Trying to find a comfortable position on his chair, Dan replied, “Let’s not spend the morning chasing rumors. We’re here to set our budget requirements.”
Humphries nodded. “I’ll get one of my people to track it down.”
Or one of my people, Dan grumbled to himself. But it’ll be okay as long as he can’t find Pancho’s sister. Only she and George and I know where we stashed her.
He said to Humphries, “Okay, you do that. Now about the budget…”
They spent the next hour going over every item in the budget that Humphries’s staff had prepared for Starpower, Ltd. Dan saw that there were no frills: no allocations for publicity or travel or anything except building the fusion drive, testing it enough to meet the IAA’s requirements for human rating, and then flying it with a crew of four to the Asteroid Belt.
“I’ve been thinking that it makes more sense to up the crew to six,” Dan said.
Humphries’s brows rose. “Six? Why do we need two extra people?”
“We’ve got two pilots, a propulsion engineer, and a geologist. Two geologists would be better… or a geologist and some other specialist, maybe a geochemist.”
“That makes five,” Humphries said warily.
“I want to keep an extra slot open. Design the mission for six. As we get closer to the launch, we’ll probably find out we need another hand.”
Suspicion showed clearly in Humphries’s face. “Adding two more people means extra supplies, extra mass.”
“We can accommodate it. The fusion system’s got plenty of power.”
“Extra cost, too.”
“A slight increment,” Dan said easily. “Down in the noise.”
Humphries looked unconvinced, but instead of arguing he asked, “Have you picked a specific asteroid yet?”
Dan tapped at his handheld computer, and the wall screen that covered one entire side of the conference room displayed a chart of the Belt. Thousands of thin ellipsoidal lines representing orbital paths filled the screen.
“It looks like the scrawling that a bunch of kindergarten brats would make,” Humphries muttered.
“Sort of,” said Dan. “There’s a lot of rocks moving around out there.”
He tapped at the handheld again and the lines winked out, leaving the screen deep black with tiny pinpoints of lights glittering here and there.
“This is what it really looks like,” Dan said. “A whole lot of emptiness with a few pebbles floating around here and there.”
“Some of those pebbles are kilometers across,” Humphries said.
“Yep,” Dan replied. “The biggest one is —”
“Ceres. Discovered by a priest on New Year’s Day, 1801.”
“You’ve been doing your homework,” Dan said.
Humphries smiled, pleased. “It’s a little over a thousand kilometers across.”
“If that one ever hit the Earth…”
“Goodbye to everything. Like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
“That’s just what they need down there,” Dan muttered, “an extinction-level impact.”
“Let’s get back to work,” Humphries said crisply. “There’s no big rock heading Earth’s way.”
“None has been found,” Dan corrected. “Yet.”
“You know,” Humphries said, musing, “If we were really smart we’d run a demo flight to Mars and do a little prospecting on those two little moons. They’re captured asteroids, after all.”
“The IAA has ruled the whole Mars system off-limits for commercial development. That includes Deimos and Phobos.”
Hunching closer to the conference table, Humphries said, “But we could just do it as a scientific mission. You know, send a couple geologists to chip off some rock samples, analyze what they’re really made of.”
“They already have pretty good data on that,” Dan pointed out.
“But it could show potential investors that the fusion drive works and there’s plenty of natural resources in the asteroids.”
Frowning, Dan said, “Even if we could get the IAA to allow us to do it—”
“I can,” Humphries said confidently.
“Even so, people have been going to Mars for years now. Decades. Investors won’t be impressed by a Mars flight.”
“Even if our fusion buggy gets there over a weekend?”
Firmly, Dan said, “We’ve got to get to the Belt. That’s what will impress investors. Show them that the fusion drive changes the economic picture.”
“I suppose,” Humphries said reluctantly.
“And we’ve got to lay our hands on a metallic asteroid, one of the nickel-iron type. That’s where the heavy metals are, the stuff you can’t get from the Moon or even the NEAs.”