the pad.

Space activities were regulated, internationally, by various treaties that dated back to the Stone Age of spaceflight: days when only governments operated spacecraft, treaties drafted in the shadow of the Cold War. But the mass of badly drafted legislation and treaties gave rise to anomalies and contradictions.

Consider tort liabilities, for instance. If Malenfant had been operating an airline, and one of his planes crashed on Mexico, then he would be responsible and his insurance would have to soak up the damages and lawsuits. But under the terms of a 1972 space liability convention, if Malenfant’s BDB crashed, the U.S. government itself would be liable.

Another problem area was the issue of certification of airworthiness — or maybe spaceworthiness — of Malenfant’s BDBs. Every aircraft that crossed an international border was supposed to carry a certificate of airworthiness from its country of registry, a certificate of manufacture, and a cargo manifest. So was a BDB an air vehicle? Federal aviation regulations actually contained no provisions for certificating a space vehicle. When she’d dug into the records she’d found that the FAA — the Federal Aviation Administration — had dodged the issue regarding the space shuttle when, in 1977, it had ruled that the shuttle orbiter was not an aircraft, despite being a winged vehicle that glided home.

It was a mess of conflicting and unreasonable regulations, at national and international levels. Maybe it was going to take a bullheaded operator like Malenfant to break through this thicket.

And all that just concerned the operation of a private spacecraft. When Malenfant reached his asteroid, there would be a whole different set of problems to tackle.

Malenfant didn’t want to own the asteroid; he just wanted to make money out of it. But it wasn’t clear how he could do even that.

Malenfant was arguing for a system that could enforce private property rights on the asteroid. The patent and property registry of a powerful nation — specifically the United States — would be sufficient. The claims would be enforceable internationally by having the U.S. Customs Office penalize any import that was made to the United States in defiance of such a claim. This mechanism wouldn’t depend on the United States, or anybody else, actually claiming sovereignty over the rock. There was actually a precedent: the opening up of trans-Appalachian America in the seventeenth century, long before any settler got there, under a system of British Crown land patents.

But the issue was complex, disputatious, drowned in ambiguous and conflicting laws and treaties.

Unutterably wearying.

She got up from her desk and poured herself a shot of tequila, a particular weakness since her college days. The harsh liquid seemed to explode at the back of her throat.

Did she actually believe all this? Did she think it was right! Did the United States have the moral authority unilaterally to hand out off-world exploitation charters to people like Malenfant?

The precedents weren’t encouraging — for instance, the British Empire’s authorization of brutal capitalists like Cecil Rhodes had led to such twentieth-century horrors as apartheid. And there was of course the uncomfortable fact that the upkeep and defense of the British Empire, though admirably profitable for some decades, had ultimately bankrupted its home country, a detail Malenfant generally omitted to mention in his pep talks to investors and politicians.

Meanwhile — like a hobby for her spare time — she was, somewhat more reluctantly, pursuing Malenfant’s other current obsession. Find me an accelerator… With glass in hand she tapped at her softscreen, searching for updates from her assistants and data miners.

A candidate particle physics laboratory had quickly emerged: Fermilab, outside Chicago, where Malenfant had a drinking-buddy relationship with the director. So Emma started to assemble applications for experiment time.

Immediately she had found herself coming up against powerful resistance from the researchers already working at Fermilab, who saw the wellspring of their careers being diverted by outsiders. She tried to make progress through the Universities Research Association, a consortium of universities in the United States and overseas. But she met more obstruction and resistance. She had to fly to Washington to testify before a subpanel of something called the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel of the Department of Energy, which had links into the president’s science adviser.

The problem was that the facilities and experiments required giant sums of money. The physicists were still smarting from the cancellation by Congress in the 1990s of the Superconducting Supercollider, a fifty-three mile tunnel of magnets and particle beams that would have been built under a cotton field in Ellis County, Texas, and would have cost as much as a small space station. And in spite of all the megabucks spent, there didn’t seem to have been a fundamental breakthrough in the field for some decades.

Well, the news today, she learned now, was that the approval for the Fermilab runs had come through.

It wasn’t a surprise. She had found the physicists intelligent, prone to outrage — but also politically naive and easily outma-neuvered.

She sat back, thinking. The question was, what should she do with this news?

She decided to sit on it for now, trying to squeeze a little more productivity out of Malenfant. Because when she told Malenfant they’d won, he would take the first plane to Chicago. And she had a lot of issues to discuss with him.

Such as the pressure Cornelius was applying for Bootstrap to get involved with another of Eschatology’s pet projects: the Milton Foundation.

The Foundation was a reaction to the supersmart children who seemed to be sprouting like weeds across the planet. The Foundation was proposing to contact these kids to make sure their special needs were met and to try to ensure they got the opportunities they needed to exercise their abilities. No potential Einsteins doomed to waste their brief lives toiling in fields, no putative Picassos blown apart in mindless wars — no more “mute inglorious Miltons.” Everyone would benefit: the kids themselves, their families, and the human race as a whole, with this bright new intellectual resource to call on.

That was the prospectus, and it had sold easily to Malenfant; it fit in with his view that the future needed to be managed, ideally by Reid Malenfant.

But it was worrying for Emma, on a number of levels. Here was a report, for example, on some kid who’d turned up in Zambia, southern Africa. He seemed the brightest of all, according to some globally applied assessment rating. But did that make it right to take him out and dump him in some school, maybe on another continent? What could a kid like that, or even his parents, possibly know about getting involved with a powerful, amorphous western entity like Eschatology?

And besides, what really lay behind this strange phenomenon of supersmart children? Could it really be some kind of unusually benign environmental-change effect, as the experts seemed to be saying?

Her instinct, if she felt she wasn’t in control of some aspect of the business, was always to go see for herself. She had to get out there and see for herself how all this worked, just once. This Zambia case, the first in Africa, might be just the excuse.

Of course it could be the tequila doing her thinking for her.

Africa. Jesus.

She poured another shot.

The journey was grueling, a hop over the Atlantic to England and then an interminable overnighter south across Europe, the Mediterranean, and the dense heart of Africa.

She flew into Harare, Zimbabwe. Then she had to take a short internal flight to Victoria Falls, the small tourist-choked town on the Zimbabwe side of the Falls themselves.