This will not be a complex operation. The methane rockets are based on tried and trusted Pratt and Whitney designs. The cargo carriers will be little more than plastic bags wrapped around big dirty ice cubes.

But in HEEO this water will become unimaginably precious. We can use it for life support and to make rocket fuel. We think Nautilus should be able to return enough water to fuel a further twenty to fifty NEO exploration missions, at minimal incremental cost. This is one measure of the payback we’re intending to achieve. Also we can sell surplus fuel to NASA.

But we are also intending to trial more complex extraction technologies on this first flight. With suitable engineering, we can extract not just water but also carbon dioxide, nitrogen, sulfur, ammonia, phosphates — all the requirements of a life-support system. We will also be able to use the asteroid dirt to make glass, fiberglass, ceramics, concrete, dirt to grow things in.

We are already preparing a crewed follow-up mission to Cruithne that will leverage this technology to establish a colony, the first colony off the planet. This will be self-sufficient, almost from day one.

And the colonists will pay their way by further processing the Cruithne dirt to extract its metals. The result will be around ninety percent iron, seven percent nickel, one percent cobalt, and traces. The trace, however, includes platinum, which may be the first resource returned to the surface of the Earth; nickel and cobalt will probably follow.

Incidentally, I’m often asked why I’m going to the asteroids first, rather than to the Moon. The Moon seems easier to get to, and is much bigger than any asteroid besides. Well, the slag that is left over after we extract the water and volatiles and metals from asteroid ore — the stuff we’d throw away — that slag is about equivalent to the richest Moon rocks. That’s why I ain’t going to

the Moon.

Later we’ll start the construction of a solar power plant in Earth orbit. The high-technology components of the plant — such as guidance, control, communications, power conversion, and microwave transmission systems — will be assembled on Earth. The massive low-tech components — wires, cables, girders, bolts, fixtures, station-keeping propellants, and solar cells — will all be manufactured in space from asteroid materials. This plan reduces the mass that will have to be lifted into Earth orbit severalfold. This plant will produce energy — safe, clean, pollution free — that we can sell back to Earth.

And that’s the plan. In the next few years Cruithne volatiles will support the space station, more Earth-orbital habitats, and missions to the Moon and Mars, as well as the first self-sufficient off-Earth colony.

That little lot ought to see me through to retirement.

But what about beyond that?

Beyond that, the Galaxy awaits, and all the universe. Virgin territory. All we need is a toehold. And that’s what Bootstrap will give us. America has discovered a new frontier, and we will become great again.

Frankly, Madame Chairman, I think I’ve spent enough time in front of Congressional committees like this and other boards of inquiry. All I need is for you to let me carry on and do my job. And I don’t see I have a damn thing to apologize for.

Thank you.

Sheena 5:

Swimming through space, despite her consuming weariness,

Sheena 5 had work to do.

She explored the complex knot of equipment that was the center of her world. It was like swimming around a sunken boat.

The machinery was covered with switches and levers, labeled with black-and-white stripes and circles so she could recognize them. And there were dials designed for her eyes — dials coated with stripes like the hide of a squid, dials that could send out pulses of twisting polarized light. The dials told her what was happening inside the equipment, and if anything was wrong she was trained to turn the levers and switches to make it right.

Sometimes she had to chase away curious fish as she did so.

If anything more serious was wrong she could ask Dan for help, and he always knew the answer, or could find it out. She would fit the plastic cup to her eye, and speckled laser light would paint images on her retina, distorted diagrams and simple signs that showed her what to do.

The machinery contained whirring motors that drove pumps and filters: devices that, coupled with the flow of heat from the sun, drove steady currents. The currents ensured that the waters mixed, that no part became too hot or cold, too rich with life or too stagnant. Otherwise the diatoms and algae would cluster under the bubble’s skin, where the sunlight was strongest, and would grow explosively until they had exhausted all the nutrients available and formed a dank cloud so thick the water would die.

And the filters removed waste from the water, irreducible scraps that no creature in this small world could digest. But something had to be done with those wastes, or gradually they would lock up all the nutrients in the water. So the machine contained a place that could burn the wastes, breaking them down into their component parts. The products, gas and steam and salts, could then be fed back to the plants and algae.

Thus, in Sheena’s spacecraft, matter and energy flowed in great loops, sustained by sunlight, regulated by its central machinery as if by a beating heart.

Dan told her that she was already a success: in her management of the equipment, she had shown herself to be much smarter and more adaptable than any human-made machine they could have sent in her place.

She knew that in their hearts the humans would prefer to send machines, mindless rattling things, rather than herself. That was because they knew they could control machines, down to the last clank and whirr. But they could never control her, as was proven by the remnants of the spermatophore she still guiltily hoarded in her mantle cavity, cemented to the inner wall.

Perhaps they were jealous.

How strange, she thought, that her kind should be so well adapted to this greater, infinite ocean, so much better than humans. As if this was somehow meant to be. It seemed to Sheena that it must be terribly confining to be a human, to be confined to the skinny layer of air that clung to the Earth.

At first she had found it strangely easy to accept that she would die without seeing Earth’s oceans again, without rejoining the shoals. She suspected this was no accident, that Dan had somehow designed her mind to accept such instructions without fear.

Which was, of course, not true.

But as her restlessness and tiredness gathered, as her isolation increased, the importance of Dan and his mission receded, and her sense of loss grew inexorably.

And, of course, there was a final complicating factor nestling in her mantle cavity.

She would have to release her eggs eventually. But not yet. Not here. There were many problems that day would bring, and she wasn’t ready for them.

So, swimming in starlight, Sheena cradled her unhatched young, impatiently jetting clouds of ink in the rough shape of the male she had known: the male with the bright, mindless eyes.

Michael:

It was some weeks after the woman had come to the village that

Stef called him.

“I have to go away,” Stef said. “So do you.”

Michael didn’t understand. Stef, with his machines and his food and his girls, was the most powerful person in the village, far more powerful than the headman or the herbalist. Who could make him do things?

And besides, Michael had never been more than a few hundred yards outside the village, never slept anywhere but in a village hut. He wasn’t sure what “going away” might actually mean, what he would be made to do.