There were a lot of interesting little wars going on, and a lot of puppet governments received hundreds of millions of dollars from their dark masters (or, in the case of the United States’ clients, their light masters), and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t supply some of their needs. So he put up a million dollars of his own money, then quickly raised another fifteen million (this time as high-interest loans rather than for pieces of his company) and was soon supplying arms to all interested parties.

When he saw the negative publicity his business rivals were receiving, he sold out his interest before any of them could come to stand on his broad shoulders.

Next came the invention of an engine that would run on water. It didn’t work, but he let Saudi Petrostock, National Dutch, China National Offshore Oil, American Petroleum, Royal Abu Dhabi, and Kuwaiti Oil Resource pool a quick two hundred million and buy it from him to keep it off the market.

He began casting around for his next business, analyzed his successes, and decided he’d pretty much followed “Wee Willie” Keeler’s old dictum from a century earlier: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.” No one had started a successful men’s magazine for a decade and a half before Suave, no one had had the chutzpah to supply weapons to warring banana republics in this hemisphere, and no one had blackmailed or terrified the auto companies in more than half a century. You had to go all the way back to Tucker, which wasn’t quite the same thing since Tucker’s car actually worked.

So Blackstone cast around for some other place where “they” weren’t, and it wasn’t long before he realized that the average state was a good five billion dollars in debt, and some of the larger spendthrifts, like California and Illinois and New York, were each well over fifty billion in the hole.

How could they raise money in a hurry since the federal government wasn’t about to bail them out? Easy. They’d legalize gambling. There’d be a hue and cry from some of the more religious sections of the electorate, but some politician would point out that even churches hosted bingo games to raise money, and besides, the alternative was bankruptcy. And within a year, spreading money around various state capitals where it would do the most good, he had built luxury casinos in North Dakota, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wyoming, and was the major stockholder in a fabulous new racetrack in Montana.

And when the dust had cleared five years later, he was no longer a millionaire, or even a multimillionaire, but had risen to the level of billionaire, and figured to amass his second billion in less than a year.

He looked around again, applying the same principle, and tried to determine where they weren’t hitting ’em that year. The landscape was covered with enterprises and innovations, and for the first time, he couldn’t spot his next move.

Until he looked up.

Then he knew. There was the biggest untouched target of all. Men had walked on it in 1969, and the stars were ours. A colony on the Moon by 1990, on Mars by 2010, then the moons of Jupiter, and surely by 2030 we’d have found a way around Einstein’s theory and would be on our way rapidly to the stars.

Science said it couldn’t be done, that there were laws that governed the universe—but Blackstone knew he came from a race of lawbreakers. Tell a man something can’t be done, and he’ll set about proving you wrong out of sheer cussedness.

Mars, the outer planets’ satellites, the Oort Cloud, the stars, we’d reach them all. But first, the Moon. The government never had any interest in it, except for reaching it before the Russians did. We’d turned our backs on it a long time ago, and it was time to get that colony built. There’d be a mining section, and a low-grav hospital for heart patients (he’d figure out how to get them there, all in good time), and an astronomical observatory, and a refueling point for trips to Mars, and maybe Venus if he could develop space suits that could withstand the heat. Then on to Io and Europa and Ganymede.

And because he knew that this was his last great business venture, because he knew he would spend the rest of his life on it, Blackstone determined not to be just a figurehead but to learn it from the ground up. He spent time in the Public Relations Department, acquired some basic lab skills, even underwent training as an astronaut (though he hated the word and wanted his own term for it, preferably something that incorporated the word Bucky or Blackstone).

He even considered running for office on a platform of going back into space. Name recognition was no problem; he was a handsome, self-made billionaire, and he and his two ex-wives, both as eye-catching as Miss 42, were featured every week in the supermarket tabloids. But as a senator, he’d be one of one hundred, and he would have to convince fifty very independent—and often very foolish—men and women to vote with him, then hope the House could find 218 members in agreement, and further hope that the president didn’t veto whatever initiative he’d launched. He could run for president, of course, and he was sure he could win, but it would take three or four years of organizing and money-raising. He didn’t want to take three years away from the Moon to organize a political campaign, and while he could pay for the campaign out of his pocket, he didn’t want anyone saying that he bought the presidency.

So, instead of becoming a member of the government, he decided that his best course of action was to rival the government, to do what it was too broke or too reluctant or too timid to do, to go back to the Moon and claim it for Blackstone Enterprises (and, incidentally, for the United States of America).

At first, the Congress ignored him, and the press made fun of his ambitious new project. That lasted about six months, until his first successful suborbital flight. By the time a year had passed, a Blackstone ship had made an orbital flight—after all, the technology had existed for half a century—and suddenly Congress decided that he meant business and was in dire need of congressional oversight.

He decided otherwise, only to find himself the object of a scare campaign. He wanted to put missiles on the Moon and fire them at our enemies. The public approved. But he might miss and hit Omaha or Charlotte or Seattle. The public laughed. He had made a secret pact with Hector Morales, the crazed dictator of Paraguay, and had promised to take him to the Moon before his downtrodden masses could rise up and kill him. And put him where? asked the public.

Finally, the government backed off and tried a new approach. “We’re incredibly proud of our dear friend and outstanding citizen Bucky Blackstone,” they announced, “and we’ll do everything we can to help him.”

“You can start by getting the hell out of my way,” Blackstone had answered through his spokespeople.

“We’re on your side,” said the government. “We have all kinds of knowledge and experience to share with you.”

“Keep it,” said his spokesman. “And,” added Blackstone, “I’ll bet you a million dollars I reach the Moon before you do.”

And, finally, the government realized that it was not dealing with its notion of a team player, and left him alone. They tried to convince the media to do the same, but even the president’s most fawning sycophants in the press couldn’t resist story after story of the cowboy billionaire who spit in Washington’s collective eye and got away with it.

Everyone at Blackstone Enterprises cheered and congratulated each other. Well, everyone except Blackstone himself. He knew how quickly a winner’s fortunes could change, especially in the financial and political arenas.

They needed something more. Everyone loved the notion of a cowboy’s defying the government, but he couldn’t do it every day, and it would soon become boring if he tried. And he could look ahead and see that he’d be a hero the day he reached the Moon and became the first man to walk on it in more than fifty years—but a month later, unless they found some purple people eaters, it would be a big yawn, just as it was the first time. People just didn’t go crazy with enthusiasm at the sight of some rocks, no matter how far away they came from.