“That can be done.”
Dan felt his brows hike up. “Really?”
“I can provide the capital,” Humphries said, matter-of-factly.
“We’re talking forty, fifty billion, at least.”
Humphries waved a hand, as if brushing away an annoyance. “You wouldn’t need that much for a demonstration flight.”
“Even a one-shot demo flight would cost a couple bill,” Dan said.
“Probably.”
“Where are you going to get that kind of money? Nobody’s willing to talk to me about investing in Astro.”
“There are people who’d be willing to invest that kind of money in developing the asteroid market.”
For an instant Dan felt a surge of hope. It could work! Open up the Asteroid Belt. Bring those resources to Earth’s needy people. Then the cost figures flashed into his mind again, as implacable as Newton’s laws of motion.
“You know,” he said wearily, “if we could just cover our own costs I’d be willing to try it.”
Humphries looked disappointed. “Just cover your own costs?”
“Damned right. People need those resources. If we could get them without driving ourselves into bankruptcy, I’d go to double-damned Pluto if I had to!”
Relaxing visibly, Humphries said, “I know how we can do it and make a healthy profit, besides.”
Despite himself, Dan felt intrigued. “How?”
“Fusion rockets.”
By the seven cities of Cibola, Dan thought, this guy’s a fanatic. Worse: he’s an enthusiast.
“Nobody’s made a fusion rocket,” he said to Humphries. “Fusion power generators are too big and heavy for flight applications. Everybody knows that.”
With the grin of a cat that had just finished dining on several canaries, Humphries replied, “Everybody’s wrong.”
Dan thought it over for all of half a second, then leaned both his hands on his desktop, palms down, and said, “Prove it to me.”
Wordlessly, Humphries fished a data chip from his jacket pocket and handed it to Dan.
SPACE STATION GALILEO
Leaving her five fellow astronauts gaping dumbfounded at the airlock in the maintenance module, Pancho sailed weightlessly to the metal arm of the robotic cargo-handling crane jutting out from the space station. It was idle at the moment; with no mass of payload to steady it, the long, slim arm flexed noticeably as Pancho grasped it in both hands and swung like an acrobat up to the handgrips that studded the module’s outer skin.
Wondering if the others had caught on to her sting, Pancho hand-walked along the module’s hull, clambering from one runglike grip to the next. To someone watching from beyond the space station it would have looked as if she were scampering along upside down, but to Pancho it seemed as if the space station was over her head and she was swinging like a kid in a zero-gee jungle gym.
She laughed inside her helmet as she reached the end of the maintenance module and pushed easily across the connector section that linked to the habitation module.
“Hey Pancho, what the hell are you doing out there?”
They had finally gotten to a radio, she realized. But as long as they were puzzled, she was okay.
“I’m taking a walk,” she said, a little breathless from all the exertion.
“What about our bet?” one of the men asked.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she lied. “Just hang tight.”
“What are you up to, Pancho?” asked Amanda, her voice tinged with suspicion.
Pancho fell back on her childhood answer. “Nothin’.”
The radio went silent. Pancho reached the airlock at the end of the lab module and tapped out the standard code. The outer hatch slid open. She ducked inside, sealed the hatch and didn’t bother to wait for the lock to fill with air. She simply pushed open the inner hatch and quickly sealed it again. A safety alarm shrilled automatically, but cut off when the module’s air pressure equilibrated again. Yanking off the space-suit’s cumbersome gloves, Pancho slid her visor up as she went to the wallphone by the airlock hatch.
Blessed with perfect pitch and a steel-trap memory, Pancho punched out the numbers for each of the five astronauts’ banks in turn, followed by their personal identification codes. Mother always said I should have been a musician, Pancho mused as she transferred almost the total amount of each account into her own bank account. She left exactly one international dollar for each of them, so the bank’s computers would not start the complex process of closing down their accounts.