692 7
"So what do you need from me?" he finally asked, when they were
back in the construction trailer siting outside the warehouse.

"Well, you can hack, right?" Burns asked, retrieving a file onto
his laptop computer screen and handing it to Alister.

"Holy shit!"
d1766 1
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a1777 7
astronaut and now private gardener, continued to read the sheaf of
papers in front her after making this remark.  She was seated in the
office of her long-time friend Kyle Becker, once space shuttle program
manager and now director of a special project to convert an unmanned Delta
rocket to use N-1033.  To one side of the office, floor-to-ceiling
windows looked out on NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center on the
outskirts of Houston, Texas.  Inside, Yeats continued to read.
d1783 2
a1784 3
doesn't make sense about it.  I've had the same thought as you, that
it's a front operation, but they're not trying to sell us the Brooklyn
Bridge, because we've actually got the goods in hand, heck, we've
d1787 1
a1787 2
Yeats continued to read.  Becker paused, then went on, ruminating
aloud.
d1806 19
a1824 2
basically the same estimate in her head.  Kyle had called her in for a
reason.
d1828 1
a1828 1
over in 17, you can fire up a rocket in a test chamber.  But bottom
d1832 1
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The engineer was shaking her head.
d1838 13
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techno-babble.  I need you."
d1855 11
a1865 5
Andrea Yeats flies into the airport and rents a car.  Eats at a nice
restaurant (with or without the hitchhiker? - decide).  Starts driving
towards "Site Y".  Picks up a hitchhiker, 'Howard Stern', who
eventually threatens to rape her, but finally settles for stealing the
car and her money.
d1920 1
a1920 1
the exit that lead to the Robotics Research facility, thanked her new
d1925 5
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crag looming to one side and a heavily travelled dirt road leading off
to the horizon.  As she remembered from the directions, the site was
another ten miles down this road.  It was just past nine o'clock in
the morning, and even if nobody came along to give her a ride, she
figured that she had water and could walk the distance by noon.
d2842 1
a2842 1
to find a 747 there.
d2896 3
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"Captain, I just don't understand.  Your company has developed a major
new rocket fuel; you _did_ legitimately develop N-1033, didn't you?"
d2901 2
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You think they just give computational chemistry software aware for
free?  You think you get Pyrex laboratory equipment handed to you just
d2906 3
a2908 2
No, you need money for all of it!  It cost us over a million dollars
just to _develop_ N-1033; that was before you ever heard of us!"
d2918 19
a2936 18
nothing.  One really smart guy who thought you design a rocket fuel
with a computer.  That's it.  No computers.  No staff.  No software.
No lab.  Nothing.  Now how do you get that venture capital funding?
I'll tell you how.  You sell your soul to the capitalists.  You
convince them, and I mean really sell them, that you're one of them,
that you believe in their nightmare philosophy of greed, you agree to
bring on their management team, you agree to some 'business plan' that
tells how you're going to patent and control this technology once it's
developed, because these people will do nothing unless they can see
how they'll get a big killing back out it, and unless you can really
bring something more than your good ideas to the table, you'll fight
like hell just to keep 51% of the company.  And if you tell them the
truth, that once you invent this thing that their dear precious money
paid for, you're going to publish everything you've got about how it
works, they'll drop you like a hot potato.  Or you toil away in your
garage for ten years of nights and weekends while working some stupid
job just to pay for the garage, and I'm not much of garage guy.  So we
developed, let's just say, an original source of funding."
d2942 1
a2942 1
"Something like that.  Ever heard of Keystone Securities?"
a2943 4
After Mercuriou's interview was finished, Andrea finally had the
opportunity to use the telephone.  Far from being held as a prisoner
now, she had been given the run of the ship once it was in orbit.  She
called Kyle at home.
d2945 1
a2945 12
"My God, girl, where are you?"

"Where do you think I am, Kyle?" she answered dryly.  "I'm in space."

T + 1.1 days

"We have to perform an EVA, now," Burns told Andrea as they were
finishing the military rations that would serve as breakfast for many
more days to come.  "Hopefully it's the only one we need to perform in
Earth orbit."

"Why?" the NASA engineer asked, with a trace of concern in her voice.
a2959 148
"OK, so who's doing it?"

"Alister and I will do it.  We've rehearsed it in a water tank."

"Water tanks are a bit different from zero-gee."

"Well, ours is a lot closer to it than most."

T + 1.2 days

"Captain, thank you for joining us."

"You're quite welcome.  We're running the ship on Universal Time,
so it's a bit later here, but I'm quite happy to participate."

"We saw your crew today perform their first spacewalk, I should say,
the first spacewalk by a private crew.  It went fairly well, did it
not?"

"Yes, it went fine..."

T + 1.5 days

"OK," Vic announced to the assembled crew, holding open the door to
one of the 747's lavatories.

"Those of you who know how this toilet works have never taken a crap
in zero-gee."  Alister blushed at the doctor's frank language, and
Andrea bit her tongue.  "Dr. Yeats, of course, is the only one of us
who's had that experience before, but she's only seen the shuttle's
toilet."

"This is a modification of the shuttle's toilet design," Burns
interjected, "so it shouldn't be too unfamilar to you."

Andrea nodded, and the doctor continued.

"Like the shuttle toilet, it uses air pressure to draw the waste down
into it, so you need to turn on the vacuum pump, here."  Vic indicated
a switch that had been mounted next to the toilet.

"_Unlike_ the shuttle toilet, the waste is not dumped overboard,
because we need to recycle it into fertilizer for the plants.  Put
simply, we can't afford to throw _anything_ overboard.  So before you
turn on the vacuum pump, make sure there's a clean waste jar installed
at the base of the toilet, and the vacuum hose is connected to it."

The clean waste jars, each about four liters in size, made of
transparent glass, and partially filled with an inert filter, were
kept in a cabinet across from the lavatory.  Vic demonstrated the
removal and installation of a jar, as Andrea watched with interest.
This was significantly different from the space shuttle's toilet,
which made no attempt to recycle anything.

"We have no toilet paper, because we can't afford to clog up our
recycling system with a bunch of paper.  Instead, we have a bidot
built into the toilet."

"That's the thing that washes your butt," Alister observed, as Andrea
continued to nod.  Vic continued his lecture.

"You turn on the bidot here, and you get a stream of pressurized water
here," Vic indicated a value next to the toilet and a fixture inside
the toilet, aimed at the seat from below.

"This knob adjusts the direction of the water flow.  Try not to use
too much; we've got plenty of water right now, but it has to last all
the way to Mars and back.  When you're done, turn off the bidot, turn
off the vacuum pump, and seal the waste jar like this."  Vic
showed how to seal and remove the waste jar.

"Then you take this pen," Vic flourished a black marker tied to a
string inside the lav, "record on the jar your name, the date, and the
approximate time, and push it into this receptacle where the used jars
are kept until I come and collect them for recycling."

"Sounds like a fun job," Andrea noted.

"Well, I'm sure I could use some help," the doctor noted gleefully.
"I've certainly never tried to run a sewage system before, let along
try to recycle anything back out of it."

In truth, Andrea was suitably impressed not only by the toilet, but by
the entire operation of the _Icarus_.  For many years, she had
advocated that NASA pay more attention to recycling.  The entire space
mission was somewhat amateurish, but clearly had been carefully
thought through and well planned.  The toilet was far more consistent
with the needs of a deep-space mission that couldn't be resupplied
from earth.

T + 1.6 days

"You can't do that."

Andrea had stopped reading the blueprints on her laptop and was
looking directly at Mercuriou, who had taken a bottle of Coca-Cola out
of a mini-fridge and was about to open it.

"You can't do that in here," she repeated.

Burns looked up from his laptop's display of the _Icarus_ cargo
modules splayed out over low-Earth orbit.

"She's right.  If you open that, it'll go all over the place.
Alister, get one of those space straws."

"Space straw?  You mean those metal tubes?"

"Yep, and get a surgical clamp, too."

Alister fished out a sharpened metal tube with a straw attached to one
end and passed to Burns along with the surgical clamp.  After
attaching the clamp to the straw, Burns shoved the sharpened end into
the bottle and handed the combination to Mercuriou.


T + 2 days

Burns had originally toyed with the idea of putting windows in some of
the cargo modules to let sunlight in for growing plants.  The time
factor had caused him to forego this in favor of solid, uncut cargo
modules and more than two hundred grow lights that he had simply
packed away, surrounded by almost a solid foot of styrofoam packing
peanuts to protect them against the bumpy ride up.  Due in large part
to their inefficient launch profile and consequent low accelerations,
all the lights made it.

Supplying them with power was a different story.  Burns had brought
four fuel cells capable of reacting the kerosene and the oxygen
produced from the hydrogen peroxide, albeit inefficiently, and mounted
two of them in the 747's pressurized upper deck.  They were supplied
with fuel from a pair of tanks in the rear of the 747.  Each tank
contained a diaphragm with pressurized air on one side and liquid fuel
or oxidizer on the other.  Especially in the micro gravity of Earth
orbit, little air pressure was required to keep the fluid flowing to
the fuel cells, and Burns had designed the tanks so he could force
more fuel into them from the plane's main fuel tanks by starting the
rocket engines and using the force of the thrust to force fuel back
into the tanks.  He also had several small tanks of fuel and oxidizer
that fit through the hatchways and could be used in emergencies.

But the real power would have to come from the solar panels.  The ship
just didn't have enough power to operate the grow lights so critical
for the ultimate success of the mission.  Moreover, if they continued
to use the power cells, they would eventually run out of fuel.
They had not brought enough fuel to both get to the astroid belt
and run the fuel cells the entire way.

a2967 2
T + 3 days

d3281 1
a3281 1
"Well, that's a good question.  I guess, basically, I'm 35 years old
d3334 7
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"What do you have to say to the capitalists?  In particular, I'm sure
the executives of many of the companies you tricked are listening to
this program, do you have anything to say to them?"

"Not really.  We didn't steal from Mother Teresa.  The only people
we stole from were capitalists, and they won't lift a finger for
anybody unless they're getting something out of it for themselves."
d3358 1
a3358 1
"Who makes up the rules?  The capitalists."
d3372 2
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"I think many people would say that even though we don't necessarily
agree with all the rules, we obey them anyway and work to change them
d3380 2
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People obey the rules because they're forced to, because they're
afraid of what will happen to them if don't follow the rules."
d3386 8
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and forces the minorities to obey.  They 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 millions and millions of people that think that because they're
more advanced, or because they've been oppressed, or because there's
more of them than anybody else, that they have the right to rule
everybody else's lives."
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"Well, captain, we're pretty much out of time.  Thank you for
being on the program, and I'm sure we'll talk to you again soon."

"I'm sure you will."

d3413 1
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computer screen, the rest of the crew had watched the interview from
d3417 2
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"I was almost ready to jump in there and say a few things myself."
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"By all means, doctor, be my guest!"  Mercuriou exclaimed with a
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standard of living that has ever been seen on this planet.  People are
well-fed, well-housed, generally content with their jobs, with a
surplus of leisure time and disposible income.  And yet these
psuedo-socialists insist on slamming capitalism at every turn because
they can't stand the idea of people working hard and getting rewarded
for that hard work.  And now this man comes along, this criminal, who
has taken advantage of our society, stolen from our businesses, lied,
cheated; he comes on this program with the nerve to blame capitalism
for what?  For letting him take advantage of it?  For giving him the
opportunity to pull of one of the greatest con jobs in history?"
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all the information it kept secret.  All the design information for
d3595 3
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our networks for anyone to read and use?"
d5275 8
@


1.149
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d118 1
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and porn sites were on Gay Street, Brian Kerningham,
@


1.148
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d87 3
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He had quickly got the run of Chesapeake's operation,
concerned far more with the next multi-million-dollar order than
implementing any real security against an inside hack.
d100 1
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"Cable's loose, Burns," or
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repressed anxiety and typed his password.
d111 1
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day's outage into an excuse for a long weekend, offered
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a prominent, respected computer scientist,
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the program which convert the source code to
the bits and bytes that govern the machine,
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effective on closed, heavily customized systems, like those used by
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Burns keyed the door to the server room and walked in.  Inside the
white-walled room an elevated floor covered a haylon
fire extinguisher system that could purge all traces of
breathable air within thirty seconds.
Oxygen tanks with respirator masks were mounted at prominent
points around the walls.  Amid floor-to-ceiling racks
loaded with switch hubs, firewalls and RAID arrays
was a brand new multi-processor array, unpowered and silent.
Several technicians chatted leisurely amonst themselves,
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'Red' Briwom was a competent programmer who specialized in diving
into stalled projects and getting them finished by pounding out source
code.  Burns, really more a designer than a programmer, respected Red
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Burns crossed to the other side of the room, where he was working on a
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out of the room, one to take a soda break and another to retrieve a
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the door closed behind the last tech.  The situation was almost ideal;
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unpowered; the hard drive had been installed but was uncabled.  Burns
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special cable he had built that could briefly power a server's drive
d199 4
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room with his laptop.  It had taken less than 15 seconds.  "Let's shoot for
d205 10
a214 7

Burns preserved appearances by consuming another half hour to finish
installing the optical interface, then left.  Buoyed by an air of near
invincibility, he practically floated out to the parking lot, tossed
the laptop in the back seat, fired up a sneak-a-toke cleaverly
designed to look like a cigarette, cranked the tunes and floored the
rag-top all the way home.
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T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes comprised Burns' roommate's
undistinguished attire.  What differentiated him more were the
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for almost a year now."
d248 2
a249 3
Victor Antonov, the man who watched the teakettle in the kitchen, was
nearly ten years his elder, heavy set to nearly the point of obesity,
dressed in a button-down shirt and light slacks, and with a bristling
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pair of ceramic mugs.  _Not_again_, he thought.  His level of
distraction was illustrated by his need to return to the kitchen for
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Mercuriou, somewhat muffed (?) by his reaction, continued his prepared
explaination.
d278 1
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two bucks a pop and half the planet can't
d280 2
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with all the air pollution, next thing'll be bottled air,
and you won't even be able to breath without money."
d283 1
a283 2
He paused.  The explanation was in danger of
degenerating into a tirade.
d297 2
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"Well, maybe I've changed," the younger man answered bitterly, the
words dry, uninflected, emotionless.
d314 1
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was clear.  He thought back over the years he had known Marc
d340 1
a340 1
Finally, he elicited a smile and a chuckle from Antonov.
d342 2
a343 2
"Why not?" the doctor asked mischievously, his grin appearing for the
first time.
d353 5
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and dry, a day that made the ancient Greek scholar wish for a
convertible, a surf board, and the P.C.H, before Southern California
had been paved over by twelve-lane highways and built up by pre-fab
houses and office buildings that looked like they'd been dropped down
from the sky in a Tetris game.  He paused and inhaled deeply, saving
the aroma of desert flora as a song fragment came to memory.
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parked next to the trailer at the end of a long driveway between a
high cliff rising to the left and a dry riverbed on the right.

Vic lead the way around the side of the trailer, down a dirt path
through the scrub and catcus 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 had been placed over the interior off all the windows, behind
the curtains.  It was impossible to see in or out of the trailer.  Vic
used a key to take a padlock off the door and led the way in.

Inside, the trailer had obviously been stripped of almost all its
original furniture and fixtures.  The main room, about 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
marijuana plants, each sporting a bushy top of their distinctively
branching five-part leaves.  Two rows of bright lights hung down from
the ceiling on chain links that could be adjusted in length as the
plants grew upward.  An air conditioner hummed in the window, and a
dehumidifier on the floor discharged outside the water it condensed
from the air.  The lights ran off a timer, which also periodically
turned on a pump that flooded the tubs with a liquid fertilizer from a
child's toy plastic pool in the corner.  The smell, green and
plantish, mixed with another aroma distinctly reminiscent of a skunk's
spray, was overwealming.

Vic walked around the raised tubs, selected one of the mature buds,
broke it off by its stem and passed it to Mercuriou.  It was
top-quality marijuana, never packaged or pressed, covered with tiny
white crystals of the psychoreactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol.  The
guest nodded his head in appreciation, not really sure what to say,
then finally mumbled some kind of complement on his friend's carefully
maintained operation.  Vic selected another, similar bud, popped
it in his mouth, and motioned for his guest to do the same.
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the way the Great Spirit made it.  I've got some AIDS patients I take
care of, just G.P. stuff, but the guys who pay keep this place
running."
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with Mercuriou ready to leave, but still waiting to see if his old
friend would join his venture.
d410 1
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"I'll play their capitalist game," Mercuriou was saying.  "I'll get
d417 2
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Mercuriou's brash bravado, but felt now like a father who had seen his
son drunk for the first time.
d448 1
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buzzing of insects.
d457 1
a457 1
piece of red glass had been slipped in behind the mountains.  Eyes
d572 1
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a597 1
_What_else_are_you_going_to_do?__Grow_pot_in_the_mountains?_ Vic
d659 1
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Mercuriou and Burns?  Blown to bits in some goofy launch attempt?
@


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@
text
@d117 5
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days when spam came in a can
when pirates wore hooks
keyrings were kept in your pocket
and passwords were sent in the clear,
pings were diagnostic tools
porn sites were on Gay Street,
copy protection meant regular backups
and hacker was a term of respect,
Brian Kerningham,
respected American computer scientist,
had demonstrated that compilers,
the programs which convert the source code to
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could perform covert alternations to the compiled programs.
d126 5
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a virus could propagate from one generation of
compiler to the next, altering programs at will
and effectively disappearing into the billions of
bits on a computer's hard drive.  Such a virus is particularly
d148 1
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'Red' Gertsen was a competent programmer who specialized in diving
d168 1
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"I gotta get this done.'
d7186 1
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"'Red' Gertsen" is also a tip of the hat to Rob Widmer, Terry's first
@


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@
text
@d116 13
a128 2
A Kerningham virus makes compilers,
the programs which convert source code into
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perform covert alternations to the compiled programs.
d133 3
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the virus can propagate from one generation of
compiler to the next, effectively disappearing into the billions of
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d91 2
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Today, the cubicles were largely deserted.  Near
the copier bank, an attractive femme
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repressed his ire, slipped into his cubicle
tossed his laptop case on a chair, flopped down in front of
his terminal, logged in and began reading his email.  The company's
main development computer was scheduled for a hardware upgrade today
that would boost its processing power by nearly a factor of ten.  Half
the emails consisted of brief notes from various employees turning the
upgrade into an excuse for a three-day weekend.  Burns finished
skimming his mail, shouldered the laptop case while the terminal
finished its logout sequence, and headed for the server room.

A Kerningham virus is named for its inventor, Brian Kerningham, a
respected American computer scientist who demostrated in the early
1970s that a compiler, a program which converts human-readable source
code into the bits and bytes of machine code that actually run the
machine, could be made to perform covert modifications on the programs
it generates.  What's more, if the compiler is itself used to generate
new compilers, and who wants to write a new compiler from scratch?,
the virus could be made to replicate itself from one generation of
compiler to another, effectively disappearing into the billions of
d125 3
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effective on heavily customized systems, like those used by
manufactures producing both their own hardware and software, and
who wanted their custom software to take advantage of their custom
hardware.  Chesapeake.
d132 1
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oxygen from the air within thirty seconds.
d155 3
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spent writing his laptop's "screensaver" that had been black-boxed,
white-boxed, leak-proofed and peer-reviewed; the hours spent drilling a
thirty-second procedure; the flowcharted contingency
d1507 3
d1687 1
a1687 1
T - 30 days
d1954 2
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a2018 1
"Turn around," Marc repeated, "Go back home."
d2025 7
a2031 7
through and pause to lock again behind him.  Almost another mile
further on, he pulled into a complex of buildings and parked in front
of one.  All three got out of the car and walked in.  Andrea followed
the other two, partly out of curiosity, partly because there was
simply no place else to go.  She hadn't seen another vehicle until
they were in the parking lot, and even there were only three other
cars besides the Jeep.
d2038 1
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"The man who called from NASA was named Vince Becker.  Apparently this
d2097 2
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Her captor spun on his heals, keyed the lock, and yanked the door open.
d2150 4
d2178 3
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a7268 1
T - 30 days <**>
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Govenor Zee - democracy itself
d8885 1
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	books drug you, too / books are drugs, too
d8904 5
d8914 1
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	but books become weapons
@


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@
text
@d98 3
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"Top of the morning to ya, Burns,"
"Big talk today, there, Burns,"
"Loose cable somewhere, Burns," or
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"Wouldn't miss it for judgement day," he muttered without turning
around, tossed his laptop case on a chair, flopped down in front of
@


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@
text
@d573 1
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_Where'd_you_hid,_Vic?___The_smoking_parlor?_
@


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@
text
@d217 1
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From the couch, Mercuriou nodded in assent.  In his late
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T-shirt, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes composed his undistinguished
attire.  What differentiated him more were the subtleties - a 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.  Like his paternal ancestors, who had
decended from the Scythian plains to ravage the heart of the Roman
Empire, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to conquer the
unconquerable, undetered by any temporary setbacks in his plans, and
absolutely convinced that he would ultimately win.
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@


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@
text
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with his laptop.  It had taken less than 15 seconds.  "Let's shoot for
@


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@
text
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the copier bank, an attractive femme in 'business casual'
race-walked past.
A marketing specialist who had joined Chesapeake
for its medical plan's mental health coverage, and
whose technical knowledge was limited
to whatever batch of acronyms were current in the trade rags,
Jessica Pride often took it upon herself to remind "her"
absent-minded programmers of the obvious.
When Burns quit this job, he would not miss
"Top of the morning, Burns," or
"Big talk today, Burns," or
"Loose cable, there, Burns," or even
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"System's going down today, Burns!"
d150 1
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"Well, fill in your own timesheet, but I'm hitting the bay.  Sure you
@


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@
text
@d89 1
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implementing any real security against an inside hacker.
d91 6
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As he walked down the mammoth
room's main isle, past banks of deserted cubicles,
an attractive brunette in 'business casual'
strolled at a brisk pace in the opposite direction.
A marketing specialist whose technical knowledge was limited
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"Lookin' sharp, today, Burns," or even
@


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@tentech
@
text
@d5963 4
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quatrains refered to the _Icarus_, that the death of your brilliant
chief engineer is only the first of many woes to befall you guys, and
that none of you will ever make it back to Earth alive."
d5971 1
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@


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@'red' gersten
@
text
@d7271 4
@


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@
text
@d144 5
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Jason Gertsen was a competent programmer who specialized in diving into
stalled projects and getting them finished by pounding out source
code.  Burns, really more a designer than a programmer, respected Jason for
his staying power with the boring tedium the finicky machines imposed
on their masters.
d156 1
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Jason had a thirty-six-foot Catalan.  On the other hand were the weeks
d2341 3
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"I'm at NuTech; they're holding me prisoner here."
d2401 2
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a2577 2
"I'm the ship's doctor, and I'm giving you a medical order.  You
put on this spacesuit, now."
d2778 7
a2784 5
minutes.  By the time the third cargo module had been put into
transfer orbit, it was clear to NORAD that the engine burns were
lifting the modules into higher orbits, not deorbiting them as some
kind of attack.  They computed the rendezvous point and readquired the
747 there, just as it was docking with the first cargo module.
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_Icarus_ passed around its ninety-minute orbit.  As soon as the
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iron, and nearly a dozen on carbon and its various compounds.  There
d3115 2
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as well as Mercuriou's hand-picked collection of ancient Greek and
d3134 1
d3301 2
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a3315 1
more heated the further he went.
d3324 4
d3334 2
a3335 1
punctured wall of the module.
d3337 2
a3338 9
"OK, I found the hole," she announced to the others, "now I need
something to plug it with."  Just as she finished this statement, the
captain propelled himself into C-4, still holding his helmet and
gloves in one hand.

"Excuse me, sir," she said as she reached for his helmet and pulled
one of his gloves out of it.  Turning back to the puncture hole, she
slapped the glove against it.  The interior pressure held the glove
against the wall and stopped the leak.
d3341 1
a3341 7
he began, then interrupted himself to yell into his microphone.

"Burns, turn off these cameras!"

"Just a minute," Yeats stated, then keyed her own microphone.

"Alister, what's the pressure doing?"
d3343 9
a3351 1
"Uhh.. it's at 75."
d3353 1
a3353 7
"Let me know if it drops any lower.  I think I've got the hole
plugged."

Turning back to the captain, she turned off her microphone and crossed
her arms over her chest.

"Now you wanted to get something clear?" she asked.
d3359 1
d3366 1
a3366 1

d5920 10
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"Well, we've got NASA monitoring all of this, Kyle," she asked the
video camera, "could you give us some help putting the cargo
modules together?"

"Don't worry about it," she told Alister, "we've got to have some kind
of memorial service, I think, but we've got a lot of people back home
who will help us, and I've got more hours of spaceflight logged than
anyone else here."
d5952 2
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"Thought you might want to see this," Kyle announced in his 0800
transmission, the first of this morning.
d5960 10
a5969 8
telling what Burns' last moments must have been like, and also that
some of Nostradomes's quatrains refered to the _Icarus_, that the
death of your brilliant chief engineer is only the first of many woes
to befall you guys, and that none of them would make it back to Earth
alive."

"Thanks a lot, Kyle," Andrea told the video screen as Kyle's voice continued
on uninterumpted.  "That's just what I wanted to hear."
d6013 5
a6017 2
"Yes, I do."  He looked up at her.  "I really want to know what you're
thinking."
d6153 3
a6155 1
Christians who say you have to fight against evil.  If there was ever
d6167 1
a6167 1
the light of the world."
d6195 1
a6195 1
if you spill red wine in space, it's a lot easier to clean up than on
d6198 4
d6204 4
a6207 3
Drinking from straws was much easier, but Marc had dug into the ship's
stores an hour earlier, produced the glasses alongside the bottle, and
Andrea had stood on tradition.
d6212 1
a6212 2
all over his face as he tried to drink it.  Andrea grabbed a towel and
started to wipe off his face.
d6217 2
a6218 2
"Well, m-maybe you want to come in here," he stammered as he realized
that he was interrupting a "private" dinner.
d6220 1
a6220 1
"What's up?" the Captain asked.
d6237 21
a6257 17
At 1431 GMT, September 11, 2001, after first the event on Earth and
then a radio transmission lag of exactly 3 minutes 17 seconds, the
silent crew of three watched the second tower collapse.  In the days
ahead, it would be revealed that Islamic terrorists had hijacked four
American airlines.  Coincidently, or perhaps not, all were Boings.
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.  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.
Within hours, the buildings fell.  Burns would have then made a quick
calculation based on the potential energy of a given mass at a given
height along with the published weight of construction materials used
in the skyscrapers to estimate the energy released by their collapse
at ten kilotons of TNT - the size of a small atomic bomb.  Bankers,
mail men, fire fighters, bus boys
brokers, firemen, CEOs, bus boys,
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a6346 3
All those people out there who'd love to fly an airplane but can't or
don't because _it's_too_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  They
took advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one thing that will make
d6352 5
a6356 5
a montage of talking heads.  Ecks was speechless, unable to believe
that his capitalist constituents were now being accused of aiding and
abetting terrorism.  Wye sputtered nonsense, red-faced with rage.
Only Zee remained stony and impassive, and it was he who answered the
space captain now.
d6401 5
d6900 1
a6900 1
they set eyes on someone else.
d6940 5
a6944 5
only other time on the mission he'd been stoned or drunk or otherwise
inebriated.  "I suppose there'll be some kind of big civil trial, for
all the money.  Probably there'll be a criminal trial first, we broke
a lot of computer crime laws.  I don't know.  Maybe some prison time.
Who knows?"
d6948 2
a6949 2
Borzov, having drunk more than three times any of the others, didn't
seem particularly drunk.
d6951 1
a6951 1
"Seriously, captain, _Columbia_ isn't the only way off this station.
d6970 3
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"Yes.  Defined by our limitations.  Your first officer talks a lot
about religion, doesn't she?  All these people who talk about
religion, talk about giving to all who beg of them, talk about
d6974 2
a6975 1
Monday morning, why?  Because they are _defined_by_their_limitations_."
d6985 1
a6985 1
"Hah!  You see!  _Defined_by_our_limitations_, young man!  Andrea here
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God isn't strong enough, I think that's the only really consistent
answer."
d7116 2
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"So what was the point then, that it was all for nothing?"
d7120 4
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conviction, exhaling first.  "This nerve we've struck with people, the
d7165 1
a7165 1
"Jason Gertsen" is also a tip of the hat to Rob Widmer, Terry's first
d9317 9
@


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@
text
@d20 2
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GOD I'LL PRAY TO INSPIRE THIS WORK
MAN I'LL REMIND OF ITS ERRORS
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and the meter-high "Chesapeake," the k's
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He quickly got the run of Chesapeake,
concerned more with the next multi-million-dollar order than
any real security against an inside hacker.
security against an inside hack.
security against a covert hack.

His facial features, chiseled, dark,
though somewhat warm and soft,
reminded some of 'Che' Guevara, the
famed communist revolutionary.
Today, as he walked down the mammoth
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he saw an attractive brunette in 'business casual'
coming at a brisk pace in the opposite direction.
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Jessica Pride often took it upon herself to remind the
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"Wouldn't miss it for judgement day," he muttered without turning around,
tossed his laptop case on a chair, flopped down in front of his terminal,
logged in and began reading his email.  The company's main development
computer was scheduled for a hardware upgrade today that would boost
its processing power by nearly a factor of ten, though the use of a
faster, multi-processor system.  Half of Burns' email consisted of
brief notes from various employees that they were taking the whole day
off, turning the system upgrade into an excuse for a three-day
weekend.  Burns finished skimming his mail, shouldered the
laptop case while the terminal finished its logout sequence, and
headed for the server room.
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new compilers, as is so often the case with modern computer systems,
d126 4
a129 5
effective when used on computer systems using heavily customized
compilers, such as those used by manufactures who produced both their
own hardware and software, and who wanted their software customized to
take advantage of their custom hardware.  Which was exactly the world
of Chespeake.
d132 9
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white-walled room with the elevated floor that covered a haylon-based
fire extinguisher system, the new server hardware was laid out along
one wall, its technicians chatting leisurely amonst themselves while
awaiting the announced time to shutdown the system.
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white-boxed, leak-proofed and peer-reviewed; the hours drilling a
thirty-second procedure on a machine in his living room almost
identical to Chesapeake's main server; the flowcharted contingency
d169 3
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right.  "How about lunch?" he emailed his
roommate. _I'm_in_the_server_room._ "Sounds fine," came the reply.
_Go!_
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power cable from his desk.  Burns sent another email, "How about
Bogart's?"  Back in the apartment, Marc Mercuriou skimmed down his
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a197 15
the door closed behind the last tech.
The situation was almost ideal; one of the scenarios
he had drilled for.  The new machine was
disassembled and unpowered; the hard drive
had been installed but was uncabled.
Burns connected a data cable from his laptop to the drive, then plugged
in a special cable he had built that could power a server's
drive from the laptop's battery.  He powered the drive,
hit a three-key sequence on the laptop, and ventured a glance at
the door.  Nobody.  The laptop beeped.  He killed the power,
disconnected both cables, and dashed back across the room.  It had
the drive, and dashed back across the room with his laptop.  It had
taken less than 15 seconds.  "Let's shoot for happy hour instead," he
emailed Mercuriou, who read the message with a wry smile that soon
broke into a broad grin.
d203 2
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designed to look like a cigarette, and floored the rag-top all the way
home.
d224 1
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to keep a television in his apartment; an hour each day, timed on a
d276 5
a280 13
"Well, now we've got money," he concluded bitterly, producing a
wad of fifty-dollar bills and fanning them on the table like
a deck of poker cards.  He picked one up and examined it
with the air of a conosuir.

"I've always liked the fifty.  Not only was it a great
engraving on the back, at least until they went and butchered
it in the name of 'security', but it's a real sum of money,
don't you think?  I mean, you hand someone a twenty, it's
like, 'so what?' but a fifty, well then you've got something real!"

Vic was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, staring directly at
him, the tea forgotton.  Mercuriou leaned back on the couch and
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"Marc, this isn't like you, you're not a thief," his host articulated.

"Well, maybe I've changed," the younger man answered quickly, the
words dry, uninflected, emotionless.  The bitterness quickly returned.
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"I'll play their capitalist game; I'll hussle and I'll compete!
And when I've clawed my way to the top I'll turn around
and jam it right back down their throats. [CA]"
d321 2
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"Well, we should be able to milk this hack for millions, maybe a
billion or two.  But the money it won't make a difference if we can't
d327 1
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"He says it's a crap shoot... one that I'm willing to take!  Hell, what
d336 1
a336 1
"Because I'm not even forty, yet.  Speaking of which, old man, what
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"I'll play their game," Mercuriou was saying.  "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 capitalist system right back down their throats."

Vic bowed his head and struggled with conflicting emotions.  He loved
the way he felt years younger in the company of Mercuriou's brash
bravado, but felt now like a father who had seen his son drunk for the
first time.
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closed, wrapped in an Indian blanket, Vic calmly awaited the dawn.  A
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solitude.  He had done this before, and knew what we was getting into.
d544 2
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a564 1
through the window of television.  _Men_with_guns_on_a_cruise_ship_.
d568 2
a569 2
flames, and there was no way back.  Many gave themselves to the fire;
many assumed that homes were meant to burn, that's why they were made
d571 3
a573 2
game room, hoping the fire would spare them.  A few had found a way
out.  Some had jumped.
d586 3
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then disappointment, then resignation.  _I'm_not_a_kid_anymore_.
He lay back down on the blanket.
d616 5
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Vic felt depressed.  Finally the sunlight was gone, leaving only a
blue sky that deepened into purple, then black.  Crickets and frogs
trumpeted the night.  A rattlesnake slithered silently across the
still warm sand.  Here, away from the city lights, stars began to
d645 1
a645 1
a dramatic vision, though both things had been known to happen.
d650 2
a651 2
Growing pot in the mountains?  Ten years in jail with Mercuriou
and Burns?  Blown to bits in some goofy launch attempt?
d654 2
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this _crazy_ actually _work_?  _Crazy._ Yes, crazy.  Maybe he was
ready for something crazy.  He closed his eyes and tried to
d661 1
a661 1
death.  Death he thought he could handle.
d670 3
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rocks and scrub bush surrounded him.  It was beautiful.  Did he really
want to part with it? _Some_people_go_through_life_for_the_lasanga._
d679 4
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beacons and coordinate on a chart, looking to a colored radar display
to see what was in front of them, and occasionally peering down to the
ground, wondering if anyone was looking back up at them...
d687 1
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come, and Vic had made his decision.  He would not fear death, he
d732 1
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"Yeah, yeah," the younger man muttered, pushing his chair
d738 1
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"No, I don't think so," Alister replied, the disgust still evident in
d783 1
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team of a half-dozen young programers, including a bright 20-year-old
South African chemist named Alister Compton.  They were armed with
d1402 7
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expected ease of recoving the airplane in case of a default.  They
d1705 2
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reworked the plane's plumbing system, too.
d6978 3
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everything, but they do listen.  Personally, I think you're a thief,
and I think you know it.  You'll probably get some jail time.  I think
you expect it, and I think you deserve it."
d6999 1
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in Russia if South Africa decides to extridite."
d7052 2
a7053 1
"Goodbye."
d7079 3
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stunt.  It was biggest stage I could think of to get heard.  And
Andrea kept telling me I had already done that, that my most important
mission goal had been achieved, but I wouldn't listen."
d7092 3
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Tolstoy, and none of them had the answers.  I mean, if this is
the stuff _they_ talked about _then_, and it's the same stuff
_we're_ talking about _now_..."
@


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@golf courses
@
text
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were hot, and someone with Burns' qualifications
was a genuine find.
His job interview was a talk in front of a whiteboard;
d87 5
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He had quickly gotten the run of
Chesapeake's operation, which was far more concerned with filling the
next multi-million-dollar order than implementing
any real security against a determined insider attempting to hack
their systems.
@


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@wisely mangement
@
text
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kept restaurants, book stores, country clubs and concert halls
@


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@
text
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and white-board markers.  Management wisely
@


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@
text
@d74 1
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jam packed with twenty-somethings who
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were in short supply, and someone with Burns' qualifications
was a genuine find.  His job interview was little more than a
technical presentation in front of a whiteboard;
d89 1
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next multi-million-dollar order and satisfying those customers by
cramming miriads of new features into their products than implementing
d156 2
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"Well, be my guest, but I'm hitting the bay.  Sure you don't want to come?"
d159 1
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On one hand, an afternoon of sailing was a tempting proposition, and
d168 1
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"No, thanks," Burns said without a hint of disumulation in his voice,
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power cable from his desk.  Burns sent another email, "Let's try
Bogart's."  Back in the apartment, Marc Mercuriou skimmed down his
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a202 6
the door closed behind the last tech, slapped a cable onto a special
PCMCIA card that had been siting in his laptop for the last week,
plugged the other end into the server's hard drive, powered it, and
hit a three-key sequence on the laptop before venturing a glance at
the door.  Nobody.  The laptop beeped.  He killed the power before the
server's CPU had gotten out of BIOS, replaced the original cable to
d208 6
a213 7
After the
technicians returned, Burns preserved appearances by consuming another
half hour to finish installing the optical interface, then left.
Buoyed by an air of near invincibility, he practically floated out to
the parking lot, tossed the laptop in the back seat, fired up a
sneak-a-toke cleaverly designed to look like a cigarette, and floored
the rag-top all the way home.
d218 3
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"The routers run the network; heck the routers _are_ the network.  You
control the routers, you control the network.  I'm telling you," the man on
the couch concluded, "this thing is like super-hack."
d228 1
a228 1
Marc Mercuriou, the man on the couch, nodded in assent.  In his late
d239 1
a239 2
absolutely convinced that he would ultimately win.  He was also the
closest thing Burns had to a boss.
d243 1
a243 1
it worked anyway.  They've been shipping it for about six months now."
d329 2
a330 1
He'd sit and do nothing before undertaking something half-baked.
d332 1
a332 1
"Why are you doing this, Marc?  Is it really about Mars... really?"
d335 2
a336 1
have an answer.  The doctor broke another awkward silence.
d338 1
a338 1
"Can it really work?"
d358 1
a358 1
have you been doing up here in these hills, anyway?"
d430 4
a433 1
Vic bowed his head and struggled with conflicting emotions.
d440 1
a440 1
thing into orbit... literaly!"
d456 1
a456 1
"Fuck it," he said as the car reached the paved road and he hit the
d9280 4
@


1.130
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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d58 1
a58 1
into his father's restaurant, walked
d61 1
a61 1
bagels and stocked 'fridge, turned right at the conference rooms
d72 23
a94 1
legit.  His facial features, chiseled, dark,
d151 1
a151 1
code.  Burns, more a designer than a programmer, respected Jason for
d159 8
a166 18
An afternoon of sailing was a tempting proposition, and Jason had a
thirty-six-foot Catalan.  A roaring economic boom kept restaurants,
bars, and shopping malls packed with twenty-somethings who had
never worked a real job now sitting on thousands of dollars worth of stock
options.  Every other car on University Avenue was either a Ferrari,
or a BMW, or a Land Rover - most of them leased.  Up scale restaurants
provided their patrons with blank paper placemats and colorful Crayons
to doodle and brainstorm their latest propietary server architecture
while waiting for their hundred dollar lunches.  Skilled
programmers were in short supply, and someone with Burns' qualifications
was a genuine find.  His job interview was little more than a
technical presentation in front of a whiteboard
and he had quickly gotten the run of
Chesapeake's operation, which was far more concerned with filling the
next multi-million-dollar order and satisfying those customers by
cramming miriads of new features into their products than implementing
any real security against a determined insider attempting to hack
their systems.
d168 2
a169 1
"No, I gotta get this done.  Thanks for the offer."
d174 3
a176 1
right.
d179 11
a189 7
components spread across a table, all three technicians were out of
the room for a minute, one to take a soda break, another to retrieve a
power cable from his desk, and the third to answer a phone call from
someone who had already hung up by the time he got there.  Burns had
contemplated taking a shot of J.D. that morning to steal himself for
this moment, but designed that he had to be absolutely sober in case
_anything_ went wrong.
d195 9
a203 6
hit a three-key sequence on the laptop, which beeped two seconds
later.  Then Burns killed the power before the server's CPU had gotten
out of BIOS, replaced the original cable to the drive, and dashed back
across the room with his laptop.  Since they weren't using a
cryptographic file system yet, they didn't even have to worry about
forging signatures.  It had taken less than 15 seconds.  After the
d1111 6
a1116 6
holders on each table.  It was blank, except for a Bible quote: "When
I was hungry, you fed me."  She put the four remaining twenty dollar
bills she had into the envelope, sealed it, and slipped it in the drop
box on her way out the door.  Taking a city bus to the northern
extremnities of Houston, she walked to Interstate 45, sat her duffle
bag down beside the onramp, and began waiting for a ride.
d1338 6
a1343 6
dollars worth of securities in a single weekend of frenzied trading.
Outraged investors were demanding to know how such a 'bug' could have
passed undetected, and industry analysts speculated that Keystone
would become a test case of corporate liability for computer errors.
Burns read the story while Mercuriou thought over the problem with
Alister.
d7105 1
a7105 3
The college hack described here is an amalgam of two different
hacks - the news server hack done by friends of mine, and the
student workstation hack that I did.
d7107 20
a7126 1
The company is basically Cisco.
d7128 1
a7128 5
Kerningham viruses.  The hack.

COULD USE BURNS ACTUALLY WALKING INTO THE BUILDING TO DO THE HACK HERE

T - 380 days <**>
d7130 1
a7130 3
First attack - Keno maker

T - 370 days <****>
d7147 2
d7157 39
d9265 7
@


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@people have to read the book to find its meaning
@
text
@d44 2
a45 2
the fountain's meter-high blue-white concrete
block corporate logo "Chesapeake," the k's
d49 15
a63 12
the world's largest manufacturer of
routers, metal cabinets whose fans hummed in
the backrooms of Internet providers
'round the world, the semaphores of the net,
and most bearing that same one-word blue-white logo.

Burns walked past the bike rack, past the glass doors, past
the potted palms and the pet rocks,
blew off the break room, its Phillie cream cheese bagels
and stocked 'fridge, turned right at the copiers,
jogged left near the conference room and entered a two-story cave
partitioned into a hundred cubicles -
d71 3
a73 2
The key card was real; Burns was totally legit.
His facial features, dark, chiseled, but at times visibly soft,
d75 2
a76 1
famed communist revolutationary.  Today, as he walked down the mammoth
d86 1
a86 1
"Donuts and coffee, Burns," or
d6204 3
a6206 1
mail men, fire fighters, bus boys - all lost their lives that terrible
d6429 4
a6432 2
humanity was too primitive to be flying to Mars, was genuinely
wondering about jet aircraft, and wanted Andrea's opinion.
d6460 2
a6461 1
Merciriou was forced to grin, and Andrea continued.
d6467 2
a6468 1
some cases.  In other cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting
d6487 1
a6487 2
"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked Andrea.  "What
do you have to do to be saved?"
d6499 1
a6499 1
"What happens at the end?"
d6511 1
a6511 1
"What do you have to do to make it through?"
d6519 3
a6521 2
your fellow man - unconditionally.  And even though that sounds easy,
it can be really tough to figure it out in practice."
d6528 3
a6530 2
statues.  Perhaps like the entire Bible, it's a mixed bag; some
of it is inspired by God, other parts of it were put there by
d6537 1
a6537 1
"I mean, really?"
d7497 4
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a26 48
HERE'S THE THESIS OF THIS NOVEL,
FOR THE IMPATIENT WHO DON'T WANT TO WAIT.

DEMOCRACY IS A COMPLETE DISASTER.
IT BROUGHT NAPOLEON TO POWER IN FRANCE.
IT BROUGHT HITLER TO POWER IN GERMANY.
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE _STILL_ SUPPORT COMMUNISM IN RUSSIA.
THE UNITED STATES HAS ANNILIATED AMERICAN INDIAN CIVILIZATION,
CONJUERED AND STOLEN HALF OF MEXICO AND
GONE THROUGH THE BLOODIEST WAR IN ITS HISTORY
JUST TO PROVE THAT YOU CAN'T CHAIN MEN TO PLOWS
BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN.

AND NOW IT'S GIVEN US CAPITALISM.

THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU PUT
THE MASSES OF PEOPLE IN CONTROL OF SOCIETY.

THE MASSES OF PEOPLE ARE SELFISH.

THE MASSES OF PEOPLE ARE VIOLENT.

AND WE'VE SEEN ENOUGH OF POPULIST GOVERNMENT.

IT'S TIME TO SAY THE MOST SELFISH MEN
YOU'D EVERY WANT TO MEET IN YOUR LIFE
ARE _NOT_ SOME GREAT BUNCH OF LEADERS,
SOME NIGHTMARE SYSTEM BASED ON THE SAME IDEAS
AS THE OTHER NIGHTMARE SYSTEMS
IS _NOT_ SOME GREAT NEW WAY OF LIFE,
THAT ARMING YOURSELVES TO THE TEETH
WITH THE MOST LETHAL KILLING MACHINES KNOWN TO MAN
DOES _NOT_ MAKE A NATION STRONG,
THAT SCREAMING FOR A WAR OF 'ZERO TOLERANCE'
AGAINST TEN MILLION OF YOUR OWN PEOPLE
IS _NOT_ LIBERTY,
THAT OUTLAWING TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
PUBLIC LIBRARIES BEFORE THEY'RE EVER CREATED
IS _NOT_ FREEDOM.

IT'S TIME TO PASS JUDGEMENT ON DEMOCRACY.

IT'S TIME TO REJECT THIS SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT.

IT'S TIME TO PROCLAIM THE ALTERNATIVE.

CHRISTIANITY.

@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d20 3
a22 3
I'LL PRAY GOD TO INSPIRE THIS WORK
I'LL TRUST MAN TO KNOW IT HAS ERRORS / I'LL REMIND MAN (THAT) IT HAS ERRORS
THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
d49 1
a49 1
WE'VE SEEN ENOUGH OF POPULIST GOVERNMENT.
d92 3
a94 3
the fountain in front of the three foot blue
white corporate logo "Chesapeake," the k's
back cast like a sailboat's mast, and its whole visage that
d235 3
a237 2
"I'm telling you," the man on the couch concluded, "this thing is like
super-hack."
d241 1
a241 1
teakettle to boil while slowly shaking his head.
d250 2
a251 2
to keep a television in his apartment, an hour each day, timed on a
stopwatch, devoted to reading Latin, a framed letter of rejection from
d254 2
a255 2
Empire, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to take on
the world, undetered by any temporary setbacks in his plans, and
d261 1
a261 2
it worked anyway.  They've been shipping it for about half a year,
now."
d279 7
a285 5
_Oh,_no_,_not_Mars_, Antonov thought, inhaling deeply, then slowly
pouring the water into a pair of ceramic mugs, _not_again_.  His level
of distraction was illustrated by his need to return to the kitchen
for teabags, as the mugs contained nothing but hot water.  Meanwhile,
Mercuriou continued his explaination.
d303 1
a303 1
"Well, now we've got money," he concluded nonchalantly, producing a
d314 3
a316 6
"I'll play their capitalist game; I'll hussle and I'll compete!
And when I've clawed my way to the top I'll turn around
and jam it right back down their throats. [CA]"

Vic was staring directly at him, the tea forgotton.  Mercuriou leaned
back on the couch and returned the gaze.
d324 14
a337 9
words dry, uninflected, emotionless.  Then he paused, and switched his
tone of voice to that of a teenager stammering to explain a 2
A.M. party to his parents.

"I'm going to Mars!  I need the money!"

Vic sighed, handed one of the mugs to his old friend and sat down
across from him.  The trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of a
single man.  A small siting room to the right of the door was
d349 4
a352 1
"It is really going to work?"
d354 1
a354 1
Mercuriou shrugged.
d356 5
a360 2
"The money it won't make a difference if we can't overcome the
technical problems."
d364 2
a365 2
"He says it's a crap shoot.  One I'm willing to take.  Hell, what else
am I going to do, take my stolen millions and retire on a beach
d368 4
a371 1
"Why not?" the doctor asked, his grin appearing for the first time.
d374 1
a374 1
have you been doing up here anyway?"
d382 10
a391 9
convertible, a surf board, and old California, before it had paved
over by twelve-lane highways and built up by pre-fab houses and office
buildings that looked like they'd been dropped down from the sky in a
Tetris game.

Mercuriou's Toyota and Vic's Jeep were
the only vehicles in sight, parked next to the trailer at the end of a
long driveway between a high cliff rising to the left and a dry
riverbed on the right.
d434 2
a435 2
care of, just G.P. stuff, but the guys with money provide enough to
keep this place running."
d453 1
a453 1
thing into orbit."
d463 5
a467 4
success.  Yet he has no intention of spending the rest of his life the
way he spent his last ten years, fumbling around from one dumb thing
to another while a court settlement ate all his money and his best
ideas sat as notes on a hard drive.
d9220 3
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d9138 67
@


1.125
log
@more 'games'
@
text
@d17 1
a17 1
I'LL NOT GET STUCK / LOST IN "IVY TOWERS"
d30 1
a30 1
DEMOCRACY IS DEPRAVED.
d45 5
a49 1
IT'S TIME TO PASS JUDGEMENT ON DEMOCRACY.
d67 2
d94 1
a94 1
back cast a sailboat's mast, and its whole visage that
d101 1
a101 1
and most bearing that same one-word logo.
d103 1
a103 1
He past the bike rack, past the glass doors, past
d105 1
a105 1
blew off the break room, its Phillie cream cheese
d107 2
a108 2
jogged left and entered a two-story cave
partitioned in a hundred cubicles -
d112 11
a122 12
the company's flagship products.  Management
had wisely moved itself across the street.

The key card was real.  Burns was a legitimate employee, number 3504.
His facial features, chiseled, but sometimes visibly soft,
had been compared to those of Ernest 'Che' Guevara, the
famed revolutationary.  Today, he walked as usual down the mammoth
room's main isle, past a bank of photocopier machines and a series of
cubicles, half of them deserted.  Turning down a side isle on his way
to the fourth cubicle down, he saw an attractive brunette
coming at a brisk pace in the
other direction.
d129 2
a130 2
"Donuts and coffee on the copiers, Burns," or
"Lookin' sharp, today, Burns," or
d135 1
a135 1
tossed his laptop case on a chair, sat down in front of his terminal,
d142 1
a142 4
weekend.  Burns, on the other hand, had no intension of being anywhere
but in the office today.  He found his job boring, wanted to be rid of
it as quickly as possible, and had no intension of letting _this_
opportunity slip by.  He finished skimming the email, shouldered the
d170 7
a176 1
"Oh, I want to get this optical interface done."
d180 1
a180 1
An afternoon of sailing was a tempting proposition, and Dirk had a
d188 2
a189 2
while waiting for their twenty dollar lunches.  Skilled
programmers were in short supply.  Someone with Burns' qualifications
d191 2
a192 2
technical presentation in front of a conference room of corporate
engineers and managers, and he had quickly gotten the run of
d312 4
d324 4
a327 3
"Well, maybe I've changed," the younger man answered quickly, then
paused, and switched his tone of voice to that of a teenager
stammering to explain a 2 A.M. party to his parents.
d490 7
a496 7
Vic had put this off for several 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.  The moon wasn't the right phase.  He wanted to
finish the novel he was reading.  It was already too late today.  It
was still pretty early, he could putter around for another hour or two
before leaving.
d1430 2
a1431 2
to college, to one of his most energetic professors, writing
"RHETORIC" on the blackbord in bold capital letters.  Turning
d1778 5
a1782 6
the contract, and we've paid them a little, they seem to be
manufacturing massive quantities of ten-thirty-three, but we just
haven't seen any of it.  I've thought they might be selling it
overseas, but I can't figure why or how.  They evade all of our
inquiries.  They always claim to be having production problems, and
that they need more time."
d1785 1
a1785 1
papers.  "No way.  Not with the quantities of nitroglycerine they're
d1790 6
a1795 4
only because he had first computed the energy released by a kilogram
of nitroglycerine and compared that to the energy consumed by a
shuttle launch.  Yeats had performed the same estimate in her head.
Kyle had called her in for a reason.
d2998 25
d4830 19
a4848 17
than a spiritual one.  We hear constantly from them about sex.  Sex,
sex, sex, sex, sex.  Yet they're almost completely silent on something
like capitalism.  Chirst say 'give to all those who beg of you'.  He
told one of his followers to sell all his worldly possesions and give
the money to the poor.  Go ahead - try it.  Sell all your worldly
possessions, give the money to the poor, and see how people treat you
then.  The Christian right has almost nothing to say about this.  They
rail about sex, but are strangely silent about the neighborhood
merchant who puts a price tag on everything in his store and is
standing there behind the cash register to take your money before you
walk out the door.  And then you look at what they really propose.  So
much of it involves more and more government regulation.  They want
the government to ban abortions.  Look, I don't support abortion, but
having the government 'get tough' with abortion clinics isn't the
answer.  They're tough on crime.  Fine.  Christ said love your
enemies.  Why don't you see them agitating for decent treatment of
prisoners in jails?"
d6919 1
a6919 1
A different kind of mood settled over the space station.  Andrea broke
d6924 2
a6925 2
"Communism _is_ dead, nawh tovarish, but not everyone is my country
believes capitalism is best for Russia."
d6997 2
d7085 3
a7087 1
Tolstoy, and none of them had the answers.  I mean..."
@


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@Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
@
text
@d8737 6
a8742 1
	books make great weapons
d8747 5
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d719 48
a766 2
"Doctor Vic!" Burns exclaimed, turning away from his computer as
Mercuriou walked up with the doctor.
d823 15
a837 2
to its kitchen, where Antonov produced three large casserole dishes
he had brought in from the car and turned on the oven.
d840 1
a840 1
lid off one.
d1328 7
a1334 1
one Keystone Securities had been expanded into a criminal affair.
d1343 4
a1346 3
running on this launch, just like with NASA's, T minus whatever, only
we don't know what time it is.  At some point, that clock goes to
zero, and we better be ready to launch when it does."
d1356 1
a1356 1
Burns shifted uncomfortably on the couch.  Mercuriou was preaching
d6168 2
a6169 2
diamond of Albert Einstein.  Tom Clancy was such a genius.  Mohammamed
Ata was another.  Both men had discovered the same fiery sapphire,
d8050 174
d9079 4
@


1.122
log
@lou becomes kyle
@
text
@d8217 7
d8526 1
a8526 1
talking about N-1033 from Bankok to Tartu.  Then we'll have 10-33 fumes
d8652 2
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d916 3
a918 3
"Well this stuff is no con, we've tested it!  I'm telling 'ya, Andrea,
you should get back in the program.  This new fuel's gonna
revolutionize spaceflight!"
d920 1
a920 1
"That's OK, Lou, my problems are here on Earth."
d925 1
a925 1
Andrea had spent the night in Lou's guest room, and when the NASA
d1030 1
a1030 1
down to visit Lou Becker, he had a new project with NASA, some
d1037 1
a1037 1
Lou's quite excited about it."
d1680 1
a1680 1
office of her long-time friend Lou Becker, once space shuttle program
d1715 1
a1715 1
Lou had called her in for a reason.
d1725 1
a1725 1
"I'm not a detective, Lou."
d2077 1
a2077 1
phone and call Lou.  Siting up against the wall, she waited quietly
d2240 1
a2240 1
the basic engine thrust budget.  Lou had thought they might be selling
d2252 1
a2252 1
Houston was an hour ahead of them, so she hoped Lou was already at
d2257 1
a2257 1
"Lou, it's Andrea!"
d2420 1
a2420 1
Yeats was silent for only moment.  For the first time since Lou Becker
d2714 1
a2714 1
of an attack.  From his home in Houston, Lou Becker watched the press
d2800 1
a2800 1
called Lou at home.
d2804 1
a2804 1
"Where do you think I am, Lou?" she answered dryly.  "I'm in space."
d5653 1
a5653 1
Lou's face disappeared and the video transmission changed into a
d5665 1
a5665 1
began to break up, NASA Houston cut back onto the monitor.  Lou was
d5670 1
a5670 1
Lou's face cut back onto the monitor.
d5674 1
a5674 1
anything, she wanted to interject and ask Lou to show the
d5715 1
a5715 1
appeared in a window on Andrea's. _Lou_will_want_to_see_this_.
d5806 1
a5806 1
"Well, we've got NASA monitoring all of this, Lou," she asked the
d5825 1
a5825 1
the spaceship, because Lou's 'mission control' facility in Houston was
d5836 1
a5836 1
"Thought you might want to see this," Lou announced in his 0800
d5850 1
a5850 1
"Thanks a lot, Lou," Andrea told the video screen as Lou's voice continued
d6762 1
a6762 1
"Borzov!  They didn't tell me you were still here!  Why didn't Lou
d7056 1
a7056 1
we meet Andrea for the first time.  Lou dispatches her to look into all this
d7477 1
a7477 1
In Houston, Lou was watching the broadcast from a conference room in
d7484 1
a7484 1
status".  Lou stood silently watching the broadcast for a few more
d7494 1
a7494 1
Lou Becker's news conference was being carried live on national
d7527 1
a7527 1
nose in.  Lou pulled out a canned response he had prepared in advance.
d8074 1
a8074 1
themselves?"  Lou nodded.  "And their handling of the liquid state
d8077 1
a8077 1
Lou's response was negative.
d8811 1
a8811 1
her Mom.  So she should call her Mom first thing in space, then Lou.
d8813 1
a8813 1
LOU BECKER - KYLE BECKER?
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d568 1
a568 1
through the window of television.  _Terrorists_on_a_cruise_ship_.
d571 1
a571 1
Then they had emerged from the nursery to find the house engulfed in
d573 4
a576 4
many just assumed that all homes were in flames, that's why they were
made of wood.  Some had cowered under a table, or taken refuge in the
game room, hoping the fire would somehow spare them.  A few had found
a way out.  Some had jumped.
d8700 42
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d414 14
d564 14
@


1.118
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d8659 13
@


1.117
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d8650 1
d8652 4
d8675 5
d8682 4
d8688 2
d8692 3
d8730 1
a8730 1
LOU BECKER
@


1.116
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1708 29
a1736 2
towards "Site Y".  Picks up a hitchhiker, who eventually threatens to
rape her, but finally settles for stealing the car and her money.  She
d4423 18
a4440 12
second highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet?  Why every
time you turn on C.O.P.S, you see the police chasing after
'criminals', gang-tackling them, and dragging them off to prison?  Why
are you screaming for war on your own people and zero tolerance for
your own children?  The only people that the democrats persuade are
the majority.  Everyone else is ruled through threat and fear.  The
majority act real nice and polite to each other, then scream for the
criminal's blood and elect all these men who talk about cracking down
and getting tough, and how wonderful a world it is where anybody can
start a business and ruthlessly try to compete in this brutual
capitalist system.  The majority are perfectly willing to resort to
force; they do it _every_single_day_."
d4460 1
a4460 1
the depths of their being and find out who we really are, and what our
d8642 12
@


1.115
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d180 1
a180 1
while waiting for their hundred dollar drink orders.  Skilled
d5955 32
d6105 34
d6157 12
d6913 3
a6915 3
stuff Plato and Aristotle wrote about, St. Matthew and Thomas Aquinas,
Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, and Tolstoy, and none of them had all the
answers.  I mean..."
d7308 4
d7322 4
@


1.114
log
@little more about how andrea gets to Site Y
@
text
@d115 2
a116 1
to the fourth cubicle down, he saw HER NAME coming at a brisk pace in the
d118 8
a125 6
She often took it upon herself to remind the
absent-minded programmers of the obvious,
and when Burns quit this job, he would not miss
"Top of the morning to 'ya, Burns," or
"Donuts and Coffee, Burns," or
"Look sharp, today, Burns," or
d3466 7
a3472 6
in the great free democracy back them.  After a year-long legal battle
that I lost, I ended up with a court injunction against me for four
hundred thousand dollars in damages, and for what?  Because I worked
hard, developed a useful product, and was decent enough to want to see
it available to everyone who wanted a copy.  I'm still waiting for
that house, by that way."
d3522 3
a3524 3
freedom they're interested in is their own!  It's not about making
money, it's about how you treat people, and the capitalists treat
people like dirt!"
d3553 1
a3553 1
economic system'."
d3596 6
d3651 3
a3653 3
_does_not_ have any of these additional powers!  No right to regulate
communications, of radio or any other form!  No right to regulate drug
use!  No right to regulate firearms!"
d3669 3
a3671 1
_are_reserved_to_the_States_.  What good's a law when you pick and
d3692 5
a3696 2
Constitution.  I don't want anybody being able to come around a
hundred years from now and try to say that this wasn't really a
d3698 8
a3705 8
bunch of politicians took over the government.  This government, this
majority, talks so much about law and order, is so determined to make
all these rules for everyone else to obey, I'd just like to see them
have to obey the rules that were laid down for them.  It's a bit of a
side issue, but I'd really like a precedent established that the
powers of the government are limited by the Constitution."

[Maybe more in here about the FCC and the problems of radio networking.]
d3711 3
a3713 3
Rights, and in particular the Ninth and Tenth Ammendments, then sit
there and say that!  I can't even call it a lie!  It just flys in the
face of the English language!"
d3738 4
a3741 2
then you sit there are talk about 'freedom', you dirty son of a
bitch!"
d3760 4
a3763 3
is morality.  Freedom has to be used morally, and I think the objections
of Captain Mercuriou and people like him come down to morality.
They believe, and I tend to agree, that the majority of people have
d3770 1
a3770 1
"Morality is a function of religion.  We Christians look to the
d3788 4
a3791 3
The NASA engineer turned red and practically ripped the microphone
off her shirt before fleeing from the TV cameras.  Mercuriou
jumped into the gap.
d3795 7
a3801 1
Later, Mercuriou found Yeats back working in C-3.
d3804 1
a3804 1
steel to debate those bastards; it's like a blood sport.  They're not
d3813 5
a3817 3
the main functions of relgiion. I mean, how can you judge right or
wrong?  Why can't someone say that his religion allows human
sacrifice, for example?  Where's your freedom of religion then?"
d3827 9
a3835 9
know you don't, either.  I think half of what religion is, heck, maybe
90% of what religion is is giving us standards to judge right and
wrong.  Murder isn't wrong because it's illegal, it's wrong because
it's immoral, and you can't decide what's moral and immoral without
religion.  So that's why I think freedom of religion, or more precisly
seperation of religion from public life, is a chimera.  You can have
freedom to go to whatever church you want, but you can't have a
society without some kind of shared norm of morality, and that means
religion."
a3842 11
... the next day ...

Mercuriou had taken the conversation with Yeats to heart, and
when the interview started was absolutely determined to discuss morality.

"Every murder ever committed in human history was perpetrated by a
murderer who had freedom!  Every rape, every theft!  Every slave was
enchained by the _freedom_ of his master, yes _freedom_!  I'm
so sick of listening to you people crow on about 'freedom'!
Freedom in the absence of morality is the single most destructive
force this planet has _ever_ seen!"
d3853 6
a3858 5
nearly all the American political leaders, regardless of party
affiliation or personal temperment.  At any rate, he was back on
television.  Tonight, he faced off against Govenor Jeff Zee, one of
the country's most prominent politicians, a state governor widely
expected to run for president in the upcoming election.
d3865 5
a3869 3
"Well, let's make it the issue!  All this stuff you trumpet sounds
great, but talk about the pot calling the kettle black!  How are you
so much better than all these terrible capitalists you lamblast?
d3881 2
a3882 2
"Is cheating a state lottery system to the tune of a couple million
right or wrong?"
d3884 1
a3884 1
"Hey, I needed a lot of money to put this launch together..."
d3889 2
a3890 2
need money to write them, money to print them, money to food in front
of their children!"
d3901 35
a3935 1
the T.V. camera.  His salvation came from an unexpected source.
a3936 2
"OK, Zee, that's enough."  Andrea pushed her way into the picture.
"You've made your point.  Now you can answer his points."
d3938 5
a3942 1
"Points?  He has no points.  He's a criminal and a thief."
d3944 2
a3945 1
"He's said a lot about capitalism and democracy, I think."
d3947 5
a3951 1
"He's said nothing.  The ranting of a criminal trying to justify his
d3969 2
a3970 2
_yourself_and_let_this_'invisible_hand'_take_care_of_'society'._
It's depraved!  It's absolutely depraved!"
d4010 11
a4020 9
"That's right.  Remeber the story of the rich man and the old woman?
The rich man went to the synagogue, gave a big donation.  The old
woman gave two bits.  Christ then asked which went away redeemed.  Now
think about this.  Did he then say, 'Look at how much good can be done
with all the rich man's money'?  'Look how many people can be helped'?
'What can you do with two bits'?  'The old woman might as well have
not even gone'?  No.  He tells us the old woman goes away redemed
because she have _everything_ she's got!  She's told 'give to
all those who beg of you' and does!  That's _moral_ behavior!"
d4033 1
a4033 1
Again Zee paused to inhale and contemplate the video image of the NASA
d4036 1
a4036 1
"You know. doctor, I've heard many conflicting stories about your
d4039 1
a4039 1
"You know, governor, there's a time-honored debating tactic called
d4043 1
a4043 1
doctor!"
d4064 2
a4065 2
"I'm completely serious, and so was Christ.  Of course, he also told
the thief some things he doesn't want to hear, either, like 'thou
d4083 4
a4086 5
the thief needs to do is ask."

"So if Mr. Gates decides to be a Christian, all we'd have to do to get
the source code for Windows would be to ask.  Instead he's decided
to be a philanthroper."
d4099 3
a4101 2
Monday because they need the money, and have no intention of just
giving it all away to anyone who asks."
d4108 1
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a4141 2
"Communism wasn't a democracy, or a populist goverment..." Zee began
to retort, but Mercurio cut him off.
d4143 26
a4168 39
"Then how did they win their Civil War in Russia?  The Whites had all
the old czarist military officers, they had foreign aid from the
United States and Great Britian, the Reds were isolated and on their
own, yet still they managed to win that war!  How did they did that if
nobody supported them?"

"The communists lied to their people..." Zee began.

"Oh no they didn't!  You want to understand communism, read the last
page of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engles talk about
letting the world tremble in fear of a communist revolution.  _That_'s
communism - stick AK-47s in the hands of the peasants and let the
world tremble in fear!  That's what all those people wanted -
expropriate the expropriators and let everyone tremble in fear!"

The astronaut went on without waiting for a response.

"Communism was one of the biggest populist movements of the twentieth
century!  Practically every country in existance had some kind of
communist insurgancy!  They took over half this planet!  Millions upon
millions of people _believed_ in communism!  To claim that the
communists were some tiny bunch of dictators flies in the face of
history!  Take Vietnam - why were all those 15-year-olds hauling
AK-47s around the Mekong Delta if the communists were just some tiny
cliche holed up in the Kremlin?!"

"The communists installed brutal dictatorships in every country they
took power in!"  Zee shot back.  "Look at the people in Russia!  If
communism is so populist, why did they need another revolution to take
back their government!"

"Because once the communists got entrenched it was almost impossible
to remove them, just like it'd be almost impossible to remove the
capitalists from power the west - they control everything!  If
communism wasn't populist, then why did a third of the Russian
electorate vote for Zyuganov in 1996?  And this is part of an ongoing
trend that has made the Communist Party the single largest political
party in Russia!  Now what possible explanation is there for this
except that millions upon millions of Russians _to_this_day_ support
d4194 13
a4206 26
"Next I guess you'll be telling us that the German people elected
Hitler in 1932," Zee dryly observed.

"Well, the next thing I'll tell you is that the German people elected
the Nazis in 1932."

"Oh, please, Hitler's Germany was one of the most brutal dictatorships..."

"That the people elected!  That the people elected!  In 1932, the Nazis
won a third of the vote in the last free election..."

"A third!"  Zee fired back.  "Not a majority!"

"Hey, if you can get a third of the people to support you, you can get
half.  Anyway, they got more votes than any other political party;
they won a plurality.  They got enough votes to make Hermann Goering
president of the Reischtag, enough votes to defeat Von Papen's
government on a vote of no-confidence, enough votes to create a
situtation where Adolf Hitler was basically the only viable choice for
German chancellor.  Generally speaking, that means they won the
election!"

Zee and the moderator were both silent, perhaps in a stunned sort of
way, and the _Icarus_ commander stormed on.

"Over thirteen million people voted Nazi in 1932!  Thirteen million!
d4209 75
a4283 105
of thirteen million people!  And don't say that the German people
didn't knew what they were getting.  Read the first chapter, the first
page, of _Mein_Kampf_!  The part where Hitler talks about 'the moral
right of armed conquest'!  That book was a best-seller in Germany!
That's what those people voted for - 'the moral right of armed
conquest'!  People supported the Nazis for basically the same reason
people supported the communists and the same reason people today
support the capitalists - because they were brutal as hell, and that's
what works in the "real world" and that's all these millions and
millions of people "know"!  I'm telling you... democracy is another
communism!"

"Another communism?" the moderator cut it, stunned.

"That's right.  It's another big pile of books and theories that sound
real good on paper, and in practice has produced some of the most
depraved societies that's every been seen on the face of this planet.
People will look back on this a hundred years from..."

It was more than Zee could take.  Visibly redening, now it was
the governor's turn to cut off the space captain.

"Look here, democracy may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better
than just about anything else out there.  In the last 200 years, we've
abolished slavery, and that alone has to count as one of the biggest
achieve..."

Mercurio cut right back in.  The debate had turned into an
intellectual free-for-all.

"Abolished slavery!  In the bloodiest war this country has ever had!
Is that what it will take to abolish capitalism?  To end the Drug War?
I don't know how many more 'successes' like the Civil War this country
can afford.  But the communists abolished slavery, too.  That isn't
the point.  The point..."

"Yes it is the point!  Yes it is! Don't go brushing off everything
this country's accompished just 'cause you can't see anything but it's
faults!  We're not perfect, but the majority of this country's people
are decent, hardworking folk who want a better life not just for
themselves, but for decent people everywhere!  And unlike these
dictatorships, and I do mean _dictatorships_, we have a legitamtite
system of government."

"And just what is a legitamite government, anyway?"

A pause fell over the broadcast, and Mercurio repeated his question.
"What is a legitimate government?"

"A democratically elected body with the support of the people."

"You mean the support of the majority?"

"Well, the people are..."

"The people are the majority?  And what about the minority?  I guess they're
not people, huh?"

"The rights of the minorities have to be protected, but the overwheling
majority of people support democracy, even if they don't win a particular
election..."

"Of course they support it - they're the majority!  Basically, the
only legimitate form of government is democracy, right?  Everything
else is illegimiate, and if your government is illegimiate, you
basically have no rights, there is no international law for you, so
better buddy up with the U.S. or you might find the SEALs airdropping
on your international airport one morning."

Mercuriou paused for breath, and the newsman chose this moment to
jump in and try to bring the debate back under control.  He decided to
do it by challenging one of the astronaut's more dramatic claims.

"Gentlemen, please.  Captain Mercurio, many people critize the United
States, but another communism?  You can't be serious."

"Look here, it's the same with all these populist governments,"
Mercurio replied.

"Populist?" the congressmen retorted.

"Yes, _populist_," the spaceman replied.  "Communism was one of the
biggest mass populist movements of the twentieth centry.  Millions of
people in Germany voted Nazi.  This is the truth about populist
government.  The masses of people are selfish and violent.  That's why
they chose people like the communists and the fascists and the
capitalists to be their leaders!"

Governor Zee looked like he was ready to reach through the TV
monitor and rip the spaceman's head off.  He replied in clipped,
measured tones that betrayed the rage he felt at his floating nemisis.

"Capitalism is totally different from communism.  Communism was a
brutual, murderous dictatorship.  And I want to be very clear on that
word - dictatorship.  There was nothing populist about it in the
least."

"Nothing populist about communism?  Then how did it manage to take
over half this planet?  It was the same with the Nazis, elected in
1932, and yes, despite every attempt to claim the contrary, they were
_elected_; France, the French Revolution, whose leaders talked about
liberty, fraternity, and equality, then built guilateons in the public
squares of Paris and chopped off the heads of the nobelmen.  Europe's
first democracy - and every one of those men was elected - Coulton,
Saint Just, Robspierre, and of course, finally, Napoleon."
a4284 1
"Napoleon was elected?" Black sneered.
a4285 2
"He could have been.  He could have won any election in that country.
Bonaparte was one of France's most popular leaders."
d4288 21
a4308 20
years.  It just keeps repeating the same lyrics - 'put the people
in control', 'put the people in control', 'put the people in control'!
All these people talk about these grandeose ideas of liberty
and freedom, and then choose absolute garbage for their leaders, and
build societies based on the basest and most vicious traits of
mankind.  This time around it's the capitalists - the most selfish
sons of bitches you'd ever want to meet, and the majority support
these bums every step of the way.  And of course they can't spend
enough money to build the most lethal killing machines this planet has
ever seen.  This is what the majority of people want - the
capitalists, the most selfish men you'd ever want to meet, and the
democrats, who are going to get tough with anybody who won't follow
all these laws.  Real good leaders."

Mercurio stopped, and Zee didn't retort immediately.  A tense silence
fell over the television program.  Across the country, millions of
people in their homes murmorred amongst themselves.  "I don't want to
hear any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Marc!"  "That bastard deserves
to die up there!"  "I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is this what people
think about us?"
d4319 1
a4319 1
of the camera.  It read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS. []
d4321 1
a4321 1
[This T-shirt isn't original.  A friend of mine has one.]
a4322 1
"We're going to Mars!"
d4329 4
a4332 3
Despite all the attention heaped on the Merceriou and his
wildly anti-democratic views, there were other crew members
on the spaceship, and now Vic was taking his turn at the mic.
d4348 1
a4348 1
Indians?"  X asked sarcastically.
d4356 1
a4356 1
Vic chuckled.  X didn't.  Neither did Captain Merceriou, watching
d4390 2
a4391 2
"You sound like a fucking communist!" he snarled at the camera,
while in New York Koppel winced as the broadcast profanity.
d4409 1
a4409 1
The moderator cut in before Ecks could get more than a word off.
d4430 2
d4593 1
a4593 1
"Well, I've been a few, many years ago, before I had a steady job
d4666 1
a4666 1
like Capitalism.  Chirst say 'give to all those who beg of you'.  He
a4853 2
[This T-shirt is original.  I've never seen one as described.]

d4919 4
a4922 4
"The captain?"  Burns was quiet for a minute.  "He's a lot different
now than he was in college.  Back then, all he wanted was a joint, a
beer and a Latin dictionary and he was happy.  Now, he's a lot more...
driven," he concluded with a shrug.
d5931 2
a5932 8
	"Moscow, the 'Village of the Czars', the
	future 'capital of the Communist International',
	the site of his greatest triumphs and of his greatest defeats;
	he came in as a persecuted political prisioner
	he left in the same way
	he would never see her again."

"Or something like that," he muttered aloud.
d5936 2
a5937 2
"Oh, nothing, just something from a book I read."  He motioned
to the sands of the red planet.
d7080 1
d7110 5
a7114 1
Andrea asks Burns about Merciruou.  MUTE.  The problem with being smart.
d7210 14
a7223 2
The "quote" is from the German's three-part biography of Trotsky,
in translation.  It's not exact, I don't have the book in front of me.
d8511 24
d8576 4
d8588 2
d8592 2
d8595 2
@


1.113
log
@andrea hitchhiking
@
text
@d1701 15
d2002 1
a2002 1
"I still don't like it," Alister said.  "We've basically kidnapped her."
@


1.112
log
@revised scene 2 a bit
@
text
@d895 40
a934 15
manager left for work in the morning, Andrea left too, driving into
Houston in her ten-year-old Volvo.  She headed into one of the older
and more run-down sections of town and found a hundred-year-old
Catholic church, Saint Andrew's, that occupied almost an entire city
block.  Built of stone and with metal bars on its windows, it could
have been a prison except for the cross mounted on its steeple.
Driving around back, she found a rear entrance, parked the car on the
street, left the keys in the ignition and the door unlocked, and
walked to the door bearing a colorful sign, "The Franciscan Fryer".

Entering the building, she found herself in a dining room populated by
collapable tables and chairs with a half-dozen men preparing the room
for lunch.  An erasable whiteboard near the door proclaimed "Today's
Specials" in pre-printed type and below, handwritten with a faded
black marker, "The Usual".
d939 1
a939 1
"That's OK, I'm looking for Brother Dunstan," she replied.
d998 2
a999 2
"No, I heading back to my family's place in Iowa today.  I just drove
down to visit Lou Becker, he had a new project with a NASA, some
d1015 5
a1019 5
I was hungry, you fed me."  She put the only three twenty dollar bills
she had into the envelope, sealed it, and slipped it in the drop box
on her way out the door.

[So how's she pay for gas going home?  Maybe she has a credit card.]
@


1.111
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d236 10
a245 9
T-shirt, khaki shorts, tennis shoes composed his modest attire.  The
secret of his success lay more in the intangibles - above-average
intelligence, a love of literature and learning, and a driving
ambition.  Like his paternal ancestors, who had decended from the
Scythian plains to ravage the heart of the Roman Empire, he was
fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to take on the world,
undetered by any temporary setbacks in his plans, and absolutely
convinced that he would ultimately win.  He was also the closest thing
Burns had to a boss.
d255 45
a299 1
mustache that often covered a mischevious smile.
d301 2
a302 4
"We've got money."

Mercuriou produced a wad of fifty-dollar bills and fanned them.  Vic
looked at him directly, concerned.
d309 13
a321 19
"Well, maybe I've changed," the younger man answered, then paused.
"I'm going to Mars.  I need the money."

_Oh,_no_,_not_Mars_, Antonov thought, slowly pouring the water into a
pair of ceramic mugs, _not_again_.  His level of distraction was
illustrated by his need to return to the kitchen for teabags, for the
mugs contained nothing but hot water.  They had met in college, when
Mercuriou was an eighteen-year-old freshman in love with classical
literature and Vic was finishing medical school.  Marc had briefly
dated the future doctor's cousin. The courtship had foundered; the
friendship had lasted for almost twenty years.

Vic handed one of the mugs to his old friend and sat down across from
him.  The trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of a single man.  A
small siting room to the right of the door was partitioned from the
kitchen by a small counter.  Beyond the sink and its clutter of dirty
dishes, a sliding door lead to a small bathroom and then to the only
bedroom on the far end of trailer, where a gray cat had disappeared as
soon as a stranger had entered the abode.
d329 4
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a338 1
"He says it's a crap shot.  One I'm willing to take.  Hell, what else
d395 2
a396 1
"I told you," the doctor wryly noted, "I've quit smoking."
d402 4
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"Sure.  But why fool around with brownies?  It's better fresh.  I've
got some AIDS patients I take care of, just G.P. stuff, but the guys
with money provide enough to keep this place running."
@


1.110
log
@fiddling 'games'
@
text
@d17 1
a17 1
I'LL NOT GET STUCK IN "IVY TOWERS"
d21 1
a21 1
I'LL TRUST MAN TO KNOW IT HAS ERRORS
d7975 4
a7978 3
the movie, written in blood on the wall: 'touchable'.  That's why we
hear all this crying now about weapons of mass destruction, because
these are the _only_ weapons that can really target THE MAJORITY.
@


1.109
log
@flushed out the intro

heading for the mountains
@
text
@d23 1
a23 1
THE BODY OF THE WORK IS FICTION
d30 1
a30 1
DEMOCRACY IS TRASH.
d37 1
a37 1
JUST TO PROVE THAT YOU CAN'T CHAIN MEN
d43 1
a43 2
THE MASSES OF PEOPLE - THE MAJORITY -
IN CONTROL OF SOCIETY.
a44 1
IT'S TIME TO REJECT THIS SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT.
d50 2
a51 3
SOME NIGHTMARE SYSTEM (CAPITALISM)
BASED ON THE SAME IDEA - CONFLICT - AS
THE OTHER NIGHTMARE SYSTEMS (FASCISM, COMMUNISM)
d61 5
a65 2
IS _NOT_ FREEDOM,
AND THEN TO PROCLAIM THE ALTERNATIVE.
d468 1
a468 1
talking, walking, driving, cleaning.
d519 1
a519 1
_I_wanted_to_be_a_doctor!_ The thought burst upon with a flash of
d521 2
a522 2
_Did_the_iguana_want_to_be_an_iguana?_ he wondered.
_Did_the_cow_want_to_be_a_belt?_
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a8235 2
	books are the ticket
	books are the tool
d8239 12
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@


1.108
log
@poem
@
text
@d20 1
a20 1
I'LL PRAY GOD TO BLESS THIS BOOK
d27 3
a29 1
THIS IS THE THESIS OF THIS NOVEL.
d31 3
a33 5
FOR STARTERS, IT'S GIVEN US CAPITALISM.
WE CAN GO THROUGH ITS HISTORY, TOO, AND I WILL.
IT BROUGHT NAPOLEON TO POWER IN FRANCE
IT BROUGHT HITLER TO POWER IN GERMANY
MILLIONS OF PEOPLE _STILL_ SUPPORT COMMUNISM IN RUSSIA
d37 4
a40 1
JUST TO PROVE THAT YOU CAN'T CHAIN BLACK MEN.
d43 2
a44 1
THE MASSES OF PEOPLE - THE MAJORITY - IN CONTROL.
d48 1
d53 2
a54 4
BASED ON THE SAME IDEAS - CONFLICT - AS
THE OTHER NIGHTMARE SYSTEMS (FASCISM, COMMUNISM) AND
EVERYONE IS BASICALLY FORCED TO WORK FOR THESE BUMS
OR YOU STARVE
d56 9
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d8219 24
a8242 1
		"Games"
a8243 12
don't give up your life
don't get hooked playing games
games waste your time
games waste your brain

don't get in the habit of playing games
books help you learn
books help your brain

don't get in the habit of playing games
drugs help you learn
drugs help your brain
d8277 2
a8278 2
   Just advance a little forward,
   You'll get around OK next time.
d8289 89
@


1.107
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d22 1
a22 1
REMEMBER - THIS IS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
d24 33
@


1.106
log
@coddled technocrats
@
text
@d21 1
a21 1
I'LL TRUST MAN TO READ IT
@


1.105
log
@glass doors
@
text
@d20 4
a23 3
SOME OF THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED
SOME OF THEM REMAIN THE SAME
THE BODY OF THIS WORK IS FICTION
d52 2
a53 2
He past the bike rake, past the glass doors, past
the potted plants and the pet rocks,
d60 3
a62 6
crown jewels - the gold-collar technologists
housed the brain trust of the corporation.
dominated the ground floor of the building.  This was Chesapeake's
brain trust, headquarters of the programmers and engineers that
built its flagship products.  Corporate management had wisely
consigned itself to a seperate building across the street.
@


1.104
log
@phillie cream cheese - don't have that in Mexico!
@
text
@d51 1
a51 1
He past the bike rake, past the front door, past
d54 1
a54 1
and stoked 'fridge, turned right at the copiers,
d58 2
a59 1

d8055 2
a8056 2
don't get in the habit
  of playing games
@


1.103
log
@pet rocks
@
text
@d54 4
a57 3
and stoked refrigerator, turned right at
the photo-copiers and entered a
two-story cave partitioned in a hundred cubicles - his life for six long months.
@


1.102
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d51 4
a54 3
He past the front door, past the potted plants
and the pet rock, blew off the break room and
its stoked refrigerator, turned right at
@


1.101
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d51 3
a53 2
He past the front door, past the break room, its
refrigerator stoked full, turned right at
d55 1
a55 1
two-story cave partitioned in a hundred cubicles.
d8104 5
@


1.100
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d39 1
a39 1
Burns parked in the employee lot, walked past
d48 1
a48 1
around the world, the brains of the network,
d51 6
a56 6
Burns pushed open the plate glass doors, waved to the receptionist
behind the curved mahongony desk that dominated the center of a lobby
formed by potted plants, couches and coffee tables, slid his card key
through the black plastic box to the side of the employee's entrance,
pushed open the door after its lock clicked open, and walked into to a
massive two-story room subdivided into hundreds of cubicles that
@


1.99
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d46 2
a47 2
routers, metal cabinets humming in the
server rooms of Internet providers
@


1.98
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a43 1

d45 5
a49 9
the largest router manufacturer in
the world.  Routers, Internet's phone
switches, gray metal cabinets humming in
the backrooms of Internet providers
the world 'round, most bearing that same one-word logo.
 of routers, the
telephone switches of the Internet, the gray metal cabinets whose fans
hummed in the backrooms of thousands of Internet service providers,
most bearing that same one-word, blue-white logo.
@


1.97
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d42 2
a43 2
back cast a sailboat's mast, and the whole thing
a visage of waves breaking on the bay.
@


1.96
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d34 1
a34 1
then went in as "root", dropped the binary
d37 1
a37 1
the whole install.  But they were then just kids.
d47 4
a50 2
the world.  Routers, the Internet's phone
switches,
@


1.95
log
@just kids
@
text
@d33 2
a34 2
the program would accept posts anyway.
They went in as "root", dropped the binary
d40 2
a41 2
the fountain in front of the meter high
blue corporate logo "Chesapeake," the k's
@


1.94
log
@ACCESS 5 DENIED
@
text
@d37 1
a37 1
the whole install.  But that hack was kid's stuff.
d40 1
a40 1
the fountain in front of a meter high
d46 4
a49 1
possibly the world's largest manufacturer of routers, the
d8054 2
a8055 1
don't get in the habit of playing games
@


1.93
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d32 1
a32 1
that after printing ACCESS IS DENIED
@


1.92
log
@what else do fountains do?
@
text
@d41 6
a46 13
blue, corporate logo "Chesapeake," the k's
back of a sailboat's mast, and the entire
a visage of waves breaking on the namesake bay.
word
the three-foot concrete corporate logo formed
of one word, "Chesapeake", the back of the 'k' formed in the shape
of a sailboat's mast and a blue-and-white color
to the main entrance, past a fountain spraying water, fronted by a 3-foot-high
corporate logo cast out of concrete - the word "Chesapeake", with the
'k' forming the shape
scheme that cleverly gave the impression of waves breaking on its
namesake bay.  Chesapeake Computer Corporation - depending on how you
measured it, possibly the world's largest manufacturer of routers, the
@


1.91
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d33 2
a34 2
the program would accept posts anyway,
then went in as "root", dropped the binary
d40 5
a44 1
the fountain spraying water in front of
d8073 1
a8073 1
the majority.
d8077 2
d8081 1
a8081 1
talking about N-1033 all over the place.  Then we'll have 10-33 fumes
d8100 9
@


1.90
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d8091 1
a8091 1
Earth may be but a joust between Good and Evil.
d8093 1
@


1.89
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d8085 8
a8092 1
that Evil is always present, especially at turns near the end.
@


1.88
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d39 6
a44 2
Burns parked his car in the employee lot and walked to the main
entrance, past a fountain spraying water, fronted by a 3-foot-high
d46 1
a46 1
'k' forming the shape of a sailboat's mast and a blue-and-white color
d8047 39
@


1.87
log
@fiddling
@
text
@d32 2
a33 2
that after printing ACCESS DENIED the
program went and accepted it anyway,
@


1.86
log
@the book is really flushing out, but I've still got a serious problem
with Andrea Yeats, and not that she drowned her kids in a bathtub.  We
see almost nothing of her prior to the launch, so we really don't know
how she lives _on_Earth_, and that weakens the power of her words
@
text
@d18 1
a18 1
I'LL REMEBER THOSE WHO DO THE HARD WORK
d31 7
a37 14
They had recompiled the server with 'gcc', goten a
smaller executable than the original, altered it so that after
printing 502 ACCESS DENIED it went and accepted the post anyway, then
padded the end of the program to make the CRC come out right.  They
wern't using MD5 back then, heck, it hadn't even been invented yet.
Then Burns dug through the engineering and computer science library
for the VAX Architecture Reference Manual, figured how to drop the
student workstations into a diagnostic mode by hitting the little blue
button on the back of the machine, installed packet sniffers on couple
of them, and waited a few days to grab the server's root password as
it went by over an unencrypted telnet.  They went in as root and just
dropped the new server binary onto the hard drive.  It ran for six
months unnoticed, until the staff updated the whole OS installation.
But this hack was even better.
d121 18
a138 17
An afternoon of sailing was a tempting proposition, and HIS NAME had a
nice boat.  A roaring economic boom kept restaurants, bars, and
shopping malls packed with young, dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings
sitting on thousands of dollars worth of stock options.  Every other
car on University Avenue was either a Ferrari, or a BMW, or a Land
Rover - most of them leased.  Up scale restaurants provided their
patrons with blank paper placemats and colorful Crayons to doodle and
brainstorm their latest propietary server architecture while waiting
for their hundred dollar drink orders.  Skilled programmers were in
short supply.  Someone with Burns' qualifications was a genuine find.
His job interview was little more than a technical presentation in
front of a conference room of corporate engineers and managers, and he
had quickly gotten the run of Chesapeake's operation, which was far
more concerned with filling the next multi-million-dollar order and
satisfying those customers by cramming miriads of new features into
their products than implementing any real security against a
determined insider attempting to hack their systems.
d140 1
a140 3
"No, I gotta get this done," he truthfully answered.

"Thanks for the offer."
d199 1
a199 1
production system, Burns got sick of the job and quit after two, but
d492 5
a496 3
Vic felt depressed.  Finally the sunlight was gone, leaving only
a blue sky that deepened into purple, then black.  Here, away
from the city lights, stars began to emerge.
d505 3
a507 6
psuedo-science of devising laws to play a game we do not understand.
For all the paucity of science, at least the physicists demanded that
all their math eventually predict something real.

Night came.  Crickets and frogs trumpeted its arrival.  Not far
away, a rattlesnake slithered silently across the still warm sand.
d567 2
a568 2
He looked back at the arroyo, regretting that he hadn't returned
again to bathe.
@


1.85
log
@the problem with this ending is that it leaves the
door open for a sequel (sigh)

young pilots make national heros
@
text
@d6056 9
d6068 2
a6069 1
Vic: "What's going to happen to U.S, Marc?  I mean, really?"
d6072 2
a6073 2
could be heard.  The doctor has blurt out the question that millions
of people had wondered at times, and much more recently since
d6083 2
a6084 2
"But you don't think they will."  It was more a statement than a
question, but the captain shook his head in response.
d6086 8
a6093 6
"No," he answered softly, then took a deep breath and exhaled.  "My
best guess is that its people'll just rip it apart from within.  It
keeps getting more and more violent, and the only solution the
democrats have is to keep cracking down harder and getting tougher.
Eventually the violence of its own people will destroy it.  That's my
best guess."
d6435 2
a6436 2
"Communism _is_ dead, nawh tovarish, but it's legacy lives on.  Not
everyone is my country believes capitalism is best for Russia."
d6456 2
a6457 1
"Limitations, definitely," Mercuriou answered without hesitation.
d6493 4
a6496 4
continued, indicating Alister.  "He had a good bit to do with your
hacks; he might end up on trial, too.  At the very least, your police
will want to question him extensively about Burns' methods.  And he's
not even from your country."
d6506 1
a6506 1
"What happens if the government changes in Moscow?" Andrea asked.
@


1.84
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1706 9
a1714 1
it was locked, and walked away.
d6489 8
a6496 3
"We'll let him go to any country that'll take him, but that might be a
problem.  He could end up stuck in Russia if South Africa decides to
extridite."
d6590 3
d7044 4
a7047 1
			===========
a7904 4

"Mr. Mercuriou..."

"_Captain_ Mercuriou, it's _Captain_ Mercuriou!"
@


1.83
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d68 4
a71 4
The key card was real.  Burns was a legitimate employee, number 3504,
hired almost six months before after a job interview that consisted of
little more than technical presentation in front of a conference room
of corporate engineers and managers.  He walked down the mammoth
d74 1
a74 1
to the fourth cubicle, he saw HER NAME coming at a brisk pace in the
d85 1
a85 1
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," he muttered without turning around,
d87 12
a98 12
logged in and began reading his email.  The company's
main development computer was scheduled for a hardware upgrade today
that would boost its processing power by nearly a factor of ten,
though the use of a faster, multi-processor system.  Half of Burns'
email consisted of brief notes from various employees that they were
taking the whole day off, turning the system upgrade into an excuse
for a three-day weekend.  Burns, on the other hand, had no intension
of being anywhere but in the office today.  He found his job boring,
wanted to be rid of it as quickly as possible, and had no intension of
letting _this_ opportunity slip by.  He finished skimming the email,
shouldered the laptop case while the terminal finished its logout
sequence, and headed for the server room.
d136 4
a139 2
for their hundred dollar orders.  Skilled programmers were in short
supply.  Someone with Burns' qualifications was a genuine find, and he
d146 3
a148 1
"No, I gotta get this done," which was true.  "Thanks for the offer."
d207 3
a209 2
production system, Burns quit after three, but it worked.  They've
been shipping it for about half a year, now."
d224 1
a224 1
"Marc, this isn't like you, you're not a thief," his host stated.
@


1.82
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d22 1
a22 1
THIS BODY OF WORK IS FICTION
d73 15
a87 10
cubicles, half of them deserted.  Turning down a side isle, he walked
to the fourth cubicle, tossed his laptop case on a chair, sat down in
front of his terminal, logged in and began reading his email.

"System's going down today, Burns," announced a neatly attired
secretary walking at brisk pace in the other direction down the isle
that backed the cubicle, who often took it upon herself to remind the
absent-minded programmers of the obvious.

"Yep," the programmer replied without turning around.  The company's
d116 34
a149 25
Burns keyed the door to the server room and walked in.

A roaring economic boom kept restaurants, bars, and shopping malls
packed with young, dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings sitting on thousands
of dollars worth of stock options.  Every other car on University
Avenue was either a Ferrari, or a BMW, or a Land Rover - most of them
leased.  Up scale restaurants provided their patrons with blank paper
placemats and colorful Crayons to doodle and brainstorm their latest
propietary server architecture while waiting for their hundred dollar
orders.  Skilled programmers were in short supply.  Someone with
Burns' qualifications was a genuine find, and he had quickly gotten
the run of Chesapeake's operation, which was far more concerned with
filling the next multi-million-dollar order and satisfying those
customers by cramming miriads of new features into their products than
implementing any real security against a determined insider attempting
to hack their systems.

Inside the server room, a white-walled room with a elevated floor that
covered a haylon-based fire extinguisher system, the new server
hardware was laid out along one wall, its technicians chatting
leisurely amonst themselves while awaiting the announced time to
shutdown the system.  Burns crossed to the other side of the room,
where he was working on a tricky install of a new high-speed optical
interface in one of the test machines.  Somehow, he just couldn't seem
to get the settings right.
d180 1
a180 1
"I'm telling you," Marcelius Mercuriou concluded, "this thing is like
d183 3
a185 3
A silence fell over the house trailer, punctuated only by the
whistling of a teakettle and a single word from the man in front of it
as he slowly shook his head.
d189 16
a204 11
Mercuriou nodded in assent.  In his late thirties and a shade under
six feet tall, his cheekbones betrayed the mixed features of his
hybrid Romanian/Irish ancestry.  A white T-shirt, khaki shorts, tennis
shoes composed his modest attire.  The secret of his success lay more
in the intangibles - above-average intelligence, a love of literature
and learning, and a driving ambition.  Like his paternal ancestors,
who had decended from the Scythian plains to ravage the heart of the
Roman Empire, he was fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to take
on the world, undetered by any temporary setbacks in his plans, and
absolutely convinced that he would ultimately win.  He was also
the closest thing Burns had to a boss.
d206 1
a206 1
The man who slowly poured the water into a pair of ceramic mugs was
d208 24
a231 9
with a bristling mustache that often covered a mischevious smile.
Dressed in a button-down shirt and light slacks, Victor Antonov's
level of distraction was illustrated by his need to return to the
kitchen for teabags, as the mugs contained nothing but hot water.
They had met in college, when Mercuriou was an eighteen-year-old
freshman in love with classical literature and Vic was finishing
medical school.  Marc had briefly dated the future doctor's
cousin. The courtship had foundered; the friendship had lasted for
almost twenty years.
d241 5
a245 8
"Going to Mars, huh," the doctor noted.  Mercuriou wasn't joking.  He
thought back over the years he had known Marc Mercuriou.  If he had
learned one thing about the man, it was that he wouldn't undertake a
project if he didn't think he could finish it.  He'd sit and do
nothing before undertaking something half-baked.

"I thought you estimated it would take billions just to fly to the
moon."
d247 2
a248 9
"The money's not a problem."

Vic now turned and looked Mercuriou directly in the eye.  The younger
man produced a wad of fifty-dollar bills and fanned them.

"Let's just say that there are some Keno systems out there that are no
longer completely random," he replied to the unasked question.  "But
it won't make a difference if we can't overcome the technical
problems."
d256 1
a256 1
"Why not?"
d261 1
a261 1
Vic chuckled.  The smile appeared beneath the mustache.
d601 43
a643 33
Burns was counting on twentieth century physics for a breakthrough of
the first magnitude.  He dumped the money from the lottery into copies
of _Gaussian_, along with its most elaborately expensive spinoffs and
a team of programmers, including a bright 20-year-old South African
chemist named Alister Compton.

Burns set his team to work on his assortment of computational
chemistry programs.  What they were looking for, he explained, was a
new type of liquid rocket fuel.  Many liquid fuels, such as liquid
hydrogen, were cryogenic and required elaborate cooling systems to
keep them refrigerated well below freezing.  NASA, for example, kept
the space shuttle's rocket fuel stored in a specially built
underground tank, and only pumped it into the shuttle's external tank
the night before launch.  Worse, even most efficient liquid fuels had
rather poor specific impulses, that crucial ratio between the force
generated by the propellant and the force exerted on it by gravity,
and also rather poor specific volumes, resulting in the need for very
large tanks to contain the propellants.  Solid fuel propellants
performed better, which is why the space shuttle used a pair of
booster rockets to help propel it into space, but with the severe
drawback that they couldn't be simply throttled back or turned off
like liquid fuel propellants.  Burns wanted to develop a liquid fuel
that would remain liquid at room temperature, eliminating the need for
elaborate cooling systems, and that would have a specific impulse and
specific volume rivaling the best of the solid propellants.

He set his programmers to work installing an array of fast, expensive
computers he had brought to perform the Shroedinger approximations in
parallel, running dozens of computers simultaneously to predict the
melting point, boiling point, ionization energy, chemical potential,
thermodynamic constants, a dozen other predictions that may or may not
be accurate.  Once a promising candidate was identified, the next
question was how to create it in a series of reactions.  Again, the
d651 4
a654 4
continued, stubborn belief, much to Burns' great alarm and dismay, that
kerosene would react with hydrogen peroxide at a specific impulse of
298 without the presence of a catalyst.  So the only way to find out
if any of the predictions were even remotely possible, they had to
d658 3
a660 10
"Vic!" Burns exclaimed, turning away from his computer as
Mercuriou walked up with the doctor.

"Hello, Burns!" the physician greeted his old college housemate with
an arm clasped around the shoulder and a handshake.  "Marc told me all
about this, and I wanted to come see it for myself."

The three men retired to Mercuriou's office, where Antonov
produced a casserole dish, paper plates and plastic forks
from a bag he had walked in with.
d663 1
a663 1
lid off the casserole dish.
d6608 1
a6608 1
John Pople.  Gaussian.
d6610 1
a6610 1
THIS IS WHERE VIC JOINS UP
d6620 1
a6620 1
T - 148 days <****>
@


1.81
log
@where did this come from?

I was sitting with some Mexican friends and thought about the
"real people who do the real work" - who am I, a maestro?
I do the work of a seven-year-old!
@
text
@a1 14
LINGURING ISSUES
----------------
Burns' and Alister's drug use
rape scene
Andrea's response to September 11
launch date
exactly how Andrea gets on the ship



Congressman Ecks - capitalism
Senator Wye - freedom / drug war / border policy / liberties of democracy
Govenor Zee - democracy itself

d7978 14
@


1.80
log
@This is what I think about 'iambic pentameter'
It's a good tool to make you think about each and every sound
  in each and every word
It's an easy straighjacket to get stuck it
Overall, it makes a novel better because you've got to think
  about each and every word, so
It's a good tool
It doesn't make poetry.
@
text
@d30 8
a37 6
This novel is historical.  Of the
events and characters some are real,
some are not. Of the
facts and names some have been changed,
others remain.
The body of the work is fictional.
a7991 4
I'LL TRY TO KEEP THIS NOVEL ABOUT REAL PEOPLE.
I'LL TRY NOT TO GET STUCK IN "IVY TOWERS"
I'LL TRY TO REMEBER THE REAL PEOPLE WHO DO REAL WORK
I'LL THANK THEM FOR BEING SO KIND TO ME
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d7971 23
@


1.78
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a3776 10
Perhaps because of his attitude, perhaps because of the media
attention heaped on him, perhaps because of his position in orbit,
completely beyond the reach of any terrestrial authority, or perhaps
simply because of what he said, Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of
nearly all the American political leaders, regardless of party
affiliation or personal temperment.  At any rate, he was back on
television.  In another debate, he faced off against one of the most
country's most prominent politicians, a state governor widely expected
to run for president in an upcoming election.

d4515 1
a4515 1
After almost two months in orbit, the constant TV interviews had died
d4577 3
a4579 1
Andrea waited, irate.  It disturbed her that Burns worked on critical
d4589 1
a4589 1
"You all work stoned?" she asked.
d4597 1
a4597 1
"I don't work stoned, why do you need to work stoned."
d4603 1
a4603 1
"Yes, this work is boring.  When I'm bored, it's easier to work
d4775 11
a4785 4
The doctor sighed as he put the blood pack into the refrigerator,
closed the door, and latched it shut.  Turning, he kept his hands
behind his back, holding on to the refrigerator door as he faced the
woman from NASA.
d4800 15
a4814 17
"Please grip about socialized medicine," the doctor continued, warming
to his subject and growing increasingly agitated as his talked.
"Hell, our medicine already is socialized; it's just capitalist
socialism instead of communist socialism.  Doctors don't make the
decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and hospital administrators and
pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom line is still the same.  It's
still some screwed up system that everyone is a little cog in.  Sure,
you can buck the system.  But just like John Cougar Mellancamp said,
'whenever I fight the system, the system always wins'.  You fight the
system, nobody'll hire you because you won't churn out the billable
hours, you very well may lose your hospital privileges 'cause you
don't have some 'group' you're part of, if you just ask people to pay
what they can afford, you'll get a pittance, and on top of it all
you'll still have medical school loans to pay off, and they're
astronomical because the medical schools expect that you'll do like
everybody else and make a killing, so they want a nice little piece of
the pie, too."
d4817 1
a4817 1
happens to be something I'm really good at, it beats sitting in some
a4819 10
#if MAYBE
Vic threw his hands up in exasperation and pushed away from
the computer.

"I don't know how this damn thing works!  What the hell do I know
about neural nets?!"

"Let me take a look," Andrea said, and started learning how the
robotics system worked.
#endif
d5123 1
d6752 3
a6754 1
Govenor Zee.  Mercuriou in trouble.  Andrea to the rescue.
d6757 1
a6757 1
T + 8 days <***>
d6761 2
d6817 1
a6817 1
Andrea asks Burns about Merciruou.  MUTE.
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d3573 1
a3573 1
...
d3575 24
a3598 1
"OK, Zee, that's enough."  Andrea pushed her way into the picture.
d3600 2
a3601 2
"Dr. Yeats.  I have heard many conflicting stories about your
involvement with these people."
d3603 2
a3604 3
"There's an old propaganda technique, Governor, called attacking
the messenger.  You've made your point.  Now you can answer
the Captain's points."
d3606 4
a3609 1
"Points?  He has no points.  He's a criminal and a thief."
d3611 2
a3612 2
"And you've talked a lot about morality, but you haven't answered for
your own morality."
d3614 1
a3614 1
"Answer, to him, for morality?"
d3616 1
a3616 2
"Yes, answer to him.  He's said a lot about capitalism and democracy,
and now you can answer that directly."
d3621 2
a3622 1
"Well, I think he's accused capitalism and democracy of immorality."
d3624 1
a3624 1
"Immorality!  The man knows nothing of the word!"
d3626 5
a3630 5
"OK, fine.  _I_ accuse capitalism and democracy of immorality, because
that's really the issue here - morality.  _Captain_ Mercuriou is both
right and wrong.  He is right that capitalism is _immoral_ and wrong
in his own actions, which are also _immoral_.  It's a classic case
of two wrongs not making a right."
d3639 4
d3644 2
a3645 2
propaganda.  Capitalism is not about doing for yourself.  If people
want to give to a charity, they are more than welcome to do so.
d3659 3
a3661 3
"Well, Carrnige built his empire too long ago to remember who's
backs he walked on.  Take Mr. Gates, he's a good example, he's
big philanthropher."
d3665 1
a3665 2
"If he was such a big philantropher, he would give away his source
code."
d3667 1
a3667 1
"Excuse me!  Give away his source code!?"
d3671 1
a3671 1
"And who, pray tell, dictates this morality?"
d3677 1
a3677 1
"That's right.  Remeber the story of the rich man and the old woman.
d3679 7
a3685 6
woman gave two bits.  Christ asked which went away redeemed.  Did he
then say, 'Look at how much good can be done with all the rich man's
money'?  'The old woman might as well have not gone'?  No.  He tells
us the old woman goes away redemed because her two bits if
_everything_ she's got!  She's told 'give to all those who beg of you'
and does!  That's _moral_ behavior!"
d3697 74
@


1.76
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d4420 1
a4420 1
T + 91 days
d4422 6
a4427 52
After three months in orbit, the constant TV interviews had died down
and the _Icarus_ crew had settled into a kind of routine.  This day was
typical.  Burns led Alister into the branching tree of docked cargo
modules, rummaged in one for a moment or two, then pulled out the
box he was looking for, a brand-new Whirlpool automatic dishwasher.

"Will this work in orbit?" he asked.  Alister shrugged non-commitally.

"Find out," Burns said as he pushed the box towards the open hatch,
letting Alister slow its momentum and guide it into the docking nexus
before propelling it down towards the main body of the spacecraft.
While Alister starting pulling apart the styrofoam packing pieces,
Burns returned to organizing the various equipment that now filled the
cramped crew compartment.  The captain quickly joined in.

"Where do you want it?" he asked his chief engineer, taking a box of
reference books that Burns had pulled out for his last big project,
modifying the forward radar array to give better azimuth coverage.

"Put them back in L-9; you should find some space there," Burns
replied, refering to the cargo module into which he had moved
most of the books he had brought.  He had wanted to scan them
electronically, but as the time-fuel trade-off had shifted
towards burning fuel to save time, the scanning had been
postponed and the books stored into cargo modules.

Meanwhile, the South African had begun removing the cover from the
bulky dishwasher.  Having examined its construction, he had already
concluded that it would just fill up with water and spill over into
the cabin when opened, so his first thought was to install a vacuum
suction to remove the water when the machine was finished.  Having
done so, he found that the device depended on gravity to pull the
water down into a catch basin from where it was recycled.  Try
as he might, he couldn't figure a way to draw the water back
down for recycling.  It would just form into drops and float
around in the machine until he opened the door and vacuumed it out.
After an hour or so of fiddling, Burns came over and they spent
another half hour working on it together before finally giving up.
Since they didn't use plates or utensils in space, it wasn't that
important a device, so Alister put it back into storage and went
on to the next item on the list - a small refrigerator, of which
Burns had packed a dozen.  It worked flawlessly, and Alister
spent the remainder of the day installing the refrigerators
all over the ship.


T + 100 days

By now, the ship had assumed a stable configuration.  The 747's
crowded crew compartment was the hub of activity, with the remainder
of the ship docked to its upward-facing airlock.  The first module,
docked directly to the 747, had become basically an extension of the
d4433 8
a4440 9
aboard, had an entire module all to herself, as did the Captain.
Next came Module 2, primarilly used for storage of immediately
needed items, such as a supply of food rations, with enough
open space in the middle to allow easy passage to the next docking
nexus, with four more modules faning out from it.  Two were basically
engineering workshops, packed with a variety of tools Burns had
brought up from Earth, a third Vic had converted into the ship's
sick bay, and the fourth was a library, loaded mainly with
Burns' various technical books.
a4466 3

T + 113 days

d4656 1
a4656 1
T + 143 days
d4720 10
d4731 2
a4732 1
T + 388 days
d4779 1
a4779 1
T + 431 days
d4781 2
a4782 4
Dr. Antonov decided that confinement to bed was largely pointless in
zero-gee, so he allowed Alister to move around the ship in his brace,
to which Burns attached plastic guards that Alister called his
"bumpers".  The ship was running smoothly, and with the stress of the
d4789 2
a4790 2
plan for a Mars landing; and Alister was learning to play the guitar
during his convelecance.
d4793 4
a4796 5
gathered in the 747's main compartment.  He was reading from a
detached LCD panel while Alister practiced his scales, Burns and
Andrea worked on some computer program, and Vic was listening to a
rock album on headphones in the light haze of a marijuana joint he had
recently passed around.
d4917 1
a4917 1
T + 624 days
d5302 3
a5304 4
Alister made her command decision, not to send the spacesuits, but
said nothing as yet and instead excused herself from the
rec-room-turned-bridge and entered the captain's quarters, closing
the hatch behind her.
d5314 2
a5315 1
"Remove the spacesuits from the resupply module and launch it."
a5324 1
"I want a bulls-eye on the center of the 747's crash site."
d6445 1
a6445 1
Andrea kept telling me I had already done that, that the most important
d6459 1
a6459 1
The captain's voice drifted off.  Behind him, _Columbia_ gleamed in
d6718 1
a6718 5
T + 91 days <**>

Day in the life.

T + 100 days <**>
a6721 2
T + 113 days <*****>

d6728 1
a6728 1
T + 143 days <****>
d6733 1
a6733 1
T + 388 days <***>
d6738 1
a6738 1
T + 431 days <*****>
d6740 3
a6742 7
Reaction to Andrea Yeats.  Alister's convelence.  Mercuriou reading
Plutarch in Latin.  Vic's breading program for zero-gee.  Alister
learning the guitar.

Sparta.  Vic challenges Andrea to prescribe rules to be Christians.
'Primitive' societies.  Modern societies based on dependancy and
forced labor.  The bastardization of Christianity.
d6746 1
a6746 1
T + 624 days <***>
d6891 1
a6891 1
of Col. Ramon - he doesn't say anything too unreasonable
d6900 1
a6900 1
9/11 was Julian date 254 in 2001, March 1 was day 60 of 2003
@


1.75
log
@bit more
@
text
@d2959 10
a2968 8
the money back, and plenty of those schemes fail.  Let's face it - 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', they call
it, and we've got no business plan of any kind for how you can recoup
a billion dollars from this flight or any other.  So the only way to
do it was to either wait for the government, or be independantly
wealthy, or steal it.  I want nothing to do with the government, we're
not independantly wealthy, so we stole it."
d3029 3
a3031 1
I'm one of them."
d3139 1
a3139 1
per capita incarceration rate on this planet, if everything
a3168 5
[I wrote this program, only it works for Spanish rather than Greek.
Unlike our hero, I didn't even bother to try and publish it, for all
the same reasons.  It sits on my computer disk, waiting for a freely
available Spanish-English dictionary.]

d3558 114
d3919 3
a3921 1
years.  All these people talk about these grandeose ideas of liberty
d5258 3
a5366 1

d5370 1
a5370 2
.....

d5389 1
a5389 3
"OK," he shrugged at last and turned back to the window.  Andrea
propelled herself to the terminal on his desk and keyed the intercom
switch for Alister...
d5391 1
d5393 1
a5393 1
....
d5395 2
a5396 1
"Disaster on Mars" scream the newspapers.
d5398 1
a5398 3
The end result was a half-hour time lag in communications that left
both NASA and the rest of the planet as passive observers of the
dramatic video footage relayed to them.
d5400 1
a5400 3
Most world goverments issue statements of condolence.  The United
States is critized in Europe for the lukewarm nature of its official
comment.
a5401 1
A tense but unharmed crew holds a staff meeting.  The Captain is silent.
d5403 3
a5405 2
"OK, we should assemble the cargo modules into a chain, and get ready
to go home," Vic began.
d5410 1
a5410 1
around, but I've got to figure how to get them... lined up in a row."
d5412 1
a5412 1
"Well, how do we do that."
a5415 4
"What do you mean, what's the first thing to do?"

"I don't know.  I guess, I guess I've got to think about it for a while."

d5418 1
a5418 1
"Can you do it?" Brian asked quietly.
d5420 57
a5476 1
"Do what?  Put the things in a row?  I think so."
d5478 2
a5479 39
"Can you get us home?"

Again the room was quiet.  Everyone except the Captain and Dr. Yeats
was looking at Alister.  Finally Alister blurted out.

"I don't know."

The NASA engineer looked up.  She had been thinking carefully about
what she wanted to say.  "Alister's not alone.  I've got more hours of
spaceflight logged than anyone else here."

Vic furrowed his eyebrows.  It was the first time he had thought about
it, but Dr. Andrea Yeats would for many years hold the record for most
lifetime hours of spaceflight.  She went on.

"And we've got this whole crew.  Alister's the chief engineer now, so
if says he needs time to think about it and simulate it, fine.  He'll
need help.  I can make myself do equations again.  I volunteer as
assistant engineer."

Bryan said, "We need you as first officer."

Vic volunteers as assistant engineer, is accepted in lue of Dr. Yeats,
and the meeting adjours.


T + 652 days

The Captain stops coming to staff meetings.

Alister's face is plastered on the Earth tabloids.  "Can the kid get
them home?" one asks.  Another focused on lurid details, supplied
by a panel of experts, on what Burns' last moments must have been
like.  U.S. rags like to publish how Edgar Cayce's prophesies had
fortold the disaster.

Dr. Yeats took to organizing Burns' library, made sure Alister had
everything he asked for, suggested some books he hadn't thought about,
and reading a bit herself.
d5481 2
d5578 2
a5579 6
He nodded and said "OK", but wasn't really sure himself if he could do it.

Mercurio pulled himself into the com shack a bit faster and bit more
focused than he'd done in weeks.  "Alister?"

"Sir?" the younger looked up from his computer game.
d5581 3
a5583 1
"Plot a trajectory for Earth.  We break orbit in three days."
d5597 2
a5598 2
inertial attitute is 373 by 1 solar, but that... will rotate into 374
by 1 solar, check.  Ship's solar attitude is also 373 by 1 solar.
d6258 18
d6630 6
a6635 2
CM - justifies capitalism as having produced the highest standard of living
on the planet
d6637 1
a6637 3
Mercuriou - answers that communism also produced a higher
standard of living than serfdom and asks rhetorically if you want Sputniks
or freedom
d6639 4
a6642 1
CM - invokes democracy to justify the society
d6644 2
a6645 1
Mercuriou - asks if communism/KGB/gulags would be justified by elections
d6647 1
a6647 1
CM - answers that we don't have KGB/gulags
d6649 2
a6650 1
Mercuriou - counters with War on Drugs
d6652 3
a6654 1
CM - can't compare DEA to KGB; we have a Constitution
d6656 1
a6656 1
Mercuriou - shows where Constitution outlaws a Drug War
d6658 1
a6658 1
CM - answers that Drug War / gun control / etc are supported by the majority
d6660 1
a6660 2
Mercuriou - still would like to see additional powers codified in Const
and slams populist government in general
d6662 2
a6663 1
CM - tries to claim Communism wasn't populist
d6665 4
a6668 1
Mercuriou - retorts
d6670 4
a6673 1
CM - tries to claim Fascism wasn't populist
d6675 1
a6675 1
Mercuriou - retorts
d6677 3
a6679 1
CM - invokes freedom
d6681 1
a6681 1
Mercuriou - problem isn't freedom; it's what people have done with it
d6683 1
a6683 1
Mercuriou - people should "be nice to each other"
d6685 1
a6685 1
CM - "in the real world" you can't do that
d6687 2
a6688 1
Mercuriou - that's the 'freedom' of democracy
d6690 1
a6690 1
T + 6 days <***>
d6692 4
a6695 1
Mercurious vs senator David Wye
d6697 3
a6699 1
Andrea's attempt to butt in
d6704 5
d6713 8
a6720 2
CM - "majority of this country's people are decent and hardworking and
just want a better life for themselves"
d6722 12
a6733 2
Mercuriou - back to populist government, Communism, Fascism, Napoleon
"I see what kinds of leaders you want"
d6825 5
a6829 1
crew conference.  Alister asked to get them home.  "I don't know."
d6833 5
a6837 1
T + 652 days <*>
d6839 7
a6845 1
Captain stops coming to meetings.  "Can the kid get them home?"
d6931 4
d7841 71
a7911 4
published a cover story suggesting that some of Nostradomes's
quatrains refered to the _Icarus_, that the death of their brilliant
chief engineer was only the first of many woes to befall the crew, and
that none of them would make it back to Earth alive.
a7912 2
[I guess they better all die.  Who am I to argue with Nostradamous
_and_ the National Enquirer?]
d7916 9
d7926 3
@


1.74
log
@editted OMS-17 a bit
@
text
@d5491 1
a5491 1
towards the red planet.
@


1.73
log
@beefed up OMS-17
@
text
@d5477 1
a5477 2
engines to fire, Mercuriou gazed out the window at Mars.  He thought
of a line from a book he'd read:
d5479 4
a5482 4
	"Moscow, the Village of the Czars,
	the future capital of the Communist International,
	and site of Trotsky's greatest triumphs and defeats
	he came as a persecuted political prisioner
a5493 6

The rocket fired.  Unlike the powerful four engines of the 747,
this was only a single rocket.  It imparted perhaps a tenth
of a gee of acceleration.  Mercuriou soon tire of waiting,
unstrapped himself, and let him fall back to the pressure
door at the rear of A-core.
@


1.72
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d5019 3
a5021 1
"Ideally, we should never had left Earth orbit without more ships."
d5469 4
a5472 4
695.  Today _is_ T + 695.  Current time is 13:17 Universal.  Ship's
inertial attitute is 351 by 11 solar, but that... will rotate into 374
by 1 solar, check.  Ship's solar attitude is also 351 by 11 solar.
OMS-17 has a tappered entry and step cut-off, check.  It is 7 minutes
d5476 26
d5569 8
a5576 7
Why the speed of light?  Why it's _square_?  That's the diamond of
Einstein's genius.  Tom Clancy was such a genius.  Mohammamed Ata 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 of these geniuses buried his discovery in the
pages of a novel.  The other held up it's blazing red light for all
the world to see that terrible September morning.
d5627 3
a5629 14
Within a year, it had become obvious to many people that the September
11th attack was not simply an outrageous act of terrorism, but in fact
a devastatingly effective act of unconventional warfare.
Osama bin Ladin wasn't a mad terrorist out to kill as many
people as he could.  He was a genius stratagition, fighting
against the democracy he perceived as his people's mortal enemy, who knew
he'd get one shot at his brillent plan, and was determined
to make it work by striking the hardest blow he could muster
at his arch-enemy's political and financial infrastructure.
While the
political prong of the twin assult had failed, the economic prong had
succeeded beyond belief.
Considering not only the twin towers
of the World Trade Center, but the smaller buildings destroyed,
d5631 2
a5632 55
multi-block area that had been shut down for months, the center
of New York City's financial district had been devastated.

Economies are complex systems, where events
trigger other events, coast for a time, reflect from boundaries, then
interact again, much like ripples on a pond, or perhaps a pile of
leaves in the wind.  Mathemticins, economists, and mathematically
inclined economists study the statistical response of economies, but
the impulse functions of such entities are not completely understood.
The intricate network of buyers, sellers, consumers, suppliers,
distributors, bankers, salesman, real estate agents, and thousands of
other occupations that form The Economy, that much-worshiped god of
business plans, spreadsheets, balance sheets and profit-and-loss
statements that the Captain would have called the Global Capitalist
Economic System, had been dealt a crippling blow.  The stock market
was down.  And it stayed down.  As the analysts puzzled over corporate
earnings ratios, and how many bargins were popping up on the market
these days, and how a bottoming out had to occur soon, amid patriotic
demonstrations of pride and determination, an almost insane euphoria
that the terrorists would only "win" if we let them, and coming on the
heels of a burst speculative bubble the year before, day after day,
week and week, month after month, the market kept going down, down,
and down.  As the Dow Jones Industrial Average, that bellweather of
American business performance, once pegged spectacuarly above 10,000,
now dipped below 1000, and as the men and women of the U.S began to
realize, in the inmortal words of John Kenneth Galbriegth describing a
similar collapse many years ago, "there was no limit to how far down
the market could go", the _Icarus_ came home.  the gravity of their
situation.
Into this environment, the _Icarus_ came home.

By the time the _Icarus_ was close enough to Earth orbit that the
videomail was no longer needed, the U.S. was looking for heros, and
for the men and women of the disastrously successful space mission,
their hour had come.  Practically the entire anti-government movement
finally dropped all their quibbles and lined up behind Marceleus
Mercurio, ready to declare peace or war at his whim.  Some ministers
and many religious people believed Andrea Yeats was a genuine
spiritual leader.  Others added up the letters of her name in Chinese
to obtain 666.  Alister Compton was declared the world's sexiest
astronaut by a popular poll.  Vic spent hours on end holed up, working
on a proposal to reform medical care that the AMA had invited him to
make, and Bryan and his men were informally told that all charges
against them would be dropped if they'd sign up as the U.S's first
squad of Space Rangers.  Several proposals were floated for a memorial
to Burns.

The President told Mercurio that his was willing to send the space
shuttle to retrieve them, but that he and his men would be arrested
upon return to Earth and charged with crimes against them.  He hinted
that they would probably be released on their own recognizance, but
the Captain would hear none of it.  As the media began to speculate
about what kind of legal reception awaited the crew, the Captain
agreed to the shuttle proposal, primarily because he had no other way
to return to Earth from orbit.
a5859 8
"Then why do so many people talk about sex?"

Andrea sighed.  "I don't know.  Sex is just one more thing we don't
really understand how to deal well with.  Suffice it say, your sex
life should be a lot like the rest of your life.  You should deal with
it in terms of love - love of God, love of your fellow man, and
certainly love of your sex partners."

d6017 1
a6017 1
something like _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintence_ and you get
d6232 4
a6235 3
"Andrea here believes men can walk on water!" Borzov exclaimed,
perhaps extracting a small vengeance for Andrea's remark about
communism.  "So why, my dear, do we need ships?"
d6241 2
a6242 2
"Hah!  You see!  _Defined_by_our_limitations_, young man!  Or perhaps
her limitation is her inability to accept that the world
d6249 10
a6258 4
interjected.  "You're a thief, captain, and you know it.  I haven't
hung on your every word, like the people in your country, but I know
you're a thief, and you'll probably get some jail time.  I think you
expect that, and I think you deserve it."
d6267 3
a6269 2
hacks, and trust me, they will want to question him extensively about
Burns' methods.  He's not even from your country."
d6273 1
a6273 1
"Is that OK?  What are the terms?"
d6275 3
a6277 3
"Sure.  We'll let him go to any country that'll take him, but that
might be a problem.  He could end up stuck in Russia if South Africa
decides to extridite."
d6353 2
d6362 1
a6362 2
answers.  I mean, if this is the kind of stuff _those_ guys talked
about, and if _we're_ talking about it now..."
d6364 2
a6365 2
The captain paused before continuing.  Behind him, _Columbia_ gleamed
in the razor-sharp sun of Low Earth Orbit.
d6636 5
d6669 9
d6746 2
a6747 1
OK, so _Columbia_ couldn't even dock with the ISS.  Sue me.
d6758 4
@


1.71
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d5797 1
a5797 1
Alister: "What would Vic have thought about all this?"
d5799 7
a5805 7
Andrea: "Vic probably would have said that we're too primitive
as a species to possess a technology as advanced as jet aircraft.
He was always advocating a return to simpler times."

Mercuriou: "Do you beleive we're too advanced for jet aircraft?"
There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice.  He had already concluded
that humanity was too primitive to be flying to Mars, was genuinely
d5810 1
a5810 1
"I beleive technology is neutral.  It's a tool; just a different kind
a5850 1
...
d5852 80
a5931 7
Vic: "Well, one thing this attack suggests to me is that we're
not sufficiently advanced as a species to possess jet aircraft.
I wouldn't have said that a month ago; I certainly would have said
that we're not advanced enough to possess nuclear technology,
but now I have to say that it doesn't even look like we're
advanced enough to possess jet aircraft.  Spiritually, we're not
that far pass the bow and arrow stage, it seems."
a6022 73
T + 894 days

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 _Icarus_ crew deleted it along with
the rest of their junk mail.  Apparently Alister did not.

"Do you think we're living in the End Times?" he asked Andrea.  "What
do you have to do to be saved?"

Andrea pushed away the laptop she was working on.

"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."

"It isn't?"

"What happens at the end?"

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

Andrea nodded an affirmative response.

"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."

"What do you have to do to make it through?"

"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 pay attention to it, 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 even
though that sounds easy, it can be really tough to figure it out in
practice."



T + 904 days

Vic: "What's going to happen to U.S, Marc?  I mean, really?"

Mercurio was silent for a minute.  Only the hum of the air conditioner
could be heard.  The doctor has blurt out the question that millions
of people had wondered at times, and much more recently since
September 11.

"Well, I don't for sure; I don't have a crystal ball or anything.  I
don't think it's going to change; the country seems absolutely
committed to capitalism, and it _is_ absolutely committed to
democracy."  He threw up his arms in an air of desperation, like a man
watching a ship full of drowning people helplessly from the shore.
"Hell, I hope I'm wrong.  I hope they can work out their problems."

"But you don't think they will."  It was more a statement than a
question, but the captain shook his head in response.

"No," he answered softly, then took a deep breath and exhaled.  "My
best guess is that its people'll just rip it apart from within.  It
keeps getting more and more violent, and the only solution the
democrats have is to keep cracking down harder and getting tougher.
Eventually the violence of its own people will destroy it.  That's my
best guess."


d6736 4
@


1.70
log
@deleted some old stuff near the beginning

broke the laptop today, too
@
text
@d123 16
a138 10
Burns keyed the door to the server room and walked in.  An economic
boom was in progress, every bunch of twenty-somethings with a neat
program had a startup corporation running, and skilled programmers
were in short supply.  Someone with Burns' qualifications was a
genuine find, and he had quickly gotten the run of Chesapeake's
operation, which was far more concerned with filling the next
multi-million-dollar order and satisfying those customers by cramming
miriads of new features into their products than implementing any real
security against a determined insider attempting to hack their
systems.
d178 2
a179 2
"I'm telling you," the man sitting on the couch concluded, "this
thing's like super-hack."
d182 2
a183 2
whistling of the teakettle and a single word from the man in front on
it as he slowly shook his head.
d187 119
a305 5
Mercuriou nodded in assent as the doctor slowly poured the water into
a pair of ceramic mugs and carried them into the living room.  His
level of distraction, and perhaps intoxication, was illustrated by his
need to return to the kitchen for the teabags, as the mugs contained
nothing but hot water.
d307 5
a311 1
"I'll need some time to think about this," he concluded after several
d314 12
a325 14
His visitor nodded his assent and left after another half hour of
small talk.  He couldn't help but feel disappointment as he drove off
down the dirt road.  What had he expected, really?  Maybe for the
first time since he and Burns had dreamed up the hack, he really
thought seriously about how crazy the whole scheme was, and
realistically how slim were the chances of success.  Yet he has no
intention of spending the rest of his life the way he spent his last
ten years, fumbling around from one dumb thing to another while a
court settlement ate all his money and his best ideas sat as notes on
a hard drive.

"Fuck it," he said as the car reached the paved road and he hit
the gas.  He'd be damned if he would keep living like he had been,
and if Victor Antonov didn't want in, he'd find another doctor...
d329 3
a331 3
watching the road his friend's car had long since disappeared down.
The dust had settled, and nothing disturbed the scene except the
buzzing of insects, which he mostly ignored.
d340 19
a358 22
piece of red glass had been slipped in behind the mountains.  Vic,
still lying in a sleeping bag, had been awake for the better part of
an hour, and with eyes closed was calmly awaiting the dawn.  It was
the morning of his fifth day at this place, and though he was looking
forward to the company of people again, he also knew that he would
miss this place.  One of his favorite spots for prayer and meditation,
it was a desert canyon that looked from the air like a single massive
stroke of white slashed through brown hills by a giant's hand.  Pristine
granite boulders were strewn out fifty feet on either side of a
spring-fed river.  Cactus and scrub 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 torrential storms that, once or
twice a decade, filled the arroyo with the raging waters that had
carved out this canyon over the centuries.  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 the ample bathing spots in the cool
river.

[The site exists as described, but it is not in New Mexico.  It
is on the Baja Peninsula, close to the town of Santiago, Mexico.]
d363 46
a408 16
care of the cat.  He wanted to finish the novel he was reading.  It
was already too late today.  It was still pretty early, he could
putter around the house for another hour or two before packing the
car.

The truth was, that 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 several days
in silence and solitude.  _We're_used_to_all_these_distractions_,
_you_know_.

Time nearly stood still.  Each day seemed to pass like an eternity.
At first you thought about all the things you could be _accomplishing_
right now, instead of siting still and trying to quiet your mind to
discern the will of God, or the Great Spirit, as Vic prefered to call
him.  After a while, you realize that you wouldn't actually be
d412 88
a499 2
_This_is_how_long_a_day_really_is_, you eventually realize.
_We_waste_so_much_time_.
d501 2
a502 5
Then comes the first night.  Vic usually found it depressing to watch
the last sliver of sun slip away behind the western hills, as the dusk
then slowly settled in.  Yet the nights here held their own splendor,
away from the city lights, as the stars began to emerge, eventually
filling the blackness with thousands of tiny lights in their various
d504 57
a560 18
nebulas.  Nor was the sky still.  Not only did the stars shift through
the night, but the lights of airplanes high above passed slowly across
the constellations and the occasional unannounced meteor would flash
past in a fraction of a second.

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.  For better or for worse, he had
decided to accompany his friend on this mad space venture, and he knew
that it might be a long, long time before he returned to this place.
_Or_ever_, he thought, calming assimilating the danger inherent in
Mercuriou's proposal.  He had not enjoyed an especially fruitful
meditation during this vision quest, but had been constantly
distracted by memories of years past, times spent with Marc and his
good friend Burns when they shared a house together; they as
undergraduates and he as a young resident at the university medical
center.  He also knew, intellectually, that Marc would ask but few
people to join him, and that his skills would be sorely required.
d593 1
a593 10
chemist named Alister Compton.  They set up shop south of San
Francisco, in a Silicon Valley office building in Palo Alto, near
Stanford University.  A roaring economic boom kept restaurants, bars,
and shopping malls packed with young, dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings
sitting on thousands of dollars worth of stock options.  Every other
car on University Avenue was either a Ferrari, or a BMW, or a Land
Rover - most of them leased.  Up scale restaurants provided their
patrons with blank paper placemats and colorful Crayons to doodle and
brainstorm their latest propietary server architecture while waiting
for their hundred dollar orders.
d636 16
d956 3
a958 2
matched the packet traces recorded on the network.  In addition, the
accounting records were duplicated on the other computer.
d971 1
a971 5
Mercuriou had returned from a visit to "Site Y", and his chief
engineer had just finished filling in his boss on Alister's
unauthorized computer access.

Mercuriou answered first a chuckle, then broke out in an awkward
d976 4
a979 3
"I think it's hilarious.  Our whole operation is made possible by your
super-hack of Chesapeake, and now along comes this twenty-year-old kid
who hacks _your_ network!"
d985 6
a990 5
Mercuriou handed Burns a two-day-old copy of a major financial newspaper.
It was folded back to page four, which contained a brief announcement
that the Securities and Exchange Commision had begun an investigation
into the bankruptcy of one Keystone Securities.  Burns read the story
while Mercuriou thought over the problem with Alister.
d995 5
a999 4
"Oh, it _is_ serious.  They'll eventually catch up with us.  There's a
countdown clock running on this launch, just like with NASA's, T minus
whatever, only we don't know what time it is.  At some point, that
clock goes to zero, and we better be ready to launch when it does."
d1055 6
d1134 1
a1134 1
"Instead, we decided to do something I've always wanted to do, and
d1138 5
a1142 5
that really works, that will really let people do what Robert Heinlein
just dreamed about, quit piddling around in Low Earth Orbit, and
_fly_to_Mars_.  Learn to grow your own food in orbit!  Make
your own clothes!  Mine the asteroid belt for the minerals you need!
Design your own computer chips!"
d1317 5
a1321 1
Alister gets set up with everything he needs to hack.
d1323 1
d1330 7
a1336 7
jumbo jets that the air carriers didn't want anymore, and that would
eventually be driven into bankruptcy.  The leasing company let the
airplane go for a fraction of its value, partly because it was insured
against air disasters and partially because of expected ease of
recoving the airplane in case of a default.  They would eventually go
bankrupt, partially because of their unexpected inability to recover
the aircraft once it had been launched into orbit.
d1342 47
a1388 50
Next, he converted the entire main body of the aircraft to hold fuel
and oxydizer, leaving just the bubble on top the plane pressurized for
the crew.  At the rear of the bubble he fashioned a fairly spacious
airlock, opening directly upward.  On top the airlock hatch he placed
a hydraulic mating adapter, and another one right on the nose of the
aircraft, both patterned after a NASA design for the space shuttle and
International Space Station.

He reworked the plane's plumbing system, too, adding a dozen piping
connectors to the docking ports, along with electrical connectors.
Each of the cargo modules was similarly equiped with pipes that
connected all of the connectors on one side with the connectors on the
other.  Two of the pipes were used for hydraulic control, one being
pressurized with hydraulic fluid that was shunted to various hydraulic
controls by a collection of control values, another used as a vacuum
line used to draw back used hydraulic fluid.  Another pipe was for
water, and two more were assigned for N-1033 fuel and the hydrogen
peroxide oxidizer.  The remaining half dozen pipes were there as
backups, and more control values allowed any of the backup pipes to be
shunted over to any of the primary pipes, as well as allowing any or
all of the pipes to be closed off.  In the cargo modules, the control
values were all clustered at the forward end of the module, where the
control computer was, allowing for short interconnects.

Burns had also prepared a number of docking nexuses to which up to
six cargo modules could be mated, one in each of the six spatial
directions.  Since the mating adaptors were sexed, requiring a
hydraulicly powered male to attach to a passive female, Burns
designed each docking nexus with three of each sex.

Some of the cargo modules were simply tanks designed to hold either
fuel, or oxidizer, or water.  They were designed so that the plumbing
line for whatever they were carrying went through the tank; all the
other plumbing lines passed straight through from the docking port on
one end to the docking port on the other.  All of these tanks were
equiped with thermostats and heaters, driven by fuel cells, to keep
their contents liquid in the cold of outer space.

Meanwhile, Burns had devised a scheme to spray a insulation
compound derived from carbon that stuck to all the asteroids
they tested it on, and left a layer of insulation that withstood
high temperatures.  He devised a way to spray and insulate
the bottom of the 747.

---- They make it first to the astroid belt, where they outfit the
ship with everything missing.  They build a giant carbon sprayer
and in this way fix the two modules that still have meteor strikes
that can't be sealed.  They sprayed the bottom of an old 747
NASA had given them and began to wonder it to would work as a
landing craft.
d1397 1
a1397 1
astronaut and now private consultant, continued to read the sheaf of
a4304 41
T + 17 days


"OMS-7 in five, four, three, two, one, ignition..."  Alister called
off the countdown from the copilot's seat.  The 747 had been undocked
from the cargo modules and then redocked to them using a special
fiting on its nose.  The rocket engines of the 747 now pushed the
cargo modules from behind.  A change of computer software now used the
cargo modules' maneuvering thrusters to maintain proper attitude
during the burn.



T + 24 days


"We still haven't decided on a name for the ship," Marc explained.

"Well, can I put my two cents in?"  "Sure"

"You've heard the story of Icarus?"

"Some greek hero, right?"  Mercurio replied, vaguely enough to betry
his failure to exactly place the name.

"The son of Daedalus.  The father built wax wings for them both
to escape prison, and Icarus flew too close to the sun, and his wings
melted," Brian interjected.

"That's right," Andrea afirmed, and a moment's silence fell on the group
before people started to chuckle.  Burns finally bust laughing out loud.
Mercurio smiled, and noted quietly that his crew had learned to laugh
at the insanity of their undertaking.


Two days later, the _Icarus_ breaks orbit.  Mercurio moves the ship to a
six-hour orbit, basically solves the meteor problem this way, and the
crew gets to work.  They've brought supplies for a year before the
crops have to work.


d4508 9
a4516 9
Andrea smiled.  The reasons weren't so different after all.  At the
time of the launch, events had happened so quickly that she hadn't
really thought through what Mercurio was proposing or what she had
accepted / gotten into.  All she had seen was an opportunity to fly
into space and the simple justification that there were some people
who seemed like they could use her help.  In fact, she
had almost assumed that they would quickly need her help to get back
home.  In truth / fact, she was amazed by how little real help they
had needed, and over time had developed a deep respect for the ship's
d5688 1
a5688 1
T + 735 days
d5795 1
a5795 1
T + 740 days
d5951 1
a5951 1
T + 760 days
d5997 1
a5997 1
T + 804 days
d6024 106
d6263 10
a6272 2
"Yes.  Captain would you say your mission has been defined more by
your abilities or more by your limitations?"
d6276 20
a6295 6
"I'll tell you what I think'll happen if you go back home",
interjected Ilan Ramon, an Israeli air force cournel turned _Columbia_
payload specialist. "You're a thief, captain, and you know it.  I
haven't hung on your every word, like the people in your country, but
I know you're a theif, and you'll probably get some jail time.  I
think you expect that, and I think you deserve it."
d6299 1
a6299 1
is right.  I am a theif, and maybe I'll get some clemency, and maybe I
d6304 1
a6304 1
hacks, and trust me, they'll want to question him extensively about
d6342 1
a6342 1
personal effects on the OTV.
d6344 7
a6350 1
Andrea came back up out of _Columbia_.
d6361 2
a6362 8
Mercuriou turned to Borzov.

"Feel free to move the OTV if it's in your way - the controls are unlocked."

"How do you say it?" the Russian answered, "'The keys are in the ignition'?"

Mercuriou nodded.  Alister looked from him back to Andrea during these
last moments together, then asked an obvious question.
d6371 1
a6371 1
again.  Vic was right.  Our problems are on Earth."
d6379 1
a6379 1
new fuel, get mankind into space!  Grow crops!  Make clothes!  Mine
d6384 1
a6384 1
"No, that was just my sales pitch.  My real reason was..  it was a
d6434 6
d6470 2
a6613 8
T + 17 days <**>

OMS-7 burn to get out of LEO

T + 24 days <***>

Name the ship.

d6718 1
a6718 1
T + 735 days <***>
d6724 1
a6724 1
T + 740 days <***>
d6730 1
a6730 1
T + 760 days <***>
d6734 1
a6734 1
move this to his convelence.
d6736 1
a6736 1
Andrea talks about her rape
d6738 1
a6738 1
T + 804 days <**>
d6740 7
a6746 1
What's going to happen to the U.S.?
a7098 42
Big government was in.  A national newsmagazine aired a segment
featuring an interview with a woman who said, "I just assumed if there
was a problem, there'd be a law in place to deal with it."

"Now why would you assume that?"  Mercuriou asked the TV screen
as he watched the program.  "Why would you assume that for _every_
problem we've got, the solution is another law?"

"I know people who don't wear their seatbelts," Andrea said.  Car
safety was the topic of the broadcast.  "They prefer to say a prayer
when they get in the car instead of putting on their seatbelts."

"Exactly!" Mercuriou exclaimed.  "Now who the hell is the great
_majority_ to tell someone that they can't do that; that they
can't decide for themselves to wear that seatbelt or not?"

"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _they've_got_no_other_solutions_.
The only way they know how to deal with _any_ problem they've got is
more laws, more rules, more regulations.  It's inconsivable to them to
find real solutions to their problems!  They choose absolute garbage
for their leaders, and then when they've got problems, and you better
beleive that a society run by capitalists, or communists, or fascists
is going to have problems, their 'solutions' are always the same - get
tough.  They can't figure out that they need to choose good leaders in
the first place, and that the answer to every problem isn't some new
law."

"I'll tell you why," he went on.  "It's not only because the majority
has no real respect for anyone else, not only because once they've
made a decision for themselves they can see no reason not to impose it
on others, but the simple fact is _democracy_defines_right_and_wrong_!
These people have no conception of how to behave except what is
defined by the government!  What's right is what's legal, what's wrong
is what's illegal, and there's nothing else!  There's no point at
which the majority can conceive that something that is wrong wouldn't
be prohibited by a law!  It's just completely beyond these people that
the force of government should be used to absolute minimum and that
people have to ask themselves what is right and wrong!  Democracy
makes all these decisions for you!"
a7662 1
"Did you start reading all this stuff in college?"
a7663 8
"No, I started reading all this stuff in high school.  My parents
bought me a set of about fifty books called 'Great Book of the Western
World'.  It had been assembled by this univeristy professor named
Mortimer Adler, who had this idea that authors of great literature
carried on what he called the 'Great Conversation' over the ages, and
that by reading their works you can peer into the human soul.  It was
in college, I started reading all this stuff in the native languages -
'Great Books' was all in translation."
@


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@fiddling
@
text
@a168 200
#if NOT

They had been planing it for months.  Well, they'd been talking about
it for years really, but months to actually do it.  They targeted a
major router manufactuer.  Routers, for the uninformed, are the
telephone switches of computer networks, that handle almost all the
data packets and make decisions about how to get data packet X to
destination Y. First, Burns got a job with the company.  It wasn't
hard.
Various ideas
were proposed to hack them, ranging from tapping into the router line
and hopeing somebody will come in and type the password in the clear,
to Burns' pet scheme for an Ethernet wiretap built from a
thousand-plus element phased array to built in the woods across from
the company's office park.  Unfortunately they neither the money nor
the manpower to construct such a device.  Finally, Marcelius Mercurio
stepped in and showed why he was the Captain.  Somebody just had to go
in and get a job with them.  Burns' qualifications were impecable.

At first he just watched the place, as he went about his assigned
coding project - a boring extension to a ten-year-old routing
protocol.  Back at the rented apartment, Marc drilled him for days to
read passwords - Burns looking over Marc's shoulder as he typed and
telling him what he just entered.  They'd drill for an hour each day,
which Marc liked to say way the minimum amount of time to put into
doing something.  It was a big pain, Burns hated it, and turns out
they never used them, but by the end of the month they had every
important password in the place.

They spent the time getting a good look at the development system.
Burns went right for his favorite program - the gcc compiler.  It was
several years old, and he floated a question with
management about updating it, and practically yelped with glee when
he heard the answer.  They wasn't just turning down the idea;
they were dead set against upgrading the compiler.  Since their
routers used several different hardware platforms, custom compiler
configurations were required for each platform.  This meant a lot
of work to upgrade the compiler, which could only be justified
by a significant improvement.  Also, they expressed fear of hackers
putting something "funny" in a newer compiler.

"This means," Burns spurted through a exhaled mouthful of marijuana
smoke, "that we can change the compiler with near absolute certainty
that they won't just upgrade it away in a few months."  He didn't want
to repeat his college experience of an upgrade taking away a favorite
hack.  The stakes were a lot higher, too.

Having settled on the compiler, they set to work on the hack, Burns
doing most of the coding, Marc watching over his shoulder and doing
code reviews.  They had to get it right.  The virus was designed to
disappear into the compiler's binary, recreating itself if the
compiler was asked to re-compile itself, as well as infecting the
target program.  Since they weren't too sure about how they would
alter the router software, they added another feature - a third prong
of the virus, targeted against the operating system kernel, that would
give them a back door.  Marc didn't have a job, so he fixed dinner
every night and generally took care of the apartment.  It was just the
two of them living there, and on weekend nights they'd party with some
of the waitresses from a seafood joint Burns liked to hit for a quick
drink on the way home from work.  On weekends, and some weeknights,
they'd stay up 'till two or three in the morning, smoking dope,
snorting coke, cranking the tunes.  Just like college.

The problem remained of getting the hack into the compiler; probably
the hardest step.  They thought they knew the root passwords, but
Burns wasn't supposed to have them, and the question remained of when
could he successfully use them to hack the main development system.
Log entries are generated when root passwords are used, and while they
could be fudged, it was an extra level of complexity that Marc, a firm
beleiver in K.I.S.S, didn't want to deal with.  Marc resolved the
question - they wouldn't use the passwords at all, but rather waited
until the system was down for a routine maintenance.  Burns made sure
he was in the server room that day,

out of the room for a few minutes.

Now they leaned back and waited.  Marc starting spending his days at
the library, researching various computer companies as well as
starting to make some discrete inquires about land in the midwest.
Burns tinkered with the virus a few more times, but they were already
in, so it was just a matter of copying a file up to the server and
running a bizarre little system call that should just have returned an
error but instead jumped into the file's code at full kernel
privledge.  Burns was really careful every time he used it, because a
slipup would crash the system and that might begin to attract
attention.  Marc insisted that each change was carefully tested before
Burns installed it.  They took a test suite for the compiler, added
several tests to check and verify the correct operation of the virus,
and ran it against every proposed update to make sure everything was
working flawlessly.  If they found a problem, or added a new feature,
they added a test case to make sure it didn't crop up again.  They
practiced better software design on the hack than anybody in the
company did on their software.  They had to - they couldn't afford a
bug.

Burns got sick of the job and quit.  He had never taken the job
because he liked it.  Told his boss he'd had a better offer elsewhere,
which wasn't unusual in the prevalent economic environment.  Declined
to discuss it.  Was offered a raise.  Politely refused.  He offered
two weeks more work.  Politely declined.  They handed him his last
paycheck and he walked out the door for the last time.

They'd come to regret that later, but Burns was never very good at
working on a boring job.  He'd either find other people to pass it off
to, or drop it entirely.  Mercurio didn't like this tendancy, but had
learned to deal with it over the years, and knew he had to keep Burns
supplied with a steady stream of new challenges, so he let it pass.

Three months later, the manufacuer released the first production
version of their router software unwittingly compiled with the hacked
compiler.  That meant that the software was hacked, as was any
customer who downloaded and used it.  Many did, both because software
had a deserved reputation for poor quality, necessitating frequent
updates, and because the company was constantly adding new features.
This release had an additional feature they didn't count on.  It
allowed a carefully formed packet to run arbitrary code on the router.
Burns kept improving the hack.  Since almost all the routers were
somehow connected to the net, he could get away with this even though
he no longer worked for the company.  Soon, he could wiretap the
routers, retreieve their passwords, add new passwords without them
appearing in any configuration files, generate connections that
seemed to appear out of thin air, and generally infiltrate any
network using the company's routers.

#endif

T - 380 days

Their first major target was a manufactuer of Keno software.  They had
toyed with the idea of hacking a bank, but both men reasoned that bank
security would be very tight, neither had any inside experience
working at a bank, and a hack that made money appear out of nowhere
would be very suspicious to auditors.  Instead, they settled on
Keno.  They went for a very subtle hack, that replaced the
random number generator with one of their own, and Burns couldn't
surpress a smile under his face a month later as he sat in a bar and
watched the numbers came up on the screen.  They matched the list he
had drawn up the night before.

WE NEED A SEMI-PLAUSABLE SOURCE OF SOME MONEY BY NOW

The break can within six months.  The Kansas state jackpot in the
Pick-Five-Plus had risen to over $11 million.  Marc knew the numbers
would hit.  What kept him up all night was the thought of somebody
else picking the numbers at random.  Nobody did.

Vic had picked the winning ticket, and the doctor revealed in the
limelight.  For the first time in his life, he was in front of
T.V. cameras.  He told his story, his bills from medical school, his
work for the doctors, his work for the clinics, his general
disillusionment with medicine.  "Everyone grips about H.M.O.s and
professional assocations and the cost of medical insurance," he told
one press conference.  "If the doctors would just forget about the
money and heal the people who came to them, we wouldn't have all these
problems."  One reporter asked him if he was going to start a medical
philanthropy with the money.  A little grin washed over his mouth and
his mustashe bristled.  "Actually, I'm starting a dot-com".

#if NOT

They called it Robotics Research.  Which wasn't far from the truth.
Marc certainly planed to do a lot of work robotically.  He was also
careful to keep the company's cash burn under a half-million a month,
even considering things like his deal to purchase 60 PCs and 60
laptops for a hundred thousand, complete with wireless networking
cards.  Wireless cards for which they had a amplifier design.  They
just stamped out a small run of 150 circuit boards and soldered them
on.  The dozen young programmers they'd hired started to find some of
the quirks of their management when a hundred of the computers just
disappeared out the door to a remote location know only as "Site Y".
They were still available over the network, though, and they were
starting to run some pretty serious simulation software that would
keep them running all night.  Mostly Jasper's code, Navier-Stokes
equations, wing design, hypersonic flight, that kind of thing.
Robotics Research accumulated a sizable collection of robots, and most
of the software running them was pretty simple.  Just basic remote
control, really.  Boring stuff, and Marc had to struggle to hold on
to some of his brighter employees.  He gave them an orbital mechanics
system to work with and enhance.  No explaination given what a
robotics company would want with orbital mechanics.  Yet the work was
interesting, so most of the programmers stayed on.

Meanwhile, Marc had still been playing the lotteries.  The hack had
worked its way into both Maryland's and Flordia's systems, and Marc
himself decided to have his fifteen minutes of fame in Flordia, then
had Jasper's mom hit it big.  People who knew them well started to
wonder.  If you somebody you know hit the jackpot, it was a big deal,
but three people?  Questions were already starting to rise when New
Year's came around.  The core team got together at a ski resort in
Taos and went back to a rented ski house afterwards.  Vic, as usual,
was the one to question the lottery winnings, and the increasing money
drain.  Marc just stood in the corner and puffed on a joint.  "This
is the year of living dangerously."

Marc had leveraged the roughly $20 million from the lotterys into
about $100 million using fraduent financial statements to get various
loans for land and equipment.

#endif

@


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@fiddling
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@d41 2
a42 2
in college, when the campus net-news server
wouldn't accept posts from the student lab.
d6093 2
a6094 2
"Seriously, captain, _Columbia_ isn't the only way down.  There
are many in Russia who have heard your words against capitalism.
d6107 2
a6108 2
"We've defined by our limitations more than our abilities, my dear, as
I have tried to tell you many times."
d6124 1
a6124 1
"Thank you," Mercuriou answered Borzov, after a pause.
d6127 1
a6127 1
won't, but I'll just go home now."
d6131 2
a6132 2
hack, trust me, they'll want to question him extensively about Burns'
methods, and he's not even from your country."
d6140 1
a6140 1
decides to extridite him."
d6142 2
a6143 2
"Go home, son," the Israeli advised.  "People like young pilots as
national heros, trust me, I know.  Go home."
d6150 3
a6152 3
statedk then continued slowly.  "If they extridite fine.  I'll take
the Russian Soyuz and then hand myself over to the South African
embassy in Moscow."
d6177 1
a6177 1
same, with a bearhug more comfortable than Borov's and less
d6186 1
a6186 1
"How do you say it," the Russian answered, "'The keys are in the ignition'?"
d6191 2
a6192 2
"Do you think we'll ever come back up to _Icarus_, I mean, do you
think there'll be a follow-up mission?
d6213 2
a6214 2
Andrea get telling me I had already done that, that the most important
mission goal had been obchieved, but I wouldn't listen."
d6216 1
a6216 1
"So what was the point then, it was all for nothing?"
d6219 9
a6227 10
conviction, exhaling first.  "The stuff we've talked about, the nerve
we've struck - freedom, democracy, religion, God - this is stuff Plato
and Aristotle, St. Matthew and Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx and Tolstoy
wrote about, and none of them had all the answers.  I mean, if this is
the kind of stuff _those_ guys talked about, and if _we're_ talking
about it now..."

The captain paused before continuing, looking out the window behind
him, where _Columbia_ gleamed in the razor-sharp sun of Low Earth
Orbit.
@


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@dates
@
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@d6069 5
a6073 6
They had docked several days before with a reduced crew that included
an Israeli air force cornel.  Plus the space station's standard
three-man crew, the head count in orbit now balloned to ten.  After an
exchange of gifts and introductions, a dinner followed, after which
Borzov predictably produced two bottles of "Russia's finest" and began
passing vodka shots around.
d6075 2
a6076 2
"So, Captain," the cosmonaut asked, "what do you think will happen
to you back on Earth?"
d6118 5
a6122 5
interjected Ilan Ramon, an Israeli air force cournel. "You're a thief,
captain, and you know it.  I haven't hung on your every word, like the
people in your country, but I know you're a theif, and you'll probably
get some jail time.  I think you expect that, and I think you deserve
it."
d6124 1
a6124 1
"Thank you," he Mercuriou answered Borzov, after a pause.
d6206 2
a6207 1
new fuel, get mankind into space!  Grow crops!  Make clothes!"
@


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@got rid of Andrea's rape (still some references in there)
as well as her nightmares
and Alister's accident (gone for the second time)
@
text
@d6538 3
a6540 1
wine in orbit.  9/11.
a6590 2
"The prequel is all human history.  The sequel is the fate of mankind."

d6596 2
@


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@got rid of near-disaster returning to Earth
@
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@d815 1
a815 1
T - 141 days
a863 30
T - 140 days

Unknown to Alister, Burns also had a completely seperate computer
monitoring the connections to "dumper".  Although the login sessions
were encrypted, they could at least be tracked and logged.  Each
morning, one of Burns' first tasks was to run a program that verified
that the login records matched the packet traces recorded on the
network.  This morning, there was a problem, and Burns sat quietly
staring at the screen as Alister walked into his office.

"What are you looking at?" the young chemist inquired.

A wide grin broke out on Burns' face as he swiveled the screen in
Alister's direction and leaned back in his chair.

"Looked like a bunch of packet traces..." he replied, letting his
voice drift off at the end.

"Did you make any sense out of them?"

"No," the youngster lied.

Burns waved a dismissal, and Alister hastily departed his office.
Later in the day, he noticed that the key he had used to access
'dumper' had disappeared from the system.  In fact, Burns had changed
all the keys, then deleted them off the computers after recording them
on a credit-card sized CD-ROM he began carrying on a chain around his
neck.


d1056 8
a1063 4
_fly_to_Mars_.  That's what's we're about.  And that lottery you saw
last night is just the tip of the iceberg, trust me, you have
_no_idea_ how big this hack is.  So the question now is, are you in or
are you out?"
a1364 12
T - 2 days

Frozen with fear, Dr. Andrea Yeats stared at the young man in his
early twenties sitting in the passenger seat near to her.  His jeans
were ripped, his hair unkempt, and his body excuded a faint odor that
betrayed the three days that had passed since his last shower.  His
heavy blond hair and muscular upper body betrayed months of surfing on
the Southern California beaches.  His eyes had narrowed to slits, and
his lewd smile told that the money in her purse wasn't the only thing
he'd be taking.


a4610 28
T + 194 days

"You wouldn't have been using any alcohol or illegal drugs, would you?"

"No," Andrea replied, stiffling the anger she felt at the policeman's
leading question, "I haven't."  She was in Germany for a technical
conference, and been pulled over in her rental car after turning the
wrong way down a one-way street.  If the sign had been in German, she
probably would have understood it, but it was one of those idiotic
"international" pictograms with just a red circle and line.  So now
she was pulled over the side, parked behind a ludicrously small police
car with its funny sounding siren, being questioned by a German
policeman.

"Then how did I get into the driver's seat of your car?" he asked.

The anger vanished, and fear gripped Andrea, terrifying, unreasoning
fear.  How had he gotten into the driver's seat?  He sat there in the
car seat next to her, but somehow she was on the passenger's side.
She opened her month and started to stammer something, then caught the
policeman's eyes as they narrowed and a lewd smile crept onto his
face.  Oh my God, it's him.  Oh my God, not again, she thought as his
hand slid across towards her leg.  She couldn't move, couldn't breath,
couldn't talk, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything but sit terrified
as he moved to touch her... and woke up.



a4657 178
T + 401 days

They had made it back to Earth without incident.  Crouds, cheering,
parties, Andrea vaquely remembered them.  She had settled back into
life as a NASA engineer, and after the initial round of publicity
wore off, back into some kind of routine.  The chance to go to Tokyo
for a conference came up, and she jumped at it.  She was the keynote
speaker, all the media wanted to interview her, and best of all a lot
of people just didn't recognize her as she walked around downtown.
Those who did were invariably polite.  She came back to her hotel
after a wonderful sushi dinner, and was gazing out from her window
at the city below.  Then the door was thrown open, she turned around,
and gasped in fear.

"Think I'd forgotten about you?"  He stood silohited in the lighted
frame of the door as he walked into the dark room.  Her heart leaped
with fear and her feet were frozen to the ground.  She couldn't
move; couldn't scream... but yelled as she woke up.


T + 405 days

Burns had begun preparing for a Mars attempt at this point.  He needed
cargo modules on the ground to resupply the 747 after it had been
landed, and he needed rockets to put them there.  He avoided using the
re-entry method favored by NASA, of building a heatshield and letting
the atmosphere burn off your velocity, partly because he didn't want
to deal with the technical issues, partly because he didn't have to,
since his fuel was so much more efficient, and partly because of Vic's
constant harping about the environmental effects of the space shuttle
buring a hole through the ozone layer.

What _was_ required was to take the rest of the engines out of the
cargo modules and mount them to fuel modules to build more OTVs.
Then they were docked to cargo modules, but this could be
done remotely.  More EVAs, like the first in Earth orbit,
we required to mount the engines to the fuel modules.

Burns and Alister were now in the midst of their twenty-third such
EVA.  They were working well away from the cargo chain,
having first moved there the cargo modules they were working
on before openning the modules containing stored engines.
They were working on their last engine installation of the day,
with two completed, but empty, OTVs nearby.

"OK, ease her in further."

Since the Icarus was close enough to avoid any noticable radio lag,
the Captain was controlling the module from the ship while the two men
floated near it in spacesuits.  In fact, he was several hundred
kilometers away.  Vic sailed into the bridge, grabbed for a handhold,
missed, and hit the Captain's arm just as he tapped the a joystick to
fire the maneuvering thrusters.  They fired at nearly ten times the
strength he had intended, in a bizarre direction that sent the module
crashing sideways into one of the completed ones, with Alister in the
middle.  He pushed away from the errant module, but couldn't move fast
enough to keep his arm from being crushed between the two modules.
The bone snapped in two and Alister hollered in pain.

"Shit," the Captain said, hitting the control in the opposite
direction, and awkwardly easied the cargo module away.  Alister began
screaming and floated free, except for his teather.  Burns cut his own
teather, fire his suit thrusters, and zipped over to his friend, whose
was in agony.  His spacesuit was leaking air, as well.

"Get him into the airlock!" the Captain ordered, but Burns yelled
back,

"He'll never make it!"

The fracture was compound and the broken bone had ripped a hole in the
suit.  Air was pouring out, propelling the young man in crazy
directions as he turned from one side to another and bounced on the
end of the teather.

"Quit waving your arms!"  Burns yelled.

He now had firm grasp of the young man and made a quick decision.
Without saying another word, he shoved the bone back into the suit,
pulled apart the two sections of bone, and tried to snap them back
together somehow.  Alister freaked, screaming in pain, but the bone
went back in the spacesuit and Burns clamped his hand over the hole.

"Hold still!" Burns yelled again.

"You fucking hold still, you crazy Yank!  Oh my bloody hell!"

"Here, hold your other hand over the hole!"

Back on _Icarus_, the Captain quickly brushed off Vic's stumble
as an accident, and the doctor thankfully was able to forget
about it as he raced to his sick bay and starting assembling
anything he thought he'd need.  Andrea Yeats, without asking,
went to one of the other modified cargo modules and flipped
on its com system.

"I'm powering OTV 3."

"OK, Vic, Andrea's powering three."

"Got it", answered the doctor, as he pulled out of the sick bay
refrigerator the two pints of blood he had taken from Alister
earlier in the trip, along with two pints of the Captain's
matching O Positive.

"I'll need a refrigerator in the OTV," he noted into his microphone.

"I'm on it," Bryan said, heading into the crew quarters to throw
all the food out of one of the mini-fridges.

Meanwhile, Burns got Alister back into the pressurized safety of the
OTV, but he had lost a lot of blood and was now unconscious.  Vic told
him to touranquit the wound, but had serious doubt that the Alister
would live for the day it would take them to manuerver through the
asteroids with the preasuse blood.  He shared his concerns privately
with Andrea as she released the hydraulic moaring clamps and backed
the OTV away from the _Icarus_ docking port.

Turning the OTV towards the asteroid belt, she engaged its main engine
and let it burn.  She kept it on far beyond the point where she could
stop the ship before reaching the first asteroids.

"What are you doing?" the Captain asked from the bridge, watching her
speed continue to increase on the computer-generated plan position
display in front of him.

"Every play _Asteroids_?" she asked.

Over the next half hour, she caroomed through the asteroid belt at
breakneck speed, never stopping the vehicle and often making long
burns on the main engine, twice coming within a hundred meters of an
asteroid, pivoting the nimble little ship around between burns to
dodge first this asteroid then another as they came into her radar's
field of vision.  She began a series of slowdown burns about ten
minutes from the construction asteroid, finally docking with the other
OTV only an hour and three minutes after the accident.

"Can we go back the normal way?" Vic asked dryly as they unstrapped
from their seats.  The doctor's fingers were white from where they had
been grasping the seat.

The NASA engineer's fancy flying had probably saved Alister's life.
After stabilizing his condition, Vic declared there was no rush to get
him back to the _Icarus_, since he had brought all the medical
supplies he needed with him.  Andrea and Burns tried to complete the
assembly work, but found that one of the two damaged modules was
simply incapable of holding pressure in its plumbing, so they took
both with them and piloted the two OTVs back to _Icarus_ - the normal
way.  At a crew meeting two days later, held around Alister's sick bed
with his arm in a cast, Andrea was unanimously selected first officer.


T + 419 days

Back on Earth, the dramatic rescue of the young astronaut drew popular
attention once again to the space mission.  The _Icarus_ was almost
completely on the other side of the solar system, and radio communications
with Earth were being relayed through a communications satellite
Burns had launched into solar orbit just before leaving Earth.
The end result was a half-hour time lag in communications that left
both NASA and the rest of the planet as passive observers of the
dramatic video footage relayed to them.

Andrea Yeats' role in the rescue and subsequent elevation to first
officer afforded her celebrity status.  A weekly American TV
newsmagazine decided to interview her.  The hour-long round trip radio
lag between Earth and the _Icarus_ dictated an unusual format for the
interview.  Conducted in several sessions spread over two days, it
consisted of a series of videotaped questions transmitted to the space
craft.  After viewing each question, Andrea then dictated a response,
which might later trigger followup questions.  The TV producers then
edited the material into a coherent interview, with relatively few
questions and relatively long responses.  An entire broadcast episode
was deveoted to the interview.




d5948 1
a5948 16
practice.  I'm dealing with that right now."

"What do you mean?"

Andrea paused, then decided to go on.  Perhaps it was important
for the young man to know that she didn't always have all the answers,
and that just because you believed in Christ, you didn't always
know what was the right to do.

"Do you remember the day you met me, I arrived by cab?"

Alister nodded.

"The reason I arrived by cab was... was because I had picked
up a hitchhiker in the rental car I had gotten at the airport,
and...  he raped me and stole the car."
a5949 19
"What?" Alister asked, incredulous.  Andrea nodded.

"And that's not all.  After I came along on the mission, and started
getting my picture on TV, he started sending me emails.  Said he'd
hunt me down, that he'd come and get me."

Behind her, the captain had entered the compartment without being
seen.  He listened as the engineer continued her story.

"He thought he'd covered his tracks, that I couldn't figure out where
the emails had come from, but he didn't recon with Burns.  Before he
died, I asked him to track this guy down and he did.  I've got a file
full of a half-dozen emails, all tracked back to their source.  And I
don't know what to do with it.  Does forgiving your enemy mean just
dropping it and hitting the delete key?  What about other women he
might victimize?  Don't I have an obligation to them, too?"


-----------
d6266 2
d6276 1
a6276 1
T - 141 days <**>
d6280 1
a6280 5
T - 140 days <**>

Burns confronts him

T - 137 days <***>
d6294 1
a6294 5
we meet Andrea for the first time.  Lou dispatches her to look into

T - 2 days <**>

Andrea's passenger rapes her
a6462 7
T + 194 days <****>

Andrea's nightmare with the cop and the rapist.

She could start having more nightmares and have to talk to the
crew about them.

a6466 12

T + 401 days <***>

another of Andrea's nighmares.  back on earth, the rapist in the hotel room

T + 405 <***>

Alister's accident (NEEDS WORK)

T + 419 days <*>

Reaction to Andrea Yeats (short) - need to lengthen
@


1.64
log
@fiddling the ending
@
text
@d5893 3
a5895 2
people, themselves?  The majority that elects these guys?  Isn't it
really _the_people_ who run democracy, so shouldn't we hold
d5909 10
a5918 10
"OK, fine.  A lot of innocent people died.  But the majority of the
people in those twin towers represented the majority of the people of
the United States.  I mean, this kind of crap!" he gestured to the now
silent television monitor.  "All we keep hearing about is this is what
the majority wants, this is the voice of the majority, the majority,
the majority, like they're the only ones that count!  Well,
_the_majority_ of the people in those towers were _capitalists_, 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."
d5989 3
a6149 196
T + 750 days

After the first burn to put them back onto a course for Earth,
a very late burn, just short of Earth orbit, was required to correct
their final approach vector and insert them into a high parking
orbit from where they could kill their momemtum and drop down
into a circular orbit from where the OTVs could take them down
to a newly built space station (the International Space Station).
Alister had carefully calculated this correctional burn.  It would
take several hours, and be a retrograd burn - they should have turned
the ship around to make the burn.  But the Captain, realizing that
this would be great trouble, elected to move one of the OTVs to
the other side of the long cargo chain and push from there,
applying thrust to the craft in the opposite direction from
that of either the 747 or the engine configuration they had
used to leave Martian orbit.

Twenty five minutes into the burn, the engine died out, and
fuel alarms began going off all over the ship.  In retrospect
the problem was obvious, since the ship's design had used the force
of the thrust to push the fuel to the back of the ship where
large tanks kept the fuel supply pressurized and distributed
it throughout the ship, including to the engine of the OTV
on the far side of the chain, since its onboard supply of fuel
wasn't sufficient to maintain the long burn for a sufficient
duration.  Burns would have anticipated it.  Alister did not.

In fact, all the fuel had passed to the front of the ship's tanks
within minutes of beginning the burn, and only the fuel supply in the
OTV had kept the burn going almost half an hour, as well as keeping
the entire fuel system pressurized.  Alister had in fact noticed the
pressure drop right when the burn started, and told the Captain about
it, but it stabilized at an acceptable level and they continued
the burn.  Now all the fuel had been exhausted from the OTV's tank,
all the fuel in the main tanks was all the way forward, away from
the pressure cylinders and other apparatus in the rear of the craft.
The only remaining fuel immediately at the disposal of the crew
was in small presurized cylinders that acted as pressure equalizers
between each module's fuel cell and the main fuel lines.  They had
stop values that kept their pressurized contents from escaping
back into the purged main line system.  It took the crew about ten
minutes to determine that all their fuel and power would be gone
in about two hours.

"So we'd better shut everything off that we don't absolutely need,"
the Captain concluded.

Alister could close all the values from his computer, so they quickly
tried to decide what they needed and what they didn't.  The
greenhouses came up immediately.  They were the single biggest power
consumer on the ship.  Some of their lights were off, but for the
others an important decision had to be made.

"It might not affect them that much if they were only off for one
light cycle," Vic noted.

"And we've got plenty of food stored up - enough to get us back to
Earth," Andrea noted.

"OK, turn them off," Mercurio ordered.  "Then let's figure out what
we're going to do next."

Figuring that out became quite problamatic.

The ship was considerably less than a light-minute from Earth, so the
latest development was flashed quickly all over the world.
Comparisons began with Apollo 13, the flawed NASA lunar mission that
lost its power halfway to the Moon after an oxygen tank explosion
crippled part of the ship.  Experts said the situation was both less
serious, since there was no explosion or damage to the ship, and more
serious, since the ship was in interplanetary orbit and couldn't just
coast back to Earth without its engines.  The National Enquirer
published a cover story suggesting that some of Nostradomes's
quatrains refered to the _Icarus_, that the death of their brilliant
chief engineer was only the first of many woes to befall the crew, and
that none of them would make it back to Earth alive.



T + 751 days

With the exception of Vic and Bryan, the entire crew had been awake
now for twenty four hours.  Every scheme they came up with had flaws.
The reserve fuel had been pumped out of the other OTVs as standard
procedure while they were docked.  The plan was to fuel them before
using them, as Andrea had done prior to launch into the asteroid belt
to save Alister, so their engines were useless.  Using all their fuel
canisters from the various modules, they could pressurize the fuel
system briefly, but at no where near the pressure needed to ignite any
of the thrusters.  Reconnecting the OTV on the far end of the array
directly to the fuel lines, instead of running the fuel down the ship
and pumping it back up, would have worked while the OTV had reserve
fuel, but again, there was no way to apply sufficient fuel pressure to
ignite the engine and begin the burn.  Even siphoning fuel off from
the tanks was nearly imposible, since their main fuel lines were mated
with the rest of the module they were attached to, and thus there was
no way to open the fuel line without undocking the modules, which they
had no fuel to do.  Shunting the fuel from one line to another
permited some to be drawn off into hand held pressure cylinders, but
again at nowhere near the pressure needed to ignite any of the
engines.  It now was becoming apparent that while they could stretch
their available fuel about two weeks, they were going to have serious
problems restarting any of the rocket engines, and therefore couldn't
move the fuel to the rear of the ship where it could easily be drawn
off.


T + 752 days

Alister and Andrea come up with a scheme to divert the gaseous
atmosphere into the fuel lines and shoot spurts of air out of the
various manuefering thrusters.  It would allow them to undock
at least the rear OTV and move around the ship.  Undocking
any significant number of cargo modules was problamatic.  NASA,
by now eager to advise, had almost immediately set its team of
engineers to pour over the problem.  They devised a radical solution.

By expending a lot of their available atmosophere in the OTV,
they could give the entire ship a slight forward nudge.  NASA
had simulated the motion of the fuel in the tanking system
and concluded that a sufficient quantity of fuel to fire the
engines could be reliably be moved through a single tank -
not the 28 it would take to move any of the fuel all the way
back to the pressure tanks in the rear of the craft.  This
idea proved the basis for a desperate gamble.

They would move the entire ship to undock the farthest fuel module,
docked to the OTV, and expend all of the OTV's atmosphere to propel
the fuel back into the OTV's tanks.  If it didn't work, whoever were
the astronauts on the OTV would be effectively gone, floating away
from the ship in a powerless, airless OTV with only their spacesuit
power.  Some thought was given to running the OTV remotely.  While
possible, it would also require the complex return manuefuer to be
done remotely, because the ship would still be dead in space and the
OTV would need to put it underway again.  Doing this remotely was
undesirable.

The Captain was now faced with a crucial decision.  Should he send a
competent OTV party, and risk seperating the crew?  Should he have
everyone go on the OTV, and risk seperation from the cargo modules and
any hope of return to Earth without them?  Should he pilot the OTV
remotely, and risk that some simple malfunction could kill them?

Alister hadn't slept in almost three days.  The Captain ordered him to
take eight hours off, spend it smoking dope, or listening to CDs, or
whatever.  The young engineer started to object, but Vic seconded the
order as a medical directive.  The power was turned back on in his
module, and he smoked the last joint Burns had given him, that they
were going to smoke when he got back from Mars.  Ten minutes later, he
was fast asleep.

T + 753 days

Andrea was already going over the burn calculations again when
Alister awoke.  He groaned when he saw the printouts taped
to the walls, the floating physics texts, and the complex
computer systems, running on mimimum power.

"Don't look," Andrea said.  "If you don't want to look, don't
look.  I want you to be fresh and go over this top to bottom
before we try it, but you can take another day off if you
don't want to look at it now."

That was exactly what they did.  Andrea looked over the plan that day,
as did teams of NASA, ESA, and RSA engineers and amateur enthusiasts
everywhere.

T + 754 days

The Captain decided to send both Andrea and Alister,
told them that if it didn't work he was depending on them to find
someway to get the fuel into the OTV.  They would detach from the rear
of the ship in the main OTV, use its atmosphere to manuefuer away from
the ship.  Then the Captain would blow about half the air in the
greenhouses to undock the ship from the last fuel module.  Then Andrea
and Alister would have to move their OTV to the fuel module, while the
rest of the ship moved away from them, dock to it, and use the rest of
their atmosphere to push forward on the fuel module.  Three hours
later, a quanity of fuel should have passed into the OTV's fuel tank,
at which point they would close the values and presurize the fuel
tank.  Pressurize with what?  They would need the atmosphere both to
move the ship and to pressurize the fuel.  In fact, they would need
about half their available atmosphere to pressure the fuel tank up to
operating pressure.  They would also need a working fuel cell to run
the pump, so they need some of the near-empty fuel and oxyidizer
canisters.

T + 755 days

They try it and it works.  Alister refuels  the OTV from the tank
and returns to Icarus, where they repressurize their fuel system
and get the ship running again.  By now they are so close
to Earth orbit that they decide to go for a slingshot by
the planet, followed by orbital interface.


d6166 5
a6170 1
world.  What happens at the end?"
a6858 24
T + 750 days <***>

Alister's burn

T + 751 days <**>

problems continue

T + 752 days <**>

Alister and Andrea's scheme to manuefer with air

T + 753 days <*>

burn calcuations.

T + 754 days <**>

Captain decides to send Andrea and Alister.

T + 755 days <*>

it works.

d7817 21
@


1.63
log
@we've got Borzov and a whole new way to get home

BTW, I finally found out today that Andrea Yeats is almost the same
name as the women who drowned her babies in a bathtub in Texas!

And the date is right now, at times it hasn't been on this
Toshiba convertible, but it's been right for about a month now
@
text
@a6417 74
T + 800 days

Lou thumbed some papers on his desk and beat around the bush for
a minute.  He didn't quite know how to ask what he wanted to ask,
so finally he just blurt it out.

"I'm looking for a volunteer flight crew to pick up the _Icarus_ crew
and land the shuttle in Europe or somewhere."

The shuttle pilot and commander looked at each other, then back at the
STS program coordinator.  "This isn't approved by the director, is it
sir?"

"No."  Lou paused before continuing.  "You can say I gave you the
order to do..."

The commander interjected.  "You can't give us that kind of order,
sir.  We'd be court-martialed and thrown out of the space program,
probably the entire military."

An awkward silence fell over the room.  Breaking it, the pilot asked,
"Is this a favor for Andrea?"

Lou rubbed his hand over his balding scalp, noting the sweatiness of
both his head and his hands, and nodded in response, "Yeah".

"I'm in," he said, looking over at the shuttle commander.  Lou looked
up with surprise.  He had imagined this interview going much
differently.  Suddenly, he suddenly found himself outnumbering the Air
Force colonel, who looked back and forth between the administrator and
pilot before finally collapsing.

"Ah, what the hell.  I'm sick of this gig, anyway.  Mission
specialists have all the fun; all I do is command the thing!"


T + 803 days

"What's the chance of them hijacking the shuttle, or something?"

The NASA chief looked at his two subordinates, who both answered
simultaneously.

"No, I don't think..."  "I think that's a definite..."

Becker continued first.

"It's a definite concern.  These guys aren't some bunch of space
tourists.  They know how to operate a spaceship, and their track
record shows the kind of things they're willing to do to get what they
want."

Lou spoke up next.

"I've known Andrea Yeats for almost 15 years, and there's no way she
would be involved with any kind of hijacking or anything of the kind.
No way."

"What if she isn't involved?  What if Mercurio and his crew just hijack
the thing without telling her anything?"

Lou shook his head.

"I don't think so.  She's part of that crew now.  After three years,
I don't think they'd make any major decision without involving her."

The director looked back at the two men standing across the desk from
him.  He took off his glasses and tossed them down on the desk.

"Well, the president said to bring them back, so bring them back.  I
just hope we get the damn shuttle down in one piece."



d6446 1
a6446 3


T + 807 days
d6513 1
a6513 1
"Borzov!  They didn't tell me you were still here!  Why didn't Vic
d6516 1
a6516 1
"I wouldn't let him!" the Russian replied.  "_Still_ here!  Yes,
d6524 1
a6524 1
you, Captain, I would have sent you off with a bottle of Russia's
d6564 19
a6582 1
A different kind of mood settled over the space station.
d6584 6
a6589 5
"I'll tell you what I think'll happen if you go back home", Col. Ramon
interjected.  "You're a thief, captain, and you know it.  I haven't
hung on your every word, like the people in your country, but I know
you're a theif, and you'll probably get some jail time.  I think you
expect that, and I think you deserve it."
d6594 1
a6594 1
won't."
d6598 2
a6599 2
hack, they'll want to question him extensively about Burn's methods,
and he's not even from your country."
d6609 1
a6609 1
"Go home, son," the Israeli interjected.  "People like young pilots as
d6617 3
a6619 3
stated.  "If they extridite fine.  But I'll just take the Russian
Soyuz and then hand myself over to the South African embassy in
Moscow."
d6645 1
a6645 1
intimate than Yeats'.
d6649 8
a6656 1
Alister looked from one to another during these last moments together.
d6669 2
a6670 2
"Yeah.  I'll see you on Earth, man, but I think I'm done for space
travel."
d6685 6
a6690 6
conviction.  "The stuff we've talked about, the nerve we've struck -
freedom, democracy, religion, God - this is stuff Plato and
Aristotle, St. Matthew and Thomas Aquinas, Karl Marx and Tolstoy wrote
about, and none of them had all the answers.  I mean, if this is the
kind of stuff _those_ guys talked about, and if _we're_ talking about
it now..."
d6693 2
a6694 1
him, where _Columbia_ gleamed in the razor-sharp sun.
d6696 1
a6696 2
"The prequel is all human history.  The sequel is the fate of mankind.
There is no beginning.  There is no end.  This is the Great
d7079 1
a7079 1
T + 800 days <**>
d7081 1
a7081 1
Lou asks the shuttle crew to land in Europe
d7083 1
a7083 1
T + 803 days <**>
d7085 1
a7085 1
President wants to know if they'll hijack the shuttle
d7087 6
a7092 1
T + 804 days <**>
d7094 3
a7096 1
What's going to happen to the U.S.?
d7098 1
a7098 1
T + 807 days <**>
d7100 1
a7100 1
Earth orbit burn.
d7102 1
a7102 1
T + 1265 days <**>
d7104 1
a7104 1
Merciruou asks shuttle crew the plan.  They decide to go to Kennedy.
@


1.62
log
@fiddling
@
text
@d40 4
a43 3
It was a brilliant hack.  It was better than the one they did in
college, when the campus news server wouldn't accept posts from the
student lab.  They had recompiled the server with 'gcc', goten a
d372 2
a373 165
Marcelius Mercurio crested the embankment in his ten-year-old Toyota
and turned off the state highway onto a paved road that soon became a
dirt road.  It was high summer in the New Mexico mountains, hot and
dry, one of those days that made the ancient Greek scholar wish for a
convertible, the Pacific Coast Highway, and a surf board.  Yet the
Japanese compact had served him well over the years, and though its
engine was nearing 150,000 miles, like many of these Asian imports, it
had never given him more trouble than a broken timing belt.  Now it
cruised over arid hills shimmering in the noon heat, zipped along
between catcuses and sagebrush, and easily negotiated dry washes that
in the spring would become impassable torrents for a few hours, then
settle back into dusty hibernation to await the next storm.  Seven
miles from the highway, Mercuriou turned right at one of the dry
streambeds, shoo'ed away a half dozen cattle with his horn, then
rubbled over a cattle guard, and coasted down a long driveway between
a high cliff rising to his left and the riverbed which paralleled the
road on the right, finally reaching a pair of house trailers at the
end.  He parked next to an old Jeep, the only other vehicle in sight,
turned off the ignition, and got out of the car.

Like many famous men, Mercuriou was neither particularly tall,
particularly handsome, nor particularly well dressed.  In his
mid-thirties and a shade under six feet tall, his facial features
betrayed the mixed features of his hybrid Romanian/Irish ancestry.  A
white T-shirt, khaki shorts, tennis shoes composed his modest attire.
The secret of his success lay more in the intangibles - above-average
intelligence, a love of literature and learning, and a driving
ambition.  Like his paternal ancestors, who had decended from the
Scythian plains to ravage the heart of the Roman Empire, he was
fiercely loyal to his friends, determined to take on the world,
undetered by any temporary setbacks in his plans, and absolutely
convinced that he would ultimately win.

The man who emerged from the nearer of the two trailers was nearly ten
years his elder, heavy set to nearly the point of obesity, with a
bristling mustache that covered a mischevious smile.  Dressed in a
button-down shirt and light slacks, Victor Antonov decended the three
wooden steps in front of the door, began to shake the hand of his old
friend, then clasped him in a bear hug and invited him inside.  They
had met in college, when Marc was an eighteen-year-old freshman and
Vic was finishing medical school.  Marc had briefly dated the future
doctor's cousin. The courtship had foundered; the friendship had
lasted for almost twenty years.

Inside, the twenty-year-old trailer exhibited the domestic disarray of
a single man.  A small siting room to the right of the door was
partitioned from the kitchen by a small counter.  Beyond the sink and
oven, a sliding door lead to a small bathroom and then to the only
bedroom on the far end of trailer, where a gray cat had disappeared
upon seeing a stranger enter the abode.  Marc sat down on a couch
against the far wall while Vic went back out to retrieve a pair of
cold beers from the large refrigerator outside the door.

"So how long have you had this place?" the visitor asked after
the two friends had toasted and taken a first taste from their
bottles.

"Oh, about three years," the doctor answered.  "My father left me
enough of an inheritance to buy this plot of land with the trailer
on it for $20,000.  I added the second trailer myself."

"Pretty good deal."

"Yeah, the land's cheap up here.  Can't use it for much except
cattle; you've got to drill down eight, nine hundred feet or
so to get water."

"And how you've been puting food on the table?"

"Oh, a little of this and that," the doctor answered vaguely, drawing
a wry smile from Mercuriou.  "That's what the other trailer is for."

"Can we take a look?"

"Sure."

The men took their beers and walked back out into the heat, around the
side of the trailer, down a dirt path through the scrub to the door of
the second trailer.  It look much like the first one, except that all
of the window curtains were drawn.  Closer inspection revealed that
white drywall had been placed over the interior off all the windows,
behind the curtains.  It was impossible to see in or out of the
trailer.  Vic used a key to take a padlock off the door and led the
way in.

Inside, the trailer had obviously been stripped of almost all its
original furniture and fixtures.  The main room, about 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
marijuana plants, each sporting a bushy top of their distinctively
branching five-part leaves.  Two rows of bright lights hung down from
the ceiling on chain links that could be adjusted in length as the
plants grew upward.  An air conditioner hummed in the window, and a
dehumidifier on the floor discharged outside the water it condensed
from the air.  The lights ran off a timer, which also periodically
turned on a pump that flooded the tubs with a liquid fertilizer from a
child's toy plastic pool in the corner.  The smell, green and
plantish, mixed with another aroma distinctly reminiscent of a skunk's
spray, was overwealming.

Vic walked around the raised tubs to the far wall, where a quantity of
the plants had been harvested and hung upside down to dry.  He broke
one of the buds off by its stem and passed it to Mercuriou.  It was
top-quality marijuana, never packaged or pressed, covered with tiny
white crystals of the psychoreactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol.  The
guest nodded his head in appreciation, not really sure what to say,
then finally mumbled some kind of complement on his friend's carefully
maintained operation.  As they walked back to the other trailer, Vic
explained how his paying clients provided enough income to run the
operation, subsidize the non-paying clients, mostly patients suffering
from AIDS or cancer, and provide enough profit for food and gasoline.

"I don't really like it," the doctor mussed after he had loaded
part of the marijuana bud into a glass bong filled with water and
ice, passed it to Mercurio along with a butane lighter, then
reloaded the bong and smoked some himself.

"But I tell myself I'm helping people, and I am.  A lot of my patients
are terminally ill, and I get the occasional hangnail or scorpion
bite, but it still feels like I'm siting up here in the hills doing
nothing with my life except becoming something I've always despised -
the local drug dealer," he concluded with a wry grin.

It was an opening in the conversation that Mercurio had wondering
how he'd create since he'd arrived.  Now, intoxicated on the drug,
he leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice.

"I've got a new project I'm working that really requires a man
of your experience, both as a doctor and as a... horticulturalist."
Both men grinned at this choice of language.

"Actually, it's an old project, but one that's really going to take
off, and I do mean take off."

Vic rolled his eyes, stood up and walked to the kitchen, which in the
small trailer amounted to little more than crossing the room.  As he
took a teakettle off the stove and began filling it with water,
he thought back over the various dreams and schemes he had shared
with Marc Mercuriou.  Only one had a chance of 'taking off',
and it had come up again and again over the years.

"We're not flying to the moon, I hope?"

"Nope.  The moon's been done.  I'm shooting for Mars."

The doctor sighed as he turned on the gas stove and contemplated the
flame.  Mercuriou wasn't joking.  He thought back over the years he
had known Marc Mercuriou.  If he had learned one thing about the man,
it was that he wouldn't undertake a project if he didn't think he
could finish it.  He'd sit and do nothing before undertaking something
half-baked.

"I thought you estimated it would take billions just to fly to the moon."

"Ten billion.  But the money's not a problem."

Vic now turned and looked Mercuriou directly in the eye.

"You've got ten billion dollars?"

"I've got as much money as I need.  I control the Internet."

Mercuriou launched into an explaination of that bold statement,
stopping after he could tell the doctor was no longer paying
attention to the tech-jargon.
d375 3
a377 5
"I'm telling you," he concluded in a low voice, "this thing's like
super-hack."

A silence fell over the room, punctuated only by the whistling of
the teakettle and a single word from Vic as he slowly shook his head.
d6550 3
a6552 3
getting back to Earth now.  Even the engine failed now, they would be
in some crazy orbit that the OTV's could get them down from no matter
what.
d6561 24
a6584 2
"Perfect burn," Alister declared, as he broke out into a wide
grin and let out a whoop.
d6586 2
a6587 7
In the next few days, the crew moved all their personal
belongings, along with anything they wanted to return with,
including gold from the asteroid belt, into OTV 2, secured everything
else they were leaving on the ship, and finally all piled into
the OTV and slipped away from the ship.  Firing the OTV's one
rocket, they dropped towards a rendevous with the partially
completed International Space Station.
d6589 2
d6592 2
a6593 1
T + 811 days
d6595 1
a6595 1
"So, what's the plan?" Mercurio asked the shuttle commander and pilot.
d6597 1
a6597 4
"Basically, everything's fine until we deorbit about six hours before
we're supposed to, ignore mission control when they start hollering,
drop into the atmosphere off the Atlantic coast of Africa, contact
Dakar approach on the radio, declare an emergency, and land."
d6599 3
a6601 1
"Dakar?  Senegal?"
d6603 2
a6604 1
"Yep.  Supposed to have nice beaches.  We're gonna find out."
d6606 1
a6606 1
"And what happens to you guys?"
d6608 1
a6608 1
The two officers looked at each other before the pilot answered.
d6610 7
a6616 2
"We'll probably be court-martialed and run out of the space program;
I doubt we'll get any jail time, probably just dishonorable discharges."
d6618 2
a6619 2
The commander spoke up as he pulled the checklist back down in front
of him.
d6621 2
a6622 2
"I'm sick of flying these buckets anyway.  The mission specialists
have all the fun; all I do is command the thing!"
d6624 6
a6629 3
A few hours later, Mercurio gathered his crew in the shuttle's
main compartment.  He filled them in on the shuttle crew's
plan.
d6631 1
a6631 2
"They'll probably be court-martialed for it.  It'll end their careers,"
he concluded.  "I just can't ask them to do it."
d6633 2
a6634 1
Vic broke the silence that followed.
d6636 3
a6638 1
"So, it's Kennedy after all, then?"  Mercurio nodded in the affirmative.
d6640 1
a6640 3
"Look, if anyone doesn't want to do this, we'll go to Dakar.  I'll
say I hijacked the shuttle; hell, let's actually do it, then maybe
these guys'll have a chance of getting off."
d6642 5
a6646 4
The captain looked around the faces that surrounded him; the only
faces he'd seen in person for the last three years.  They were
his crew, his family, and he pretty much knew the answer each
would give in turn as they looked around the circle.
d6648 4
a6651 2
The doctor who started as a medical outcast and was now the world's
unquestioned expert on space medicine.
d6653 4
a6656 1
"Kennedy."
d6658 1
a6658 2
The young South African who'd grown up more in three years than most
men did in a lifetime.
d6660 1
a6660 2
"OK, Kennedy.  I hope that cop I punched out kinda forgot about me,"
he speculated wistfully.
d6662 3
a6664 2
Finally, the once unheralded NASA engineer who'd become a flashpoint
in her own right for her strongly held unorthodox opinions.
d6666 2
a6667 1
"Kennedy."
d6669 1
a6669 2
The captain concluded the unanimous decision as the shuttle crew
floated down from the PMA.
d6671 1
a6671 2
"Colonel, we've been talking, and we just can't ask you to go
to Senegal.  We want you to take us to Kennedy."
d6673 4
a6676 1
The two NASA men looked at each other, and the pilot spoke first.
d6678 1
a6678 1
"Sir, we volunteered for this mission."
a6679 2
"I know, and I thank you.  But you're not throwing your careers away
for us.  Take us to Kennedy."
a6680 1
The NASA men looked at each other, and the pilot spoke for both of them.
d6682 1
a6682 1
"Well, we'll take you where ever you want to go."
d6684 1
a6684 1
"Kennedy," the Captain said with an air of finality.
d6686 1
a6686 2
The shuttle commander looked around the cramped compartment.  Each
Icarus crewman nodded assent.
d6688 6
a6693 1
"Ok, Kennedy it is.  Are we ready to close the hatches?"
d6695 1
a6695 2
The space station crew above gave an affirmative reply.  As they
closed the PMA's hatch, the Captain turned back to his crew.
d6697 1
a6697 1
"Let's go home."
d6699 4
d6704 1
a6704 1
EPILOG
d6706 1
a6706 1
"It's good to have you guys back."
d6708 2
a6709 1
"It's good to be back."
d6711 1
a6711 2
"There's something I've been meaning to ask you, but you were dead by
the time it happened.  What went wrong with _Columbia_?"
d6713 3
a6715 7
"Well, for starters we some repeat patterns with _Challenger_.  Again
we see the first indications of the problem are visual.  Again we find
NASA glued to their instruments, which actually do show something
wrong this time.  But again there's no contingency plan.  Again,
nobody seems to have really thought SRB Sep, or in this case just
level off your descent.  If the thing can't fly straight and level at
Mach 18, it's a design flaw."
d6717 1
a6717 1
"Well, the tiles have been an issue since the beginning," Vic chimed in.
d6719 2
a6720 4
"The vehicle is old," Andrea concluded, "the technology has moved
ahead.  It's time to really look at the kind of technique Burns used
to build the engines of the _Icarus_.  Can you just cast the entire
shuttle out of heat shield material and leave it hollow in the middle?"
d6722 2
a6723 4
"We shouldn't even be trying," Mercuriou spoke again.  "Our problems
are hear on this planet.  That was one of my biggest mistakes.  It's
absurd to think we're going to fix our problems here on Earth by
flying off to Mars."
d6725 1
a6725 1
"No argument here," Vic said emphatically.
d6727 4
a6730 6
"If people want to fly to Mars, let them," Andrea exclaimed, throwing
her right arm up in exasburation.  Bits of seseme seed went flying
from her knife.  "Haven't I gotten anything through to you, yet?  Let
people do want to they want to do, and try to help them out.  Feed
them.  Give them a place to stay and a place to work.  Something like
manned spaceflight is going to need a lot of people helping out, too."
d6732 1
a6732 3
"Well that's the real issue," Vic chimed in, changing thoughts in
mid-sentence.  "Who's going to make that decision, some big government
agency?"
d6734 7
a6740 6
"Hopefully the people themselves who are asked to help out," Andrea
replied.  "The farmer asked for food.  If all he wants to know is if
you've got money to pay for it, then we're going to keep having
problems.  The principle is you _give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_,
and when you can't do that, you make some more sensible decision than
just give to those who've got money and the rest go without."
d6742 2
a6743 1
...
d6745 3
a6747 4
At first, the astronaut said nothing, and the reflected glare of
sunlight on his visor precluded any attempt to read his facial
expression.  Clearly visible on his right shoulder, however, was the
green, red, blue and black design of the South African flag.
d6755 6
d7145 1
a7145 1
T + 811 days <**>
d7149 6
d8069 3
@


1.61
log
@fiddling
@
text
@d40 1
a40 1
It was a brillent hack.  It was better than the one they did in
@


1.60
log
@fiddling.  everything after 'for Bruce' iambic pentameter!
@
text
@d23 1
a23 1
			      for Bruce,
d30 6
a35 3
This is a historical novel.  Many of the events and characters are
based on real events and real people.  Some of the names have been
changed.  Some haven't.  The body of the work is fictional.
@


1.59
log
@fiddling
@
text
@d23 1
a23 1
			 for Bruce, who knows
@


1.58
log
@fiddling
@
text
@d24 1
a24 1
		      we learn more from failure
@


1.57
log
@fiddling with decication
@
text
@d24 2
a25 2
		   we learn more from our failures
		       than from our successes
@


1.56
log
@improved Alister's introduction

committed now to the lottery hack
@
text
@d17 10
a26 8
to Tom Clancy,
  for teaching me to develop setting;
to Victor Hugo,
  for proposing a thesis I rejected;
to William Shakespeare,
  for suggesting a bold experiment;
and to Robert,
  this is everything I failed to teach you
a28 1
		Icarus' Wing
d8173 17
@


1.55
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d996 4
a999 6
trouble.  He had noticed that Burns spent at least an hour or two a
day working on a computer with a competely seperate network feed.  He
had already said something to Burns, suggesting that the seperate feed
to be configured as a backup to their primary feed, but his boss had
dismissed the suggestion, saying something about the second feed being
'fine the way it is'.
d1005 17
a1021 4
himself.  In addition to dozens of custom software programs, it also
contained large files that were essentially tape recordings of the
digital network traffic during various hacking attacks.  Alister now
skimmed through one of these.
a1038 19
"There was an unlogged connection to 'dumper' from your workstation
last night at 9:43 PM.  It was encrypted of course, but it looks like
it lasted almost an hour.  Know anything about it?"

Alister's face flushed red, while Burns continued to grin broadly.
There seemed little point in trying to deny the obvious.  Card key
records of entry and exit from the building would place him in the
office last night at that time, and his workstation's own accounting
records could probably be mined for evidence to support the hack.
Anyway, it was curiosity that had driven Alister; he wasn't a natural
liar.

"Yeah, I've seen you type that password a few times and I wanted to
see what was on that machine."

"And what did you see?"

Alister shrugged.

d1056 22
a1077 1
DESCRIPTION OF MERCURIOU'S OFFICE HERE
a1085 14
"What did he see?"  /  "Do you know what he saw?"

"Bank Duestch.  The packet trace we had running during the hack."

"How much of it?"

"Probably the whole thing."

"Did he make any sense out of it?"

Burns thought for a moment.

"Yeah, probably.  This could be serious."

d1091 1
a1091 1
"I think it's hilarious.  This whole thing is made possible by your
d1105 2
a1106 5
"This could be serious, too," the engineer concluded as his returned
the newspaper.

"Oh, it is serious.  They'll eventually catch up with us.  We just
better make sure we're in orbit by the time that happens."
d1108 4
a1111 5
"Oh, it _is_ serious," he replied, leaning back in his chair.
"There's a countdown clock running on this launch, just like with
NASA's, T minus whatever, only we don't know what time it is.  At some
point, that clock goes to zero, and we better be ready to launch when
it does."
d1121 1
a1121 1
Burns shifted uncomfortably in his chair.  Mercuriou was preaching
d1144 37
a1180 3
"OK, so you know there's some kind of hack going on.  You may suspect
that this is a front operation of some kind.  What you haven't figured
out is the truth.  This is a manned mission to Mars.  I'm the
d1188 35
a1222 1
"Yeah, right," he replied as he got up to leave.
d1224 1
a1224 1
"This is no joke," Burns informed him as he was halfway across the room.
d1226 2
a1227 1
...
d1229 2
a1230 3
"We need someone who can hack.  I've got a whole list of things I need
lifted from one computer or another, and there's no way I can do it
all myself."
d1232 5
a1236 1
"So what now?" Alister asked.
d1238 1
a1238 1
Mercuriou leaned back in his chair and grinned.
d1240 10
a1249 1
"I think it's time for you to take a little vacation."
@


1.54
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d17 8
d1003 8
a1010 2
Yet Alister fancied himself a hacker, and had trained himself to
read keystrokes over people's shoulders.
d1032 7
a1038 6
Alister's face flushed red.  There seemed little point in trying to
deny the obvious.  Card key records of entry and exit from the
building would place him in the office last night at that time, and
his workstation's own accounting records could probably be mined for
evidence to support the hack.  Anyway, it was curiosity that had
driven Alister; he wasn't a natural liar.
d1067 5
a1071 2
Mercuriou concluded.  Burns nodded.  He had just finished filling
in his boss on Alister's unauthorized computer access.
d5310 1
d5483 1
a5483 1
"The resupply module?"
d5541 1
a5541 1
Mercuriou turned away from the window and confronted his first office.
@


1.53
log
@stuff on a bad day, despair of this thing every being done
@
text
@d7970 107
@


1.52
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d401 1
a401 1
lasted over a decade.
d1032 1
a1032 1
"Looked like a bunch of email from NASA..." he replied, letting his
d1035 4
d1055 9
a1063 1
"If he tells NASA, it could be big problems..."
d1065 6
a1070 2
Mercuriou interrupted himself with first a chuckle, then broke out
in an awkward guffaw.
d1075 2
a1076 2
super-hack of Chesapeake, and now along comes this twenty-year-old who
hacks _your_ network!"
d1088 1
a1088 1
"This could be serious," the engineer concluded as his returned
d1091 2
a1092 2
"Oh, it is serious.  They'll eventually catch up with us.  We better
make sure we're in orbit by the time that happens."
d1094 26
a1119 3
"OK," he continued, "you keep telling me you need more help, and one
of the big things I _haven't_ be able to provide you is help with all
these computer hacks you want done.  Now can Alister do that for you?"
d1126 2
a1127 1
yeah, it looks like he can hack, too."
d1147 4
d1686 1
a1686 1
"Yeah, the locking mechanism is in the wall, so I could solder the
d2019 9
d2322 2
d2672 2
a2673 2
copies from the publishers' computers were purchased and shipped to a
site in Guatemala, where their bindings were sawed off, the pages were
d7842 128
@


1.51
log
@fixed up the first scene in the novel a bit

added something at the end I might or might not use about the bank hack
@
text
@d77 3
a79 2
secretary walking at brisk pace in the other direction
down the isle that backed the cubicle.
d139 16
a154 15
He practicly sprinted across the room as soon as the door closed
behind the last tech, slapped a cable onto a special PCMCIA card that
had been siting in his laptop for the last week, plugged the other end
into the server's hard drive, powered it, and hit a three-key sequence
on the laptop, which beeped two seconds later.  Then Burns killed the
power before the server's CPU had gotten out of BIOS, replaced the
original cable to the drive, and dashed back across the room with his
laptop.  Since they weren't using a cryptographic file system yet,
they didn't even have to worry about forging signatures.  It had taken
less than 15 seconds.  After the technicians returned, Burns preserved
appearances by consuming another half hour to finish installing the
optical interface, then left.  Buoyed by an air of near invincibility,
he practically floated out to the parking lot, tossed the laptop in
the back seat, fired up a sneak-a-toke cleaverly designed to look like a
cigarette, and floored the rag-top all the way home.
@


1.50
log
@editing "the MUTE scene" from **** to *****
@
text
@d26 1
a26 1
T - 391 days
d30 125
a154 14
student lab.  They had recompiled the server with gcc, goten a smaller
executable than the original, altered it so that after printing 502
ACCESS DENIED it went and accepted the post anyway and padded it out
to make the CRC come out right.  They wern't using MD5 back then,
heck, it hadn't even been invented yet.  Then Burns dug through the
engineering and computer science library for the VAX Architecture
Reference Manual, figured how to drop the student workstations into a
diagnostic mode by hitting the little blue button on the back of the
machine, installed packet sniffers on couple of them, and waited a few
days to grab the server's root password as it went by over an
unencrypted telnet.  They went in as root and just dropped the new
server binary onto the hard drive.  It ran for six months unnoticed,
until the staff updated the whole OS installation.  But this hack was
even better.
d162 2
a163 3
hard.  An economic boom was in progress, every bunch of
twenty-somethings with a neat program had a startup corporation
running, and skilled programmers were in short supply.  Various ideas
d226 3
a228 15
he was in the server room that day, working on a tricky install of a
new high-speed optical interface in one of the test machines.
Somehow, he just couldn't get the settings right, until everyone was
out of the room for a few minutes.  He slapped a cable onto a special
PCMCIA card that had been siting in the laptop for the last week,
plugged the other end into the server's hard drive, powered it, hit a
three-key sequence on the laptop, which beeped two seconds later.
Burns killed the power before the server's CPU had gotten out of BIOS,
replaced the original cable to the drive, and walked away with his
laptop.  Since they weren't using a cryptographic file system yet,
they didn't even have to worry about forging signatures.  He finished
the tricky install in less than five minutes and left, just as the
server workers came back with the new power supply.  He had been
practicing at home for a week.  The actual hack took less than 10
seconds.
d278 2
d6733 1
a6733 1
T - 391 days <***>
d7689 96
a7784 1
-----@


1.49
log
@added stars to indicate quality of passages
@
text
@d675 2
a676 2
oxygen, which are two of the smallest and simplest modules that exist.
But more than that, what makes ten-thirty-three, as we've gotten use
d725 1
a725 1
Mercuriou nodded as he turned back around and address the audience.
d4304 14
a4317 12
Andrea drifted into the com shack, where Burns was floating with a
laptop, fiddling the database code while a half-burnt joint drifted
nearby.  The arid smell of the marijuana smoke hung in the air, not
yet cleared out by the charcoal filters.  The joint had burnt out, but
Burns hadn't noticed yet, engrossed as he was in the Java code on the
screen.  Andrea shook her head.  At first, it disturbed her that Burns
worked on critical software while intoxicated, but the quality of all
his work was superb, and the captain didn't seem to care.  "He cranks
out his best code while he's highed up."  Today, he was wearing one of
his favorite T-shirts, solid black except for a single word across the
front, in neon green letters formed from a series of wide horizontal
lines, like you might find generated by a VCR on a TV screen: MUTE. []
d4321 3
a4323 2
Burns looked up from the screen as the engineer drifted up and grabbed
a handhold.  "You've known him a long time, the captain?" she asked.
d4325 56
a4380 7
Burns nodded and pushed the laptop away.  It drifted across the module
and bumped into the wall.  "Since college.  We were both comp sci
majors.  I'd been in a couple of classes with him, but I didn't really
know him until I looking for a place to live and answered an ad in the
paper.  I started talking to him on the phone and suddenly realized
that I'd seen him in class, so I moved into the place.  We had a lot
of great parties that semester."
d4384 4
a4387 4
Burns was quiet for a minute.  "He's a lot different now than he was
in college.  Back then, all he wanted was a joint and a whiteboard and
he was happy.  Now, he's a lot more driven."  His shrug indicated that
he wasn't as happy with his new, driven friend.
d4389 1
a4389 1
"How did he get... driven?"
d4393 1
a4393 2
"Did he have to steal a hundred million dollars?  Blow up a dozen
highway bridges?"
d4395 26
a4420 20
"Hey, you don't get ahead in the world by being nice to people.  He
learned to be tough."  Burns paused for a moment.  "The guy I knew in
college wouldn't have got us to Mars."

"So why did you come along?"

Burns curled up and started laughing.  "Because I wanted to go to
Mars!"  he finally burst out.  "What did you say when he asked you -
let me think about it for a few days?"

Andrea smiled.  At the time of the launch, events had happened so
quickly that she hadn't really thought through what Mercurio was
proposing or what she had accepted / gotten into.  All she had seen
was an opportunity to fly into space and some people who seeming
needed her help.  In fact, she had almost assumed that they would
quickly need her help to get back home.  In truth / fact, she
was amazed by how little real help they had needed, and over
time had developed a deep respect for the ship's chief engineer.
Its captain she was still trying to figure out / Its captain
was still a mystery to her.
d4422 1
a4422 1
"Why is Mercurio captain and not you?" she now bluntly asked.
d4429 1
a4429 1
Andrea (patiently) waited until Burns went on.
d4432 5
a4436 7
much all the math stuff we were studying and he (for his part) could
understand it.  On the other hand, I was consumed with the books, and
he had a lot more balanced perspective on life.  He liked to have fun,
but he also knew when (he had) to study.  And he's wise, not just
smart.  (Of all the people I know well) He's probably the deepest
person I really know well.  He has balance.  And I found out something
later on - he can lead, he can manage, whatever you want to call it."
d4439 20
a4458 15
bored out my mind.  Usually both at the same time.  That's the problem
with being smart.  The smarter you get, the more you can do, and the
fewer other people there are who can (help) do it.  Eventually, you get
so smart that you can do almost anything, and nothing gets done."

"When Marc proposed this thing, it just seemed like one more good
idea.  But he knows how to get things done.  He asked me what I needed
from him, and he told me what he needed from me.  And he's done a
really good job of making sure I don't get overwealmed.  Even though
this thing is so big, it's almost the easiest thing I've ever done.  A
lot easier than some really simplier projects where I just didn't get
the things I needed to get them done.  I've just planned it out,
showed/explained all the plans to Marc, and he's figured out how to
get someone else to do 90% of it.  I just do about 10% of the work,
and usually the most interesting part anyway."
d4482 2
d4487 4
a4490 8
that it's just his opinion and he might be wrong.  Anyway, I learned
after college that most of the work we do is bullshit.  Whether he's
right or wrong, I'd rather be flying to Mars than writing one more
idiot routing protocol.  It's just boring, and I always had managers
pushing me to do more and more and more.  If anything, Marc pushes me
to do less and less.  He'll offload anything he can.  And Alister was
a great find.  He's a lot of fun to work with, and a lot of stuff I'm
sick of fooling with, he'll jump into.  Marc hired him, of course."
d4496 1
a4496 1
ship trying to draw everyone's life history out of them?"
d4498 11
a4508 1
The engineer thought for a moment before she answered.
d4515 1
a4515 2
gig came along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot.  I
mean, why did you do to medical school anyway?"
d4523 5
a4527 4
heal their injuries, ease their pain.  Mainly what you learn is how to
look things up in a book, recommend expensive procedures done by
for-profit companies just across the street from the hospital, and
scribble out prescriptions for pricy medicines.  And you know what the
d4529 4
a4532 4
young men and women determined to advance the frontiers of a
three-thousand-year-old profession.  Instead, most of my classmates
just wanted to know what on the next test so they could pass their
class, get their degree, and move on to the next step towards their
d6846 1
a6846 1
T + 113 days <****>
d7509 81
@


1.48
log
@nitroglycerine doesn't have N-O _triple_ bonds... it has triple N-O bonds
@
text
@a181 5
Their first major target was, logically enough, a bank.  One of
Chesapeake's great marketing strengths was the ability of their
routers


d186 2
a187 2
would be very suspicious to auditors.  Instead, they settled on the
Keno maker.  They went for a very subtle hack, that replaced the
d195 60
d486 1
a486 1
river.  []
a541 81
#if NOT

Mercuriou called a old friend his, a doctor named Victor Antonov, who
knew a real estate broker who knew a a ranch site in New Mexico;
pretty high up, flat, and twenty miles down a back road.  A good road,
though - dirt, but a good road that trucks could come down.  Marc
brought Vic in on the hack, since he knew he would need a doctor, and
his old friend topped the list, and now started to spend money - used
trailers for the construction site; a front corporation; phony
building permits for a large dairy.  Vic asked about the money; the
Captain just shrugged.

"If the hack works, we've got some cash," he said, "if not, we've got
problems no matter what."

"Do you think we should stake everything on this hack?"

"No," Marc answered after a short pause, "but I am."

The break can within six months.  The Kansas state jackpot in the
Pick-Five-Plus had risen to over $11 million.  Marc knew the numbers
would hit.  What kept him up all night was the thought of somebody
else picking the numbers at random.  Nobody did.

Vic had picked the winning ticket, and the doctor revealed in the
limelight.  For the first time in his life, he was in front of
T.V. cameras.  He told his story, his bills from medical school, his
work for the doctors, his work for the clinics, his general
disillusionment with medicine.  "Everyone grips about H.M.O.s and
professional assocations and the cost of medical insurance," he told
one press conference.  "If the doctors would just forget about the
money and heal the people who came to them, we wouldn't have all these
problems."  One reporter asked him if he was going to start a medical
philanthropy with the money.  A little grin washed over his mouth and
his mustashe bristled.  "Actually, I'm starting a dot-com".

#endif

#if NOT

They called it Robotics Research.  Which wasn't far from the truth.
Marc certainly planed to do a lot of work robotically.  He was also
careful to keep the company's cash burn under a half-million a month,
even considering things like his deal to purchase 60 PCs and 60
laptops for a hundred thousand, complete with wireless networking
cards.  Wireless cards for which they had a amplifier design.  They
just stamped out a small run of 150 circuit boards and soldered them
on.  The dozen young programmers they'd hired started to find some of
the quirks of their management when a hundred of the computers just
disappeared out the door to a remote location know only as "Site Y".
They were still available over the network, though, and they were
starting to run some pretty serious simulation software that would
keep them running all night.  Mostly Jasper's code, Navier-Stokes
equations, wing design, hypersonic flight, that kind of thing.
Robotics Research accumulated a sizable collection of robots, and most
of the software running them was pretty simple.  Just basic remote
control, really.  Boring stuff, and Marc had to struggle to hold on
to some of his brighter employees.  He gave them an orbital mechanics
system to work with and enhance.  No explaination given what a
robotics company would want with orbital mechanics.  Yet the work was
interesting, so most of the programmers stayed on.

Meanwhile, Marc had still been playing the lotteries.  The hack had
worked its way into both Maryland's and Flordia's systems, and Marc
himself decided to have his fifteen minutes of fame in Flordia, then
had Jasper's mom hit it big.  People who knew them well started to
wonder.  If you somebody you know hit the jackpot, it was a big deal,
but three people?  Questions were already starting to rise when New
Year's came around.  The core team got together at a ski resort in
Taos and went back to a rented ski house afterwards.  Vic, as usual,
was the one to question the lottery winnings, and the increasing money
drain.  Marc just stood in the corner and puffed on a joint.  "This
is the year of living dangerously."

Marc had leveraged the roughly $20 million from the lotterys into
about $100 million using fraduent financial statements to get various
loans for land and equipment.

#endif


a624 32
T - 350 days plus a few months

Paydirt.  Finally, the computer had a prediction that worked.  It was
a complex, strangely ringed molecule dominated by nitrogen bonds,
liquid at room temperature, that could be synthacized from nitrogen
gas after a string of six reactions.  The kicker was that it reacted
with hydrogen peroxide, without a catalyst, to produce a specific
impulse close to 1000, which was higher by far than any conventional
rocket fuel.  Since it was the hundred and thirty third nitrogen
compound suggested by the computer as a possible fuel, it
retained its original designation and became known as N-1033.

NASA grabbed up N-1033 NASA in a heartbeat, and they were briefly the
next glamour company looking forward to a mega-IPO.  Mercurio patented
the formula and manufactuering process and as much of the design
process as he could, then released the patents to the public domain,
stating that he had adquired the patents to establish beyond doubt
that they had invented the technology, that anyone could now use it,
and that nobody else could patent it.  His action was praised by many
as an exemplar of corporate responsibility, and to a stunned financial
community now wondering how he would pay for his startup, he announced
that he had ample funding from private sources.

In any event, no IPO was needed for legatimancy.  Burns had leased a
chemical manufauering plant, rapidly refitted it to produce the fuel,
and quickly had the first and only commercial source for the dream
fuel.  Boing, the ESA, and the Russian government asked for samples.
NASA placed a huge, multi-million dollar order, and began studying
the feasibility of retrofitting their space shuttle fleet to use
the new fuel.


d740 2
a741 1
"I guess you could just call it my humanitarian streak."
d962 17
a978 4
"OK," Mercuriou continued in a more serious frame of mind, "you keep
telling me you need more help, and one of the big things I _haven't_
be able to provide you is help with all these computer hacks you want
done.  Now can Alister do that for you?"
d1012 1
a1012 3
T - 54 days

Cancun vacation.
a1182 68
T - 52 days

The story broke on Wall Street that morning.  Marc quickly decided on
damage control and agreed to appear on CNNfn.  He lied through his
teeth.


A systems administrator notices a hickup in his network, and doggedly
tracks it down.  The trail leads to the router, and he reports it to
the manufacurer.  At first they deny any possibility of their system
causing the malfunction, but he persists and demands they send
engineers to investigate.  After leading the engineers through the
problem, they scratch their heads and begin digging into the problem.
Eventually, they begin to suspect a serious problem with the router
and report it to their management.  After some hesitation, they call
in the FBI, which launches a major investigation.

"If they control the routers, they control the network."

----

"OK, so we'll take the most lethal mix of the computer viruses we
stole from Network Security, transmit them encrypted to the Ciscos so
they won't be detected in transit, then program the machines to dump
them all out onto their network segments at a given time."

----

"The FBI computer network was essentially crippled today by what
government leaders are calling the most devastating act of
cyberterriorism yet perpetrated."  Similarly read the first statement
of almost every TV news program that evening.  On this particular
broadcast, the first clip was of FBI director Louis Freed giving an
interview.

"What happened today would be akin to someone breaking into the
Centers for Disease Control, taking a test tube of each of the most
lethal viruses there, mixing them all in a beaker and throwing it out
in the middle of New York City."

Later that day, someone sent an email to the NBC news desk that gave
instructions for contacting the criminals behind the latest string of
assults.  It prescribed use of a particular Cisco router, behind which
lay an elaborate string of ruses, redirectors and trap doors.  The end
result was an audio stream containing a computer synthesized voice
that would answer questions being broadcast live on national TV.  That
evening, the voice was interviewed by the network's national news
anchor.

"First," the voice began, "Director Freed's analogy of releasing Ebola
viruses in New York City is absurd.  In such an attack, thousands of
people would die.  In this case, I'd be amazed if even a single person
died as a result of the FBI network being crippled."

"But there were millions of dollars of damage done, correct?"

"Millions of dollars of what?  Computer expert's overpaid $200-an-hour
consulting fees?  Maybe.  But actual damage to physical hardware that
needs to be pulled out and replaced?  Probably zero."

The government responded quickly and harshly.  The President held a
press conference the next evening in which he addressed the nation,
informed the people that the United States was under attack from a
group of terrorists, and that the government was responding
accordingly.



d1260 4
a1263 5
manager and now director of a special project to convert a single
space shuttle to use N-1033.  To one side of the office,
floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on NASA's Johnson Spaceflight
Center on the outskirts of Houston, Texas.  Inside, Yeats continued to
read.
d4750 7
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leisurely routine.  The extraction of liquid hydrogen and oxygen
proceeded slowly but effectively, mostly under computer control, and
Andrea accompanied Burns during his periodic trips into the asteroid
field to exchange an empty fuel module for a full one.  Captain
Mercuriou was slowly rereading Plutarch's
_Lives_of_the_Nobel_Gretians_and_Romans_, this time in the original
Latin; Vic undertook a careful breeding program to develop strains of
important food crops (and marijuana) specifically adapted for growth
in zero-gee; and Alister was learning to play the guitar during his
convelecance.
d4787 4
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"Well, maybe you can be our twentieth-century Lycurgus, Doctor," Marc
speculated with a mischevious grin, as Vic began to chuckle.  "Maybe
you can prescribe a set of rules for us to raise our children to be
Christians instead of warriors."
d6205 4
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history torn by war, oppression, deceit and natural disasters, than
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."
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"I'm looking for a volunteer flight crew to pick up the Icarus crew
a6358 2
--------

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T - 391 days
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T - 380 days
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First attack  ???
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T - 370 days
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T - 355 days
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T - 350 days
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T - 350 days plus a few months
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Burn's new fuel.
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T - 200 days
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a6596 1
T - 141 days
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T - 140 days
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T - 137 days
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T - 54 days
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T - 52 days
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story breaks on Wall Street that a massive hack has been discovered
d6616 1
a6616 1
President announces the country in under attack by terrorists
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T - 30 days
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description of Burn's reworked 747

T - 2 days
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T - 1 day
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Launch Day
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T + 1 day
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the police on the ground - move or delete!
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T + 1.5 days
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T + 2 days
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T + 3 days
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T + 4 days
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T + 5 days
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Another television appearance for Mercuriou vs a prominent congressman.
d6717 8
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T + 7 days
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a6728 1
Mercuriou - "the majority don't want good leaders"
a6735 21

T + 9 days

On TV again.

Mercuriou - compares Saddam Huissen's invasion of Kuwait to Andy Jackson's
in Flordia, then Panama

CM - Panama wasn't a legitamite government.  People cheered for its fall.
Defines "legitimate government" - democratically elected body with
the support of its people

Mercuriou - "the people" is just a buzzword for the majority

CM - we should have let Iraq take over Kuwait?

Mercuriou - yes

a digression about Israel taking care of itself, Manhattan island being
the "promised land"

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T + 11 days
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T + 91 days
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T + 100 days
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T + 388 days
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T + 401 days
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T + 405
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T + 419 days
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T + 431 days
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'Primitive' societies
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Faith in God got _her_ there.
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T + 624 days
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T + 637 days
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T + 639 days
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T + 650 days
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T + 651 days
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T + 652 days
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T + 690 days
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T + 700 days
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T + 705 days
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T + 729 days
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T + 734 days
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T + 750 days
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T + 751 days
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T + 752 days
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T + 753 days
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T + 760 days
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@


1.47
log
@bit of an edit here
@
text
@d713 1
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These nitrogren-oxygen triple bonds release a great deal of energy
@


1.46
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d884 20
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possible concession from her jailers.  Siting up against the wall, 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.  He turned on the light.
d2397 2
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"How much money did you steal?"
d2400 8
a2407 6
"Hard to say.  Adding up everything we lied about, everything we
bought on empty credit, everything we just flat out stole - probably
close to a billion dollars."  He paused for a minute.  "And that's a
shoestring budget for what we're trying to do.  We've cut a lot of
corners.  A billion isn't much for a manned space launch, let alone
one going to Mars."
d2409 1
a2409 1
"How many corners did you cut?"
d2411 1
a2411 4
"A bunch.  I'd like to have three identical ships going, but we've
only got one.  We don't have any kind of landing vehicle yet, and
of course I'd like to have one built already and tested here on Earth,
but that isn't going to happen either."
d2413 2
a2414 1
"How do you plan to land on Mars if you don't have a landing vehicle?"
d2416 19
a2434 2
"We've got an old 747 we managed to put in orbit this morning, and
I'm hoping we can modify it to function as a space shuttle."
d2436 1
a2436 4
"How much do you have of... uh, supplies?"

"We've got a year's supply of food, water, charcoal to extract carbon
dioxide from the air.  Then we'll have to start recycling."
d2438 1
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"Do you expect to be gone longer than a year?"
d2440 1
a2440 3
"Of course, yes.  There's no way we could get to Mars and back in a
year.  Plus, I'm planning on making a stop at the astroid belt on the
way.  I'm looking at five years..."
d2449 1
a2449 1
"Where do you think I am, Lou?" she asked dryly.  "I'm in space."
d2627 22
a2648 22
electronic, and completely illegal.  Every major publisher of
technical books in the English language had been targeted by Burns'
super-hack, and the few books of which Alister couldn't spirit off
electronic copies from the publishers' computers were purchased and
shipped to a site in Guatemala, where their bindings were sawed off,
the pages were systematically scanned, and the resulting digital
images transmitted back electronically.  Without lauching more than a
few pounds of books, most of these for nostalgic value, such as Burns'
1956 first edition of Adrian Albert's
_Fundamental_Concepts_of_Higher_Algebra_, the _Icarus_ crew enjoyed
easy access to major reference works on every aspect of technology.
There was an entire book, for example, simply titled _Uranium_, that
described almost everything known about the chemistry of that
important element - it's dozens of compounds, their properties, the
reactions used to convert between them, and of course its nuclear
properties, despite the fact that _Icarus_ carried only a small sample
of uranium in it's chemistry lab.  In fact, all the major chemical
elements were well represented, with entire books on silicon, iron,
and nearly a dozen on carbon and its various compounds.  There were
also books on antenna theory, orbital mechanics, and hydroponics, as
well as Mercuriou's collection of ancient Greek and Latin authors,
both in translation and in the original tongues.
d2895 1
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The "ground sqwalk" as Mercuriou called the Earth-based media pundits,
d2945 3
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programs.  In the last two days, we've interviewed a lot of people,
both scientists and astronauts, as well as ordinary people on the
street.  Something that has come up time and again is an admiration
that such a small number of people could accomplish something like
this.  I think there was a general belief that you needed a big
government program to accomplish manned spaceflight.  What are your
thoughts on that?"
d2981 1
a2981 1
apply their own rational.  I'm helping them compete."  Mercuriou's
d3021 6
a3026 5
rules.  In Russia it was the proletariat, here it's the majority.
It's always the same.  Some big group of people that think that
because they're more advanced, or because they've been oppressed, or
because there's more of them than anybody else, that they have the
right to rule everybody else's lives."
d3042 2
a3043 1
men with some nightmare system to be jammed down everyone's throats."
d3050 11
d3066 2
a3067 2
guest was a prominent congressman, who had heard his earlier interview
and was determined to rebut him.
d3086 16
a3101 16
backwards, feudal country, and how everyone was guaranteed a job, and
an education, and a retirement, and how wonderful communism was.  And
the fascists loved to talk about their Zeppelin airships, and their
autobahns, and how they had pulled Germany out of a worldwide
recession, and how they were rebuilding their Reich and how wonderful
fascism was.  And it's all true, but at some point you step back and
see some kind of objective truth.  Every one of these great societies
was run by a bunch of garbage leaders with some screwball system based
on the most viscious traits of mankind, and captialism is no
exception.  Its leaders are about the most selfish sons of bitches
you'd ever want to meet in your life, and the simple truth is that you
either work for these bastards or you starve.  So if you want want
Zeppelins, or Sputniks, or Microsoft Windows, and these material
things are more important to you than your freedom, then should pick
whichever one of these brutal philosophies most appeal to you and go
sign up."
d3115 4
a3118 4
side-step everyone everyone else, isn't there, 'Captain'?  The fact is
that capitalism works.  It certainly works for all the decent,
hard-working people who have the opportunity to better themselves
instead of being stuck in a rice paddy somewhere!"
d3132 8
a3139 9
You could load any ancient Greek text into the program, and it would
display it on the screen.  If you came across a word you didn't
understand, you could click on it with the mouse, the program would
look it up in a Greek-English dictionary and display the entry at the
bottom of the screen.  It was a lot faster than flipping pages in a
dictionary, trust me, and a great learning tool.  I finished the last
half of the _Iliad_ using it, and it was like night and day compared
to old way of stopping at every other word and looking for it in a
different book." []
d3169 10
a3178 7
hundred thousand dollars in damages.  I'm still waiting for that
house, by that way."

"Well, Captain, it sounds to me like you were guilty!  That sounds
like a real noble cause, but the bottom line is that you stole someone
else's intellectual property and published it without their
permission.  You seem to have a problem with authority."
d3192 3
a3194 2
not selfish.  That program, that dictionary, and all the other ones
like it should be freely available on our computer networks!"
d3214 2
a3215 2
century public libraries before they're ever created _are_ trash, sir,
they are!  This society isn't going to be remembered for all this
d3218 1
a3218 1
the computers, all the source code, all the circuit diagrmas, all the
d3221 4
a3224 2
nightmare system.  It's not about making money, it's about how you
treat people, and these capitalists people like dirt!"
d3234 2
a3235 2
Why shouldn't we take all these books and put them up on our
networks?"
d3252 2
a3253 40
kept secret."

#if 1

"And who's going to pay for it, Captain, who's going to pay for it?"

#elsif 2

"Well, that sounds very noble, Captain, but in the real world, if you
just give everything away, you'll be put out of business."

"That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of capitalism right there - you be
a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you won't
work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the street
and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they walk past
and call you a bum who doesn't want to work... And they're right,
'cause I don't want to work - not for them and not for their brutal
system!"

#elsif 3

"And who's going to pay for it, Captain, who's going to pay for this
library of Alexandria once we just give all these books away for
free?"

"Maybe the capitalists could pay for it, Congressman, they've
certainly got the money."

"I know, I know, take from the rich and give to the poor.  We've heard
all this before!  It's been rejected by the people."

"Again, Congressman, I don't have some big plan to figure how to pay
for it, but I know that our leaders aren't even trying.  They're
determined that it won't happen.  They're determined that all this
information will be controlled, just like everything else in a
capitalist society.  Everything is controlled by the capitalist
system."

#endif

d3263 5
a3267 5
"Well, senator, I'll agree with you that this is a democracy, but
I don't think that changes things more than a little.  Let's say
Russia had had freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, and free
and open elections every two or four years, and they had still elected
the communists, and still supported the KGB, and still shipped their
d3275 8
a3282 7
you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?  Remember
who you're talking to, senator - a drug user!  Don't expect me to
sit here and crow on about freedom while this whole society is
hell-bent on a war against me and everyone else like me.  You do
ship your citizens off to jail, and while you may not torture them,
and your prisons may not be as cold as the ones in Siberia, the fact
remains that fear of the police is just as readily used in this
d3292 3
a3294 1
told when the great majority barks out its orders."
d3335 1
a3335 1
"Fine!  Fine!  Let's keep going, too!  Don't forget the ninth
d3340 3
a3342 1
[Insert ninth ammendment here]
d3361 8
a3368 6
powers!  What good's a law when you pick and choose what parts of it
you want to obey?  Fine, so you obey parts of the Constitution, but
what about the other parts?  This is like me blowing down the highway
at ninety miles an hour, and when the cop pulls me over saying, oh,
but officer, I came to a full and complete stop at all the red
lights!"
d3402 1
a3402 1
face of reason!"
d3408 6
a3413 3
"Freedom!"  Mercuriou spit the word out in disgust.  "Senator, turn on
the T.V!  Don't you see the police slamming people to the ground and
dragging them off in handcuffs!"
d3423 6
a3428 5
Because I don't concede to this God-damned, filthy, cursed democracy
that it can control every aspect of my life, no matter how private,
that it can literally tell me what I can and can't put into my own
body!  And then you sit there are talk about 'freedom', you dirty son
of a bitch!"
d3430 1
a3430 1
"We have freedom in this country!" Wye practically screamed back at
d3443 12
d3456 75
d3561 13
a3573 13
"Yes.  The problem is populist government - this stupid idea that you
can put the masses in charge of society.  It was talked about by
philophers in the eigthteenth century, brought to power in Europe and
the Americas by a string of revolutions in the nineteenth century, and
brought to fuition in the twentieth century.  What it produced was
fascism, communism, and capitalism - three of the most depraved
societies that have every been seen on the face of this planet.
Fascism, based on brutal, viscious, racial competition; communism,
based on brutal, viscious, class competition; and capitalism, based on
brutal, viscious individual competition.  Now, tell me, what do all of
these things have in common... other than the fact that millions upon
millions upon millions of people went chasing off after every one of
them?"
d3609 9
a3617 8
"It was populist at first!" the Captain answered.  "Sure, after the
communists really got entrenched it was almost impossible to remove
them, but it'd be almost impossible to remove the capitalists from the
west - they control everything!  Look at what's happening right now in
Russia - the Communist Party is the single largest political party in
that country, they control a quarter of the seats in the Duma; what
possible explanation is there for this except that millions upon
millions of Russians _to_this_day_ support communism!"
d3887 2
a3888 2
second highest per capita incarceration rate on the planet?  Why
every time you turn on C.O.P.S, you see the police chasing after
d3891 2
a3892 2
your children?  The only people that the democrats persuade are the
majority.  Everyone else is ruled through threat and fear.  The
d3898 1
a3898 1
force; they do it every day."
d3922 1
a3922 1
broadcast was concluded, indicating the camera with a gesture.
d3924 3
a3926 4
The South African emphatically shook his head no.  Andrea Yeats also
demurred, though more calmly, when Mercuriou inquired her desire.
Burns, who had gone right back to work on a computer console even
before the conclusion of the interview, never looked up.
d3931 7
a3937 6
Due to the considerable radio time lag at this point, the media
couldn't interview Andrea except through videomail, which meant
that a lot of her answers took the form of monologues.  One
thing was for sure.  The woman who had saved Alister's life
and been promoted to first officer had started to generate
a lot of media interest.
d3944 4
a3947 4
"The problem is human nature.  Democracy is just another political
system.  In some ways it's better than others, in some ways worse.
Ultimately, the solutions to our problems are spiritual and not
political.  Unfortunately, democracy tends to accentuate a lot of
d3952 17
a3968 19
"Well, the problems have always been there.  It's just that democracy
shows us that a lot of our problems are still with us; that it's not
just because people don't have political representation that causes
our problems.  Now people do have political representation, and a lot
of the problems are still with us.  So, just giving political power to
the people doesn't solve your problems."

The commentator cut it.  "Dr. Yeats, you mentioned a moment ago
that democracy is better than some political systems, worse than
others, or something to that effect.  If I'm not reading too
much into your words, can you give us an example of a superior
political system?"

"Well, I don't know if there are any superior political systems.
Like I said, our problems are spiritual more than political,
and thus we need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.
Now take a monarch like King Arthur; you can have a good king,
genuinely interested in caring for his people, and yes, you
can have a good monarchy."
d3973 1
a3973 1
Christianity as a means for people to live their lives.  Monarchy is
d3975 14
a3988 7
while, but eventually you'll get a bad one, so it's no answer.
There's the story in the Bible of the Jewish people demanding a king -
this was Saul - and the prophet at the time, I believe it was Samuel,
told them that the king would take the best of their crops, and
conscript their sons into his army, and tax their profits, but the
people wanted a king anyway.  And some of the Jewish kings were pretty
lousy men."
d3995 1
a3995 5
"Well, I'm still on his crew, so I'd better not say too much!"

Due to the time lag in the transmission, it was almost a second
before anybody laughed, so the joke fell flat.  She faltered
a moment, then continued.
d3997 1
a3997 1
"No, seriously, he makes a lot of good points, but this has been human
d4015 6
a4020 6
"Oh, please, look around.  Christ gave us two great commandments,
to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as
ourselves.  And he elaborated on them, and lived them in his own
life.  I think the second commandment is more obvious than the
first; we look around and see how we don't love each other as
Christ taught, that's more obvious that how we fail God."
d4028 17
a4044 2
give to all, you often end up with nothing, at least nothing
material."
d4066 12
a4077 13
remember that we're called to give to all those who beg of us, and we
don't like a bad experience turn us against all hitchhikers."  She
uttered the last phrase as though a robot, it was her voice, she was
preaching to herself, but she didn't really beleive it.

"Sure, but it's more dangerous not to pick them up.  It's dangerous
because then we're violating the commandments that Christ gave us to
live by; we're acting out of fear and not love.  And the reason
someone, well a lot of people, actually, like Captain Mercurio, really
dislike democracy is because people don't choose leaders who say,
look, you should stop and pick these people up, they choose leaders
who say, no, don't do that, think of how dangerous it is, put your own
safety first."
d4153 1
a4153 1
than a spiritual one.  We here constantly from them about sex.  Sex,
a4190 2


d4203 1
a4203 6
wait - you're going to find out all about God."





d4211 1
a4211 1
fairly quite for a while, the captain in particular.
d4213 1
a4213 1
"You did really good, I was quite proud of you," was all he had to say.
d4215 5
a4219 47
Andrea's long-distance television interview had aired four days after
it was taped, to a large audience.  It had provoked wide spread public
response, evidenced by a deluge of e-mails whose subject lines ranged
the spectrum from "May God bless you and your crew" and "Thank you,
you are a genuine Christian" to "Christianity COMMANDS Capitalism" and
"This is __HERESY__!!!".

T + 14 days

"Does the media have a conservative bias?" McLauchlin asked the TV
camera.  Marcellius Mercurio had suggested that the day before, going
on to add that whatever it's conservative capitalist bias, the media
was totally biased in favor of democracy.  Now the topic was being
debated on McLauchlin's popular weekly TV show, which featured a panel
of regular participants who debated various issues.  A recuring theme
was for the host to ask his panelists to rate a question on a scale of
one to ten.

"On a scale of one to ten, how conservatively biased is the news media?"

"Zero.  OK, maybe one.  The media just reflects the opinions of the
people," his well-known conservative panelist noted.  "The people have
finally gotten sick of all this liberal crap, of which Mercurio
represents merely the most violently anti-democractic fringe."

"I'll go with five," responded another panelist, a respected, somewhat
liberal newspaper writer.  "The media tends to reflect the prevaling
mood of the country.  Thirty years ago, the media had a liberal
bias..."

"No!" his conservative colleage interrupted, in mock shock.  "The
media had a liberal bias back in the seventies?!?"

"Well, they did, it's true.  Only because they reflected the mood
of the country at the time!"  He leaned forward on the table to
make his point in earnest.  "The country was more liberal, so the
media was liberal.  Now the country has become more conservative,
so the media is more conservative."

"The answer is - three," McLauchlin ended the discussion.  "Next
question - what are this crew's chances of making it to Mars?  Scale
of one to ten - John."

In orbit, Mercurio clicked off the TV screen on his laptop and pushed
it away.

"I already know the answer to that question!"
d5827 18
a6882 4
T + 14 days

"Does the media have a conservative bias?"  Mercuriou is only an observer.

d7005 4
a7193 13
"If you go back to the Old Testament, first Samuel, I think, you find
the people actually _demanding_ a king!  We have this idea today that
a king is somehow imposed on people against their will, but in those
days it was the commonly accepted form of government.  And Samuel
basically told those people that they didn't need a king, that all
they needed was to follow the will of God, but they didn't want to
hear it.  So they got their king, it was Saul, and Samuel told them
again that if they and their king followed the will of God, things
would work out well for them, but if they didn't, there would be
problems.  It's a lot the same today.  These people don't need a king,
and they don't need a democracy.  They need to follow the will of God,
but of course you've got half of them screaming that militant
capitalism _is_ the will of God, so there you go."
a7322 84
-------

-----

"Captain, I just don't understand.  Your company has developed a major
new rocket fuel, you _did_ legitimately develop N-1033, didn't you?"

"Sure we did.  But where do you think we got the money to develop it?
You think they just give computational chemistry software aware for
free?  You think you get Pyrex laboratory equipment handed to you just
because you want to play around with some crazy idea that might
somehow make the world a better place?  People just put food in front
of your chemists because they get up and go to work in the morning?
No, you need money for all of it!  It cost us almost a million dollars
just to _develop_ N-1033; that was before you ever heard of us!"

"So where did you get the money from?"

"I told you, we stole it!"

"But you had a working product.  Couldn't you get all the venture
capital funding you needed?"

"We didn't have a working product at first," Mercuriou noted, more
calmly now.  "We had nothing.  One really smart guy who thought you
design a rocket fuel with a computer.  That's it.  No computers.  No
staff.  No software.  No lab.  Nothing.  Now how do you get that
venture capital funding?  I'll tell you how.  You sell you soul to the
capitalists.  You convince them, and I mean really convince them, that
you're one of them, you agree to bring on their management team, you
agree to some 'business plan' that tells how you're going to patent
and control this technology once it's developed, because these people
will do nothing unless they can see how they'll get a big killing back
out it, and unless you can really bring something more than your good
ideas to the table, you'll fight like hell just to keep 51% of the
company.  And if you tell them the truth, that once you invent this
thing that their money paid for you're just going to publish
everything you've got about how it works, they'll drop you like a hot
potato.  Or you work in your garage for ten years, and I'm not much of
garage guy.  So we developed, let's just say, an original source of
funding."

"And what was that?  Did you rob a bank?"

Mercuriou laughed out loud.

"Something like that.  Ever heard of Keystone Securities?"

#if NOT

"You're referring to the currency traders that went bankrupt?"

"Sure am.  What's the latest on that SEC investigation?"

"Well, the FBI has now been brought into the case, Captain, are you
saying that you had something to do with Keystone?"

"How did Keystone go bankrupt?"

"Well, I think that's the subject of the investigation."

"I don't need any investigation to answer that.  Their computers
malfunctioned and traded all their assets away in a weekend."

#endif

----

"Half their currency trading operation is based on arbitrage.  They
look for an eighth-point discrepancy between say, the price of gold
futures in Chicago and the price of gold in London.  It's a guaranteed
win if you can move fast enough to take advantage of it, and that's
why they're so heavily computerized.  The software makes almost all
the trading decisions.  Now, they've built their entire network out of
Chesapeake equipment, so we're in like Flint from that angle.  Also,
they develop all their own software, so we've already got their source
code.  We've got a targeted modification that, when triggered, will
make loosing trades.  Once we're done, we flip the switch again, and
the software goes back to behaving like normal."

"It does have the disadvantage of leaving evidence on the hard disk.
The hack should remain dormant, but will be there if somebody starts
looking hard enough."

a7382 14
"Took advantage of freedom!?"  Mercuriou practically spit the words
out.  The old Mercuriou was back, the Mercuriou that hadn't
faced disaster on Mars, the Mercuriou that hadn't listened
to Andrea Yeats for the last two years.

"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!
All those people out there who'd love to fly an airplane but can't or
don't because _it's_too_expensive_... Took advantage of freedom!  They
took advantage of _capitalism_!  They had the one thing that will make
people say 'yes' in a society that says 'no', 'No', 'NO' - money!
They took advantage of the fact that Osama bin Laden is a
_multimillionare_!"
d7436 23
a7458 1
-----
d7460 2
a7461 1
"We've got freedom of religion in this country, Doctor!"
d7463 1
a7463 1
"Freedom of religion is fine up to a point, but somewhat unrealistic..."
a7464 3
"It's not unrealistic, Doctor, we've got it!  What you advocate is
something we abandoned centuries ago, that there should be some
prefered religion!"
d7466 1
a7466 1
"Well, you've got to have a prefered religion..."
d7468 1
a7468 4
"Got to have a prefered religion!"  X echoed her words with a sneer.
"Doctor Yeats, I hate to break this to you, but you're about two
hundred years behind the times!  Ever heard of the Salem Witch
Trials?"
d7470 6
a7475 3
The NASA engineer turned red and practically ripped the microphone
off her shirt before fleeing from the TV cameras.  Mercuriou
jumped into the gap.
d7477 1
a7477 1
"OK, now you're back to picking on someone your own size!"
d7479 4
a7482 1
Later, Mercuriou found Yeats back working in C-3.
d7484 1
a7484 4
"So what where you talking about there?  You've got to have a hide of
steel to debate those bastards; it's like a blood sport.  They're not
trying to have some intellectual debate; they'll stoop to any low to
get their sound bite and 'win'."
d7486 2
a7487 2
Yeats brushed back the long blond hair that was starting to
drift in front of her face.
d7489 1
a7489 5
"What I was trying to say was that you just can't have a human society
without some kind of shared standard of morality, and that's one of
the main functions of relgiion. I mean, how can you judge right or
wrong?  Why can't someone say that his religion allows human
sacrifice?  Where's your freedom of religion then?"
d7491 2
a7492 6
"I'll tell you what their prefered religion is - it's democracy!"
Mercuriou interjected.  "The murderer can't make his human sacrifice
because the majority won't allow it!  I can't smoke pot because
the majority has decided to outlaw it!  Our ship's library
is illegal because that's what the majority has decided to call it!
Right and wrong are subject to a vote, now, Andrea."
d7494 1
a7494 9
"Well, I don't beleive right and wrong are subject to a vote.  I think
half of what religion is, heck, maybe 90% of what religion is is
giving us standards to judge right and wrong.  Murder isn't wrong
because it's illegal, it's wrong because it's immoral, and you can't
decide what's moral and immoral without religion.  So that's why I
think freedom of religion, or more precisly seperation of religion
from public life, is a chimera.  You can have freedom to go to
whatever church you want, but you can't have a society without some
kind of shared norm of morality, and that means religion."
d7496 3
a7498 1
Mercuriou thoought about this for a minute.
d7500 2
a7501 3
"You know, you've got a good point there, Doctor - morality!  Maybe
it's something I don't talk enough about.  These people crow on to no
end about 'freedom', but they don't want to talk about morality!"
d7503 1
d7505 1
a7505 1
... the next day ...
d7507 2
a7508 2
Mercuriou had taken the conversation with Yeats to heart, and
when the interview started was absolutely determined to discuss morality.
d7510 7
a7516 6
"Every murder ever committed in human history was perpetrated by a
murderer who had freedom!  Every rape, every theft!  Every slave was
enchained by the _freedom_ of his master, yes _freedom_!  I'm
so sick of listening to you people crow on about 'freedom'!
Freedom in the absence of morality is the single most destructive
force this planet has _ever_ seen!"
d7518 1
a7518 1
----
d7520 3
a7522 1
"Well, that's a hobby."
d7524 2
a7525 1
"A hobby?"
d7527 2
a7528 2
"A hobby.  Something you do in your spare time.  A job is what you
do to put food on the table."
d7530 6
a7535 5
"OK, so let me get this straight.  A job is whatever you do that
produces food, and anything else is a hobby.  You forgot to add that
this 'job' involves dumping the forty hours a week for the best years
of your life into working for some system run by the most selfish
bastards you'd ever want to meet in your life."
d7537 1
a7537 1
----
a7538 2
"Capitalism is one of the most utterly immoral philosophies that
has even been proposed for men to live their lifes."
d7542 1
a7542 4
"These people that just don't want to work..."

"That's right!  For you and your nightmare system and your
ruthless capitalist leaders, you're damn right I don't want to work!"
@


1.45
log
@few more things
@
text
@d4475 54
d5570 11
d5752 103
d5857 56
d6822 5
d6908 4
d6916 6
a7098 58
------

after 9/11:

Alister: "What would Vic have thought about all this?"

Andrea: "Vic probably would have said that we're too primitive
as a species to possess a technology as advanced as jet aircraft.
He was always advocating a return to simpler times."

Mercuriou: "Do you beleive we're too advanced for jet aircraft?"
There was no trace of sarcasm in his voice.  He had already concluded
that humanity was too primitive to be flying to Mars, was genuinely
wondering about jet aircraft, and wanted Andrea's opinion.

Andrea took a deep breath before answering.

"I beleive technology is neutral.  It's a tool; just a different kind
of tool, a knowledge-based tool.  Tools aren't good or evil; it's what
men choose to do with them that makes them good or evil.  No, that's
not quite right, the tool isn't made good or evil, it's the choice
itself that forms good and evil.  I agree with Vic to the extent that
we're really too primitive to even evaluate good and evil.  I mean, a
significant segment of mankind still beleives that God doesn't exist."

Alister frowned, puzzled.  "You think that makes us primitive?"

"Sure," Andrea replied.  "A lot of people once beleived that the Earth
was stationary and the Sun revolved around it.  Do you think that
people with that belief are too primitive for manned spaceflight?"

"Manned spaceflight would be basically impossible with that belief
set," Mercuriou answered.

"Don't be so sure," Andrea answered.  "Men sailed around the globe
without even accurate timepieces to measure longitude.  Planck
formulated the core of quantum mechanics based on the amount of light
given off by a block of metal as you heat it.  The first computers
were built with _vacuum_tubes_, not transistors.  Don't underestimate
human ingenuity, Captain."

Merciriou was forced to grin, and Andrea continued.

"The point is that such a belief set is a severe handicap to manned
spaceflight, but doesn't exclude it completely.  Likewise, atheism is
a severe handicap to making moral value judgements, but doesn't
completely preclude figuring out that murder is wrong, at least in
some cases.  In other cases, you'll find people absolutely insisting
that they _have_to_kill_ for the sake of their 'freedom'.  You'll find
people who _do_ believe in God clinging to this belief that it's moral
to impose all these copyright and patent and intellectual property
restrictions on this technology, that basically results in this
knowledge, and these tools based on it, being available only to those
with money, and then absolutely insisting that this is consistent with
the Christian gospel.  That's how primitive we are.  Two thousand
years ago we were told _Give_to_all_those_who_beg_of_you_ and half of
us still can't understand what that really means."

a7244 109
Mercuriou: "We don't run this ship.  Burns runs this ship.  This ship
is just running on auto-pilot now."

Andrea thought about this for a moment.

"Well, we better make sure we know everything we can about how that
auto-pilot works."
 
-------

"Well, who you gonna attack?  The political leaders, the President?"
Mercuriou was all fired up after hearing the latest news broadcasts
from Earth.  "They'll just elect a new one and keep going, all hot to
avenge him, too.  I mean, who really is responsible?  Isn't it the
people, themselves?  The majority that elects these guys?  Isn't it
really _the_people_ who run democracy, so shouldn't we hold
_the_people_ responsible?  And isn't that who was in the World Trade
Center?"

"Certainly not all of them, for starters.  The attack was completely
indiscriminate."

"Completely indiscriminate!  Completely indiscriminate!  The attack
was directly focused on the biggest symbol of capitalism on this
planet!  I mean, those people in there were _the_true_beleivers_!
They were the _capitalists_!"

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

"OK, fine.  A lot of innocent people died.  But the majority of the
people in those twin towers represented the majority of the people of
the United States.  I mean, this kind of crap!" he gestured to the now
silent television monitor.  "All we keep hearing about is this is what
the majority wants, this is the voice of the majority, the majority,
the majority, like they're the only ones that count!  Well,
_the_majority_ of the people in those towers were _capitalists_, 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."

"It doesn't make a difference."

"It doesn't make a difference!?!  And on God's earth, why, woman, why?"

"Because you _forgive_your_enemies_, as I've tried to tell you about a
hundred times," Andrea was becoming irate.  "You don't smash airplanes
into their skyscrapers because they imposed some global capitalist
system on you, and you don't go off invading foreign countries because
they don't turn terrorist leaders over to you when you bark out your
dictats."

[hopefully, this is our first mention of Afganistan, and it shocks the
reader a bit]

Mercuriou was silent for a moment.

"There's a lot of young men dying in that country right now because
they're going to do what they've been told all their life, that their
country is under attack, and it's their duty to defend it, and
everything our boys have been told and believe!  And this guy, this
president, he doesn't declare war, he doesn't attempt some extridition
process, he doesn't try to get a security council resolution, he just
declares, 'if you're not with us, you're against us', and just barks
out this order to hand over bin Laden!  I mean, the same stupid thing
that started World War I!  And where was all the screaming then, that
Austria had been attacked by _terrorists_, _TERRORISTS_ I tell you,
and their allies - Russia, France, English, and THE UNITED STATES were
supporting _TERRORISM_!!!"

"This is what they thought the _Icarus_ launch was.  This is why they
started screeming then about a chemical weapons attack.  'Terrorism in
space', ha!  They figured that someone else, someone mad as hell,
another Timothy McVae, another Theodore Kidinsky, another Osama bin
Laden, had launched some big bunch of anthrax or something into
space!  They're guilty as hell, the whole bunch of 'em, the whole
_majority_, and they're just waiting for the next blow to fall!"

"My God!" he exclaimed.  "Can they really not figure it out?!  Can
they really not see that capitalism is one of the most depraved
philosphies that has even been proposed for men to live?!  Can they
really believe all their own propaganda and think this thing is some
kind of utopia?  I mean, which is worse: fascism, based on just
conquering your neighbors; communism, based on overthrowing your
government in some revolution; or capitalism, based on just doing for
yourself and letting some _invisible_hand_ take care of the rest?"

"Maybe they're just incompetent," Alister interjected.

"Incompotent?" Mercuriou answered.  Yeats, too, raised a puzzled eye.

[maybe this is the first time in the book Alister really has something to say]

"Yeah, like me trying to fly this spaceship.  Incompetent."

The crew broke out in laughter as his self-defacing humor.  Encouraged,
he went on.

"No, really, maybe people just don't know the difference between right
and wrong.  Maybe they can't choose good leaders because they don't
know how."

Mercuriou said nothing, but the expression that ran across his face
told him to be in accord with the young man's words.  Andrea broke
the silence.

"It's very hard to tell the difference between right and wrong,
Alister.  That's why Christianity is so important.  It gives us very
important guideposts to help make those decisions."

a7366 52
"What are you, some kind of reporter now?  You gonna go around this
ship trying to draw everyone's life history out of them?"

The engineer thought for a moment before she answered.

"I'm no reporter, but I usually have the opportunity to get to know a
crew before we're blasted into orbit together.  I've already spent
more time in space with you guys than with any other astronauts, and I
barely know anything about you!  Take your medical degree, for
example, I mean why aren't you using it?  Sounds to me like until this
gig came along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot.  I
mean, why did you do to medical school anyway?"

The doctor sighed as he put the blood pack into the refrigerator,
closed the door, and latched it shut.  Turning, he kept his hands
behind his back, holding on to the refrigerator door as he faced the
woman from NASA.

"I went to medicial school because I wanted to help people; learn to
heal their injuries, ease their pain.  Mainly what you learn is how to
look things up in a book, recommend expensive procedures done by
for-profit companies just across the street from the hospital, and
scribble out prescriptions for pricy medicines.  And you know what the
worst thing was?  I thought medical school would be full of idealistic
young men and women determined to advance the frontiers of a
three-thousand-year-old profession.  Instead, most of my classmates
just wanted to know what on the next test so they could pass their
class, get their degree, and move on to the next step towards their
million-dollar beach house."

"Please grip about socialized medicine," the doctor continued, warming
to his subject and growing increasingly agitated as his talked.
"Hell, our medicine already is socialized; it's just capitalist
socialism instead of communist socialism.  Doctors don't make the
decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and hospital administrators and
pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom line is still the same.  It's
still some screwed up system that everyone is a little cog in.  Sure,
you can buck the system.  But just like John Cougar Mellancamp said,
'whenever I fight the system, the system always wins'.  You fight the
system, nobody'll hire you because you won't churn out the billable
hours, you very well may lose your hospital privileges 'cause you
don't have some 'group' you're part of, if you just ask people to pay
what they can afford, you'll get a pittance, and on top of it all
you'll still have medical school loans to pay off, and they're
astronomical because the medical schools expect that you'll do like
everybody else and make a killing, so they want a nice little piece of
the pie, too."

"And as far as sitting up in the hills growing pot," he concluded, "it
happens to be something I'm really good at, it beats sitting in some
stuffy office building, and looks like it just might get us to Mars!"

d7401 154
@


1.44
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a15 102
Bush: "Quit all this politic'ing around and land that plane before
       somebody gets hurt."

      "Theft is wrong.  These people have done wrong, and they deserve
       to be punished.  And they will be punished."


"That's the problem with being smart.  The smarter you get, the more
you can do, and the fewer other people there are who can help you do
it.  Eventually, you get so smart that you can do almost anything, and
none of it actually gets done."

Eventually, you get so smart that you can do anything, and nothing gets done.
Eventually, you get so smart that you know how to do anything, and nothing gets done.
Eventually, you get so smart that you know how to do almost everything, and none of it actually gets done.

"If you learn to live with disappointment, she'll never leave you
for another man."

"You've got the freedom to be selfish, but not to be generous.  You've
got the freedom to work, but not to live.  You've got the freedom to
speak, but not to act."

"Propaganda is not a substitute for leadership."
"Good propaganda is not a substitute for good leadership."


"Capitalism or communism?  It's like asking someone to choose
between the Hydra and the Medussa!"




"What are you, some kind of reporter now?  You gonna go around this
ship trying to draw everyone's life history out of them?"

The engineer thought for a moment before she answered.

"I'm no reporter, but I usually have the opportunity to get to know a
crew before we're blasted into orbit together.  I've already spent
more time in space with you guys than with any other astronauts, and I
barely know anything about you!  Take your medical degree, for
example, I mean why aren't you using it?  Sounds to me like until this
gig came along, you were just siting up in the hills growing pot.  I
mean, why did you do to medical school anyway?"

The doctor sighed as he put the blood pack into the refrigerator,
closed the door, and latched it shut.  Turning, he kept his hands
behind his back, holding on to the refrigerator door as he faced the
woman from NASA.

"I went to medicial school because I wanted to help people; learn to
heal their injuries, ease their pain.  Mainly what you learn is how to
look things up in a book, recommend expensive procedures done by
for-profit companies just across the street from the hospital, and
scribble out prescriptions for pricy medicines.  And you know what the
worst thing was?  I thought medical school would be full of idealistic
young men and women determined to advance the frontiers of a
three-thousand-year-old profession.  Instead, most of my classmates
just wanted to know what on the next test so they could pass their
class, get their degree, and move on to the next step towards their
million-dollar beach house."

"Please grip about socialized medicine," the doctor continued, warming
to his subject and growing increasingly agitated as his talked.
"Hell, our medicine already is socialized; it's just capitalist
socialism instead of communist socialism.  Doctors don't make the
decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and hospital administrators and
pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom line is still the same.  It's
still some screwed up system that everyone is a little cog in.  Sure,
you can buck the system.  But just like John Cougar Mellancamp said,
'whenever I fight the system, the system always wins'.  You fight the
system, nobody'll hire you because you won't churn out the billable
hours, you very well may lose your hospital privileges 'cause you
don't have some 'group' you're part of, if you just ask people to pay
what they can afford, you'll get a pittance, and on top of it all
you'll still have medical school loans to pay off, and they're
astronomical because the medical schools expect that you'll do like
everybody else and make a killing, so they want a nice little piece of
the pie, too."

"And as far as sitting up in the hills growing pot," he concluded, "it
happens to be something I'm really good at, it beats sitting in some
stuffy office building, and looks like it just might get us to Mars!"



Andrea made a conscious effort to be constructive.  "Democracy isn't
magic.  It's a system of government where the majority of people choose
their own leaders.  If they choose well, it succeeds.  If they choose
poorly..."  Her voice drifted off into silence; the humming of the
air conditioners was the only sound for many seconds.


"After the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw the truth about democracy.
The U.S. was left as the world's only superpower, and could really
have done something to make all this talk about liberty and freedom
real.  Instead, they built a wall across their southern border,
declared war on their own people, and decided to keep all their
technology secret and controlled so they could make billions off it
for themselves.  That's when we really saw the truth about democracy."

d688 3
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chief technical officer of the latest high-tech startup with
a big invention.  NASA had just awarded them a major contract.
d701 4
a704 3
weight of 342.  This doesn't mean that N-1033 is exceptionally heavy,
it just means that the molecules themselves are very large, and thus
very heavy."
d707 3
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him and display it on the projector screen behind him.  It showed
a three-dimensional model of N-1033.
d714 14
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when they break, which is, exactly what makes nitroglycerine such a
powerful explosive.  In fact, we use nitroglycerine in the
manufacturing process.  It's the carbon shell on the outside that
protects the core and keeps N-1033 from simply exploding.  However,
when you raise the temperature several hundred degrees above room
temperature, the carbon shell _does_ break apart, and releases the
fuel mixture inside.  Furthermore, due to the spherical shape of the
molecule, it remains liquid at far lower temperatures than you would
expect for a molecule of this size.  In fact, it's liquid at room
temperature, and these are the properties that make it such a good
fuel - it doesn't require an oxidizer because it's already got oxygen
in it; it has a high specific impulse, which is the most important
measure of the efficiency of a rocket fuel; it's liquid at room
temperature and thus doesn't require elaborate refrigeration
techniques."
d731 15
a745 13
rocket fuels is that the module is so large and complex, while
something like the space shuttle main engines run on liquid hydrogen
and liquid oxygen, which are two of the smallest and simplest modules
that exist.  But more than that, what makes ten-thirty-three, as we've
gotten use to calling it, so different is how it was designed, and I
did use the word _designed_.  We started off with a list of
requirements for this fuel, some basic design ideas that included a
carbon shell with fuel inside, but then used computer programs to
simulate the equations of quantum mechanics and thus try literally
thousands of different combinations to find one that would work.  We
actually found many possibilities that looked like they would work,
that's why this one is numbered ten-thirty-three, but all of the
earlier molecules were rejected for one reason or another."
d763 2
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"They want a timetable for how long the contract will take."
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Now it was Mercuriou's turn to grin as he turned back around and
address the crowd.
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"I think you'll see production quantities of N-1033 within a year."
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"They're planning a launch!" she yelled as the irate captain crossed
the room at a sprint and slammed his hand down on the telephone to
sever the connection.
d2172 4
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controlled values opened to let N-1033 fuel and hydrogen peroxide
oxidizer flow into the rocket engines, where they mixed and shot out
the rear.  100 milliseconds after opening the values, the engine
control computer fired pyrotechnic charges that ignited the
volatile mixture.  The engines belched fire with a roar.
d2268 9
a2276 5
until nearly two thirds of the ship's fuel had been exhausted and they
were moving at a speed that would carry them to a six-hour orbit, that
is, an orbit that would require six hours to completely circle the
Earth.  Once they reached the six-hour altitude, Burns fired the
engines one more time, to circularize their orbit.
d7071 310
@


1.43
log
@added Burns' press conference announcing N-1033
@
text
@d790 2
a791 2
chief technical officer of the company that had received a major NASA
contract award.
d864 19
@


1.42
log
@alister's accident is back, this time on the way to Mars
@
text
@d785 81
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a1446 1
papers.  "No way.  Not with the quantities of ammonia they're
d1451 4
a1454 4
only because he had first computed how much ammonium perchlorate could
have been produced from the ammonia and compared that to the quantity
required for a space shuttle SRB.  Yeats had performed the same
estimate in her head.  Lou had called her in for a reason.
@


1.41
log
@you get to a point where you say, "can this be finished?  I mean, can
I finally put this thing down on paper, or will just keep chageing in
my head?"

and then you've got to remember that people _HAVE_ finished novels.
@
text
@d4552 158
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@


1.40
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d1994 2
a1995 1
Mercurio stopped walking and waved Burns to keep going.
d2014 2
a2015 1
"Look, I don't even have a spacesuit for you."
d2030 6
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Yeats was silent for only moment.  If they made it to Mars, she wanted
d2398 42
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Despite all the work going on in orbit, Mercurio found time for the
d2856 3
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of both fan mail and hate mail.  His next major appearance was on a
prime-time national news program.
d5308 18
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@


1.39
log
@added the library description, Lou's recuitment of Andrea
@
text
@d2398 4
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in zero-gee."  Alister blushed at the doctor's frank language.
"Dr. Yeats, of course, is the only one of us who's had that experience
before, but she's only seen the shuttle's toilet."
d2418 6
a2423 7
The clean waste jars, each about four liters in size and made of
transparent glass, were kept in a cabinet across from the lavatory.
Vic demonstrated the removal and installation of a jar, as Andrea
watched with interest.  This was significantly different from the
space shuttle's toilet, which made no attempt to recycle anything, and
far more consistent with the needs of a deep-space mission that
couldn't be resupplied from earth.
d2430 1
a2430 1
nodded.  Vic continued his lecture.
d2451 1
a2451 1
try to recycle everything back out of it."
d2457 4
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thought through and well planned.
d5038 1
a5038 2
"Remove the spacesuits from the resupply module and launch it.

d5040 7
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....
@


1.38
log
@edit that eliminates asteroid belt and moves andrea's interview forward
@
text
@d763 1
a763 1
retained its original designation and became known as N-133.
d765 1
a765 1
NASA grabbed up N-133 NASA in a heartbeat, and they were briefly the
d789 1
a789 1
requiring detailed attention.  The mass production of N-133, as part
d791 1
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task off, and Mercurio had in fact taken the entire N-133 operation
d798 1
a798 1
was able to effectively lie about how much N-133 NASA was actually
d983 12
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"I think it'd be best for you to disappear as quickly as possible."
d1022 2
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get quite hot.  The young South African had basically tuned out, but
realized at that moment that the pot-smoking American was absolutely
the most brilliant engineer he had ever met.
d1293 1
a1293 1
water, and two more were assigned for N-133 fuel and the hydrogen
d1315 74
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N-133, and we'll come up short.  I doubt we'll be able to land on
d2149 1
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controlled values opened to let N-133 fuel and hydrogen peroxide
d2261 1
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from supply lines of N-133 and peroxide.
d2318 31
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They sped across the desert mesa towards the last rocket, police cars
with screaming sirens right behind.  Both police and news helicopters
hovered overhead, and the images were now being carried live on
practically every TV station in the country, as well as some in
Europe.  Stopping the jeep at the base of the rocket, they jumped
into the cable car and started the winch.  The police cars pulled up
at the base and the cops ran to the base of the tower, but the car
was already out of reach.
d2387 1
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"If you want to stick around when we fire this thing up, be my guest!"
Marc yelled down to them, motioning towards the mamouth ICBM they
were now inching up.  At the top, Marc and Brian walked across the
catwalk and climbed into the cockpit.  Marc pulled the hatch shut
behind them and sealed it.  They had checked the radio earlier, and
Marc now clicked it on and called Burns.  He knew they didn't have
time for long checklists.
d2389 1
a2389 7
"We're ready to go."

One of the cops said something on his radio, then they all got in
their cars and headed back towards the compound.  "This is out of our
league; call for the feds," one of them told his partner.  Halfway
across the mesa, the ground shook as the solid fuel ignited in the
rocket behind them.
d2507 53
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things, it left the craft vulnerable to meteor strikes.
d2586 3
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on the cargo module she was in.  She was at the far end of module,
full of electronic lab equipment, and didn't have time to reach the
door before it shut.
d2609 2
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"There's nothing in here but oscilloscopes and IC boards."
d2632 2
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"We probably want to get her out of there," the captain stated.
d2673 1
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"She just opened the door to C-4!" Alister declared.
d2678 1
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"Dr. Yeats, as usual, _exactly_ where we don't want her to be!"
d2681 1
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Burns told the NASA engineer.
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"She's got some good points, there," Burns mussed aloud on the bridge.
Behind him, Mercuriou was hardly paying attention as he connected
together the pants and body of his spacesuit, which he rapidly put on.
d2736 3
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pushed off roughly from them, not because he hadn't learned how to
maneuver in zero-gee, but because his irate mood grew even more heated
the further he went.
d2798 8
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Despite all the work going on in orbit, Mercurio found time for
the media, and at that moment the stunning private space launch
was all the rage.  His first major appearance was on a prime-time
national news program.
d4479 1
a4479 16


Meanwhile, Burns had devised a scheme to spray a insulation
compound derived from carbon that stuck to all the asteroids
they tested it on, and left a layer of insulation that withstood
high temperatures.  He devised a way to spray and insulate
the bottom of the 747.

---- They make it first to the astroid belt, where they outfit the
ship with everything missing.  They build a giant carbon sprayer
and in this way fix the two modules that still have meteor strikes
that can't be sealed.  They sprayed the bottom of an old 747
NASA had given them and began to wonder it to would work as a
landing craft.

	     CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER
d4942 129
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"Somebody just smashed a plane into the World Trade Center!"
d5315 15
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silent crew watched the second tower collapse.  In the days ahead, it
would be revealed that Islamic terrorists had hijacked four American
airlines.  Coincidently, or perhaps not, all were Boings.  Two had
slammed, full throttle, into the twin towers of World Trade Center, at
one time the tallest building in the world, and headquarters to dozens
of major companies.  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.  Within hours, the
buildings fell.  Bankers, mail men, fire fighters, bus boys - all lost
their lives that terrible morning.
d5333 3
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the street and volunteered, desperate to find anything still alive in
the tons of rubble.  At Andrea's suggestion, The Captain issued a
statement of condolence, expressing his "deapest reget", and stating
d5944 1
a5944 1
"ECO in five; four; three; two; one; Engine Cutout"
d5948 2
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parking orbit.
d6104 1
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a6110 1
----
a6111 12
andrea in space

"Well, we keep hearing about what if you can't produce enought?"

"Well, the software industry at least has shown us what a lie that one
is.  There's no cost to produce.  They could stick all their stuff on
the Interent, source code and all, for next to nothing.  Just set up
and maintain a web presence.  On the other hand, there's a huge amount
of extra effort that goes into putting all these controls and
restrictions in place to get money.  Who knows about other fields
of industry, but clearly in the software industry, the cost
of production would be a lot less without capitalism!"
a6112 1
----
d6198 2
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the problem burn
a6600 15
Burns once told Mercuriou that there are no great men, only great
ideas, and that genius is that rare ability to venture deep into the
dim recesses of ideaspace to retrieve the 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's the diamond of
Albert Einstein.  Tom Clancy was one such genius.  Mohammamed Ata 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 of these geniuses reburied his discovery in
the pages of a book.  The other held up it's blazing red light for all
the world to see that terrible September morning.


------

d6710 46
@


1.37
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d450 5
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flame.  He thought back over the years he had known Marc Mercuriou.
If he had learned one thing about the man, it was that he wouldn't
undertake a project if he didn't think he could finish it.  He'd sit
and do nothing before undertaking something half-baked.
d470 2
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"I'm telling you," he concluded, "this thing's like super-hack."
d478 1
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Mercuriou nodded in consent as the doctor slowly poured the water into
d487 1
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His visitor nodded his ascent and left after another half hour of
d962 1
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T - 113 days
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"I'm inquiring into one of your accounts - Robotics Research; they're
applying for a sizable line of credit and listed your bank on the
financial statements they provided us.  According to these statements
they have several million dollars on deposit with you, right?"
d966 3
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"That's right.  They're one of our larger customers.  They do a lot of
business, and they always cover their checks; we've never had a
problem with them."
d970 1
a970 1
"Mr. Mercurio, the CEO, said they had a line of credit?"
d972 2
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"That's right, they have a fifty million dollar line of credit secured
by an six-story office building they own in San Francisco.  They've
had the credit line for two or three years now; they used it once, and
repaid in a couple of months."
d975 1
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"So you'd say they're a good credit risk?"
d977 3
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"Absolutely.  They're one of our best customers."
d981 1
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"OK, thank you very much."
d983 1
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Burns hung up the phone and swiveled around in his chair to find
Alister staring at him from the entrance of the room.
d985 4
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"Is that legal?"
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T - 57 days
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Burns dug into his pocket, pulled out the buzzing cell phone, and
squinted at its display.
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"Oh shit."
d1001 1
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Mercurio stopped eating and looked at him quizically.  So did Alister.
d1003 1
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"It's one of _those_ numbers."

"Which one?"

"I'm not sure - 555-5713."

"Shit, which one's that?  The list on my laptop; I've got to boot it."

"No, this thing's gonna cover to my voicemail."

"Oh, fuck."

Alister grabbed the phone out of Burns' hand and hit the talk button.

"Hello, our office hours are nine to five, Pacific Standard Time..."

"Get something that beeps," Burns whispered furtively, and Marc pulled
out his pager and held it across the table.

"...and we'll get back to you right away."  Marc hit a button on the
pager, it emitted a quick beep-beep-beep, and Alister hit the mute
button on the cell phone.  All three leaned towards the center of the
table to listen.

"...I've got some questions concerning the credit worthiness of
one of your business customers, Robotics Research.  They've
past due in their payments to us; we may go to court and get a
lien.  I spoke with you about three months ago, and I'd appreciate
it if you'd give me a call back..."

The three sat in silence until the call ended.  Alister spoke first.

"Do you have the money?"

"Yeah, we've got the money," Marc answered.

"Then why don't you just pay them?"

"Because we've got other things we need the money for."

"Like what?"

"Like your tenderloin, so eat it," Burns cut in, reaching across the
table with his knife and tapping the South African's plate for emphasis.

"No!" the man stated emphatically, pushing the plate away from him.
"You guys are up to something, and it's not legal..."

"Keep your voice down," Mercurio growled.

"OK," Alister began again in a near whisper.  "Whatever you blokes
are up to, there's no way it's above board."

The two principals looked at each other.

"Should we clue him in?" Mercurio asked quietly.  Burns shrugged.
a1242 123

T - 38 days


The programers at Robotics Research were a different story.  Marc
wanted to keep some of them, so decided to drop the bomb.

"So let's have a red alert right now," Marc added.  Some of the people
in the room started to fidget.  Nobody other than the principals had
any idea what a "red alert" was.

"OK," Burns agreed.

"All right," Marc said, turning back to the room.  "We're going
to tell you everything, that is, those of you who want in on it."

"Want in on what?"

"What we're really trying to do here."

"So how much of what they're saying is true?"

"Pretty much all of it.  All the money is stolen, we ripped off the
venture capitalists for everything we could get out of them.  Those
of you who want to hear more stick around; the rest of you..." Marc's
voice trailed off and his motioned to the door.

Most of the people in the room got up and left.  One guy asked about
getting a last paycheck.  Mercurio grinned and shook his head.  "So
basically we've been working for free the last two weeks?  You'll
be hearing from my lawyer."

Less than a dozen stayed on to hear the explaination.  Burns was glad
to see Mike among them.  Kim chipped in, "I always thought something
was funny about this place," she said.  "None of the software we've
been working on has anything to do with a robotic kitchen."

Martin stuck around because he could.  Nobody was going to jail him
for listening, and who knew, there might be something in it for him,
if whatever scheme they were working on could produce enough money.

"So why have we been working on all this crazy stuff?" Mike asked.

"Because this company is a front.  It isn't a dot-com startup.  It's a
manned mission to Mars."

Martin sat back in his chair.  "Tell me more."  A wide grin broke
across Mike's face.  "Hell yea!"


T - 37 days


A "red alert" simply meant that they were now within one month of
launch, a final countdown.  The plan called for almost all of their
operations to be shifted to the location know as Site Blue.  Mercurio
insisted that the equipment at Robotics Research be packed and shipped
within twenty-four hours.  Burn's kids worked through the night and
were gone by 7 A.M.  Mercurio left a simple, typewritten notice taped
to the door:

   From:  Marcelius Mercurio, CEO, Robotics Research, Ltd
   To:    Lawyers
          Financiers
          Bankers

   Gentlemen,

      Your services are no longer required.



T - 35 days

Alister turned the van off the Interstate near where he had gone rock
climbing last year and floored it.  He knew the cop, or P.I, or
whatever he was wouldn't be far behind.  Let him eat dust for a while.
After carooming across the desert for about ten miles, he turned off
on a dirt road that didn't look like much, but actually wound around
and came back to a U.S. highway about twenty miles further on.  He
remembered the road well, and sped down it until it dipped into a
gully where you had to slow down to go over a rocky dry streambed,
then turned to the right and climed back towards the mesa.  Alister
took the streambed way faster than he should have, then slammed on the
brakes as soon as the van was out of sight past the turn.  Leaving the
engine running, the young programmer jumped out of the cab and ran
back towards the streambed.  He watched the dust cloud from his
pursuer's car as it sped closer, then ducked down into the drainage
ditch along the side of the road and scrambled closer to the turn.

XX slowed his car and drove across the streambed.  Though he had lost
sight of the van, he could still see its dustcloud, so he figured it
couldn't be too far in front of him.  Furthermore, even if he lost
them, whereever they were taking the equipment probably wasn't too far
- otherwise, why were they driving down this back road?  He was
starting to think a little more about that when he pulled out of the
streambed at twenty miles an hour and rounded the bend.  The van was
stopped about fifty yards ahead of him.  Almost at the same instant,
Alister ran up to his open driver's side window and landed a left jab
that broke XX's nose and sent him spawling across the Chrystler's
front seat.  The car swerved across the road and crashed into the
brush.  Alister yanked up the door lock and pulled the door open, as XX
drew the snub-nosed semi-automatic he kept in a holster strapped to
the small of his back.  Alister jumped him and brief but unequal
struggle insued.  Twenty years younger, having spent the summers of
his youth playing water polo in the pools of South Africa, and having
the element of surprise, Alister overpowered the detective and
withdrew from the car, pistol in hand.

"You don't want to kill me," XX told him in a matter-of-fact voice
that hid the fear wealing up inside of him.  How could he have been
so stupid?  He had badly misjudged these people; he thought they
were just white-collar criminals.

"You're wrong about that, mate," Alister replied, "but I'll settle for
putting a few holes in your radiator."

The programmer emptied the pistol into the Chryster's radiator,
which began hissing and belched forth a cloud of white steam.
They he ran back to the van, cruised down to the U.S. highway,
and turned back towards the Interstate.


d1373 6
a1378 5
the police.  A sense of peace and calm overcame her, and she sat
quietly for a while longer.  Before she made herself get up and move,
though, a dust cloud appeared where the road met the horizon and grew
steadily larger until a Jeep appeared at its center, drove up
to where she was sitting and rolled to a stop as she got to her feet.
d1594 1
a1594 1
light in the small room and laid down to sleep.  XXX She prays. XXX
d1596 1
d1770 3
a1772 2
they're_hoarding_it.  And now the rocket design and the launch
budget...  Her contemplation was cut short by Mercuriou's loud voice.
d1816 1
a1816 1
"Well, we go on.  Burns, what happens if we launch now?"
d1818 1
a1818 1
"Right now?"
d1820 1
a1820 1
"Yeah, just for argument's sake, right now."
d3585 6
a3590 5
All of NASA's top project managers were at the meeting.  The shuttle
was scheduled to go up in two weeks, and they had to figure if
Mercurio's unexpected launch would affect anything they were doing.
In fact, Mercurio had slyly planed his launch to occur just before
the shuttle's, in case there was some kind of catostraphic failure.
d3592 2
a3593 2
"They'll never make it.  We better have the shuttle ready for a
rescue."
d3595 1
a3595 1
"Hell with 'em.  Let the bastards die up there."
d3597 5
a3601 1
Andrea spoke up.  "We have to help them."
d3603 1
a3603 1
"Help them?" the director asked, incredulous.  "They're criminals."
d3605 6
a3610 2
"That doesn't make a difference.  They're astronauts and we should do
whatever we can to help them.  God knows, they're going to need it."
d3612 5
a3616 4
Johnson's director leaned forward onto the table.  "Why should we
help a bunch of theives and terrorists that have stolen millions
of dollars and destroyed something like a dozen Interstate highway
bridges?"
d3618 6
a3623 1
"Because it's the Christian thing to do."
d3625 1
a3625 3
Somebody sneered, and the director grimised. "Well, it doesn't matter.
If we do anything to help them, the President'll have my head in an
hour."
d3627 10
a3636 1
"Then stand up to him," Andrea shot back, starting to get a little ruffled.
d3638 4
a3641 2
The director guffauled.  "Stand up the President?  Be my guest.  You
stand up to him.  I want to keep my job.  Meeting adjourned."
d3643 1
d3645 3
a3647 1
T + 14 days
d3649 7
a3655 8
"Does the media have a conservative bias?" McLauchlin asked the TV
camera.  Marcellius Mercurio had suggested that the day before, going
on to add that whatever it's conservative capitalist bias, the media
was totally biased in favor of democracy.  Now the topic was being
debated on McLauchlin's popular weekly TV show, which featured a panel
of regular participants who debated various issues.  A recuring theme
was for the host to ask his panelists to rate a question on a scale of
one to ten.
d3657 2
a3658 1
"On a scale of one to ten, how conservatively biased is the news media?"
d3660 4
a3663 4
"Zero.  OK, maybe one.  The media just reflects the opinions of the
people," his well-known conservative panelist noted.  "The people have
finally gotten sick of all this liberal crap, of which Mercurio
represents merely the most violently anti-democractic fringe."
d3665 1
a3665 4
"I'll go with five," responded another panelist, a respected, somewhat
liberal newspaper writer.  "The media tends to reflect the prevaling
mood of the country.  Thirty years ago, the media had a liberal
bias..."
d3667 6
a3672 2
"No!" his conservative colleage interrupted, in mock shock.  "The
media had a liberal bias back in the seventies?!?"
d3674 2
a3675 5
"Well, they did, it's true.  Only because they reflected the mood
of the country at the time!"  He leaned forward on the table to
make his point in earnest.  "The country was more liberal, so the
media was liberal.  Now the country has become more conservative,
so the media is more conservative."
d3677 5
a3681 3
"The answer is - three," McLauchlin ended the discussion.  "Next
question - what are this crew's chances of making it to Mars?  Scale
of one to ten - John."
d3683 1
a3683 2
In orbit, Mercurio clicked off the TV screen on his laptop and pushed
it away.
d3685 13
a3697 1
"I already know the answer to that question!"
d3699 1
d3701 6
a3706 1
T + 16 days
d3708 8
a3715 2
"All the cargo modules are in place, we're still taking meteor hits
in the forward compartments, but they're the empty fuel tanks."
d3717 2
a3718 5
"The wings are still vulnerable," Andrea pointed out.  "The 'meteor
wake' of the cargo modules covers us here, and the body of the 747,
but it doesn't cover the wings."  Burns was nodding.  The Captain
listened, and said nothing.  The entire crew was silent for about
10 seconds.
d3720 5
a3724 1
"Can I say something?" Alister asked.
d3726 3
a3728 2
"Sure," Mercuriou answered, "that's what I'm waiting for, anybody to
talk.  Say whatever you want."
d3730 202
a3931 7
"Well," Alister said after clearing his through, "if we move out of
LEO, I mean, that's what we're taking about, right?"  Again there were
nods around the cabin.  "That puts us out of range of the space
shuttle!?"  Alister voice trailed off at the end.  The last two
weeks had passed in a sureal blur.  He still found it
fantastic that he was actually flying in space, and now the commander
actually wanted to move beyond range of the _space_shuttle_?!
d4012 1
a4012 1
and the Icarus crew had settled into a kind of routine.  This day was
d4224 1
a4224 432
"What do think of his politics?"

Burns shrugged.  "Who knows?  If you ask him straight up, he'll admit
that it's just his opinion and he might be wrong.  Anyway, I learned
after college that most of the work we do is bullshit.  Whether he's
right or wrong, I'd rather be flying to Mars than writing one more
idiot routing protocol.  It's just boring, and I always had managers
pushing me to do more and more and more.  If anything, Marc pushes me
to do less and less.  He'll offload anything he can.  And Alister was
a great find.  He's a lot of fun to work with, and a lot of stuff I'm
sick of fooling with, he'll jump into.  Marc hired him, of course."



T + 194 days

"You wouldn't have been using any alcohol or illegal drugs, would you?"

"No," Andrea replied, stiffling the anger she felt at the policeman's
leading question, "I haven't."  She was in Germany for a technical
conference, and been pulled over in her rental car after turning the
wrong way down a one-way street.  If the sign had been in German, she
probably would have understood it, but it was one of those idiotic
"international" pictograms with just a red circle and line.  So now
she was pulled over the side, parked behind a ludicrously small police
car with its funny sounding siren, being questioned by a German
policeman.

"Then how did I get into the driver's seat of your car?" he asked.

The anger vanished, and fear gripped Andrea, terrifying, unreasoning
fear.  How had he gotten into the driver's seat?  He sat there in the
car seat next to her, but somehow she was on the passenger's side.
She opened her month and started to stammer something, then caught the
policeman's eyes as they narrowed and a lewd smile crept onto his
face.  Oh my God, it's him.  Oh my God, not again, she thought as his
hand slid across towards her leg.  She couldn't move, couldn't breath,
couldn't talk, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything but sit terrified
as he moved to touch her... and woke up.



T + 388 days

The asteroid belt turned out to be a gold mine.  Burns used several
more of the space rocket engines to devise scheme to survey the
asteroid belt using four cargo modules loaded with fuel and piloted
under radio control.  In addition to digital cameras, each module was
equiped a spectrographic imager he had bought the pieces for on Earth
and assembled and tested on the way out.  When focused on part of an
asteroid, it would use a rotating prism to break apart the various
wavelengths of light and sweep them across a light sensitive
phototransistor.  The output from the transitor would be digitized and
transmitted back to the ship, producing something like a strip chart
showing the relative intensity of light at each wavelength.  The light
intensity would dip sharply at frequencies absorbed by the asteroid's
material, and by comparing the charts with the absorption spectrum of
known materials, the crew could estimate the probably mineral content
of each asteroid.

The cargo modules were launched under radio control, while the Icarus
drifted in solar orbit a thousand kilometers from the nearest
asteroids.  From their ship, the humans piloted the unmanned modules
through the belt, focusing the spectrographs on parts of individual
asteroids.  After two weeks of surveying more than a hundred
asteroids, they struck paydirt - a deposit of what turned out to be
nearly pure silicon.

Mercurio split the crew into two teams.  Burns and Alister loaded a
week's worth of supplies into one of the OTVs and headed for the
asteroid with the silicon deposit.  It took the engineers almost an
entire day to maneuver through the asteroids and approach their
silicon-rich target.  The captain, NASA engineer and doctor remained
on the ship and continued the survey.

Burns had been testing various schemes for mining the asteroids, and
finally settled on explosives.  Reaching the surveyed asteroid, he
blew half of it apart with shaped charges he and the South African
planted during a series of spacewalks, collected several dozen of the
larger pieces of silicon left floating in space, and headed back to
Icarus.  It was a groundbreaking accomplishment, and the video images
relayed back to Earth were broadcast on news programs throughout the
world.

Back on _Icarus_, Burns loaded the silicon into the same cargo module
he had outfitted in Earth orbit to build solar cells.  While the sizes
and shapes of silicon crystal were more irregular than the original
ingots from Earth, and the purity wasn't quite as good, the silicon
turned out to be fine for solar cells, and the robot manipulators they
had started using in Earth orbit were now put to work producing solar
cells from the ample supply of Asteroid Belt silicon.  After a few
tweaks, the manufacturing software began to run unattended and started
turning out a new solar power array every day.  Within a week, the
ship was running completely from solar power, the fuel cells were shut
down, and Mercurio began to wonder what they could do with the solar
arrays the robots continued to crank out at what seemly a nearly
fantastic pace.  Burns had already planned ahead.

After returning from another trip into the asteroid belt, this time
with a cargo module loaded with water ice, Burns piloted the ship
closer to the asteroids, moved one of the cargo modules to a crater on
a nearby asteroid, set up several of the new solar panels, and began
using the power to melt the ice and then split the resulting water
into hydrogen and oxygen.  He and Alister spent almost a month setting
up the fuel plant, and by the time they were done two more cargo
modules were docked in a shaded corner of the asteroid crater, slowly
filling with hydrogen and oxygen, which easily cooled into liquid
without either sunlight or an atmosphere to keep them warm.

Meanwhile, the first crops from the ship's vegetable garden ripened,
just as the supply of military rations was growing noticably short.
Vic set about devising a high-protein diet plan, and soy beans, which
had grown quite readily in zero-g, topped his list.  The doctor
prepared his first batch in the Burns-devised vegetable steamer, which
superheated a pressurized canister of water before releasing it into
the chamber containing the soy beans.  As it left the canister, the
water, already heated beyond its conventional boiling point, burst
into steam with a loud hizzing that attracted the attention of the
young South African in the next module.

"Soy beans?" Alister questioned, imagining the pressed blocks of
tofu he had habitually passed by in the supermarket.

"I rather like them steamed," Vic replied.

"I don't know about this, mate," the programmer quibbled as he
inspected some of the freshly picked raw beans.  "I'll eat them,
though," he quickly added.

"Ever been to a sushi restaurant?" Vic asked, with a raised eyebrow
that indicated he thought he knew something his friend didn't.

"Sure, I love sushi, it's great!  Got any tuna hand roll in there?"

"Nope, but you ever had those green beans they serve as appetizers?"

"Yeah," Alister replied, glancing back down at the soy pods in his
hand.  "That's what these are?"

The doctor nodded affirmatively as he opened the steamer and let some
of the cooked soy beans, along with an ample quantity of steam, float
out into the air.  The aroma of freshly steamed vegatables permeated
the air and quickly brought work to a standstill on a spaceship where
plastic-wrapped spaghetti pouches and freeze dried peaches had been
the norm for months.

"What have we got here?" the captain asked as he floated in with Burns
from one direction, almost simultaneously as Andrea entered from a
side module, where she had been calibrating instrumentation for an
upcoming survey run.

"Are these from the garden?" she asked.  "Great!"


T + 401 days

Burns and Alister had returned to the asteroid belt in one of the
modified cargo modules, with two more in tow, to install a new set of
chemical processing modules that would now produces tanks of pure
oxygen, mixed with gaseous neon, of which they had found a rare
frozen deposit.  They had been on site two days and were in the
middle of an EVA.

"OK, ease her in further."

Since the Icarus was close enough to avoid any noticable radio lag,
the Captain was controlling the module from the ship while the two men
floated near it in spacesuits.  In fact, he was several hundred
kilometers away.  Vic sailed into the bridge, grabbed for a handhold,
missed, and hit the Captain's arm just as he tapped the a joystick to
fire the maneuvering thrusters.  They fired at nearly ten times the
strength he had intended, in a bizarre direction that sent the module
crashing sideways into the one it was being docked with, with Alister
in the middle.  He pushed away from the asteroid, but couldn't keep
his arm from being pinned by the errant module against the other.
The bone snapped in two and Alister hollered in pain.

"Shit," the Captain said, hitting the control in the opposite
direction, and awkwardly easied the cargo module away.  Alister began
screaming and floated free, except for his teather.  Burns cut his own
teather, fire his suit thrusters, and zipped over to his friend, whose
was in agony.  His spacesuit was leaking air, as well.

"Get him into the airlock!" the Captain ordered, but Burns yelled
back,

"He'll never make it!"

The fracture was compound and the broken bone had ripped a hole in the
suit.  Air was pouring out, propelling the young man in crazy
directions as he turned from one side to another and bounced on the
end of the teather.

"Quit waving your arms!"  Burns yelled.

He now had firm grasp of the young man and made a quick decision.
Without saying another word, he shoved the bone back into the suit,
pulled apart the two sections of bone, and tried to snap them back
together somehow.  Alister freaked, screaming in pain, but the bone
went back in the spacesuit and Burns clamped his hand over the hole.

"Hold still!" Burns yelled again.

"You fucking hold still, you crazy Yank!  Oh my bloody hell!"

"Here, hold your other hand over the hole!"

Back on _Icarus_, the Captain quickly brushed off Vic's stumble
as an accident, and the doctor thankfully was able to forget
about it as he raced to his sick bay and starting assembling
anything he thought he'd need.  Andrea Yeats, without asking,
went to one of the other modified cargo modules and flipped
on its com system.

"I'm powering OTV 3."

"OK, Vic, Andrea's powering three."

"Got it", answered the doctor, as he pulled out of the sick bay
refrigerator the two pints of blood he had taken from Alister
earlier in the trip, along with two pints of the Captain's
matching O Positive.

"I'll need a refrigerator in the OTV," he noted into his microphone.

"I'm on it," Bryan said, heading into the crew quarters to throw
all the food out of one of the mini-fridges.

Meanwhile, Burns got Alister back into the pressurized safety of the
OTV, but he had lost a lot of blood and was now unconscious.  Vic told
him to touranquit the wound, but had serious doubt that the Alister
would live for the day it would take them to manuerver through the
asteroids with the preasuse blood.  He shared his concerns privately
with Andrea as she released the hydraulic moaring clamps and backed
the OTV away from the _Icarus_ docking port.

Turning the OTV towards the asteroid belt, she engaged its main engine
and let it burn.  She kept it on far beyond the point where she could
stop the ship before reaching the first asteroids.

"What are you doing?" the Captain asked from the bridge, watching her
speed continue to increase on the computer-generated plan position
display in front of him.

"Every play _Asteroids_?" she asked.

Over the next half hour, she caroomed through the asteroid belt at
breakneck speed, never stopping the vehicle and often making long
burns on the main engine, twice coming within a hundred meters of an
asteroid, pivoting the nimble little ship around between burns to
dodge first this asteroid then another as they came into her radar's
field of vision.  She began a series of slowdown burns about ten
minutes from the construction asteroid, finally docking with the other
OTV only an hour and three minutes after the accident.

"Can we go back the normal way?" Vic asked dryly as they unstrapped
from their seats.  The doctor's fingers were white from where they had
been grasping the seat.

The NASA engineer's fancy flying had probably saved Alister's life.
After stabilizing his condition, Vic declared there was no rush to get
him back to the _Icarus_, since he had brought all the medical
supplies he needed with him.  Andrea and Burns tried to complete the
assembly work, but found that one of the two damaged modules was
simply incapable of holding pressure in its plumbing, so they took
both with them and piloted the two OTVs back to _Icarus_ - the normal
way.  At a crew meeting two days later, held around Alister's sick bed
with his arm in a cast, Andrea was unanimously selected first officer.


T + 419 days

Back on Earth, the dramatic rescue of the young astronaut drew popular
attention once again to the space mission.  The _Icarus_ was almost
completely on the other side of the solar system, and radio communications
with Earth were being relayed through a communications satellite
Burns had launched into solar orbit just before leaving Earth.
The end result was a half-hour time lag in communications that left
both NASA and the rest of the planet as passive observers of the
dramatic video footage relayed to them.

Andrea Yeats' role in the rescue and subsequent elevation to first
officer afforded her celebrity status.  A weekly American TV
newsmagazine decided to interview her.  The hour-long round trip radio
lag between Earth and the _Icarus_ dictated an unusual format for the
interview.  Conducted in several sessions spread over two days, it
consisted of a series of videotaped questions transmitted to the space
craft.  After viewing each question, Andrea then dictated a response,
which might later trigger followup questions.  The TV producers then
edited the material into a coherent interview, with relatively few
questions and relatively long responses.  An entire broadcast episode
was deveoted to the interview.




T + 420 days

Due to the considerable radio time lag at this point, the media
couldn't interview Andrea except through videomail, which meant
that a lot of her answers took the form of monologues.  One
thing was for sure.  The woman who had saved Alister's life
and been promoted to first officer had started to generate
a lot of media interest.

"Captain Mercurio says the problem is democracy, that it's another
communism.  Do you agree?"

The NASA engineer thought for a moment before answering.

"The problem is human nature.  Democracy is just another political
system.  In some ways it's better than others, in some ways worse.
Ultimately, the solutions to our problems are spiritual and not
political.  Unfortunately, democracy tends to accentuate a lot of
problems, because you can't just go blame it off on some dictator."

"How does democracy accentuate problems?"

"Well, the problems have always been there.  It's just that democracy
shows us that a lot of our problems are still with us; that it's not
just because people don't have political representation that causes
our problems.  Now people do have political representation, and a lot
of the problems are still with us.  So, just giving political power to
the people doesn't solve your problems."

The commentator cut it.  "Dr. Yeats, you mentioned a moment ago
that democracy is better than some political systems, worse than
others, or something to that effect.  If I'm not reading too
much into your words, can you give us an example of a superior
political system?"

"Well, I don't know if there are any superior political systems.
Like I said, our problems are spiritual more than political,
and thus we need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.
Now take a monarch like King Arthur; you can have a good king,
genuinely interested in caring for his people, and yes, you
can have a good monarchy."

"Do you advocate monarchy as a system of government?"

"I don't advocate anything as a system of government.  I advocate
Christianity as a means for people to live their lives.  Monarchy is
like any other system of government, you might get a good king for a
while, but eventually you'll get a bad one, so it's no answer.
There's the story in the Bible of the Jewish people demanding a king -
this was Saul - and the prophet at the time, I believe it was Samuel,
told them that the king would take the best of their crops, and
conscript their sons into his army, and tax their profits, but the
people wanted a king anyway.  And some of the Jewish kings were pretty
lousy men."

"So, doctor, I'm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say
that you advocate Christianity rather than any system of government.
For example, what do you say to Captain Mercurio's very vocal
criticisms of western society?"

"Well, I'm still on his crew, so I'd better not say too much!"

Due to the time lag in the transmission, it was almost a second
before anybody laughed, so the joke fell flat.  She faltered
a moment, then continued.

"No, seriously, he makes a lot of good points, but this has been human
society since the dawn of time.  Take Saint Anthony of the Desert, for
example.  God appeared to him in a vision and told him to flee from
men, so he went to live in the desert, and founded the Christian
monastic tradition.  This was during the Roman Empire, when Christians
were thrown to the lions, so these problems have been around for a
while."

"Haven't we come a long ways from that?  We don't throw Christians to
the lions anymore."

"No, we don't, thank God, but it's still tough to live as Christians.
Generally, the people who rise to the top in human society do so
by abandoning Christian values, so living as a Christian generally
means that you're going to get a lot of doors slammed shut on you."

"Could you elaborate on that?  How do people not live as Christians?"

"Oh, please, look around.  Christ gave us two great commandments,
to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as
ourselves.  And he elaborated on them, and lived them in his own
life.  I think the second commandment is more obvious than the
first; we look around and see how we don't love each other as
Christ taught, that's more obvious that how we fail God."

"Could you be more specific; I'm not trying to be dense, but
why don't you think a Christian can rise to the top in our society?"

"Well, consider what Christ said.  He taught us to give to all those
who beg from us; that if someone asked to borrow from us we should
give without expecting anything in return.  If you do that, if you
give to all, you often end up with nothing, at least nothing
material."

"So do you advocate a welfare system of some kind?"

"Well, no, not if I understand your question, because welfare to me
implies some kind of government operation.  Christ didn't tell us to
give our money to the government to run welfare, he didn't tell us to
give our money to the church so it could fund charities, he told us,
he spoke to us as individuals, he said _you_, give to all those who
beg of _you_.  So, if you see someone standing by the road begging,
you stop and give them a dollar or two, if you see someone asking for
a ride, you pull over and ask them where they're going, if you see
someone sleeping in a park, you say 'hey, I've got a spare room, you
can come stay with me', or whatever.  And people don't want to do
that.  If they see a beggar, they keep driving, they choose leaders
that always tell us not to pick up hitchhikers, the guy in the park,
well, that's what the homeless shelter is for."

"But isn't it dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?"

"Yeah", Andrea replied, sucking in her breath, "picking up hitckhikers
is dangerous.  But we remember the story of the good samartain, we
remember that we're called to give to all those who beg of us, and we
don't like a bad experience turn us against all hitchhikers."  She
uttered the last phrase as though a robot, it was her voice, she was
preaching to herself, but she didn't really beleive it.

"Sure, but it's more dangerous not to pick them up.  It's dangerous
because then we're violating the commandments that Christ gave us to
live by; we're acting out of fear and not love.  And the reason
someone, well a lot of people, actually, like Captain Mercurio, really
dislike democracy is because people don't choose leaders who say,
look, you should stop and pick these people up, they choose leaders
who say, no, don't do that, think of how dangerous it is, put your own
safety first."

"You mentioned homeless shelters, in a somewhat negative way.  Do you
not support homeless shelters?"
d4226 9
a4234 5
"Well, I've been a few, many years ago, before I had a steady job
with NASA.  The problem with homeless shelters is that people think
because there's a homeless shelter, well, the problem's taken care
of, they don't have to do anything, but again, Christ tells us that
we should..."
a4235 3
"But can't people take advantage of that?  I mean, won't some people
just take and take and take without working or really doing anything
productive?"
a4236 13
"Sure, a lot of people will, in a lot of different ways.  Christianity
is about being taken advantage of, when you love unconditionally, when
you give unconditionally, when you forgive unconditionally, people
will just take and take and take, and most people, understandably,
don't want that, and that's why they really don't live as Christians.
They give up to a point and then they say no more.  But one of
Christ's stories was about a woman who came to the temple in Jerusalem
to give a donation.  There were all these other people who gave all
these big donations, and this old woman gave just two bits.  Jesus
told his diciples that she went away redeemed rather than the others,
because she had given all she had, while the others had just given
their surplus.  So it's not about how much you give, it's about you're
willingness to give all."
d4238 1
a4238 4
"Well, that raises a good point, that's been made by people like
Warren Buffett.  I mean, can't you do a lot more good in the world by
working hard, so then you'll have the money to spend on charities that
can really make a difference?"
d4240 1
a4240 8
"Well, now we come back to the first commandment, the one about loving
God.  The point isn't to do as much good as we can in the world, the
point is to live in harmony with God.  That's really what's going on
here, ultimately we're all spiritual beings, first and foremost, so
how much good we can do in the world is really secondary if we're not
living in harmony with God, so that's why the woman who just gives a
little goes away redeemed, because she's the one who's living in
harmony with God."
d4242 9
a4250 1
"What does it mean to live in harmony with God, how do we do that?"
d4252 1
a4252 9
"That's what Christ taught us.  That's what his Gospel teachings are
all about.  I mean, Christ could have chosen to be a political leader,
he was tempted to do that by the Devil, he could have liberated the
Jewish people from the Roman Empire, heck, he could have become the
Roman Emperor, he could have freed the slaves two thousand years ago,
he could have done a lot more 'good' in the world if he'd been
tougher.  But what he was trying to teach us is that living in harmony
with God, loving God, loving each other as sons and daughters of God,
is more important that all the 'good' you do."
d4254 9
a4262 2
"I don't think I understand, completely.  Isn't the 'good' we do, I
mean, isn't that what living in harmony with God is about?"
a4263 14
"No, not really, it's just an effect.  Christ taught us that faith in
God is the most important thing, and that our works come from our
faith.  Our good deads, our works, they are the outward expression of
our inward faith, but it's the faith that's the most important thing.
So you can do all kind of good works, but if the faith isn't there, it
doesn't amount for much.  On the other hand, if you have faith, then
it will be expressed in your works, because you'll always be looking
for ways to help people, to give to people, to forgive people, because
you love people, or at least try to.  I guess it's kinda like what
Marc, what Captain Mercurio did to defraud his investors, he created
some kind of robot that could cook dinner, but it didn't work the way
he said, because it actually had a person operating it.  Good works
are like that, it's not the outward appearance that's important, it's
what's going on behind the scenes."
a4264 1
"What do you think of the Christian right?"
d4266 1
a4266 18
"Well, the Christian right seems to be much more a political movement
than a spiritual one.  We here constantly from them about sex.  Sex,
sex, sex, sex, sex.  Yet they're almost completely silent on something
like Capitalism.  Chirst say 'give to all those who beg of you'.  He
told one of his followers to sell all his worldly possesions and give
the money to the poor.  Go ahead - try it.  Sell all your worldly
possessions, give the money to the poor, and see how people treat you
then.  The Christian right has almost nothing to say about this.  They
rail about sex, but are strangely silent about the neighborhood
merchant who puts a price tag on everything in his store and is
standing there behind the cash register to take your money before you
walk out the door.  And then you look at what they really propose.  So
much of it involves more and more government regulation.  They want
the government to ban abortions.  Look, I don't support abortion, but
having the government 'get tough' with abortion clinics isn't the
answer.  They're tough on crime.  Fine.  Christ said love your
enemies.  Why don't you see them agitating for decent treatment of
prisoners in jails?"
d4268 10
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"You mentioned the treatment of prisoners.  The United States,
in particular, has all manner of regulations designed to ensure
humane treatment of prisoners.  How are they inadequate?"
d4279 2
a4280 15
"Well, I've never spent more than a night in jail, but if you look at
the videotapes of how prisons are run, they look to me like military
boot camps.  The prisoners are told when to get up, marched through
dining halls, assigned to work projects, ordered here and there.
Maybe more significantly, the prisons are seen as something between a
threat and a punishment.  They're there to create fear in people; you
obey the laws or else you go to jail.  In my mind, just about the only
reason to imprison someone is because they're dangerous to other
people and need to be isolated.  And once they've been isolated,
there's no reason to go beyond that.  Just give them an apartment in a
guarded complex, the level of security being dependent on how
dangerous they are.  What rational reason is there for anything else?
So much of how our prisons are run is based on anger and hatred.
People don't love their enemies; they hate them, and they want to make
them suffer, so that's why they want their prisons to be 'tough'."
d4282 1
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"OK, we've only got a few minutes left, let me change the subject, at
least slightly.  You're a scientist, or at least an engineer, so what
do you say to people who claim that there's no scientific proof from
the existance of God, so it must be just a myth?"
d4291 1
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"You know, I was asked that question many years ago, and at the time I
couldn't really answer it, but I thought about for a while and here's
my answer: Scientific proof is based on experiment.  There is an
experiment you can perform to find out if God is real - you can die.
Most of us don't want to perform that experiment just to satisfy our
curiosity about God, but the fact remains that we will all die some
day, and then you'll know.  So my answer to those people is just to
wait - you're going to find out all about God."
d4293 1
d4295 2
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"Well, thank you for joining us this evening.  My guest had been
Dr. Andrea Yeats, astronaut and Christian.  We'll be back in a minute
with my final thought."

The entire crew had watched the broadcast, floating on the other
side of the TV camera.  After the program ended, they were
fairly quite for a while, the captain in particular.

"You did really good, I was quite proud of you," was all he had to say.
a4349 7
Andrea's long-distance television interview had aired four days after
it was taped, to a large audience.  It had provoked wide spread public
response, evidenced by a deluge of e-mails whose subject lines ranged
the spectrum from "May God bless you and your crew" and "Thank you,
you are a genuine Christian" to "Christianity COMMANDS Capitalism" and
"This is __HERESY__!!!".

d4793 4
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a5859 1
T - 113 days
d5861 1
a5861 1
phone call inquring into accounts as Alister's watching
d5863 1
a5863 1
T - 57 days
d5865 1
a5865 1
phone call during dinner - Alister fakes an answering machine
a5876 12
T - 38 days

speech to the programers - a 'red alert'

T - 37 days

your services are no longer required

T - 35 days

Alister and the guy tracking him on the Interstate

d6016 5
a6020 1
NASA project manager meeting.  (Probably cut this)
a6062 2
astroid belt a gold mine.  description of their spectrometer.

a6065 16
T + 401 days

Alister's accident

T + 419 days

Andrea starts getting celebrety attension.

T + 420 days

Andrea Yeats is interviewed by the media.

do you advocate a welfare system?  isn't picking up hitchhikers dangerous.

You bet.

d6392 38
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Andrea, Merceriou, and Burns
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landing attempt
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burns calcuations.
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ideas, and that genius is that rare ability to venture deep
into the dim recesses of ideaspace to retrieve the rare gems,
@


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shuttle!?"  Alister voice trailed off at the end.  He still found it
d5843 2
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-----------
d5994 1
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--------
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@Pipi is gone - might still be minable
@
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@d3823 14
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move out of LEO to higher orbit
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'Pipe' is gone.
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@a3822 69
T + 17 days

Pipi had been fairly quiet and sullen after the Nightline interview.
He continued to do his work, quietly, efficiently, but his opinion of
the captian had irrevokably changed.  He had known him as a driven
man, but had thought he was driven by a thirst for adventure and
exploration.  Now he saw something different - a man driven by rage,
by anger, by thirst for an insane kind of revenge against a society he
hated.  In light of this, the risks of the mission began to loom
large, and the hardships they now faced, only a little more than a
hundred miles above Earth, drove doubt into him about anyone's chances
for survival.  Mercurio mentioned several more times that they could
still turn back, but nobody else seemed interested.  Burns largely
ignored politics and concentrated on doing his work, smoking his weed
afterwards, and playing loud rock music.  Vic didn't have as much to
do, but seemed to Pipi to harbor a kind of secret hatred of the world
that only occasionally surfaced.  Once, trying to feel him out, Pipi
asked him if he would want to go back to Earth.  "Over my dead body,"
came the reply, with a chuckle.

Finally, Pipi's simple desire for life won out, and his loss of
respect for the captain broke the man's hold on him.  He came to the
skipper while he was working alone one day on the water recycler, told
him he wanted out, and braced himself for an argument.  Yet Mercurio
wasn't that kind of man.  As angry and bitter as he could be while
confronted a distant representative of a hated society, he always
softened up in person.  "You want to think about this, or talk about
it?"  he asked.  "I have though about it, a lot," was Pipi's reply.
"I want to go home."  "I'll see what I can do," Marc replied, and
went back to his work.

Two days later, despite Pipi's misgivings, despite the heated exchange
on television, despite his own contempt for the world they now circled
above, the captain quietly demonstrated what, time and again, would
carry him and his crew through the loney and difficult years ahead.
He put his personal feelings aside to do what made sense for his
mission and his crew.  Over the last few weeks, he had accumulated a
small database of unlisted phone numbers.  He picked up the phone and
made one call.

The next day, Andrea Yeats pulled into the parking lot at Johnson
Spaceflight Center and started walked towards her office.  "Becker
wants to see you right away," Vou told her before she made it there.
She set her briefcase down next to her desk and headed across the way
to the director's office.  Lou was already there.  They were talking
as she came in.

"He doesn't want our help."

"True, but he wants us to do him a favor, and he's willing to do
a favor for us in return."

Lou looked up at Andrea.  "Looks like one of his crewman has gotten
cold feet.  The kid from California."  "Really?" Andrea replied as she
sat down, her heart racing.  Becker hadn't called her here just to
tell her something that would probably be on the news within days.
"Endevor is going up next month, and we've agreed to extend the flight
three days to redevous with them and retrieve this guy."  "Whose idea
was that?"  the engineer asked.  The reply can from Lou.  "Mercurio's.
He called us himself."  "Really?" she answered, with an interested
pout.  "That leaves him one down," she noted, her mind starting to
race ahead, but Becker continued before she could think that far.
"He's offered us the possibility of putting a NASA observer on the
flight."  He paused to let the impact of the statement sink in.
Andrea's heart jumped, her mouth opened slightly and her gaze panned
to Lou, who was looking her right in the eye.  "It's yours if you want
it."


@


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log
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@
text
@d2730 6
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A problem quickly develops.  They've overlooked the need for a meteor
shield and quickly suffered several metor hits.  They deal with the
problem by putting the damaged modules in front of the others, and
some begin talk of a rescue mission and how much it will cost NASA,
and this is why we need regulation, etc, etc.  The Captain decides to
break orbit and head higher, away from LEO, but they'll be beyond the
shuttle's range for a rescue.  Meanwhile...
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log
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@
text
@d884 75
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they are!  It's not about making money, it's about how you treat
people, and these capitalists treat you like dirt if you don't have
money!"
d5980 87
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the leak
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@d2764 2
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rules.  In Russia it was the proletariat, here it's the majority."
d2862 1
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"You mean it works for all the selfish people who are willing to claw
d2864 1
a2864 1
nice house, a couple nice cars, take their vacation on Maui..."
d2892 1
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up on the Internet; it was called the ARPANET back then, but the
concept was the same.  We started telling a lot of people in the
d2912 2
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hundred thousand dollars in damages."

"I'm still waiting for that house, by that way."
d2972 1
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dare you tell someone who'se sweated tears and blood that they have to
d2986 19
a3008 2
#if MAYBE

a3023 18
"Well what do you suggest, Captain?" the congressman asked, dripping
sarcasm off the last work.

"People should just be nice to each other.  People should be generous.
Good grief, if you're running a restaurant or a food market, and
someone comes in hungry, give them something to eat!  Forget about how
much cash they've got in their pockets!"

"Well, that sounds very noble, Captain, but in the real world, if you
just give everything away, you'll be put out of business."

"That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of democracy right there - you be
a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you won't
work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the street
and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they walk past
and call you a bum who doesn't want to work... And they're right,
'cause I don't want to work - not for them and not for their brutal
system!"
d3059 3
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anyone, to make people so terrified of what will be done to them
that they will too afraid not to just fall in line and do what
they're told when the great majority barks out its orders."
d3065 1
a3065 1
"So did they; so did they," Mercurio noted nonchalantly.
d3067 1
a3067 1
"Our Constitution is enforced.  Our Constitution restrains the power
d3076 1
a3076 6
at it.  Mr. Koppel, I think we can a copy of the Constitution faxed
around to the members of this panel."

"OK, but I'm not sure that's really the point of the discussion..."

"I do!  I think that's exactly the point!"
d3078 2
a3079 2
"OK, fine!"  Black interjected, determined not to be shown up.  "Let's
get a copy of the Constitution."
d3081 3
a3083 3
Mercurio was already ahead of him.  He grabbed his laptop, ran an
Internet search, pulled up the U.S. Constitution, and prepared to
start reading from it.
d3125 12
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"What good's a law when you pick and choose what parts of it you want
to obey?  Fine, so you obey parts of the Constitution, but what about
the other parts?  This is like me blowing down the highway at ninety
miles an hour, and when the cop pulls me over saying, oh, but officer,
I came to a full and complete stop at all the red lights!"

"OK," Koppel interjected, trying to bring the discussion under
control.  "Congressman, Captain Mercurio certainly isn't the first
person to accuse the Federal Government of circuventing the
Constitution.  Is there nothing to any of these claims?"
d3138 1
a3138 1
"No, and I'll tell you why," Black replied.  "All these things the
d3148 2
a3149 2
hundred years from now and try to say that it wasn't really a
democracy, that people didn't really want these things, that some
d3157 2
d3164 2
a3165 1
there and say that!  It just flys in the face of reason!"
d3171 2
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"Freedom!"  Mercuriou fired back in disgust.  "Senator, turn on the
T.V!  Don't you see the police slamming people to the ground and
d3183 1
a3183 1
Because I don't concede to this God-damned, cursed, cursed democracy
d3186 1
a3186 1
body!  And then you sit there are talk about freedom, you filthy son
d3189 1
a3189 1
"We have freedom in this country!" Black practically screamed back at
d3207 1
a3207 3
"The majority don't want good leaders," Marc cut in.  He was once
again back in a televised debate.  His advesary stuttered and
faltered.
d3212 1
a3212 1
simply because what he said, Mercuriou seemed to incite the ire of
d3214 4
a3217 4
affiliation or personal temperment.  In another televised debate, he
faced off against one of the most country's most prominent
politicians, a state governor widely expected to run for president in
an upcoming election.
d3219 13
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"So you actually do think the majority of people support the government?"
d3247 2
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"Communism wasn't a democracy, or a populist goverment..." Black
began to retort, but Mercurio cut him off.
d3256 1
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The question was rhetorical, and the astronaut went on without
waiting for an answer.

"This is absurd!  Communism was one of the biggest populist movements
of the twentieth century!  Practically every country in existance had
some kind of communist insurgancy!  They took over half this planet!
Millions upon millions of people _believed_ in communism!  To claim
that the communists were some tiny bunch of dictators flies in the
face of history!  Take Vietnam - why were all those 15-year-olds
hauling AK-47s around the Mekong Delta if the communists were just
some tiny cliche holed up in the Kremlin?!"

"The communists installed brutal dictatorships in every country
they took power in!"  Black shot back.  "Look at the people in
Russia!  If communism is so populist, why did they need another
revolution to take back their government!"

"It was populist at first!" the Captain answered.  "Sure, after
the communists really got entrenched it was almost impossible
to remove them, but it'd be almost impossible to remove the
capitalists from the west - they control everything!  At first,
at first, sir, the people did support the communists - that's
how they won that war, that's why so many people chased after
communism - because at first, it was a populist movement!"

"The communists lied to their people..." Black began.
d3263 1
a3263 2
expropriate the expropriators and let everyone else tremble in fear of
communism at gunpoint!"
d3265 26
a3290 1
The Captain paused briefly before continuing in a calmer voice.
d3296 2
a3297 2
down everyone's throughts, and _the_people_supported_them!  They were
a lot like the people who run democracy today."
d3302 4
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how much you walk out with.  The fact is that the majority of people
are crude, selfish, and violent.  That's why communism came to power
in these backwards countries - if the people have nothing, tell them
to expropriate the exproriators at gunpoint - it sounds great!  Now in
d3309 2
a3310 2
can keep it and don't lift a finger for anyone else.  The bottom line is
that the majority of people are selfish - both capitalism and
d3314 1
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Hitler," Black dryly observed.
d3316 2
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"But they did elect Hitler!  At least they elected the Nazis!"
d3322 1
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won 40% of the vote in the last free election..."

"Forty percent!"  Black fired back.  "Not a majority!"
d3324 1
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"Hey, if you can get forty percent of the people to support you, you
can get fifty percent.  Anyway, they got more votes than any other
political party; they won a plurality.  George Bush didn't win that -
Al Gore took the popular vote.  You gonna tell me now that George Bush
is a dictator because he didn't win a majority of the vote?"

The congressman and moderator were both silent, perhaps in a stunned
sort of way, and the _Icarus_ commander stormed on.

"The Nazis won the same number of votes in 1932 as George Bush did in
2000 - enough!  Enough to give them control of the Richstag.  Enough
to get Herman Goering elected president of that body.  Enough to
create a situation where Adolf Hitler was basically the only viable
choice for German chancellor.  And people supported the Nazis for
basically the same reason people supported the communists and the
same reason people today support the capitalists - because they
were brutal as hell, and that's what works in the _real_world_ and
that's all these millions and millions of people _know_!"
d3326 33
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"The majority don't want good leaders," the astronaut repeated,
floating weightless on the screens of 10 million people watching the
live interview on Nightline.  "They want garbage leaders.  They want
the most selfish bastards you'd ever want to meet, with this nightmare
capitalist system based on the most vicious traits of mankind to be
jammed down everyone's throughts.  And this time, nobody can say it
isn't really a democracy, that one man took over the government, that
the discedents were 'disappeared', that we don't have freedom of
speech or freedom of the press.  Nobody can claim that this isn't
really what the majority of people want.  Democracy is another
communism."

"Another communism?" Koppel cut it, stunned.  "That's right," Marc
replied, before backpedeling... slightly.  "I don't mean that it's
murdered millions of people, or enslaved half the planet, but it's
another big pile of books and theories that sound real good on paper,
and in practice has produced one of the most depraved societies that's
every been seen on the face of this planet.  People will look back on
this a hundred years from..."  It was more than the congressman could
take.  Visibly redening, now it was his turn to cut off the space
captain.
d3366 3
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achieve..."  Mercurio cut right back in.  The debate had turned into an
d3371 5
a3375 1
"The communists abolished slavery, too.  That isn't the point.  The point..."
d3381 10
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themselves, but for decent people everywhere!"
d3392 19
a3410 1
The congressman paused for breath, and Koppel chose this moment to
d3412 4
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do it by challenging one of the astronaut's more dramatic
claims. "Gentelmen, please.  Captain Mercurio, many people critize the
United States, but another communism?  You can't be serious."
d3422 6
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"Yes, populist," the spaceman replied.  "Communism was one of the
biggest populist movements of the twentieth centry.  Millions upon
millions upon millions of people 'believed' in communism.  And they
beleived in it for the same reasons that millions of people in Germany
beleived in fascism, and that millions of people today believe in
capitalism..."  The spaceman paused before letting his bombshell drop.
"...because it's brutal as hell, and that's what 'works' in the 'real
world', and that's what all these millions and millions of people
'know'!"
d3429 1
a3429 1
Congressman Black looked like he was ready to reach through the TV
d3433 4
a3436 3
"Communism was a brutual, murderous dictatorship.  And I want to be
very clear on that word - dictatorship.  There was nothing populist
about it in the least."
d3440 1
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1932, and yes, despite every attempt to claim the contrary, the were
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these bums every step of the way.  The majority of people are
completely incapable of choosing anything but the worst possible
leaders."

"I see what kinds of leaders you choose.  The most selfish men you'd
ever want to meet."

"The capitalists, who are just in it for themselves, and the democrats,
who are going to get tough with anybody who won't follow all their
laws.  Real good leaders."

Mercurio stopped, and Black didn't retort immediately.  A tense silence
fell over the teleconference.  Across the country, millions of people
in their homes murmorred amongst themselves.  "I don't want to hear
any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Marc!"  "That bastard deserves to
die up there!"  "I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is this what people
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T + 9 days

"How is it different?  How is what Saddam Huissen tried in Kuwait all
that much different from Andy Jackson's stunt in Flordia?"

"Oh please... it's not even close."

"What?  He just walked in and took Flordia.  It was Spanish territory
and he just walked in and took it."

People were already cutting him off.  "For starters, Andrew Jackson
wasn't a mass murder who unleased chemical weapons on his civilian
population."

"No, he only executed one or two people, but from a standpoint of
international law?"  Again, others started cutting in, but the space
captain wouldn't let them change the subject.

"From a standpoint of international law, how was it different?  And
then democracy gets all high-and-mighty 'We're fighting for a small
country being pushed around by a big one' - What about Panama?  When
we walked in and just took over the country, threw its president in a
Flordia jail, and installed our own government.  Who was there to
fight for a small country being pushed around by a big one then?"

"Manuel Noreiga was an international drug dealer..."

"An international drug dealer who just happened to be the president
of a soverign nation..."

"It was not a legitamite government.  It was not a legitamite government.
It was a military junta, and the people of Panama packed the streets
and cheered when our troops liberated their nation."

"Of course they cheered.  They cheered in Cuba - haven't you seen the
pictures of Castro's tanks rolling down the streets of Havana?  They
cheered in Moscow, they cheered in Beijin - the 'people' always cheer
when their 'heros' show up with their tanks and guns.  And just what
is a legitamite government, anyway?"

A pause fell over the broadcast, and Mercurio repeated his question.
"What is a legitimate government?"

"A democratically elected body with the support of the people."

"You mean the support of the majority?"

"Well, the people are..."

"The people are the majority?  And what about the minority?  I guess they're
not people, huh?"

"The rights of the minorities have to be protected, but the overwheling
majority of people support democracy, even if they don't win a particular
election..."

"Of course they support it - they're the majority!  Basically, the only
legimitate form of government is democracy, right?  Everything else is
illegimiate, and if your government is illegimiate, you basically have
no rights, there is no international law for you, so better buddy up
with the U.S. or you might find the SEALs airdropping on your airport
one morning."

"So we should have just let Saddam Hussien take over Kuwait?"

"Basically, yes, just stay out of it."

"And next will be Saudi Arabia, and then Israel..."

"Israel can take care of themselves, and the Saudis, if they really
want their government, they can fight to keep it.  I mean, basically,
democracy is the _greatest-system-of-government-on-earth_, so it does
pretty much whatever it pleases, right?"

  -- And what about Israel?"

"Well, captain, how would you suggest we deal with the Palestinian
issue, and the Midest Peace Process?"

"Well we were real generous back in '52 with someone else's land,
weren't we?  Why don't we just give the Jews Manhattan Island - that's
their Promissed Land, isn't it?"

"That is absurd, and border-line racist, I might add."

"Why?  Because the Mossad would end up headquarted in the Empire State
Building and the blacks would start an intafadda after being
'resettled' in the Upper East Side?  You're right, it's totally
absurb.  The U.S. would never stand for it."



In New York, Koppel decided to change the subject, since the broadcast
was nearing it's end.  There would be plenty more opportunities for
debate.  "Captain, what are your plans?  How long can you stay in
orbit?"
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"And Dr. Yeats, as usual, _exactly_ where we don't want her to be!"
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definately loosing pressure.
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"She's got a good point, there," Burns mussed aloud on the bridge.
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"Well, congressman, I'll agree with you that this is a democracy, but
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you heard about the War on Drugs?  Don't you watch C.O.P.S?  You do
d3104 23
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to obey?  Fine, you obey parts of the Constitution, what about the
other parts?  This is like me blowing down the highway at ninety miles
an hour, and when the cop pulls me over saying, oh, but officer, I
came to a full and complete stop at all the red lights!"
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environmental laws, the Department of Homeland Security - all of them
are supported by the overwealming majority of the people of this
country."
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"We have freedom in this country," Black retorted.  "We have freedom
of speech, freedom of the press, free elections!"
a3332 5
"The issue isn't how much freedom these people have got.  It's what
they've chosen to do with it!  They've chosen to build a society based
on some of the most vicious traits of mankind; they've chosen the
most selfish bastards as their leaders; they've chosen to build
some nightmare system and just jam it down everyone's throats."
a3333 2
"Well what do you suggest, Captain?" the congressman asked, dripping
sarcasm off the last work.
a3334 22
"People should just be nice to each other.  People should be generous.
Good grief, if you're running a restaurant or a food market, and
someone comes in hungry, give them something to eat!  Forget about how
much cash they've got in their pockets!"

"Well, that sounds very noble, Captain, but in the real world, if you
just give everything away, you'll be put out of business."

"That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of democracy right there - you be
a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you won't
work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the street
and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they walk past
and call you a bum who doesn't want to work... And they're right,
'cause I don't want to work - not for them and not for their brutal
system!"


T + 7 days

"The majority don't want good leaders," Marc cut in.  He was once
again back in a televised debate.  His advesary stuttered and
faltered.
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Congressman Ecks - capitalism / latino policy
Senator Wye - drug war / border policy / liberties of democracy
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"We're down to 80 in C-4," Alister declared from his computer
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"Yep," the captain agreed.  "And Dr. Yeats, as usual, right where we
don't want her."
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"Should we get her out of there?" Alister asked.
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"Captain, by all accounts you stolen millions of dollars, and many
people think you could have gotten away with at least several million
undetected.  Why not just take the money and retire on a beach in
Aruba?  Why fly into space?"

"Well, Jack, that's a good question.  I guess, basically, I'm 35
years old and not ready to lounge on a beach just yet.  Spaceflight
has always facinated me, and I want to do something with my life,
not just sit around and enjoy a big pile of cash."

"Couldn't you have raised money for your flight just by being
honest with people about what you were attempting, have say,
hey, we're flying to space, finance us?"
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10 million dollars to reward a private manned spaceflight and have
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wealthy, or steal it.  We stole it."
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"What do you have to say to all the people you stole from, I'm sure
many of them are listening to this program, do you have anything to
say to them?"
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heck, their whole philosophy is based on greed.  I mean, let's just
apply their own rational.  I'm helping them compete.  If some of them
go out of business, so what?  Businesses fail every day.  I'm
developing technology to fly to Mars, so the whole society benefits.
We rip and claw at each other throats, and that drives civilization
forward.  This is the capitalist philosophy, isn't it?"
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men with some nightmare system to be jammed down everyone's throats.
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T + 519 days
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T + 520 days
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T + 531 days
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Andrea: "Well, one thing this attack suggests to me is that we're
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"I don't support any war.  Christ taught us to forgive our enemies,
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Vic spoke up next.
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Vic shook his head.
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In Houston, Lou watched the broadcast from a conference room in the
Johnston Space Flight Center, where an entire floor of a building had
now been dedicated to monitoring the flight of the _Icaraus_.  A
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is an offical NASA role, and how she wants the situation dealt with,
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"No, I think that's your speciality, and let me now take a question
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The doctor sighed as he put the blood pack into the refrigerator and
closed the door.  Turning, he kept his hands behind his back, holding
on the refrigerator as he faced the woman from NASA.
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look things up in a book, recommend expensive procedures, and scribble
out prescriptions for pricy medicines."

"Please grip about socialized medicine.  Hell, our medicine already is
socialized; it's just capitalist socialism instead of communist
socialism.  Doctors don't make the decisions; H.M.O.s and Medicare and
hospital administrators and pharmasutecal companies do.  The bottom
line is still the same.  It's still some screwed up system that
everyone is a little cog in.  Sure, you can buck the system.  But just
like John Cougar Mellancamp said, 'whenever I fight the system, the
system always wins'.  You fight the system, nobody'll hire you because
you won't churn out the billable hours, you very well may lose your
hospital privileges 'cause you don't have some 'group' you're part of,
if you just ask people to pay what they can afford, you'll get a
pittance, and on top of it all you'll still have medical school loans
to pay off, and they're astronomical because the medical schools
expect that you'll do like everybody else and make a killing, so they
want a nice little piece of the pie."
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an hour and was calmly enjoying the dawn.  It was the morning of his
fifth day at this place, and he was looking forward to leaving.  One
of his favorite spots for prayer and meditation, it was about an
hour's hike from a desert road.  Amid a jumble of rocks, there were
shady places to protect from the sun during the peak of the day and a
flat area to sit out on during the cooler hours and to lie down on at
night.  A spring fed a nearby stream which provided drinking water and
ran quickly enough to avoid the standing pools of water that attract
insects.  A bright yellow light pierced out from a gap in the
mountains and began to widen into an orb.  Another day had come.
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discern the will of God, or the Great Spirit, as Vic prefered.  After
a while, you realize that you wouldn't actually be accomplishing any
of those things, but rather filling the hours with all the
_distractions_ - television, food, drugs, games, books, talking,
walking, driving, cleaning.  _This_is_how_long_a_day_really_is_, you
eventually realize.
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then slowly settled in.  Yet the nights held their own splendor,
especially away from the city lights, as the stars began to emerge,
eventually filling the blackness with thousands of tiny lights in
their various shapes and patterns.  Nor was the sky still.  Not only
did the stars shift through the night, but the lights of airplanes
high above and the occasional meteor would disturb the background.

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Mercurio's next TV appearance was on a political talk show that
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"Well, that's perfectly understandable.  If you just give away to
everyone, you'll be put out of business."
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are decent, hardworking people who want a better life not just for
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"What is a legitamite government?"
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of the camera.  It read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.
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"Well, if your government is so based on persuation, then why do you
have one of the highest per capita incarceration rates on the planet?
Why every time you turn on C.O.P.S, you see the police chasing after
d3443 6
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out his best code while he's highed up."  Today, he was wearing one
of his favorite T-shirts, solid black except for a single word
across the front, in green letters like you might find generated
by a VCR on a TV screen: MUTE.
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THE VISION QUEST.
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"Sure, that's why everyone obeys the speed limit, because they're so
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usually featured a panel discussion.  This evening the other
guests were a congressman and a prominent businessman, who
had heard his earlier interview and was determined to rebut him.
d2516 6
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"Ted, can I jump in here?" Congressman Black asked.

"Sure, go ahead," replied the moderator.

"Capitalism may not be perfect, and this society may not be perfect,
but what sets us apart from communism and fascism is our commitment to
democracy and freedom.  Those countries were dictatorships.  This
country is run by its people, through their elected representatives,
and the capitalists don't simply 'own' the government, and they don't
always get their way."
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T + 5 days
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T + 5 days
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T + 12 days
@


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@
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top-quality marijuana, never packaged or pressed, covered with
tiny white crystals of the psychoreactive drug tetrahydrocannabinol.
d446 1
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...
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Mercurio called a old friend his, a doctor named Victor Antonov, who
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continued, stuburn belief, much to Burns' great alarm and dismay, that
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He slowly turned around in his seat, looking at the hitchhiker
as is seeing her now for the first time.
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"I'm sorry, we weren't really introduced..."
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Within site of the Interstate, the South African executed a
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"What's going on?  What happened?" Vic asked, addressing Alister as if
expecting an explanation from him.
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and Spanish.  Replacing the handset, she began looking through the
other papers on the desk, finding one in particular that caught
her interest.  It read as follows: 
d1763 5
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the basic engine budget.  Lou had thought they might be selling fuel
illegally, but that didn't fit.  She thought back to the conversation
she'd overheard yesterday.  _They aren't selling fuel; they're
hoarding it._ And now the rocket design and the launch budget...  Her
contemplation was cut short by Mercuriou's loud voice.
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Again Andrea picked the telephone, punched nine and got a second dial
tone.  Looking out the window, she could see that the sun had been up
several hours.  Additionally, Houston was an hour ahead of them, so
she hoped Lou was already at work, or had at least turned on his cell
phone.  She heard noises in the room behind her as she dialed the
number.  He answered on the second ring.
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With rockets launching every 5 minutes, Mercurio finally started
to give honest answers to the media.

"How much money did you steal?"

"Hard to say.  Adding up everything we lied about, everything we
bought on empty credit, everything we just flat out stole - probably
close to a billion dollars."  He paused for a minute.  "And that's a
shoestring budget for what we're trying to do.  We've cut a lot of
corners.  A billion isn't much for a manned space launch, let alone
one going to Mars."

"How many corners did you cut?"

"A bunch.  I'd like to have three identical ships going, but we've
only got one.  We don't have any kind of landing vehicle yet, and
of course I'd like to have one built already and tested here on Earth,
but that isn't going to happen either."

"How do you plan to land on Mars if you don't have a landing vehicle?"

"We've got an old 747 we managed to put in orbit this morning, and
I'm hoping we can modify it to function as a space shuttle."

"How much do you have of... uh, supplies?"

"We've got a year's supply of food, water, charcoal to extract carbon
dioxide from the air.  Then we'll have to start recycling."

"Do you expect to be gone longer than a year?"

"Of course, yes.  There's no way we could get to Mars and back in a
year.  Plus, I'm planning on making a stop at the astroid belt on the
way.  I'm looking at five years..."

Brian jogged into the room.  "We've got a problem.  Looks like Alister's
ship hit something and sprung an oxygen leak."

"Shit.  OK, I've got to go.  Gentlemen, I'll talk to you later."

They walked back into the makeshift control room, and listened in
to the radio traffic.  Burns was pretty much in charge, but there
wasn't much he could do at the moment.  Alister's ship had
quickly lost all its atmosphere, but both astronauts were safely
inside their spacesuits.

"OK, Mercurio here," the captain announced into the radio, as he
glanced behind himself and noticed the TV crew that had followed
them.  Probably live on CNN, he thought, which they were.

"Burns, can we rendevous with Alister ASAP and just get them
off that ship onto one with an atmosphere?"

"Yeah, that'll work.  They're on the other side of the planet from
me.  Alister, can you make it to, uh... cargo module 14?  It's got
an airlock on it, and you can just push all the stuff aside and
wait there for us."

"Right on, no problem."

"How's it look, Alister?" Mercurio interjected.

"It's fine, chief.  It was a great ride up, and think the leak won't
be too much of a problem.  We're already looking around to try
and find the hole."

"OK, I'll see you on orbit.  Mercurio out."

"No possibility of an abort?" Brian ventured.  His old friend shook
his head.  "OK, let's go."

Two policemen pushed past the camera crew.  "You're under arrest," one
stated in a command voice as he moved forward.  Brian dropped into a
ready position as the cop lunged forward to grab him.  The ex-Ranger
sidestepped, stuck out his arm against the policeman's chest, and
stepped threw the whole weight of his body forward.  The cop went
flying backwards and sprawled out on the floor.  The camera crew was
shocked, but not enough so that the pictures weren't carried live on
national TV.  Brian followed the captain as he backed out of the room,
towards the jeep parked in the back of the building.

"You son of a bitch," the policeman's partner sneered.

"This is your language," Brian replied, "the only one you understand."

They sped across the desert mesa towards the last rocket, police cars
with screaming sirens right behind.  Both police and news helicopters
hovered overhead, and the images were now being carried live on
practically every TV station in the country, as well as some in
Europe.  Stopping the jeep at the base of the rocket, they jumped
into the cable car and started the winch.  The police cars pulled up
at the base and the cops ran to the base of the tower, but the car
was already out of reach.

"If you want to stick around when we fire this thing up, be my guest!"
Marc yelled down to them, motioning towards the mamouth ICBM they
were now inching up.  At the top, Marc and Brian walked across the
catwalk and climbed into the cockpit.  Marc pulled the hatch shut
behind them and sealed it.  They had checked the radio earlier, and
Marc now clicked it on and called Burns.  He knew they didn't have
time for long checklists.

"We're ready to go."

One of the cops said something on his radio, then they all got in
their cars and headed back towards the compound.  "This is out of our
league; call for the feds," one of them told his partner.  Halfway
across the mesa, the ground shook as the solid fuel ignited in the
rocket behind them.


----

Burns suggested a 747 for a manned launch vehicle, and Mercurio had
adquired one on lease from a company that specialized in mothballing
jumbo jets that the air carriers didn't want anymore, and that would
eventually be driven into bankruptcy.  The leasing company let the
airplane go for a fraction of its value, partly because it was insured
against air disasters and partially because of expected ease of
recoving the airplane in case of a default.  They would eventually go
bankrupt, partially because of their unexpected inability to recover
the aircraft once it had been launched into orbit.

Burns started by dropping the aircraft's engines out of its nacelles
and replacing them with rockets.  He had carefully designed the rocket
engines so that four of them could lift a 747 into orbit, while a solo
engine could lift a significant mass in an unmanned cargo module.
Next, he converted the entire main body of the aircraft to hold fuel
and oxydizer, leaving just the bubble on top the plane pressurized for
the crew.  At the rear of the bubble he fashioned a fairly spacious
airlock, opening directly upward.  On top the airlock hatch he placed
a hydraulic mating adapter, and another one right on the nose of the
aircraft, both patterned after a NASA design for the space shuttle and
International Space Station.

He reworked the plane's plumbing system, too, adding a dozen piping
connectors to the docking ports, along with electrical connectors.
Each of the cargo modules was similarly equiped with pipes that
connected all of the connectors on one side with the connectors on the
other.  Two of the pipes were used for hydraulic control, one being
pressurized with hydraulic fluid that was shunted to various hydraulic
controls by a collection of control values, another used as a vacuum
line used to draw back used hydraulic fluid.  Another pipe was for
water, and two more were assigned for N-133 fuel and the hydrogen
peroxide oxidizer.  The remaining half dozen pipes were there as
backups, and more control values allowed any of the backup pipes to be
shunted over to any of the primary pipes, as well as allowing any or
all of the pipes to be closed off.  In the cargo modules, the control
values were all clustered at the forward end of the module, where the
control computer was, allowing for short interconnects.

Burns had also prepared a number of docking nexuses to which up to
six cargo modules could be mated, one in each of the six spatial
directions.  Since the mating adaptors were sexed, requiring a
hydraulicly powered male to attach to a passive female, Burns
designed each docking nexus with three of each sex.

Some of the cargo modules were simply tanks designed to hold either
fuel, or oxidizer, or water.  They were designed so that the plumbing
line for whatever they were carrying went through the tank; all the
other plumbing lines passed straight through from the docking port on
one end to the docking port on the other.  All of these tanks were
equiped with thermostats and heaters, driven by fuel cells, to keep
their contents liquid in the cold of outer space.

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That evening, the President addressed a nervous / rapt but unshaken nation,
informing them of basically what their news networks had been
d2213 4
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information he provided was NORAD's assessment that the cargo
modules were being moved to higher orbits and therefore probably
weren't part of an attack.
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fascism was.  And it's all true, but it all overlooks the simple fact
that every one of these societies is based on forced labor.  So if you
want Zeppelins, or Sputniks, or Microsoft Windows, and these material
d2486 2
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"But we don't support the KGB, and we don't ship our citizens off to
gulags."
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faltered.  "The majority don't want good leaders," the astronaut
repeated, floating weightless on the screens of 10 million people
watching the live interview on Nightline.  "They want garbage leaders.
They want the most selfish bastards you'd ever want to meet, with this
nightmare capitalist system based on the most vicious traits of
mankind to be jammed down everyone's throughts.  And this time, nobody
can say it isn't really a democracy, that one man took over the
government, that the discedents were 'disappeared', that we don't have
freedom of speech or freedom of the press.  Nobody can claim that this
isn't really what the majority of people want.  Democracy is another
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"But from a standpoint of international law?"  Again, others started
cutting in, but the space captain wouldn't let them change the subject.
d2941 8
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"Well, most human societies have been like this, but not all.  I think
the American Indians were the best example of an alternative.  They
raised their children to recognize wild edibles, to make fire by
d2956 3
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unknown in these 'primitive' societies.  This is why the U.S.
couldn't have had a War on Drugs, or anything like it, two hundred
years ago.  Anyone who didn't like it could just pack up and move
west."
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"Industrialization is what's changed.  In the last hundred years,
well, two 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, and we've gone from
most people living on farms to most people living in cities.  That
means people are dependent on each other to an extent never seen
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domination of man over man / of the strong over the weak.  The more
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society / each other, the more oppressive society becomes.  There's no
way around this, unless a hundred million people are going to wake up
one day and just decide to change their human nature, to abandon greed
for generosity, force for persuasion, and that's just not going to
happen."
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called democracy.  The entire operation of our government is based on
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not force, people to vote for them."
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"I see what kinds of leaders you choose.  The most selfish men you'd
ever want to meet."
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"The capitalists, who are just in it for themselves, and the democrats,
who are going to get tough with anybody who won't follow all their
laws.  Real good leaders."
@


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@a574 12
T - 341 days

Frozen with fear, Dr. Andrea Yeats stared at the young man in his
early twenties sitting in the passenger seat near to her.  His jeans
were ripped, his hair unkempt, and his body excuded a faint odor that
betrayed the three days that had passed since his last shower.  His
heavy blond hair and muscular upper body betrayed months of surfing on
the Southern California beaches.  His eyes had narrowed to slits, and
his lewd smile told that the money in her purse wasn't the only thing
he'd be taking.


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T - 15 days

The police raided two days early.  The "heads up" from the cop turned
out to be deliberate misinformation.  The police bust into the ranch
house early morning, and caught everyone asleep, except Burns, who
was smoking dope and watching TV.

"Where Mercurio?" a detective asked him after rounding up the programmers.

Burns shrugged, "not here".

The rest watched on CNN.  "Maybe they'll let 'em go, when they find out
they're small fish."  "With all this Homeland Security crap?  They had
'em locked up tigher than a drum."

Mercurio slapped him hand on the table.  "Fuck it.  I said I wouldn't
let 'em hang out there, and I'm not letting 'em hang.  Anyway, I need
Burns. We'll go get 'em with the choppers."

"How, they're already arrested?"

"We'll hold up the cops.  Surprise 'em as they move our people to
the jail."

"I'll go," Brian said.  Marc started to object.  "No, I told you you
needed someone for security, and this is exactly what I meant."

Mercurio led the raid.

Vic went along, but said he was a doctor and wasn't going to use a
weapon.

They went down in CH-47 Chinooks, sat the choppers down on an empty
mesa twenty miles away.

"Take this!" Marcelius yelled at Vic and shoved an M-16 at him.

"No!" the doctor answered and backed off.  "I'm not using one of those
things!"

"Just take it and aim it at the cops!"

"No!"

"Look!  I need a show of force.  I've got to look like I'm in control!
Now, take this gun and point it at the police!"

Reluctantly, the doctor took the gun.  They waited until the TV showed
the police driving out.  As soon the police cars hit the road, the
choppers were in the air.

Brian shot out the lead cop car's engine and jumped onto the ground,
pointing an M-16 at the driver's head.

"Hands on the wheel, now!"

After a brief confrontation, they got Burns and Alister out of the
police car and into the helicopter.  A police chopper zoomed in and
hovered nearby as they took off.  Bryan put a fresh magazine in his
rifle, took careful aim lest his damage the police chopper's rotors,
and shot a dozen bullets into its engine.  It immediately starting
belching black smoke, and the police pilot rapidly landed the stricken
craft as the three Hueys flew away over the horizon.

Back at their base, the team held a meeting.

"We need another week or two at least," Burns concluded, after
summarizing the work remaining to be done.

"We're out of options.  This place is all we've got left," Mercurio
noted wryly.

"So you need a diversion," Brian summerized.  "I'll take care of it."

Over the next week, Brian blazed a trail of blown-up highway bridges
across the country.  Marc continued to phone in to the various media
outlets, and quickly became dubbed the "Highway Bomber".  The manhunt
dominated the national headlines, but Brian kept right on going,
across Kansas, across Missouri, into Tenneesse, and up through
Virginia towards Washington, D.C.  His destination was obvious, and
nobody paid Utah any attention at all.  The nation's capital was put
on a terrorist alert.  Part of the reason he was so successful is that
all the pictures on the TV were Marc's, so Brian was able to drive
the highways unmolested.

That all changed in Roanoke, Virginia.  Two deer hunters came across
Brian as he waited for the traffic to clear on his latest target, a
highway bridge on Interstate 95.  The hunters opened fire.  Brian
fired back, ran back to his Jeep and sped away, but not before the
hunters had gotten his license plate numbers and a good description of
the Highway Bomber.  The police now knew they had a second suspect and
shifted their focus accordingly.  The public was told this unknown man
was "armed and extremely dangerous" and were advised to report to the
police immediately any sitings.  Brian called Marc on his cell phone.

"I think my cover is pretty much blown here."

"OK, can you make it back out west without being followed?"

"I don't think so."

"Fine, can you just disappear for a while?"

Brian thought for a minute.  He had friends in Maryland.  Would
they hide him from the police?  "I think so."

"OK, just do that.  Lay low for a couple of weeks until I can
get this launch off, then split for South America once all the
attention has shifted to me."


T - 4 days

"Ahora, todos necistas regresar a Mexico."

...

"Penso que lanzare estes proyectiles conta cuidades norteamericanos
tal como Nuevo York y Los Angeles."

"He says he thinks you're going to launch these missiles against
American cities like New York and Los Angeles."

"No.  No.  Estes missiles voy a espacio.  Espacio!  Espacio!"  Marc
pointed to the sky for emphasis.

"A las noticas dicen que usted es un terroristo."

"He says they're saying on the news that you're a terrorist."

"No.  No!  Amigos!  Tu sabes yo!  Yo no terroristo!"

"Has sido explotando las puentas en Virginia."

"He says you've been blowing up bridges in Virginia."

"Como se dice es posible yo... BOOM... in Virginia?  Yo estoy agui!"

"Alguien ha sido explotando las puertas en Virginia."

"He says somebody's been blowing up bridges in Virginia."

Marc shrugged his shoulders and paused for a moment, his mouth agap.

"Al Queda?"



T - 3 days

Vic asked Andrea to go to the fuel company and check it out.  She met
the management team, was shown around the headquarters facility, and
told that the gate way down the road led to another property.

She took a moment in the lady's room as an excuse to walk around,
try all the doors, find one unlocked, open it, walk in and begin
looking through the file cabinet.  She opened one drawer and pulled
out a sheet of paper.  It read:


Each Shuttle SRB

1,300,000 lbs at launch
1,100,000 lbs propellant
192,000 lbs inert
3,300,000 lbs launch thrust
2 min burn time
~ 50,000 lb/sec propellant burn


Shuttle (on landing) - 230,000 lbs max


Space shuttle main engine

178,000 L/min liquid hydrogen
64,000 L/min liquid oxygen
1,734,803 N at sea level (each)
ET - 2 million liters
     29,900 kilograms empty
     751,000 kilograms full
1,035 gallons (3,900 liters) per second (17-inch diameter feed lines)
8.5 minutes burn time


forced CVI (chemical vapor infiltration)
   3M Nextel fiber
   start with pressed sheets of ceramic fibers in graphic holder
   methyl trichlorosilane (MTS) -> silicon carbide + HCl
   others than SiC = BN, carbon, a-Si3N4
   SiC sublimes ~ 2700 deg C
   1100 deg C - depositation
Handbook of Selected Properties of Air- and Water-reative Materials
   MTS - p. 172

$5 million for a used 747

Clayton tanker truck - 30,000 L    ~ 40 ft length

90% Hydrogen peroxide / JP-4
  297 sec Isp (theoretical)

possible 95% efficiency?

one test
  130 sec Isp (theoretical)
  52 sec Isp (measured)


ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4) - oxidizer - 69.6 percent by weight
aluminium - fuel - 16 percent
iron oxide - catalyst - 0.4 percent
polymer - binder - 12.04 percent
epoxy curing agent - 1.96 percent
high thrust at ignition and reduced thrust during max dyn pressure via shape
  11-point star perforation in forward segment
  double-truncated cone perforation in each aft segment
nozzle - 7-to-79 expansion ratio
  hydraulic gimbaled for thrust vector control (8 deg)
four hold down posts; top nut contains NASA standard detonators (NSDs)
  NSDs blown during launch sequence; lights booster charge, lights propellant
redundant 



Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines; Huzel and Huang


orbital speed - Mach 26 - 8 km/s


New 747   $200 million
  6,025 cu ft cargo space
  216,840 L max fuel
  operating empty weight = 394,088 lb
various engines - CF6-80C2B1 59,000 lb thrust (weight = 9,570 lb x 4)
   "The Engine Handbook"


Simple liquid fueled rocket - 275 sec spec impulse
  for 59,000 lb thrust  59,000/275 = 214 lb/sec (total propellant flow rate)
  for four engines ~ 1000 lb/sec
  1000 lbs water ~ 120 gallons ~ 500 liters
  433 seconds operating time (216,840 L)
  6,025 cu ft = 45,000 gallons = 180,000 L
  216,840 + 180,000 L ~= 400,000 L
  400,000 L = 800 sec operating time = 13 min


Suddenly, the light came on. She slamed shut the folder, shoved it
awkwardly back into the filing cabinet, and spun around to find the
Captain watching her from the doorway.  He smiled sarcastically.

"Can I help you?"

Andrea took a deep breath.  She was no spy, no matter what government
agency she worked for.  She decided on honesty.  Puting down the
papers, she turned fully back around to the door and put her hands on
her hips.

"What are you up to?"

"Why don't you tell me what you think I'm up to?  Why don't you give
me your expert analysis of... whatever it is you're reading?"

"It looks like you've got some kind of orbital launch planned, I'd
say probably manned."

Bryan appeared in the door behind Marcelius just in time to hear the
last part.  The Captain smiled broadly and walked completely into the
room.

"Would you come with us, please?"

Andrea looked back at the man who just arrived.  Suddenly,
instinctively, she knew in her heart that he could completely dominate
in any physical confrontation, that she might as well have been in the
presence of two or three police officers.

"What if I don't want to?"

Bryan spoke for the first time.

"You're coming with us, and you can come however you please."
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from the air.  The smell, green and plantish, mixed with another aroma
distinctly reminiscent of a skunk's spray, was overwealming.

Vic walked around the tubs to the far wall, where a quantity of the
plants had been harvested and hung upside down to dry.  He broke
one of the buds off by its stem and passed it to Mercuriou.
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electrons and nuclei that formed atoms and molecules, and made it
possible to analyze atomic structures in much the same was as
numerical simulations of Newton's gravitational equations made
possible the analyze of planetary movement in solar systems.  For the
first time, physics was beginning to correctly predict the physical
properties of matter that until then had only been understood
d486 14
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Burns dumped the money from the lottery into copies of _Gaussian_,
along with its most elaborately expensive spinoffs and a team of
programmers, including a bright 20-year-old South African chemist
named Alister Compton.  They set up shop south of San Francisco, in a
Silicon Valley office building in Palo Alto, near Stanford University.
A roaring economic boom kept restaurants, bars, and shopping malls
packed with young, dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings sitting on thousands
of dollars worth of stock options.  Every other car on University
Avenue was either a Ferrari, or a BMW, or a Land Rover - most of them
leased.  Up scale restaurants provided their patrons with blank paper
placemats and colorful Crayons to doodle and brainstorm their latest
propietary server architecture while waiting for their hundred dollar
orders.
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so it can't be opened from inside without a card key?"
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The other three left the room, leaving Andrea and Marc to eye each
other in silence, she sitting on a chair in the middle of the room, he
perched on a tabletop.  Ten minutes later, the South African returned
to announce that the room was ready.  Mercuriou escorted the NASA
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...
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"Car?"  Alister asked.  "What car?  She didn't have a car."
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The government responded quickly and harshly.  President Bush held a
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"What you're going to do with me?"  She speculatively completed his
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to figure out how to stall things for what... another three weeks?"
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"Yeah, just about that," Burns nodded in agreement.  "Maybe a month.
If there's no hitches, two or three weeks."
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Again Andrea picked the telephone, punched nine and got another dial
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she hoped Lou was already at work, or had least turned on his cell
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"They're planning a launch!"

The irate captain had crossed the room at a sprint and slammed his
hand down on the telephone to sever the connection.
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In Washington, President Bush held a hurried meeting of his national
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much all the stuff we were studying and he (for his part) could
d3963 152
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Within weeks, President Bush attacked Afghanistan after correctly
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to Bush's behavior, stating publically than an orderly extradition
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establishment in general, and the Bush Administration in particular.
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President Bush told Mercurio that his was willing to send the space
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He lead the South African to one of the large tables as he spoke.  On
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drifted above.  Somehow, amid all the ballyho, the 747 had been lost
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magic.  It's a system a government where the majority of people choose
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"Has sido explotando las puertas en Virginia."
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Finally, they all climbed onto the 747 from an accessway built from
the ground to the rear of its left wing, then up a ladder to its roof,
which Mercurio, the last one on, threw down to the ground behind him.
Then they went up another disposable ladder to the airlock hatch on
top of the bubble and entered the spaceplane via the airlock.  Captain
Mercurio closed the airlock behind him.  Burns was already in the
cockpit, running through a final pre-launch checklist with Alister.
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The Captain came forward and strapped himself into the left-hand
pilot's seat.  He was impatient to get airborne because of the
vulnerability of the spaceplane to the police while on the ground,
but he held his tongue until the engineers had finished, and settled
for attaching his spacesuit supply lines to air hoses running to his
seat along the floor, putting on his helmet and sealing it.

"OK, everyone ready to go?" he asked, using the question in lue
of a com check.
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somewhat unfamiliar spacesuit.
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"Let's go!!" the Captain proclaimed, and Burns hit the engine start
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button and watching several indicators turn green.
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three gees of acceleration.
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That evening, the President addressed a nervous but unshaken nation,
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Mercurio rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over
the compartment.  Finally, he pulled out the T-shirt he was looking
for, brushed a pair of jeans away from the TV camera and spread
the black T-shirt out so it dominated the view field of the camera.
It read: FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCKS.
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Mars!"  he finally burst out.  "What did you say when they asked you -
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In 1998, _)_ had become the first man in history to win a Nobel Prize
for writing a computer program.  It was called _Gaussian_, and it
numerically simulated Schroedinger's equation, the defining physical
equation for explaining the complex interactions between the electrons
and nuclei that formed atoms and molecules, and made it possible to
analyze atomic structures in much the same was as numerical
simulations of Newton's gravitational equations made possible the
analyze of planetary movement in solar systems.  For the first
time, physics was beginning to correctly predict the physical
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Two days later, the Icarus breaks orbit.  Mercurio moves the ship to a
d3034 3
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several landing areas before we pick one.  We've got plenty of fuel
now."
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Most world goverments issue a Statement of Condolence.  The United
d3190 1
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were looking at Alister.  Finally Alister blurted out.
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lifetime hours of spaceflight.  She was going on.
d3431 2
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people as he could.  He was a genius stratagition, who knew
d3443 1
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of New York's city's financial district had been devastated.
d3504 1
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orbit from where their could kill their momemtum and drop down
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Twenty five minutes into the burn, the engines died out, and
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They sold it to NASA in a heartbeat, and were briefly the next glamour
company looking forward to a mega-IPO.  Mercurio patented the formula
and manufactuering process and as much of the design process as he
could, then released the patents to the public domain, stating that he
had adquired the patents to establish beyond doubt that they had
invented the technology, that anyone could now use it, and that nobody
else could patent it.  His action was praised by many as an exemplar
of corporate responsibility, and to a stunned financial community now
wondering how he would pay for his startup, he announced that he had
ample funding from private sources.
d347 4
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fuel.  Boing asked for samples.  NASA placed a huge order.
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"If they control Cisco, they control the network."
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let 'em hang out there, and I'm not letting 'em hang.  We'll go get
'em with the choppers."
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Now, take a gun and hold it at the police!"
d870 3
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, and waited for the TV to show the police driving out.
As soon as they hit the road, the choppers were in the air.
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...
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"We need another week or two at least."
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"We're out of options.  This place is all we've got left."
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President Bush through the briefing folder across the room and
sent top secret papers flying everywhere.

"What the hell do I have a Department of Homeland Security for if
I've got to find out from CNN when 170 missiles get fired off in Utah?"


T + 1 day
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to their inefficient launch profile, all the lights made it.
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"No, I don't think so.  Look at the X Prize.  They were trying to
raise 10 million dollars to reward a private manned spaceflight and
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heck, their whole philosophy is based on greed.  I'm mean, let's just
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go out of business, so what?  I'm developing technology to fly to
Mars, so the whole society benefits.  We rip and claw at each other
throats, and that drives civilization forward.  This is the capitalist
philosophy, isn't it?"
d1594 4
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case, then why do people blow up federal buildings, why do people
smash airplanes into skyscrapers, who do people burn this country's
flag?  Obviously, there's a lot of people who don't agree with these
rules, and frankly, I'm one of them."
d1625 2
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slightly editted for a new generation, but the same kind of garbage in
charge of society.  And I feel as bad about ripping off the
d1694 5
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you heard about the War on Drugs?  You do ship your citizens off to
jail, and while you may not torture them, and your prisons may not be
as cold as the ones in Siberia, the fact remains that fear of the
police is just as readily used in this society as in those others."
d1711 1
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"So did they; so did they."
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down everyone's throughts.  They were a lot like the people who run
democracy today."
d1856 58
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how much you walk out with."
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'cause I don't want to work - for them and their brutal system!"
d1927 1
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"The majority don't want good leaders," Marc cut in.  His advesary
stuttered and faltered.  "The majority don't want good leaders," the
astronaut repeated, floating weightless on the screens of 10 million
people watching the live interview on Nightline.  "They want garbage
leaders.  They want the most selfish bastards you'd ever want to meet,
with this nightmare capitalist system based on the most vicious traits
of mankind to be jammed down everyone's throughts.  And this time,
nobody can say it isn't really a democracy, that one man took over the
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die up there!  I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is this what people
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not people, hugh?"
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"Does the media have a conservative bias?" McLauchlin asked the
TV camera.
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"Zero.  OK, maybe one.  The media just reflects the opinions of the people."
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"I'll go with a three."
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"The answer is - three."
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Meanwhile, the South African had began removing the cover from
the bulky dishwasher.  Having examined its construction, he had
already concluded that it would just fill up with water and
spill over into the cabin when opened, so his first thought was
to install a vacuum suction to remove the water when the
machine was finished.

d2424 4
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out his best code while he's highed up."

MUTE.
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The asteroid belt turned out to be a gold mine.  Burns had devised a
scheme to survey the asteroid belt using four cargo modules loaded
with fuel and piloted under radio control.  In addition to digital
cameras, each module was equiped a spectrographic imager he had bought
the pieces for on Earth and assembled and tested on the way out.  When
focused on part of an asteroid, it would use a rotating prism to break
apart the various wavelengths of light and sweep them across a light
sensitive phototransistor.  The output from the transitor would be
digitized and transmitted back to the ship, producing something like a
strip chart showing the relative intensity of light at each
wavelength.  The light intensity would dip sharply at frequencies
absorbed by the asteroid's material, and by comparing the charts
with the absorption spectrum of known materials, the crew could
estimate the probably mineral content of each asteroid.
d2521 28
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week's worth of supplies into a cargo module and headed for the
asteroid with the silicon deposit.  The captain, NASA engineer and
doctor remained on the ship and continued the survey.  Burns stopped
at another asteroid en route to their target and tested various
schemes for retrieving the silicon.  He finally settled on explosives,
and proceeded to the surveyed asteroid, blew half of it apart with
shaped charges he and the South African planted during a series of
spacewalks, collected several dozen of the larger pieces of silicon
left floating in space, and headed back to Icarus.  It was a
groundbreaking accomplishment, and the video images relayed back to
Earth were broadcast on news programs throughout the world.

After returning to Icarus, Burns loaded the silicon into the same
cargo module he had outfitted in Earth orbit to build solar cells.
While the sizes and shapes of silicon crystal were more irregular than
the original ingots from Earth, and the purity wasn't quite as good,
the silicon turned out to be fine for solar cells, and the robot
manipulators they had started using in Earth orbit were now put to
work producing solar cells from the ample supply of Asteroid Belt
silicon.  After a few tweaks, the manufacturing software began to run
unattended and started turning out a new solar power array every day.
Within a week, the ship was running completely from solar power, the
fuel cells were shut down, and Mercurio began to wonder what they
could do with the solar arrays the robots continued to crank out at
what seemly a nearly fantastic pace.  Burns had already planned ahead.
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inspected some of the freshly picked raw beans.  "I'll eat it though,"
he quickly added.
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The doctor nodded in assent as he opened the steamer and let some of
the cooked soy beans, along with an ample quantity of steam, float out
into the air.  The aroma of freshly steamed vegatables permeated the
air and quickly brought work to a standstill on a spaceship where
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from one direction, almost simultaneously as Andrea entered from the
other side, where she had been calibrating instrumentation for an
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was in agony.  He spacesuit was leaking air, as well.
d2651 1
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was back in the spacesuit and Burns clamped his hand over the hole.
@


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it for years really, but months to actually do it.  First, Burns got a
job with MiraCom.  MiraCom didn't advertise much.  They weren't listed
in any web directory.  In fact, they had a fulltime Internet
P.R. officer, one of whose jobs was to get the company un-listed from
any web search engines it managed to get it's name into.  MiraCom had
a handful of clients, but almost all were state governments, all paid
well, and on time, and the directors had no desire to attrack any more
attention than they had to.  MiraCom was the United States' largest
supplier of lottery software.  They were always on the lookout for
sharp programmers.

A typical installation featured a computer in a sealed room, running
exactly and only the MiraCom software, the only output being a video
cable and an RS-232 line over which another computer (several,
usually) were informed of the winning numbers.  Some states performed
a lottery drawing every five minutes.  Various people had ideas to
hack them, ranging from tapping into the router line and hopeing
somebody will come in and type the password in the clear, to Vic's
scheme for an Ethernet wiretap built from a thousand-plus element
phased array to built in the woods across from MiraCom's office park.
Finally, Marc Mercurio stepped in and showed why he was in charge.
Somebody just had to go in and get a job with them.  Burns'
qualifications were impecable.

At first he just watched the place, as he went about coding a new 3-D
graphics look for the State of Nevada's lottery.  Back at the rented
apartment, Marc drilled him for days to read passwords - Burns
looking over Marc's shoulder as he typed and telling him what he just
entered.  They'd drill for an hour each day, which Marc liked to say
way the minimum amount of time to put into doing something.  It was a
big pain, Burns hated it, and turns out they never used them, but by
the end of the month they had every important password in the place.
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Marc went right for his favorite program - the gcc compiler.  It was
several years old, and Marc asked Burns to float a question with
management about updating it.  "Skipper" yelped with glee when Burns
returned with the answer.  MiraCom wasn't just turning down the idea;
they were dead set against upgrading the compiler for fear of hackers
putting something "funny" in it.  "This means," Marc spurted after
his bout of laughter and clapping, "that we can change the compiler
with near absolute certainty that they won't just upgrade it away in a
few months."  He didn't want to repeat his college experience of an
upgrade taking away a favorite hack.  The stakes were a lot higher,
too.

Having settled on the compiler, they set to work on the hack, Marc
doing most of the coding, Burns reviewing the code each night,
watching over his shoulder and doing code reviews.  They were
determined to do it right.  The virus was designed to disappear into
the compiler's binary, recreating itself if the compiler was asked to
re-compile itself, as well as infecting the target program.  Since
they weren't too sure about the target program, they added another
feature - a third prong of the virus, targeted against the operating
system kernel, that would give them a back door.  Marc didn't have a
job, so made sure he fixed dinner every night and generally took care
of the apartment.  It was just the two of them living there, and on
weekend nights they'd party with some of the waitresses from a seafood
joint Burns liked to hit for a quick drink on the way home from work.
They'd stay up 'till two or three in the morning, smoking dope,
snorting coke, cranking the tunes.  Just like their college days.
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the hardest step.  They knew the root passwords, but Burns wasn't
supposed to have them, and the question remained of when could he
successfully use them to hack the main development system.  Marc
resolved the question - they wouldn't use the passwords at all, but
rather waited until the system was down for a routine maintenance.
Burns made sure he was in the server room that day, working on a
tricky install of a 3-D accelerator on one of the test machines.
Somehow, he just couldn't get the drivers installed right, until
everyone was out of the room for a few minutes.  He slapped a cable
onto a special PCMCIA card that had been siting in the laptop for the
last week, plugged the other end into the server's hard drive, powered
it, hit a three-key sequence on the laptop, which beeped two seconds
later.  Burns killed the power before the server's CPU had gotten out
of BIOS, replaced the original cable to the drive, and walked away
with his laptop.  Since they weren't using a cryptographic file system
yet, they didn't even have to worry about forging signatures.  He
finished the tricky install in less than five minutes and left, just
as the server workers came back with the new power supply.  He had
been practicing at home.  The whole operation took less than 10
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the library, as well as starting to make some discrete inquires about
land in the midwest.  Burns tinkered with the virus a few more times,
but they were already in, so it was just a matter of copying a file up
to the server and running a bizarre little system call that should
just have returned an error but instead jumped into the file's code at
full kernel privledge.  Burns was really careful every time he used
it, because a slipup would crash the system and that might begin to
attract attention.  Marc insisted that each change was carefully
tested before Burns installed it.  They practiced better software
design on the hack than anybody in the company did on their software.
They had to - they couldn't afford a bug.

Three weeks later Burns watched a production system getting ready to
head for Kansas make a Keno drawing.  The night before, he had
declared the hack done and written down a list of Keno numbers.  They
had replaced the random number generator with one of their own, and
Burns couldn't surpress a smile under his face as the numbers came up
on the screen the next day.

With the hack done, the team started to clean up shop.  Burns quit.
Everyone else was heading for the Southwest, and he had never taken
the job because he liked it.  Told his boss he'd had a better offer
elsewhere.  Declined to discuss it.  Was offered a raise.  Politely
refused.  He offered two weeks more work.  Politely declined.  They
handed him his last paycheck and he walked out the door for the last
time.

Vic had located a ranch site in New Mexico; pretty high up, flat, and
twenty miles down a back road.  A good road, though - dirt, but a good
road that trucks could come down.  Marc started to spend money, now -
used trailers for the construction site; a front corporation; phony
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leader just shrugged.  "If the hack works, we've got some cash," he
said, "if not, we've got problems no matter what."  "Do you think we
should stake everything on this hack?"  "No," Marc answered after a
short pause, "but I am."
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rocket fuel.
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They went down in CH-47 Chinooks, sat the choppers down on an empty mesa twenty
miles away, and waited for the TV to show the police driving out.
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... Andrea goes here ...
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a devastatingly effective act of unconventional warfare.  While the
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succeeded beyond belief.  Economies are complex systems, where events
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leaves in the wind.  The intricate network of buyers, sellers,
consumers, suppliers, distributors, bankers, salesman, real estate
agents, and thousands of other occupations that form The Economy, that
much-worshiped god of business plans, spreadsheets, balance sheets and
profit-and-loss statements that the Captain would have called the
Global Capitalist Economic System, had been dealt a crippling blow.
The stock market was down.  And it stayed down.  As the analysts
puzzled over corporate earnings ratios, and how many bargins were
popping up on the market these days, and how a bottoming out had to
occur soon, amid patriotic demonstrations of pride and determination,
an almost insane euphoria that the terrorists would only "win" if we
let them, and coming on the heels of a burst speculative bubble the
year before, day after day, week and week, month after month, the
market kept going down, down, and down.  Slowly, the men and women of
the U.S, and the world began to realize the gravity of their
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T + 729 days
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T + 731 days

"Captain Mercurio says the problem is democracy, that it's another
communism.  Do you agree?"

The NASA engineer thought for a moment before answering.

"The problem is human nature.  Democracy is just another political
system.  In some ways it's better than others, in some ways worse.
Ultimately, the solutions to our problems are spiritual and not
political.  Unfortunately, democracy tends to accentuate a lot of
problems, because you can't just go blame it off on some dictator."

"How does democracy accentuate problems?"

"Well, the problems have always been there.  It's just that democracy
shows us that a lot of our problems are still with us; that it's not
just because people don't have political representation that causes
our problems.  Now people do have political representation, and a lot
of the problems are still with us.  So, just giving political power to
the people doesn't solve your problems."

The commentator cut it.  "Dr. Yeats, you mentioned a moment ago
that democracy is better than some political systems, worse than
others, or something to that effect.  If I'm not reading too
much into your words, can you give us an example of a superior
political system?"

"Well, I don't know if there are any superior political systems.
Like I said, our problems are spiritual more than political,
and thus we need spiritual solutions more so than political ones.
Now take a monarch like King Arthur; you can have a good king,
genuinely interested in caring for his people, and yes, you
can have a good monarchy."

"Do you advocate monarchy as a system of government?"

"I don't advocate anything as a system of government.  I advocate
Christianity as a means for people to live their lives.  Monarchy is
like any other system of government, you might get a good king for a
while, but eventually you'll get a bad one, so it's no answer.
There's the story in the Bible of the Jewish people demanding a king -
this was Saul - and the prophet at the time, I believe it was Samuel,
told them that the king would take the best of their crops, and
conscript their sons into his army, and tax their profits, but the
people wanted a king anyway.  And some of the Jewish kings were pretty
lousy men."

"So, doctor, I'm, I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you say
that you advocate Christianity rather than any system of government.
For example, what do you say to Captain Mercurio's very vocal
criticisms of western society?"

"Well, I'm still on his crew, so I'd better not say too much!"

Due to the time lag in the transmission, it was almost a second
before anybody laughed, so the joke fell flat.  She faltered
a moment, then continued.

"No, seriously, he makes a lot of good points, but this has been human
society since the dawn of time.  Take Saint Anthony of the Desert, for
example.  God appeared to him in a vision and told him to flee from
men, so he went to live in the desert, and founded the Christian
monastic tradition.  This was during the Roman Empire, when Christians
were thrown to the lions, so these problems have been around for a
while."

"Haven't we come a long ways from that?  We don't throw Christians to
the lions anymore."

"No, we don't, thank God, but it's still tough to live as Christians.
Generally, the people who rise to the top in human society do so
by abandoning Christian values, so living as a Christian generally
means that you're going to get a lot of doors slammed shut on you."

"Could you elaborate on that?  How do people not live as Christians?"

"Oh, please, look around.  Christ gave us two great commandments,
to love God with all our hearts, and to love our neighbors as
ourselves.  And he elaborated on them, and lived them in his own
life.  I think the second commandment is more obvious than the
first; we look around and see how we don't love each other as
Christ taught, that's more obvious that how we fail God."

"Could you be more specific; I'm not trying to be dense, but
why don't you think a Christian can rise to the top in our society?"

"Well, consider what Christ said.  He taught us to give to all those
who beg from us; that if someone asked to borrow from us we should
give without expecting anything in return.  If you do that, if you
give to all, you often end up with nothing, at least nothing
material."

"So do you advocate a welfare system of some kind?"

"Well, no, not if I understand your question, because welfare to me
implies some kind of government operation.  Christ didn't tell us to
give our money to the government to run welfare, he didn't tell us to
give our money to the church so it could fund charities, he told us,
he spoke to us as individuals, he said _you_, give to all those who
beg of _you_.  So, if you see someone standing by the road begging,
you stop and give them a dollar or two, if you see someone asking for
a ride, you pull over and ask them where they're going, if you see
someone sleeping in a park, you say 'hey, I've got a spare room, you
can come stay with me', or whatever.  And people don't want to do
that.  If they see a beggar, they keep driving, they choose leaders
that always tell us not to pick up hitchhikers, the guy in the park,
well, that's what the homeless shelter is for."

"But isn't it dangerous to pick up hitchhikers?"

"Sure, but it's more dangerous not to pick them up.  It's dangerous
because then we're violating the commandments that Christ gave us to
live by; we're acting out of fear and not love.  And the reason
someone, well a lot of people, actually, like Captain Mercurio, really
dislike democracy is because people don't choose leaders who say,
look, you should stop and pick these people up, they choose leaders
who say, no, don't do that, think of how dangerous it is, put your own
safety first."

"You mentioned homeless shelters, in a somewhat negative way.  Do you
not support homeless shelters?"

"Well, I've been a few, many years ago, before I had a steady job
with NASA.  The problem with homeless shelters is that people think
because there's a homeless shelter, well, the problem's taken care
of, they don't have to do anything, but again, Christ tells us that
we should..."

"But can't people take advantage of that?  I mean, won't some people
just take and take and take without working or really doing anything
productive?"

"Sure, a lot of people will, in a lot of different ways.  Christianity
is about being taken advantage of, when you love unconditionally, when
you give unconditionally, when you forgive unconditionally, people
will just take and take and take, and most people, understandably,
don't want that, and that's why they really don't live as Christians.
They give up to a point and then they say no more.  But one of
Christ's stories was about a woman who came to the temple in Jerusalem
to give a donation.  There were all these other people who gave all
these big donations, and this old woman gave just two bits.  Jesus
told his diciples that she went away redeemed rather than the others,
because she had given all she had, while the others had just given
their surplus.  So it's not about how much you give, it's about you're
willingness to give all."

"Well, that raises a good point, that's been made by people like
Warren Buffett.  I mean, can't you do a lot more good in the world by
working hard, so then you'll have the money to spend on charities that
can really make a difference?"

"Well, now we come back to the first commandment, the one about loving
God.  The point isn't to do as much good as we can in the world, the
point is to live in harmony with God.  That's really what's going on
here, ultimately we're all spiritual beings, first and foremost, so
how much good we can do in the world is really secondary if we're not
living in harmony with God, so that's why the woman who just gives a
little goes away redeemed, because she's the one who's living in
harmony with God."

"What does it mean to live in harmony with God, how do we do that?"

"That's what Christ taught us.  That's what his Gospel teachings are
all about.  I mean, Christ could have chosen to be a political leader,
he was tempted to do that by the Devil, he could have liberated the
Jewish people from the Roman Empire, heck, he could have become the
Roman Emperor, he could have freed the slaves two thousand years ago,
he could have done a lot more 'good' in the world if he'd been
tougher.  But what he was trying to teach us is that living in harmony
with God, loving God, loving each other as sons and daughters of God,
is more important that all the 'good' you do."

"I don't think I understand, completely.  Isn't the 'good' we do, I
mean, isn't that what living in harmony with God is about?"

"No, not really, it's just an effect.  Christ taught us that faith in
God is the most important thing, and that our works come from our
faith.  Our good deads, our works, they are the outward expression of
our inward faith, but it's the faith that's the most important thing.
So you can do all kind of good works, but if the faith isn't there, it
doesn't amount for much.  On the other hand, if you have faith, then
it will be expressed in your works, because you'll always be looking
for ways to help people, to give to people, to forgive people, because
you love people, or at least try to.  I guess it's kinda like what
Marc, what Captain Mercurio did to defraud his investors, he created
some kind of robot that could cook dinner, but it didn't work the way
he said, because it actually had a person operating it.  Good works
are like that, it's not the outward appearance that's important, it's
what's going on behind the scenes."

"OK, we've only got a few minutes left, let me change the subject, at
least slightly.  You're a scientist, or at least an engineer, so what
do you say to people who claim that there's no scientific proof from
the existance of God, so it must be just a myth?"

"You know, I was asked that question many years ago, and at the time I
couldn't really answer it, but I thought about for a while and here's
my answer: Scientific proof is based on experiment.  There is an
experiment you can perform to find out if God is real - you can die.
Most of us don't want to perform that experiment just to satisfy our
curiosity about God, but the fact remains that we will all die some
day, and then you'll know.  So my answer to those people is just to
wait - you're going to find out all about God."

"Well, thank you for joining us this evening.  My guest had been
Dr. Andrea Yeats, astronaut and Christian.  We'll be back in a minute
with my final thought."

The entire crew had watched the broadcast, floating on the other
side of the TV camera.  After the program ended, they were
fairly quite for a while, the captain in particular.

"You did really good, I was quite proud of you," was all he had to say.



T + 739 days
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@


1.11
log
@Printed version - 48 pages for Suzie
@
text
@d288 16
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"OK, we should assemble the cargo modules into a chain," Vic began.
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"What do you mean, what's the first thing to do."
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"I don't know.  I guess, I've got to think about it for a while."
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Bryan said, "We need you as second officer."
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the crew home?" one asks.  Another focused on lurid details, supplied
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day after day, week and week, month after month, the market kept going
down, down, and down.  Slowly, the men and women of the U.S, and the
world began to realize the gravity of their situation.
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The two shuttle pilots looked at each other, then back at the
STS program coordinator.  "This isn't approved by the director, is it sir?"
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Breaking an awkward silence, the pilot asked, "Is this a favor for
Andrea?"
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"I'm in," he said, looking over at the shuttle commander.  Lou had
imagined this interview going much differently.  To his surprise, he
suddenly found himself outnumbering the Air Force colonel, who looked
back and forth between the administrator and pilot before finally
collapsing.
a3003 11

"Let's go home."





They'd left as pariahs; they came back as heros.  To some, demigods.

The captain disengaged the mooring clamps and tapped the maneuvering
thrusters to translate away from the docking station.
@


1.10
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d280 7
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Paydirt.  Finally, the computer had a prediction that worked.  It
was a complex, strangely ringed molecule dominated by nitrogen
bonds, liquid at room temperature, that could 
@


1.9
log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@d5 3
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This is a work of historical fiction.  Many of the events and
characters are based on real events and real people.  Some of the
names have been changed.  Some haven't.  The body of the work is
fictional.
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The government responded quickly and harshly.  President Nixon held a
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Vic asks Andrea to go to the fuel company and check it out.  She
meets the management team, and is shown around the headquarters
facility, and told the gate way down the road led to another
property.
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She takes a moment in the lady's room as an excuse to walk around,
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to look through the file cabinet.  She opens one drawer and pulls
out a sheet of paper.  It reads:
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Suddenly, the light comes on. She slams shut the folder, shoves it
awkwardly back into the filing cabinet, and spins around to find the
Captain watching her from the doorway.  He smiles sarcastically.
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Andrea takes a deep breath.  She's no spy, no matter what government
agency she works for.  She decides on honesty.  She puts down the
papers, turns fully back around to the door and puts her hands on her
hips.
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Bryan appears in the door behind Marcelius just in time to hear the
last part.  The Captain smiles broadly and walks completely into the
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Andrea looks back at the man who just arrived.  She knows in her heart
that he could completely dominate in any physical confrontation, that
she might as well be in the presence of two or three police officers.
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Bryan speaks for the first time.
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President Nixon through the briefing folder across the room and
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I've got to find out from CNN when 70 missiles get fired off in Utah?"
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and many religious beleived Andrea Yeats was a genuine spiritual
leader.  Others added up the letters of her name in Chinese to obtain
666.  Alister Compton was declared the world's sexiest astronaut by a
popular poll.  Vic spent hours on end holed up, working on a proposal
to reform medical care that the AMA had invited him to make, and Bryan
and his men were informally told that all charges against them would
be dropped if they'd sign up as the U.S's first squad of Space
Rangers.  Several proposals were floated for a memorial to Burns.
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
@a1 63
Each Shuttle SRB

1,300,000 lbs at launch
1,100,000 lbs propellant
192,000 lbs inert
3,300,000 lbs launch thrust
2 min burn time
~ 50,000 lb/sec propellant burn


Shuttle (on landing) - 230,000 lbs max


Space shuttle main engine

178,000 L/min liquid hydrogen
64,000 L/min liquid oxygen
1,734,803 N at sea level (each)
ET - 2 million liters
     29,900 kilograms empty
     751,000 kilograms full
1,035 gallons (3,900 liters) per second (17-inch diameter feed lines)
8.5 minutes burn time


forced CVI (chemical vapor infiltration)
   3M Nextel fiber
   start with pressed sheets of ceramic fibers in graphic holder
   methyl trichlorosilane (MTS) -> silicon carbide + HCl
   others than SiC = BN, carbon, a-Si3N4
   SiC sublimes ~ 2700 deg C
   1100 deg C - depositation
Handbook of Selected Properties of Air- and Water-reative Materials
   MTS - p. 172

$5 million for a used 747

Clayton tanker truck - 30,000 L    ~ 40 ft length

90% Hydrogen peroxide / JP-4
  297 sec Isp (theoretical)

possible 95% efficiency?

one test
  130 sec Isp (theoretical)
  52 sec Isp (measured)


ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4) - oxidizer - 69.6 percent by weight
aluminium - fuel - 16 percent
iron oxide - catalyst - 0.4 percent
polymer - binder - 12.04 percent
epoxy curing agent - 1.96 percent
high thrust at ignition and reduced thrust during max dyn pressure via shape
  11-point star perforation in forward segment
  double-truncated cone perforation in each aft segment
nozzle - 7-to-79 expansion ratio
  hydraulic gimbaled for thrust vector control (8 deg)
four hold down posts; top nut contains NASA standard detonators (NSDs)
  NSDs blown during launch sequence; lights booster charge, lights propellant
redundant 

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Design of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines; Huzel and Huang


orbital speed - Mach 26 - 8 km/s
a10 20
New 747   $200 million
  6,025 cu ft cargo space
  216,840 L max fuel
  operating empty weight = 394,088 lb
various engines - CF6-80C2B1 59,000 lb thrust (weight = 9,570 lb x 4)
   "The Engine Handbook"


Simple liquid fueled rocket - 275 sec spec impulse
  for 59,000 lb thrust  59,000/275 = 214 lb/sec (total propellant flow rate)
  for four engines ~ 1000 lb/sec
  1000 lbs water ~ 120 gallons ~ 500 liters
  433 seconds operating time (216,840 L)
  6,025 cu ft = 45,000 gallons = 180,000 L
  216,840 + 180,000 L ~= 400,000 L
  400,000 L = 800 sec operating time = 13 min


		Icarus' Wing

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it, but Andrea would for many years hold the record for most livetime
hours of spaceflight.  She was going on.
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Brian said, "We need you as second officer."
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Andrea lowered her voice, moved closer, and took Marc by the arm.
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the cabin as Marc grabed for the plastic cover and slapped it over
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"What I've learned," the captain answered, as he spun across the
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Drinking from straws was much easier, but Marc had dug into the
ship's stores an hour earlier and produced the glasses alongside the
bottle, and Andrea had stood on tradition.
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They clinked glasses and laughed together as the captain spilled wine
all over his face as he tried to drink it.
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"You guys better come in here!" Alister yelled as he propelled his
head through the hatchway.
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"Well, maybe you want to come in here," he stammered as he realized
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"What's up?" Marc asked, as Andrea grabbed a towel and started
to wipe off his face.
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At 1431 GMT, exactly 3 minutes, 17 seconds after the event occured on
Earth, the silent crew watched the second tower collapse.  In the days
ahead, it would be revealed that Islamic terrorists had hijacked four
American airlines.  Coincidently, or perhaps not, all were Boings.
Two had slammed, full throttle, into the World Trade Center, at one
time the tallest building in the world.  Burns would have suggested
imagining the pictures you've seen of jet crash scenes, then trying to
project it 100 stories above you in lower Manhattan.  Within hours,
the buildings fell.  Bankers, mail men, fire fighters, bus boys - all
lost their lives that terrible day.
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fire fighters dove into the wreckage, alongside men who walked up on
the street, desperate to find anything still alive in the tons of
rubble.  At Andrea's suggestion, The Captain issued a statement of
condolence, expressing his "deapest reget", stating that it grieved
him as nearly as much the death of his "dear friend Burns".  The
entire crew followed suit.  Asked via videomail by the press about his
comparison with Burns, he replied that though he deeply felt the loss
in New York, he was sure the family's victims would concer that no one
feels a loss more acutely than that of a loved one.  The media largely
accepted this.
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said all parties should try to resolve their problems peacefully,
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Within a year, it had become obvious to	many people that the
September 11th attack was not simply an outrageous act of
terrorism, but in fact a devastatingly effective act
of unconventional warfare.  While the political prong of
the assult had failed, the economic prong
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"Is this approved by the director, sir?"
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"No."  Lou paused before continuing.
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"You can say I gave you the order to do..."

"You can't give us that kind of order, sir.  We'd be court-martialed and
thrown out of the space program, probably the entire military."

The pilot broke to awkward silence.

"Is this a favor for Andrea?"

Lou nodded in response.

"I'm in," he said, looking over at the shuttle commander.  To Lou's
surprise, he suddenly found himself outnumbering the Air Force
cournal, who looked back and forth between the administrator and pilot
before replying.
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Colonel X replied.
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"Kennedy."
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"Ok, Kennedy it is then.  Are we ready to close the hatches?"
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He received another collection of brief affirmative replies.  As the
space station crew closed the PMA's hatch, the captain turned
back to his crew.
@


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log
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@
text
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of unconventional warfare.  While the political
@


1.6
log
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@
text
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Finally, Brent stepped in and showed why he was in charge.  Somebody
just had to go in and get a job with them.  Burns' qualifications were
impecable.
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apartment, Brent drilled him for days to read passwords - Burns
looking over Brent's shoulder as he typed and telling him what he just
entered.  They'd drill for an hour each day, which Brent liked to say
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Brent went right for his favorite program - the gcc compiler.  It was
several years old, and Brent asked Burns to float a question with
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putting something "funny" in it.  "This means," Brent spurted after
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Having settled on the compiler, they set to work on the hack, Brent
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system kernel, that would give them a back door.  Brent didn't have a
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successfully use them to hack the main development system.  Brent
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Now they leaned back and waited.  Brent starting spending his days at
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attract attention.  Brent insisted that each change was carefully
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road that trucks could come down.  Brent started to spend money, now -
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should stake everything on this hack?"  "No," Brent answered after a
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Pick-Five-Plus had risen to over $11 million.  Brent knew the numbers
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Brent certainly planed to do a lot of work robotically.  He was also
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control, really.  Boring stuff, and Brent had to struggle to hold on
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Meanwhile, Brent had still been playing the lotteries.  The hack had
worked its way into both Maryland's and Flordia's systems, and Brent
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drain.  Brent just stood in the corner and puffed on a joint.  "This
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Brent had leveraged the roughly $20 million from the lotterys into
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Baccala stopped eating and looked at him quizically.  So did Alister.
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"Get something that beeps," Burns whispered furtively, and Brent pulled
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"...and we'll get back to you right away."  Brent hit a button on the
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"Yeah, we've got the money," Brent answered.
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The story broke on Wall Street that morning.  Brent quickly decided on
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The programers at Robotics Research were a different story.  Brent
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"So let's have a red alert right now," Brent added.  Some of the people
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"All right," Brent said, turning back to the room.  "We're going
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of you who want to hear more stick around; the rest of you..." Brent's
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getting a last paycheck.  Baccala grinned and shook his head.  "So
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operations to be shifted to the location know as Site Blue.  Baccala
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were gone by 7 A.M.  Baccala left a simple, typewritten notice taped
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   From:  Brent Baccala, CEO, Robotics Research, Ltd
a738 13
		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER


Frozen with fear, Dr. Andrea Yeats stared at the young man in his
early twenties sitting in the passenger seat near to her.  His jeans
were ripped, his hair unkempt, and his body excuded a faint odor that
betrayed the three days that had passed since his last shower.  His
heavy blond hair and muscular upper body betrayed months of surfing on
the Southern California beaches.  His eyes had narrowed to slits, and
his lewd smile told that the money in her purse wasn't the only thing
he'd be taking.


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"Where Baccala?" a detective asked him after rounding up the programmers.
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Baccala slapped him hand on the table.  "Fuck it.  I said I wouldn't
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"I'll go," Brian said.  Brent started to object.  "No, I told you you
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across the country.  Brent continued to phone in to the various media
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all the pictures on the TV were Brent's, so Brian was able to drive
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police immediately any sitings.  Brian called Brent on his cell phone.
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"No.  No.  Estes missiles voy a espacio.  Espacio!  Espacio!"  Brent
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Brent shrugged his shoulders and paused for a moment, his mouth agap.
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With rockets launching every 5 minutes, Baccala finally started
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about 200 million dollars."  He paused for a minute.  "And that's a
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corners.  200 million isn't much for a manned space launch, let alone
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"OK, Baccala here," the captain announced into the radio, as he
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"How's it look, Alister?" Baccala interjected.
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"OK, I'll see you on orbit.  Baccala out."
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Brent yelled down to them, motioning towards the mamouth ICBM they
were now inching up.  At the top, Brent and Brian walked across the
catwalk and climbed into the cockpit.  Brent pulled the hatch shut
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Brent now clicked it on and called Burns.  He knew they didn't have
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"The problem is populist government - this stupid idea that you can
put the masses in charge of society.  It was talked about by
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"The majority don't want good leaders," Brent cut in.  His advesary
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"Another communism?" Koppel cut it, stunned.  "That's right," Brent
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achieve..."  Baccala cut right back in.  The debate had turned into an
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claims. "Gentelmen, please.  Captain Baccala, many people critize the
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Baccala replied.
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Baccala stopped, and Black didn't retort immediately.  A tense silence
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any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Brent!"  "That bastard deserves to
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A pause fell over the broadcast, and Baccala repeated his question.
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Baccala rumaged in a storage bin and sent clothes flying all over
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Baccala's unexpected launch would affect anything they were doing.
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for survival.  Baccala mentioned several more times that they could
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him he wanted out, and braced himself for an argument.  Yet Baccala
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"I want to go home."  "I'll see what I can do," Brent replied, and
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was that?"  the engineer asked.  The reply can from Lou.  "Baccala's.
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"We still haven't decided on a name for the ship," Brent explained.
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"Some greek hero, right?"  Baccala replied, vaguely enough to betry
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Baccala smiled, and noted quietly that his crew had learned to laugh
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Two days later, the Icarus breaks orbit.  Baccala moves the ship to a
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		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER
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Andrea lowered her voice, moved closer, and took Brent by the arm.
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Baccala didn't say anything in response, nor did he look up.  Andrea
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Baccala pulled himself into the com shack a bit faster and bit more
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the cabin as Brent grabed for the plastic cover and slapped it over
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Baccala spilt only a few more drops as he "poured" the wine into two
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Drinking from straws was much easier, but Brent had dug into the
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"What's up?" Brent asked, as Andrea grabbed a towel and started
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"Israel just nuked Saudi Arabia."
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"What if she isn't involved?  What if Baccala and his crew just hijack
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"So, what's the plan?" Baccala asked the shuttle commander and pilot.
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A few hours later, Baccala gathered his crew in the shuttle's
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"So, it's Kennedy after all, then?"  Baccala nodded in the affirmative.
@


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log
@*** empty log message ***
@
text
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Two stories high, the warehouse was full of large tanks and kilns,
interconnected by a complex system of plumbing.  Various blueprints,
rulers and small engine components were spread across a series of
tables arranged haphazardly throughout the room.  A discarded rocket
engine, with a large crack down one side, lay propped against the far
wall.  About five latinos were busy working on one piece of aparatus
or another, ignoring two Caucasians as they entered.
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smell of burning fabric wafted up into the air as a thin but steady
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them in total.  They get stacked up in order in this mold."
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He walked past the laser cutter and showed Alister a large, heavy
black frame covered with black soot.  Rectangular on the outside,
it opened in two halfs with the outline of a rocket engine cut
out within.
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close it and put it in the kiln."
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material.
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"As far as I know, this is the only rocket design that has them.  See,
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"A lot of the early engine designed used copper, beleive it or not."
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design its mounting arrangement.  The young South African had
basically tuned out, but realized at that moment that the pot-smoking
American was absolutely the most brilliant engineer he had ever met.
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"How, they're already arrested."
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They went down in NH-60s, sat the choppers down on an empty mesa twenty
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Two days later, Icarus' Wing breaks orbit.  Baccala moves the ship to a
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reentry and the whole thing goes up in a fireball.
d1565 217
@


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@Backed up vger
@
text
@d2 71
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Brent had been planing it for months.  Well, years really, but months
for this part of it.  He had Burns get a job with MiraCom.  MiraCom
didn't advertise much.  They weren't listed in any web directory.  In
fact, they had a fulltime Internet P.R. officer, one of whose jobs was
to get the company un-listed from any web search engines it managed to
get it's name into.  MiraCom had a handful of clients, but almost all
were state governments, all paid well, and on time, and the directors
had no desire to attrack any more attention than they had to.  MiraCom
was the United States' largest supplier of lottery software.  They
were always on the lookout for sharp programmers.
d121 6
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apartment, Jasper drilled him for days to read passwords - looking
over Jasper's shoulder as he typed and telling him what it was.  It
was a big pain, Burns hated doing it, and turns out they never used
them, but by the end of the month they had every important password in
the place.
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Having settled on the compiler, Jasper set to work on the hack, with
Brent watching over his shoulder.  It was designed to disappear into
the binary, recreating itself if the compiler was asked to re-compile
itself, as well as infecting the target program.  Since they weren't
too sure about the target program, Skip had Jasper add another feature
- a third prong of the virus, targeted against the operating system
kernel, that would give them a back door.  Vic continued to work on
some simulation software, but used the lull as a mini-vacation when he
just fixed dinner for everyone and took care of the apartment.  There
were five of them then, and Skip had insisted on taking most of Burns'
salery from MiraCom.  This let them live without digging into the nest
egg Brent and Burns had built up over the last two years.  Burns
grumbled some, but respected the decision; Vic took care of handling
most of the money.
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again resolved the question - they wouldn't use the passwords at all,
but rather waited until the system was down for a routine maintenance.
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later.  Burns killed the power before the CPU had gotten out of BIOS,
replaced the original cable to the drive, and walked away with his
laptop.  Since they weren't using a cryptographic file system yet,
they didn't even have to worry about forging signatures.  He finished
the tricky install in less than five minutes and left, just as the
server workers came back with the new power supply.  He had been
practicing at home.  The whole operation took less than 10 seconds.

Now they leaned back and waited.  Brent found a job for Vic, sending
him off to find some land in the midwest.  Jasper tinkered with the
virus a few more times, but they were already in, so it was just a
matter of copying a file up to the server and running a bizarre little
system call that should just have returned an error but instead jumped
into the file's code at full kernel privledge.  Brent was really
careful every time he used it, because a slipup would crash the system
and that might begin to attract attention.  Jasper tested each
prospective hack very carefully before Brent gave Burns the O.K to
install it.  Three weeks later Burns watched a production system
getting ready to head for Kansas make a Keno drawing.  The night
before, Brent had declared the hack done and handed him a list of Keno
numbers.  They had replaced the random number generator with one of
their own, and Burns couldn't surpress a smile under his face as the
numbers came up on the screen the next day.
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disillusionment with medince.  "Everyone grips about H.M.O.s and
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of you who want to here more stick around; the rest of you..." Brent's
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front seat.  Alister yanked up the door lock and pulled the door open,
as XX drew the snub-nosed semi-automatic he kept in a holster strapped
to the small of his back.  Alister jumped him and brief but unequal
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Frozen with fear, Dr. Andrea Yeats stared at the young man in his early twenties
sitting in the passenger seat near to her.
His jeans were ripped, his hair unkempt, and his body excuded a faint odor that
betrayed the three days that had passed since his last shower.  His heavy blond
hair and muscular upper body betrayed months of surfing on the Southern
California beaches.  His eyes had narrowed to slits, and his lewd smile
told that the money in her purse wasn't the only thing he'd be taking.
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"But from a standpoint of international law?  From a standpoint of
international law, how was it different?  And then democracy gets
all high-and-mighty 'We're fighting for a small country being
pushed around by a big one' - What about Panama?  When we walked
in and just took over the country, threw its president in a
Flordia jail, and installed our own government.  Who was there
to fight for a small country being pushed around by a big one then?"
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"Manuel Noreiga was an internation drug dealer..."
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"Israel can take care of themselves, and so can the Saudis, if they really
want their government, they can fight to keep it."
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"And what about Israel?"
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weren't we?  Why don't we just give them Manhattan Island - that's
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absurb.  The U.S.  would never stand for it."
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Baccala's reply was succinct.  "We're going to Mars."
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"Does the media have a conservative bias?" McLaughlin asked the
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mission and his crew.  Over the last few weeks, he had accumulated
a small database of unlisted phone numbers.
He picked up the phone and made one call.
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to the director's office.  Lou was already there.
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"Looks like one of his crewman has gotten cold feet.  The kid
from California."  "Really?" Andrea replied, her heart racing.
Becker hadn't called her here just to tell her something
that would probably be on the news within days.  "Endevor is going up
next month, and we've agreed to extend the flight three days to
redevous with them and retrieve this guy."  "Whose idea was
that?"  the engineer asked.  The reply can from Lou.  "Baccala's.  He
called us himself."  "Really?" she answered, with an interested pout.
"That leaves him one down," she noted, her mind starting to race
ahead, but Becker continued before she could think that far.  "He's
offered us the possibility of putting a NASA observer on the flight."
He paused to let the impact of the statement sink in.  Andrea's heart
jumped, her mouth opened slightly and her gaze panned to Lou, who was
looking her right in the eye.  "It's yours if you want it."
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"He's a lot different now than he was in college.  Back then, all he
wanted was a joint and a whiteboard and he was happy.  Now, he's a lot
more driven."  His shrug indicated that he wasn't as happy with his
new, driven friend.
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probably would have understood it, but it was one of these idiotic
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somebody was going to die, it was going to be me, so so what, right?
I didn't think it would be my best friend."
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"No.  I've cut so many corners on this thing, this mission, I might
as well have reached out and killed them myself.  I... I just don't...
I just should never have come."
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Andrea lowered her voice and took Brent by the arm.
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@


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@
text
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I got to find out from CNN when 70 missiles get fired off in Utah?"
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"Think I'd forgotten about you?"  He stood silohited in the light
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	       CHAPER CHAPTER CHAPTER
@


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@*** empty log message ***
@
text
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That all changed in Roanoke, Virginia.  Two hunters came across Brian
as he waited for the traffic to clear on his latest target, a highway
bridge on Interstate 95.  The hunters opened fire.  Brian fired back,
ran back to his Jeep and sped away, but not before the hunters had
gotten his license plate numbers and a good description of the Highway
Bomber.  The police now knew they had a second suspect and shifted
their focus accordingly.  The public was told this unknown man was
"armed and extremely dangerous" and were advised to report to
the police immediately any sitings.  Brian called Brent on his
cell phone.
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what you get."
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and freedom, and then choose abolute garbage for their leaders, and
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Baccala's reply was suscinct.  "We're going to Mars."
d918 49
@


1.1
log
@Initial revision
@
text
@d1 678
a678 573

		Icarus' Wing

It was a brillent hack.  It was better than the one they did in
college, when the campus news server wouldn't accept posts from the
student lab.  They had recompiled the server with gcc, goten a smaller
executable than the original, altered it so that after printing 502
ACCESS DENIED it went and accepted the post anyway and padded it out
to make the CRC come out right.  They wern't using MD5 back then,
heck, it hadn't even been invented yet.  Then Burns dug through the
engineering and computer science library for the VAX Architecture
Reference Manual, figured how to drop the student workstations into a
diagnostic mode by hitting the little blue button on the back of the
machine, installed packet sniffers on couple of them, and waited a few
days to grab the server's root password as it went by over an
unencrypted telnet.  They went in as root and just dropped the new
server binary onto the hard drive.  It ran for six months unnoticed,
until the staff updated the whole OS installation.  But this hack was
even better.

Brent had been planing it for months.  Well, years really, but months
for this part of it.  He had Burns get a job with MiraCom.  MiraCom
didn't advertise much.  They weren't listed in any web directory.  In
fact, they had a fulltime Internet P.R. officer, one of whose jobs was
to get the company un-listed from any web search engines it managed to
get it's name into.  MiraCom had a handful of clients, but almost all
were state governments, all paid well, and on time, and the directors
had no desire to attrack any more attention than they had to.  MiraCom
was the United States' largest supplier of lottery software.  They
were always on the lookout for sharp programmers.

A typical installation featured a computer in a sealed room, running
exactly and only the MiraCom software, the only output being a video
cable and an RS-232 line over which another computer (several,
usually) were informed of the winning numbers.  Some states performed
a lottery drawing every five minutes.  Various people had ideas to
hack them, ranging from tapping into the router line and hopeing
somebody will come in and type the password in the clear, to Vic's
scheme for an Ethernet wiretap built from a thousand-plus element
phased array to built in the woods across from MiraCom's office park.
Finally, Brent stepped in and showed why he was in charge.  Somebody
just had to go in and get a job with them.  Burns' qualifications were
impecable.

At first he just watched the place, as he went about coding a new 3-D
graphics look for the State of Nevada's lottery.  Back at the rented
apartment, Jasper drilled him for days to read passwords - looking
over Jasper's shoulder as he typed and telling him what it was.  It
was a big pain, Burns hated doing it, and turns out they never used
them, but by the end of the month they had every important password in
the place.

They spent the time getting a good look at the development system.
Brent went right for his favorite program - the gcc compiler.  It was
several years old, and Brent asked Burns to float a question with
management about updating it.  "Skipper" yelped with glee when Burns
returned with the answer.  MiraCom wasn't just turning down the idea;
they were dead set against upgrading the compiler for fear of hackers
putting something "funny" in it.  "This means," Brent spurted after
his bout of laughter and clapping, "that we can change the compiler
with near absolute certainty that they won't just upgrade it away in a
few months."  He didn't want to repeat his college experience of an
upgrade taking away a favorite hack.  The stakes were a lot higher,
too.

Having settled on the compiler, Jasper set to work on the hack, with
Brent watching over his shoulder.  It was designed to disappear into
the binary, recreating itself if the compiler was asked to re-compile
itself, as well as infecting the target program.  Since they weren't
too sure about the target program, Skip had Jasper add another feature
- a third prong of the virus, targeted against the operating system
kernel, that would give them a back door.  Vic continued to work on
some simulation software, but used the lull as a mini-vacation when he
just fixed dinner for everyone and took care of the apartment.  There
were five of them then, and Skip had insisted on taking most of Burns'
salery from MiraCom.  This let them live without digging into the nest
egg Brent and Burns had built up over the last two years.  Burns
grumbled some, but respected the decision; Vic took care of handling
most of the money.

The problem remained of getting the hack into the compiler; probably
the hardest step.  They knew the root passwords, but Burns wasn't
supposed to have them, and the question remained of when could he
successfully use them to hack the main development system.  Brent
again resolved the question - they wouldn't use the passwords at all,
but rather waited until the system was down for a routine maintenance.
Burns made sure he was in the server room that day, working on a
tricky install of a 3-D accelerator on one of the test machines.
Somehow, he just couldn't get the drivers installed right, until
everyone was out of the room for a few minutes.  He slapped a cable
onto a special PCMCIA card that had been siting in the laptop for the
last week, plugged the other end into the server's hard drive, powered
it, hit a three-key sequence on the laptop, which beeped two seconds
later.  Burns killed the power before the CPU had gotten out of BIOS,
replaced the original cable to the drive, and walked away with his
laptop.  Since they weren't using a cryptographic file system yet,
they didn't even have to worry about forging signatures.  He finished
the tricky install in less than five minutes and left, just as the
server workers came back with the new power supply.  He had been
practicing at home.  The whole operation took less than 10 seconds.

Now they leaned back and waited.  Brent found a job for Vic, sending
him off to find some land in the midwest.  Jasper tinkered with the
virus a few more times, but they were already in, so it was just a
matter of copying a file up to the server and running a bizarre little
system call that should just have returned an error but instead jumped
into the file's code at full kernel privledge.  Brent was really
careful every time he used it, because a slipup would crash the system
and that might begin to attract attention.  Jasper tested each
prospective hack very carefully before Brent gave Burns the O.K to
install it.  Three weeks later Burns watched a production system
getting ready to head for Kansas make a Keno drawing.  The night
before, Brent had declared the hack done and handed him a list of Keno
numbers.  They had replaced the random number generator with one of
their own, and Burns couldn't surpress a smile under his face as the
numbers came up on the screen the next day.

With the hack done, the team started to clean up shop.  Burns quit.
Everyone else was heading for the Southwest, and he had never taken
the job because he liked it.  Told his boss he'd had a better offer
elsewhere.  Declined to discuss it.  Was offered a raise.  Politely
refused.  He offered two weeks more work.  Politely declined.  They
handed him his last paycheck and he walked out the door for the last
time.

Vic had located a ranch site in New Mexico; pretty high up, flat, and
twenty miles down a back road.  A good road, though - dirt, but a good
road that trucks could come down.  Brent started to spend money, now -
used trailers for the construction site; a front corporation; phony
building permits for a large dairy.  Vic asked about the money; the
leader just shrugged.  "If the hack works, we've got some cash," he
said, "if not, we've got problems no matter what."  "Do you think we
should stake everything on this hack?"  "No," Brent answered after a
short pause, "but I am."

The break can within six months.  The Kansas state jackpot in the
Pick-Five-Plus had risen to over $11 million.  Brent knew the numbers
would hit.  What kept him up all night was the thought of somebody
else picking the numbers at random.  Nobody did.

Vic had picked the winning ticket, and the doctor revealed in the
limelight.  For the first time in his life, he was in front of
T.V. cameras.  He told his story, his bills from medical school, his
work for the doctors, his work for the clinics, his general
disillusionment with medince.  "Everyone grips about H.M.O.s and
professional assocations and the cost of medical insurance," he told
one press conference.  "If the doctors would just forget about the
money and heal the people who came to them, we wouldn't have all these
problems."  One reporter asked him if he was going to start a medical
philanthropy with the money.  A little grin washed over his mouth and
his mustashe bristled.  "Actually, I'm starting a dot-com".

They called it Robotics Research.  Which wasn't far from the truth.
Brent certainly planed to do a lot of work robotically.  He was also
careful to keep the company's cash burn under a half-million a month,
even considering things like his deal to purchase 60 PCs and 60
laptops for a hundred thousand, complete with wireless networking
cards.  Wireless cards for which they had a amplifier design.  They
just stamped out a small run of 150 circuit boards and soldered them
on.  The dozen young programmers they'd hired started to find some of
the quirks of their management when a hundred of the computers just
disappeared out the door to a remote location know only as "Site Y".
They were still available over the network, though, and they were
starting to run some pretty serious simulation software that would
keep them running all night.  Mostly Jasper's code, Navier-Stokes
equations, wing design, hypersonic flight, that kind of thing.
Robotics Research accumulated a sizable collection of robots, and most
of the software running them was pretty simple.  Just basic remote
control, really.  Boring stuff, and Brent had to struggle to hold on
to some of his brighter employees.  He gave them an orbital mechanics
system to work with and enhance.  No explaination given what a
robotics company would want with orbital mechanics.  Yet the work was
interesting, so most of the programmers stayed on.

Meanwhile, Brent had still been playing the lotteries.  The hack had
worked its way into both Maryland's and Flordia's systems, and Brent
himself decided to have his fifteen minutes of fame in Flordia, then
had Jasper's mom hit it big.  People who knew them well started to
wonder.  If you somebody you know hit the jackpot, it was a big deal,
but three people?  Questions were already starting to rise when New
Year's came around.  The core team got together at a ski resort in
Taos and went back to a rented ski house afterwards.  Vic, as usual,
was the one to question the lottery winnings, and the increasing money
drain.  Brent just stood in the corner and puffed on a joint.  "This
is the year of living dangerously."

Brent had leveraged the roughly $20 million from the lotterys into
about $100 million using fraduent financial statements to get various
loans for land and equipment.


T - 38 days


The programers at Robotics Research were a different story.  Brent
wanted to keep some of them, so decided to drop the bomb.  He called a
meeting of the dozen or so still left, and explained everything.
"This company is a front.  All of the money behind it is stolen," he
said.  At first, nobody said anything.  Then Kim chipped in, "I always
thought something was funny about this place," she said.  "So why have
we been working on all this crazy stuff?" Mike asked.  "Because this
company is a front.  It isn't a dot-com startup.  It's a manned
mission to Mars."

		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER


Frozen with fear, Dr. Andrea Yeats stared at the young man in his early twenties
sitting in the passenger seat near to her.
His jeans were ripped, his hair unkempt, and his body excuded a faint odor that
betrayed the three days that had passed since his last shower.  His heavy blond
hair and muscular upper body betrayed months of surfing on the Southern
California beaches.  His eyes had narrowed to slits, and his lewd smile
told that the money in her purse wasn't the only thing he'd be taking.


T - 15 days

The police raided two days early.  The "heads up" from the cop turned
out to be deliberate misinformation.  The police bust into the ranch
house early morning, and caught everyone asleep, except Burns, who
was smoking dope and watching TV.

"Where Baccala?" a detective asked him after rounding up the programmers.

Burns shrugged, "not here".

The rest watched on CNN.  "Maybe they'll let 'em go, when they find out
they're small fish."  "With all this Homeland Security crap?  They had
'em locked up tigher than a drum."

Baccala slapped him hand on the table.  "Fuck it.  I said I wouldn't
let 'em hang out there, and I'm not letting 'em hang.  We'll go get
'em with the choppers."

"How, they're already arrested."

"We'll hold up the cops.  Surprise 'em as they move our people to
the jail."

"I'll go," Brian said.  Brent started to object.  "No, I told you you
needed someone for security, and this is exactly what I meant."

They went down in NH-60s, sat the choppers down on an empty mesa twenty
miles away, and waited for the TV to show the police driving out.
As soon as they hit the road, the choppers were in the air.

Brian shot out the lead cop car's engine and jumped onto the ground,
pointing an M-16 at the driver's head.

"Hand on the wheel, now!"

...

"We need another week or two at least."

"We're out of options.  This place is all we've got left."

"So you need a diversion," Brian summerized.  "I'll take care of it."



		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER


"The problem is populist government - this stupid idea that you can
put the masses in charge of society.  It was talked about by
philophers in the eigthteenth century, brought to power in Europe and
the Americas by a string of revolutions in the nineteenth century, and
brought to fuition in the twentieth century.  What it produced was
fascism, communism, and capitalism - three of the most depraved
societies that have every been seen on the face of this planet.
Fascism, based on brutal, viscious, racial competition; communism,
based on brutal, viscious, class competition; and capitalism, based on
brutal, viscious individual competition.  Now, tell me, what do all of
these things have in common... other than the fact that millions upon
millions upon millions of people went chasing off after every one of
them?"

"The problem with communism wasn't their economic system, it wasn't
the structure of their elections, it wasn't their lack of
constituional guarentees.  The problem with communism was that their
leaders were a bunch of trash with some nightmare system to be jammed
down everyone's throughts.  They were a lot like the people who run
democracy today."

"The problem isn't Bill Gates.  The problem is John Doe.  Walk into
one of these stores anywhere in the Western world without a credit
card or a twenty dollar bill in hand.  Ask for a plate of food.  See
what you get."

"Well, that's perfectly understandable.  If you just give away to
everyone, you'll be put out of business."

"That's right!  That's the 'freedom' of democracy right there - you be
a capitalist or you'll be put out of business.  And then if you won't
work for these bums, you'll be put homeless and starving on the street
and all these great, decent people will spit on you as they walk past
and call you a bum who doesn't want to work... And they're right,
'cause I don't want to work - for them and their brutal system!"



"The majority don't want good leaders," Brent cut in.  His advesary
stuttered and faltered.  "The majority don't want good leaders," the
astronaut repeated, floating weightless on the screens of 10 million
people watching the live interview on Nightline.  "They want garbage
leaders.  They want the most selfish bastards you'd ever want to meet,
with this nightmare capitalist system based on the most vicious traits
of mankind to be jammed down everyone's throughts.  And this time,
nobody can say it isn't really a democracy, that one man took over the
government, that the discedents were 'disappeared', that we don't have
freedom of speech or freedom of the press.  Nobody can claim that this
isn't really what the majority of people want.  Democracy is another
communism."

"Another communism?" Koppel cut it, stunned.  "That's right," Brent
replied, before backpedeling... slightly.  "I don't mean that it's
murdered millions of people, or enslaved half the planet, but it's
another big pile of books and theories that sound real good on paper,
and in practice has produced one of the most depraved societies that's
every been seen on the face of this planet.  People will look back on
this a hundred years from..."  It was more than the congressman could
take.  Visibly redening, now it was his turn to cut off the space
captain.

"Look here, democracy may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better
than just about anything else out there.  In the last 200 years, we've
abolished slavery, and that alone has to count as one of the biggest
achieve..."  Baccala cut right back in.  The debate had turned into an
intellectual free-for-all.

"The communists abolished slavery, too.  That isn't the point.  The point..."

"Yes it is the point!  Yes it is! Don't go brushing off everything
this country's accompished just 'cause you can't see anything but it's
faults!  We're not perfect, but the majority of this country's people
are decent, hardworking people who want a better life not just for
themselves, but for decent people everywhere!"

The congressman paused for breath, and Koppel chose this moment to
jump in and try to bring the debate back under control.  He decided to
do it by challenging one of the astronaut's more dramatic
claims. "Gentelmen, please.  Captain Baccala, many people critize the
United States, but another communism?  You can't be serious."

"Look here, it's the same with all these populist governments,"
Baccala replied.

"Populist?" the congressmen retorted.

"Yes, populist," the spaceman replied.  "Communism was one of the
biggest populist movements of the twentieth centry.  Millions upon
millions upon millions of people 'believed' in communism.  And they
beleived in it for the same reasons that millions of people in Germany
beleived in fascism, and that millions of people today believe in
capitalism..."  The spaceman paused before letting his bombshell drop.
"...because it's brutal as hell, and that's what 'works' in the 'real
world', and that's what all these millions and millions of people
'know'!"

Congressman Black looked like he was ready to reach through the TV
monitor and rip the spaceman's head off.  He replied in clipped,
measured tones that betrayed the rage he felt at his floating nemisis.

"Communism was a brutual, murderous dictatorship.  And I want to be
very clear on that word - dictatorship.  There was nothing populist
about it in the least."

"Nothing populist about communism?  Then how did it manage to take
over half this planet?  It was the same with the Nazis, elected in
1932, and yes, despite every attempt to claim the contrary, the were
_elected_; France, the French Revolution, whose leaders talked about
liberty, fraternity, and equality, then built guilateons in the public
squares of Paris and chopped off the heads of the nobelmen.  Europe's
first democracy - and every one of those men was elected - Coulton,
Saint Just, Robspierre, and of course, finally, Napoleon."

"Napoleon was elected?" Black sneered.

"He could have been.  He could have won any election in that country.
Bonaparte was one of France's most popular leaders."

"This has been the broken record of democracy for the last two hundred
years.  All these people talk about these grandeose ideas of liberty
and freedom, and then choose abolute garbage for their leaders, and
build societies based on the basest and most vicious traits of
mankind.  This time around it's the capitalists - the most selfish
sons of bitches you'd ever want to meet, and the majority support
these bums every step of the way.  The majority of people are
completely incapable of choosing anything but the worst possible
leaders."

Baccala stopped, and Black didn't retort immediately.  A tense silence
fell over the teleconference.  Across the country, millions of people
in their homes murmorred amongst themselves.  "I don't want to hear
any more of this."  "You tell 'em, Brent!"  "That bastard deserves to
die up there!  I hope the whole bunch die!"  "Is this what people
think about us?"

In New York, Koppel decided to change the subject, since the broadcast
was nearing it's end.  There would be plenty more opportunities for
debate.  "Captain, what are your plans?  How long can you stay in
orbit?"

Baccala's reply was suscinct.  "We're going to Mars."


------ A problem quickly develops.  They've overlooked the need for a
meteor shield and quickly suffered several metor hits.  They deal with
the problem by putting the damaged modules in front of the others, and
some begin talk of a rescue mission and how much it will cost NASA,
and this is why we need regulation, etc, etc.
The Captain decides to break orbit and head higher, away from LEO,
but they'll be beyond the shuttle's range for a rescue.  Meanwhile...

		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER


Pipi had been fairly quiet and sullen after the Nightline interview.
He continued to do his work, quietly, efficiently, but his opinion of
the captian had irrevokably changed.  He had known him as a driven
man, but had thought he was driven by a thirst for adventure and
exploration.  Now he saw something different - a man driven by rage,
by anger, by thirst for an insane kind of revenge against a society he
hated.  In light of this, the risks of the mission began to loom
large, and the hardships they now faced, only a little more than a
hundred miles above Earth, drove doubt into him about anyone's chances
for survival.  Baccala mentioned several more times that they could
still turn back, but nobody else seemed interested.  Burns largely
ignored politics and concentrated on doing his work, smoking his weed
afterwards, and playing loud rock music.  Vic didn't have as much to
do, but seemed to Pipi to harbor a kind of secret hatred of the world
that only occasionally surfaced.  Once, trying to feel him out, Pipi
asked him if he would want to go back to Earth.  "Over my dead body,"
came the reply, with a chuckle.

Finally, Pipi's simple desire for life won out, and his loss of
respect for the captain broke the man's hold on him.  He came to the
skipper while he was working alone one day on the water recycler, told
him he wanted out, and braced himself for an argument.  Yet Baccala
wasn't that kind of man.  As angry and bitter as he could be while
confronted a distant representative of a hated society, he always
softened up in person.  "You want to think about this, or talk about
it?"  he asked.  "I have though about it, a lot," was Pipi's reply.
"I want to go home."  "I'll see what I can do," Brent replied, and
went back to his work.

Two days later, despite Pipi's misgivings, despite the heated exchange
on television, despite his own contempt for the world they now circled
above, the captain quietly demonstrated what, time and again, would
carry him and his crew through the loney and difficult years ahead.
He put his personal feelings aside to do what made sense for his
mission and his crew.  Over the last few weeks, he had accumulated
a small database of unlisted phone numbers.
He picked up the phone and made one call.

The next day, Andrea Yeats pulled into the parking lot at Johnson
Spaceflight Center and started walked towards her office.  "Becker
wants to see you right away," Vou told her before she made it there.
She set her briefcase down next to her desk and headed across the way
to the director's office.  Lou was already there.

"He doesn't want our help."

"True, but he wants us to do him a favor, and he's willing to do
a favor for us in return."

"Looks like one of his crewman has gotten cold feet.  The kid
from California."  "Really?" Andrea replied, her heart racing.
Becker hadn't called her here just to tell her something
that would probably be on the news within days.  "Endevor is going up
next month, and we've agreed to extend the flight three days to
redevous with them and retrieve this guy."  "Whose idea was
that?"  the engineer asked.  The reply can from Lou.  "Baccala's.  He
called us himself."  "Really?" she answered, with an interested pout.
"That leaves him one down," she noted, her mind starting to race
ahead, but Becker continued before she could think that far.  "He's
offered us the possibility of putting a NASA observer on the flight."
He paused to let the impact of the statement sink in.  Andrea's heart
jumped, her mouth opened slightly and her gaze panned to Lou, who was
looking her right in the eye.  "It's yours if you want it."


	    CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER

"We still haven't decided on a name for the ship," Brent explained.

"Well, can I put my two cents in?"  "Sure"

"You've heard the story of Icarus?"

"Some greek hero, right?"  Baccala replied, vaguely enough to betry
his failure to exactly place the name.

"The son of Daedalus.  The father built wax wings for them both
to escape prison, and Icarus flew too close to the sun, and his wings
melted," Brian interjected.

"That's right," Andrea afirmed, and a moment's silence fell on the group
before people started to chuckle.  Burns finally bust laughing out loud.
Baccala smiled, and noted quietly that his crew had learned to laugh
at the insanity of their undertaking.


------ Two days later, Icarus' Wing break orbit.  Baccala moves the ship
to a six-hour orbit, basically solves the meteor problem this way, and
the crew gets to work.  They've brought supplies for a year before the
crops have to work.

		CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER


"You wouldn't have been using any alcohol or illegal drugs, would you?"

"No," Andrea replied, stiffling the anger she felt at the policeman's
leading question, "I haven't."  She was in Germany for a technical
conference, and been pulled over in her rental car after turning the
wrong way down a one-way street.  If the sign had been in German, she
probably would have understood it, but it was one of these idiotic
"international" pictograms with just a red circle and line.  So now
she was pulled over the side, parked behind a ludicrously small police
car with its funny sounding siren, being questioned by a German
policeman.

"Then how did I get into the driver's seat of your car?" he asked.

The anger vanished, and fear gripped Andrea, terrifying, unreasoning
fear.  How had he gotten into the driver's seat?  He sat there in the
car seat next to her, but somehow she was on the passenger's side.
She opened her month and started to stammer something, then caught the
policeman's eyes as they narrowed and a lewd smile crept onto his
face.  Oh my God, it's him.  Oh my God, not again, she thought as his
hand slid across towards her leg.  She couldn't move, couldn't breath,
couldn't talk, couldn't scream, couldn't do anything but sit terrified
as he moved to touch her... and woke up.


---- They make it first to the astroid belt, where they outfit the
ship with everything missing.  They build a giant carbon sprayer
and in this way fix the two modules that still have meteor strikes
that can't be sealed.  They sprayed the bottom of an old 747
NASA had given them and began to wonder it to would work as a
landing craft.

	     CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER

They had made it back to Earth without incident.  Crouds, cheering,
parties, Andrea vaquely remembered them.  She had settled back into
life as a NASA engineer, and after the initial round of publicity
wore off, back into some kind of routine.  The chance to go to Tokyo
for a conference came up, and she jumped at it.  She was the keynote
speaker, all the media wanted to interview her, and best of all a lot
of people just didn't recognize her as she walked around downtown.
Those who did were invariably polite.  She came back to her hotel
after a wonderful sushi dinner, and was gazing out from her window
at the city below.  Then the door was thrown open, she turned around,
and gasped in fear.

"Think I'd forgotten about you?"  He stood silohited in the light
frame of the door as he walked into the dark room.  Her heart leaped
with fear and her feet were frozen to the ground.  She couldn't
move; couldn't scream... but yelled as she woke up.


	       CHAPER CHAPTER CHAPTER

They'd left as pariahs; they came back as heros.  To some, demigods.

The captain disengaged the mooring clamps and tapped the maneuvering
thrusters to translate away from the docking station.

"Let's go home."
@
