Chapter 8: Kings of the High Frontier



CHAPTER 8

There is no such thing as a professional pioneer. The men, women, and children who settled the
New World were not ex-navy test-sailors, even though the science of inter-continental sea travel
was still in its infancy. These people poured their life savings into a venture that cost many of
them their lives. None had ever settled a savage new continent before. And while none of them
may have been fully aware of all the risks, most of them knew that their decisions were total,
irrevocable, and permanent.
How does space migration differ in any fundamental way?
-- The Orbital Settlers' Guide

19 May
It rained a hot, muggy rain that evening, when the three held a brainstorming session in
Bernadette's dorm room. Bernadette sat on a reversed chair, her arms dangling over the chair
back to prop her chin. She wore an embroidered crimson Chinese robe and smoked a joint from
a foot-long black-and-gold cloisonné cigarette holder. Davy's cheroot imparted its own
aroma to the room, rising in a Morse code of streaks and swirls as he puffed slowly. Sam paced
hyperactively about when not rushing to his laptop to run a few more calculations.
"There are ways to make it cheap," Friedman said. "We can scrimp on payload, since we
won't be taking much more than ourselves up."
Davy blew a smoke ring. "We pass the savings on to you!"
"We won't need much life support, if we're only going up for a day or two."
Bernadette chimed in with Davy. "We pass the savings on to you!"
Friedman began to chuckle. "And forget all that systems redundancy and safety
equipment!"
"We pass the savings on to you!"
"Tracking devices? Out the airlock with 'em!"
Bernadette and Davy collapsed to the floor in laughter, not all of it induced by the verbal
exchange. "We pass the savings on to you!"
Sam couldn't contain himself. "Landing gear? Cabin pressure? Who needs it!"
"We pass the savings on to you!"
"All right, all right," Davy said after a moment. Climbing out from under a dragon lady that
seemed obsessed with tickling him mercilessly, he regained the bed to say, "Payload
requirements for us will be different: computers are a million times more powerful per cubic
foot than they were in the Apollonian era."
A snicker escaped from Bernadette. "The what?"
"The Apollonian era," Sam explained. "The golden age of space travel. The--"
"The golden age of space travel," Crockett said, "begins when we launch this puppy."
Sam nodded, tapping at his laptop. "We could have the equivalent of NASA mission control
onboard the spacecraft itself. We wouldn't need any ground support."
"Aren't you forgetting a minor technicality, Earthwise?" Crockett stared up at the ceiling.
"Aside from paying for all this, where are we going to build and launch it?"
Bernadette and Friedman exchanged puzzled glances.
Crockett took a long drag on his cheroot, then said through the cloud of smoke, "We need to
operate in secret -- NASA abhors competition. We'll require a large, enclosed area so the
spaceship won't be seen from the air or on satellite photos. We need a construction site where
nobody will notice loads of material coming in. And, most important, we need an area with
those factors that is also uninhabited so that when we launch, we don't toast everyone beneath
us."
Bernadette took an equally long drag on her long holder, held the smoke deep in her lungs,
and thought about the problem. Then she grinned.
"I've got just the place!"
20 May
"You read about it all the time," she said, walking with Crockett and Friedman through the
South Bronx in the grey light of dawn. She wore a black leather biker jacket with matching
shorts, her pale white legs a sharp contrast to the second skin. The spike heels of her boots
clacked on the brick sidewalk. Sam wore his army jacket and fatigue pants, Davy his
rawhide.
"This area fits the bill perfectly -- it's been a wasteland for years. Look!" She pointed at the
buildings down the empty, clutter-strewn avenue. The windows of abandoned factories were
boarded up from the third to top floors -- the windows on the first two floors were bricked in to
keep out transients and gangs.
"Some of these buildings -- unbeknownst to their absentee owners, if they even have
owners-- house operations of dubious legal nature." She turned a corner and waved at one of the
larger buildings -- a sealed-up factory of red-brown brick and rusted iron. "That's a likely
prospect."
Crockett gazed at the sprawling, rickety relic with disdain. From one of the pockets inside
his fringed jacket, he pulled a slab of beef jerky and bit off a piece. "It's a dump. Think we can
afford the rent?"
Bernadette smiled with glee. "What rent? Haven't you ever heard of adverse possession?
It's the joy of being a squatter!"
"Yeah," Sam said. "Well, let's squat through that hole in the wall and check it out."
Others had entirely trashed the place. Garbage, ruined machinery, and collapsed girders
littered the dim interior landscape like the aftermath of war. Water dripped ceaselessly
somewhere. Rats scurried about on their own errands, oblivious to the invaders. It exuded all
the warmth and welcome of a vampire's crypt.
"We won't have much problem bringing the roof down when we're ready to launch,"
Friedman said, looking up at the sagging skylights.
"The trick," Crockett added, "will be keeping it up till then." He kicked at a pile of rags.
Cockroaches raced away toward safer hideouts. "Gee, gang, I'm very enthusiastic about such a
glamorous project. Let's do it."
"Low Earth Orbit or Bust!" Bernadette shouted. Her words echoed through the cavernous
factory for long seconds before it faded away.
Friedman's voice grew quieter. "Now how do we pay for it?"
Crockett's replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "The same way anything's paid for these days:
with other people's money. Other people's effort. We couldn't afford this if we had to pay for
anyone or anything. There's a fortune, though, in idle hands and idle goods all throughout New
York City. We're going to con them into the future."
Thus began the South Bronx Space Project.
26 May
It did not look like an ordinary kegger to Penny Giannini. When her friend Bernadette had
told her to grab ten other friends and venture into the South Bronx for a party, she was
suspicious. When Bernie told her to take along her acetylene torch, it only served to confirm her
suspicion of work in the offing. Not that she objected to work -- her youth in Brooklyn had
included a lot of that. She only objected to work inadequately disguised as fun.
One look at the building let her know that fun was not the reason for this excursion.
"A clean up party?" one of the guys shouted. "What a gyp!"
Another one poked Penny in the ribs with his elbow and whispered, "Who's the
cowboy?"
"Davy Crockett."
"Yeah, right. Hope I don't flip out after four years here."
Penny tilted upright the oxy-acetylene tanks she had wheeled in. She smoothed out the
wrinkles in her scarlet jumpsuit and straightened up. Though shorter than Bernadette, who was a
bit of a sprite herself, every inch of Penny's frame consisted of hardbodied muscle. Her black
hair, short and straight, clung to her scalp like a helmet. Her chestnut eyes surveyed the rotting
factory behind the ludicrous figure of the man in rawhide and coonskin hat.
"You made it!" Bernadette, equally incongruous in a pink lab coat with black pockets and
belt, jangled over to the new arrivals. Her hair today bore streaks of pink and orange, the silver
hardware hanging from her earlobes depicted a planet orbited by a sleek, old-fashioned rocket
with winglets. On closer inspection, her lab coat was smeared with dust and rust and other
varieties of filth.
Giannini nodded and leaned an arm across the tank-cart handle. "What's the deal,
Bernie?"
"Isn't it great? All we have to do is spruce it up and we've got a searing place to hang
out."
"If you don't mind getting shot at on the way over. We just about--"
"Are you the welder?" Crockett's voice boomed across the floor. "There's a beam that needs
to be cut in two so we can drag it out of the way."
Bernadette smiled that sort of smile reserved for introducing embarrassing friends. "Penny,
Davy Crockett. Davy, Penny Giannini."
Not everyone got off to as bad a start. Most of the undergrads and postgrads viewed the
opportunity to do something -- anything -- other than study as a godsend. Davy directed the
cleanup crew; Sam, as chemist, ran the bar; Bernadette oversaw the influx of tools and
equipment. They started Friday night by the light of borrowed lanterns connected to NASA
surplus fuel cells. By Sunday morning they had dragged all the trash out to vacant lots or into
other abandoned buildings in the surrounding area. The hung-over masses returned to their
dorms, there to remain comatose through Monday.
Only the Unholy Trinity, as Penny branded Sam, Davy, and Bernadette, knew the truth about
their efforts. Now that they had their construction site, that had to change.
The three conspirators sat within the cleared factory by the fading light of an ultra-bright
luciferin/luciferase compound Sam had concocted. The last remaining party-ball of beer
squatted between Davy's legs like a bad case of elephantiasis. Even so, he drank his own beer
from a can, dispensing the draft to the other two.
"The spacecraft's frame gotta be light but strong," he muttered, peering blearily at the can.
"Aircraft-grade aluminum. Nothing fancy. Not like those Titan rockets where they spend a
fortune reaming out little triangles on the inside of the skin."
Friedman shook his head. "Composites. Lighter than metals. Better protection from
meteoroids, too."
Bernadette, flat on her back staring at the skylights six stories up, voted for aluminum. "It's
cheap, plentiful, and doesn't need a genius to assemble. I'm not going to spend my time knitting
a spaceship!"
Sam yawned and nodded. "Fine, fine. We're only dealing with one atmosphere of negative
pressure. Not 'zif we're building a sub or anything."
"I died." Bernadette rolled over to lay her head on Davy's lap.
"Can't slow down now," Crockett said, adding to the yawn quotient. "We have to come up
with a money-pump scheme. There are some things that just can't be begged, borrowed, or
restored to the private sector. We need some serious mazuma."
Bernadette's face gazed up at his in bleary despair. "We'll never pull it off. Where're we
going to get money?"
Crockett tossed his empty beer can into a bag of recyclables. "New York is the richest city
in the world. All you need is an angle." He stared at Friedman with glazed eyes. "You're a
chemist. We're physicists. Where's the money being made?"
The three answered as one.
"Programming!"
27 May
That morning -- still awake and tipsy -- Crockett and Friedman descended on the Computer
Science department. At a terminal, almost hypnotically staring at the screen of a Cray III
supercomputer, sat an intense computer addict. Thickly spectacled of eye, obsidian black of
skin, colorfully penned of pocket-protector, and heedlessly surrounded by a days-old
accumulation of empty White Castle hamburger containers, soda cans, and Twinkie wrappers,
"Hacker" Sewell barely acknowledged their existence.
"Where's the robot, Hacker?" Crockett waited for an answer. He asked once more.
Receiving no answer from the possessed figure at the keyboard, Crockett and Friedman nodded
to each other and -- in unison -- lifted Sewell from his seat, scattering burger wrappers to the
floor. Hijacking him to a storage room, Crockett presented Hacker with a proposition.
"We need your robot prepped for work in wet environments and equipped with a simple
pattern-recognition program that I'm sure you'll have no problem writing."
Hacker roused from his spell. "Unhand me," he said with authority. He had, in his junior
year, forsaken the accent of his Harlem birth for something vaguely British. He found that it
helped in dealing with upperclassmen.
Crockett unhanded him and Friedman assured him, "You just program it, set it free, and
forget about it. We'll handle the rest."
Hacker frowned. "What's in it por moi?"
"In exchange," Friedman said, "I'll give you the security code to Dr. Welch's computer files
so that little uranium hexafluoride incident can disappear from your permanent record."
Sewell nodded. "I can see the utility in that. Deal."
28 May
The next day on the streets of Manhattan, a man reached into his pocket to pay a cabbie. A
quarter and a pair of nickels fell to the pavement and rolled down a storm drain. Inside the
sewer, an electric whirring grew louder and louder. A robot -- about the size of a suitcase --
equipped with treads, twin stereoscopic cameras, and manipulative hands, rolled on balloon tires
over the soggy bottom of the drain, pausing every few seconds to reach out and pick up this or
that. It lifted a thick metal washer up to its eyes to scan, its onboard computer employing a
fuzzy-logic pattern-recognition program to identify the piece of metal as such. It tossed the disc
behind it and proceeded onward.
The lost coins clattered through the drain grating and into the sewer, splopping directly in
front of the robot. Stopping to examine them, it recognized that they were coins, picked them
up, and dropped them into a storage box attached to its back. The area under the grate turned
out to be a rich vein, and the robot continued to discover other coins. It identified a wedding
band as a ring, kept it, and then found another washer, which had a hole wide enough that the
robot could not decide whether it was a washer or a ring. It spent a few nanoseconds
deliberating the problem before its programming defaulted to saving the object for humans to
decide. In it went with the other booty.
Back at the chem students' dorm, the Postal Service still dumped catalogues on the front
steps. As soon as they landed, though, a troop of students carted them over to a blue trailer-sized
trash container on the side of which hung a banner proclaiming the "Chem Dept. Paper
Drive."
Friedman looked away from his fifth floor window to gaze at Crockett. The physics grad
stoked the emptied front third of his cheroot with leafy material taken from a baggy.
"We won't get into Space on paper drives and spare change, Davy."
"We'll hit the big time," Crockett said with a cheerful grin. He sealed the baggy, twisted the
end of the cheroot, and snapped his Zippo open to light it. After a deep drag, he said, "We're
going to tap the people that have just enough brains to make money and not enough to use it
properly."
"How?" Friedman gazed at his friend. "Sell them dope?"
"We're going to sell them something worse." Davy grinned even wider. "Something far
worse."
At that moment, the sewer robot clattered in. Crockett lowered his cheroot to gaze at the
crud-dripping machine. Friedman nearly gagged before he could pinch his nose in reaction to
the scent carried back from the depths. It stopped, scanned the area to confirm its whereabouts,
then dumped its wet, slimy load of corroded coins, tarnished jewelry, soggy currency, and rusty
washers at their feet. It may have been what he smoked, but Crockett began to laugh, starting
with an uncharacteristic chortle that grew to a guffaw when Friedman donned bright blue
chemical gloves to handle the mess and increased to an uncontrollable horselaugh as he watched
his friend try to sort the valuables from the junk.
The robot sat impassively, observing the scene without comprehension, dripping green-black
storm drain scum on the beige dorm-room tiles.
"Eeeyiuu! What's that smell?" Bernadette walked in holding a stack of newspapers. She
saw the robot and Sam beside it, sorting corroded coins and rusty washers. Her smiled collapsed
into a pout. "Do we really want to get into Space that badly?"
Crockett jumped from his seat and seized the papers. "Is this it? Did they run it?"
"Page seventeen," she said, pulling a green and gold cowboy-style kerchief from her emerald
green sequined knapsack, dousing the cloth with perfume, and covering her mouth and nose with
it. The color went well with what she wore that day: a severely straight, waist-length red wig, a
Lincoln-green mini-skirt, and rust-hued boots that rode up to her knees. She sniffed and said,
"Could you open a window?"
Crockett opened the top copy of the paper and turned it toward Sam. Friedman looked at the
full page ad in The Village Voice and groaned.
"I can't believe I'm doing this."
Bernadette, her own copy of the Voice opened to the same page, said, "Just think of
it as the
price you have to pay to leave Earth."
"Every shred of my dignity. Every ounce of my self worth."
"I think it's inspired," Crockett said, tearing the page out to pin it to his bulletin board. "And
it beats sorting sewer finds."
"Does it?" Friedman asked. "Or am I jumping into a bigger sewer?"
The ad proclaimed, in ninety-six point type:

YOUNG URBAN PROFESSIONALS!
SWAMI RAMA BEN SAMESH
WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO HAVE
EVERYTHING YOU WANT
WITHOUT GUILT OR STRESS!

Below the blurb lay a huge photograph of Friedman in a turban and Fu Manchu moustache.
His expression was that of a man forced at gunpoint to appear mystical.
"I tell you, Sam -- I mean Rama -- this'll drag them in off the streets. You could be the new
spiritual guide for this generation."
"But what do I tell them?"
Davy shrugged. "The usual mystical crap mixed with self-help truisms dating back to
Norman Vincent Peale and Napoleon Hill. Add a dash of crackerbarrel wisdom and you're
set."
Bernadette pulled a thick file out of her knapsack and handed it to Davy.
"I got this from Ken Potter. His dad worked on the Apollo program back in the Sixties. It's
all about ærospike engines."
Davy took the manual and added it to a pile under his bunk. "Great. I've received a lot of
material about the Starblazer from those guys in California. It's amazing what people will send
you just to brag about their work." He kicked at the pile. "We'd better start asking for stuff on
microfiche, though. It's getting crowded in here."
Friedman removed his gloves and smiled, reaching into his army jacket. "I've done you one
better." He produced a plastic jewel case. "An entire set of blueprints for a liquid-fueled
single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft on CD-ROM."
Crockett's eyes widened. "CAD-CAM?"
Sam handed the CD to Davy and spread his fingers wide. "Hook a laptop to a computerized
mill and away we go."
"How'd you get it?"
"Okay -- Mike Dreesen knows this math major named Bill Einstein. And Bill's
brother-in-law works for the drafting company that transferred the blueprints to disc. He made a
copy of the archival disc for Bill, Bill gave it to Mike, and Mike gave it to me. Be warned,
though -- the design's a tad unconventional."
"Our going into Space is a tad unconventional," Bernadette muttered, her head buried in a
Voice article.
"No," Sam insisted. "This is really out in left field. It's an orbital helicopter."
That made the others sit up and listen.
"A helicopter?"
Sam nodded, running a hand through his black curls of hair. "It's not as weird as you think.
The numbers look impressive." He slid the rainbow-hued disc into his laptop and called up a
schematic of the spacecraft, which looked for all the world like a beer can with a conical top.
From the base of the cone, four rotor blades sprouted, each displaying at its tip a slender rocket
nozzle.
"Are you sure," Davy asked, "that you didn't get plans for one of those portable hand-held
fans?"
"Not unless the fan is twenty feet tall with a forty-foot wingspan."
The physicist in Crockett immediately took control as questions erupted from him at
machine-gun pace. "How come the rotor blades don't break off or burn off during the ascent
phase?"
"It doesn't rise as fast as a normal rocket," Friedman replied, in an equally staccato
manner.
"What about cavitation? When the rotor tips go transonic?"
"That's a control, stability, and noise problem for true helicopters, not this. The rotor acts
more like a vertical propeller in the lower atmosphere, then the whole thing goes supersonic as it
transitions to pure rocket propulsion, but only in the upper atmosphere and doesn't stay that way
for long. The reduction in maximum dynamic pressure more than compensates for the increased
drag from the rotor. Even though it's inefficient compared to helicopters or propellers, that's not
what we're comparing it to; the lift is superior to conventional rockets, meaning more payload or
smaller vehicle."
"What about the tip rockets? How do you feed the fuel?"
Sam smiled. "That's the neatest feature. They're high pressure rocket nozzles fed by
centrifugal pumping. The rockets burn, the rotor spins, and the suction draws up the fuel
resulting in turbopump efficiency coupled with pressure-fed simplicity!"
Bernadette harrumphed and put down the newspaper. "I'd like to see someone design a
rotating seal for cryogenic fuel."
Friedman called up a wire-frame diagram of the seal. "It's all here. The rotational velocity
at the tips may be high, but at the hub it's just a few dozen feet per second. The pressure at the
hub runs between five and fifteen p.s.i., and lots of rotating machinery have seals that exceed the
requirements. According to the designer, there are some good ones as stock items in aviation
catalogues."
"And the rotor blades burning off on reentry?" Bernadette's voice dripped with
sarcasm.
"High altitude deceleration. You come in horizontally, or nearly so. The rotor blades
provide drag to decelerate you while providing lift so that the re-entry is slow and smooth. It
sounds weird, but the numbers seem to support it. The tip rockets can provide further descent
rate reduction. You can hover this thing for a landing practically anywhere that's flat!"
"Wow." Davy nodded in admiration. "I'd like to meet this guy someday."
"Copy this design," Sam said, removing the CD from the laptop, "and you will meet
him... in
court."
Crockett laughed and pocketed the disc. "I think if we got one of his babies off the ground
he'd be our biggest supporter."
"Rehearse that line. The jury will want to hear it."
Crockett's grin grew wider, his eyes sparkling with glee. "Sam! You still haven't gotten it
through your head, have you? We're leaving this planet. Not only does that put us out of reach
of the law, that makes us heroes. And heroes don't sweat the small stuff."
"Gee, remind me to rob a bank and kill a few people before we blast off." Sam gazed at
Davy with a sudden intensity. "We can't leave Earth with dirty hands. Heroes don't do
that."
Bernadette leaned forward on the bed, the hair of her long red wig spread out over the
covers. "What do you suggest we do?"
"Build it, I guess," Friedman said. "And be ready to offer some sort of post facto
restitution
to the designer in case he objects."
"Good. Agreed." Davy glanced at the wall clock. "Hey, Sam. Don't you have a dead spirit
to channel or something?"
29 May
At class the next day, Professor Gibbon noted -- more by the silence than by any direct
indication -- that several students were missing and, now that he recalled, had not been there for
at least a week or two. That Crockett hillbilly and his clique. And a few others. He pondered
why he should have noticed their absence, especially with Laurence Poubelle, the Interplanetary
Treaty, and other matters on his mind. Then it came to him.
Prompted by one of his young friends in the class, he once gave an impromptu discourse on
NOSS and its achievements over the years, including a complete pedigree on its evolution from
the Society for the Advancement of Rocketry, through its absorption of a score of other space
interest groups, to its current status as the largest and most effective pro-space lobby in the
country. He asked for a show of hands to indicate who were members or intended to join.
Crockett and the others did not raise theirs.
Their response -- their lack of one, rather -- troubled him. NOSS had something to offer
anyone interested in Space. He even developed a Space Freedom Special Interest Group devoted
to continual debates on the rôle individual liberty played in contributing to the common
good. Crockett was a young idealist. Why did NOSS hold no interest for him? More important,
Gibbon thought, why was he unable to persuade Crockett with his logic?
They started skipping class, he realized, shortly after Crockett's outburst regarding the
Treaty. About the same time those infantile student wars stopped.
For a moment, Gibbon lost track of what he had been saying to the class and looked again at
the empty seats. He feared putting his finger on something he dared not consider.

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