Virginia nodded. “Ah yes. Plateau Three.”

Carl knew she thought his opinions were too simplistic, too much a rubber stamp of the NearEarth colonies’ doctrine. Still, he honestly didn’t see how she could disagree.

A century of struggle had finally given mankind the technology to exploit the solar system—efficient transport, mech’d mining and assembly, integrated artificial biospheres of any size needed.

Now was the moment, the colonists argued, to move out.

Unmanned satellites had been the first level of space exploitation—Plateau One. As far back as the 1980s people had made billions with communications satellites. Saved lives with weather sats.

Automated space factories using lunar materials had been the next rung up—Plateau Two.

Each Plateau had been climbed by a few who saw the benefits well in advance and took huge risks for that vision. Plateau Two had nearly failed, then became a roaring economic miracle-helping to pull the world out of the Hell Century.

Each ascent seemed to provoke an Earth-centered apprehension—first, that the investment might go bust, then that the birthplace of mankind was being relegated to a mere backwater. This was aggravated by Earth’s never-ending social problems—malaises that the space colonies, by design, did not share. The Birth and Childhood Rules, which commanded that each spaceborn child must spend at least its first five years on the ground, were a legal expression of an underlying fear.

PlateauThree was a dream, a political issue, an economic sore point, a faith—all rolled into one. But big rotating colonies were possible now. The colonists now looked on the Birth and Childhood Rules as symbols of apronstrings they had long out-grown. They wanted to exploit the rocky asteroids and moons, but needed volatiles as well, for propellants and for biospheres. They’d even funded a small Ganymede ice mine, but that hadn’t worked out well.

Some saw comets as the key, and fervently believed that humans could scatter through the solar system like dandelion seeds, if they could only learn to herd the ancient snowballs to orbits where they were usable.

Virginia leaned back languidly in her web-chair. “You can’t expect Mother Earth to let go so easily.”

“They have everything to gain! We’ll bring them asteroids galore, raw materials, provide new markets—”

She held up her palm. “Please, I know the litany.” An amused expression of feigned longsuffering patience flitted across her face, instantly disarming him. Perhaps It wasn’t t intended that way, but with a single gesture she could make him see himself as gawky, thick-wilted, too obvious. Well, maybe I am. I’ve lived in space over half my adult life.

“Just ’cause it’s familiar doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Carl, do you really think mining comets for volatiles is going to ring in the millennium?”

“Where else can we get cheap fluids?” To him this was the trump card, a cold economic fact. At the very beginning of the solar system, the hot young sun had blown most of the light elements outward, away from the inner solar system. Only Earth had retained enough volatile elements to clothe its rocky mantle with a thin skin of air and water. When humans ventured into space to exploit the resources there,—asteroids, the moon, Mars-they had to haul their liquids up from Earth.

“Sure,” Virginia said. “Get ice from comets! In eighty years we’ll be back, Hail the conquering heroes! But by then somebody may’ve discovered frozen lakes deep in our own moon. Or even found a cheap way to chip iceteroids out of the Jovian moons—who knows?”

Carl was startled. “That’s crazy! No way you can pay the expense of dipping into Jupiter’s grav well, just for water and ice. Jupiter Project is proving that.”

She smiled impishly. “So? Chasing comets is easier?”

Her dark eyes teased, and Carl knew it, but he couldn’t let go.

“It’s worth a try, Virginia. Nobody’ll find a way to steer comets unless we make the outgassing method work. Nobody’ll find volatiles hiding on the moon or Venus because they’ve been baked out. You can’t prospect and mine the asteroids with mechs alone—because finding metals is still a craft, not a science. Dried-up comets like Encke can’t be herded precisely because there’s no way to use their outgassing to steer them. So—”

“I surrender, I surrender!” She held both hands high.

Carl blinked. Oh hell, he thought. Why do I always get carried away?

A deep male voice said from over Carl’s shoulder, “Do not rush into defeat, Virginia. Ask for reinforcements first.”

Carl turned as Saul Lintz settled into a soft green web-chair nearby and put his drink into a hold notch on their table. He was lean and weathered, his movements in low gravity deliberate.

“You’re too late,” Carl said, searching for something witty to say to redeem himself. “She’s already conceded that I’m a bore.”

“Then my help is unneeded.” Saul chuckled as he said this, but Carl felt a quick jolt of irritation.

“I was arguing that we’re all going to get rich out of this expedition, if we’re patient,” Carl said evenly. “And we should leave politics behind us.”

Saul nodded, took a long pull at his drink. “Admirable sentiments.”

“We’ve got to. Halley Core is too small for the kind of petty—”

“Insert coin for Lecture Twelve,” Virginia said lightly.

“Well, it’s true.” Carl did not know how to take her, didn’t like the way her attention had swerved to Saul Lintz the moment he joined them. She had turned halfway in her chair, nearly facing Saul, and barely glanced back as Carl finished. “And any hints that some people are going to profit more than the rest of us—well it’ll cause troubl.”

Saul lifted an inquiring eyebrow. He seemed to know how to comment on what you’d said with a minimal gesture or shrug, an economy of expression Carl envied.

‘He refers to scuttlebutt below decks,” Virginia explained. “The fact that, ah, non-Percells hold all the important slots.”

“Non-Percells such as myself?”

“Now that you mention it,” Carl said.

“Seniority. After all, none of you genetically preselected people are over forty.”

“You sure that’s all?” Carl leaned forward, hands knitted together, elbows on knees.

The older man frowned, sensing something in Carl’s voice. “What else do you think it could be?”

“How about Earthside not wanting any of us where we could make trouble?”

Saul carefully put his drink down and sat back. “Exiles are ill powered to cause Pharaoh grief,” he said as if to himself.

The remark seemed irritatingly opaque to Carl. “Why don’t you just answer my question?”

“Was that a question? It sounded like an accusation.”

Carl’s voice had been more harsh than he had planned, but he’d be damned if he’d back down now. “Look at Life Support Installation, my group. Our section head is Suleiman Ould-Harrad, an…”

“Ortho?” Saul supplied quietly.

“Well, that’s the slang, yeah.”

“So he is. Genetically orthodox.” Saul leaned back, making a steeple of his fingers “Meaning an untampered zygotic mix from the sea of human genes-no more. Genes do not carry opinions.”

Carl shook his head. He disliked the pedantic manner the scientists always adopted, as if all that jargon made them better, smarter, wiser. “Look—the outgassing work, the slot studies—all in the hands of… you people.”

“So you surmise that they will clutch these fruits to themselves? To sell their skills upon our return?”

Virginia said mildly, “It’s not an impossible scenario, Saul.”

Saul looked surprised to hear this coming from her. “I’m afraid for me it is. The direct implication that there is some conspiracy of the normal contingent—”

“See?” Carl pounced. “He calls his people `normal’—so we’re not.”

Saul said stiffly, “I did not mean it that way.”