“Then what?”

“Then we have to live off the income from existing operations. We have no new construction projects.”

“That’s the last of the power satellites?” asked the board member that Dan had privately nicknamed Bug Eyes. His eyes were even wider than usual, as if this was the first time he’d heard the bad news.

Dan clasped his hands as he answered carefully, “Although there are several orbital slots still available to accommodate solar power satellites, the GEC refuses to authorize any new construction.”

“It’s those damned Chinese,” growled one of the older men. “China is not alone in this,” said a plump oriental woman sitting halfway down the table. Dan’s name for her was Mama-San. “Many nations prefer to build power stations on their own ground rather than buy electrical power from space.”

“Even though the price for that electricity is more than twice as high as our price,” Dan pointed out. “And even higher, if you count the costs of sequestering their greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Their governments subsidize the greenhouse amelioration,” the treasurer pointed out.

“The people still have to pay for it, one way or another.”

“What about beaming power from the Moon?”

“You wouldn’t need the GEC to allocate any orbital slots for that, by god!” Santa Claus thumped the table with his fist.

“It’s a possibility,” Dan admitted, “and we’ve talked about it with the officials of Selene—”

“Selene doesn’t own the whole damned Moon! Go off and build solar energy farms in the Ocean of Storms. Cover the whole expanse with solar cells, for god’s sake!”

“We’ve looked into it,” Dan said.

“And?”

“The problem is that no matter where the electricity is generated, it’s got to be beamed to the ground here on Earth.”

“We know that!”

Holding on to his temper, Dan went on, “The Pan-Asia bloc doesn’t want to import energy, whether it comes from orbit or the Moon or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. They won’t allow us to build receiving stations on their territory. The Europeans have gone along with them and, between the two blocs, they have the GEC all wrapped up.”

“How can we generate electricity from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud?” asked Bug Eyes. “That’s quite a long distance away, isn’t it?”

Give me strength, Dan prayed silently.

He got them through the various departmental reports at last, fielding what seemed like seventeen thousand questions and suggestions — most of them pointless, several absolutely inane — and went on to new business. “At least here I have something positive to report,” Dan said, smiling genuinely. “Our prototype fusion drive has been assembled in lunar orbit and test-flown successfully.”

“You are ready to go to the Asteroid Belt?” asked Mama-San.

“As soon as we get the required crew-rating from the IAA.” From the far end of the table, Humphries spoke up. “We should have IAA approval in two to three weeks, barring any unforeseen setbacks.”

“Setbacks?”

“An accident,” Humphries said lightly. “Failure of the equipment, that sort of thing.”

Or an IAA inspector on the take, Dan added silently. It happened only rarely, but it happened.

“How much is this mission to the asteroids costing us?” asked the sprightly, dapper Swiss gentleman whom Dan had dubbed The Banker. “The mission is being fully funded by Starpower, Limited,” Dan replied.

“Astro owns one-third of Starpower,” Humphries pointed out.

“And you own the rest?” The Banker asked.

“No, Humphries Space Systems owns a third, and the other third is owned by Selene.”

“How can a city own part of a corporation?”

“All the details are in the reports before you,” Dan said, tapping his stylus against the computer screen built into the tabletop.

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll explain it after the meeting,” Humphries said, full of graciousness.

The Banker nodded but still looked unsatisfied.

“The point is,” Dan told them, “that once this flight to the Asteroid Belt is accomplished, Astro’s stock is going to rise. We’ll have taken the first step in opening up a resource base that’s enormous — far bigger than all the mining operations on Earth.”

“I can see that Starpower’s stock will go up,” Santa Claus challenged. “Astro’s will, too,” Dan said. “Because we have the corner on building the fusion engines.”

“Not Humphries Space Systems?” They all turned to Humphries. He smiled gently, knowingly. “No, this is going to be Astro’s product. My corporation is merely supplying the capital, the funding.” Dan thought that Humphries looked like a cat eyeing a helpless canary.

So there you have it,” Dan said to the IAA inspector. “The system performs as designed.” They were sitting in Starpower, Ltd’s one and only conference room, a tiny cubicle with an oval table that felt crowded even though only five people were sitting around it. The display screens on all four smartwalls showed data from the test flights of the fusion drive. The first half-dozen flights had been run remotely from the control center underground in Armstrong spaceport. The second string of six flights had been piloted by Pancho and Amanda. Pointing to the screens, Dan said, “We’ve demonstrated acceleration, thrust, specific impulse, controllability, shutdown and restart… every facet of the full test envelope.”

The inspector nodded solemnly. He was a young man with Nordic fair skin and pale eyes, dressed rather somberly in a plain gray pullover shirt and darker slacks. His hair was a thick dirty-blond mop that he wore long, almost down to his shoulders. Despite his conservative outfit, though, he wore several small silver earrings, silver rings on his fingers, a silver bracelet on his right wrist, and a silver chain around his neck. There was a pendant of some sort hanging from the chain but most of it was hidden beneath his shirt.

Pancho and Amanda sat flanking Dan; Humphries was on the other side of the small oval table, next to the inspector. For some long moments there was silence in the conference room. Dan could hear the background hum of the electrical equipment and the soft breath of the air circulation fans. At last, Dan asked, “Well, what do you think, Mr. Greenleaf?”

“Dr. Greenleaf,” the IAA inspector replied. “I have a doctorate in sociology.” Dan felt his brows hike up. Why would the IAA send a sociologist to check out a new spacecraft propulsion system? And why this particular little prig of a sociologist?

Greenleaf steepled his fingers in front of him. “You’re surprised that a sociologist is evaluating your test data?”

“Well… yes, actually I am,” Dan said, feeling decidedly uncomfortable.

“I can assure you, Mr. Randolph—”

“Dan.”

“I can assure you, Mr. Randolph, that your data has been examined by the best engineers and physical scientists that the IAA has at its command,” Greenleaf said. “We are not taking your application lightly.”

“I didn’t mean to imply anything like that,” Dan said, thinking, This guy is out for blood.

Greenleaf shifted his gaze from Dan to the wall screen before him. “I can see that your device has performed within your design criteria quite reliably.”

“Good,” said Dan, relieved.

“Except in one respect,” Greenleaf went on.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Long-term reliability,” said Greenleaf. “The longest flight in your testing program was a mere two weeks, and even then it was at low power.”

“I wouldn’t call a constant acceleration of one-tenth g low power,” Dan said, testily. “And the IAA seemed very happy with the data we got from that test flight.”

Pancho and Amanda had flown the test rig on a parabolic trajectory that took them around Venus. The ship carried a full panoply of instrumentation for making observations of the planet as it flew by a scant thousand kilometers above Venus’s glowing clouds. A team of planetary astronomers had provided the equipment and monitored the flight, all of them from universities that belonged to the IAA, all of them ecstatically happy and grateful for the data that the flight brought back — for free.