April 2: Down to Earth (18 page)

"Oh no April. We want to advertise these as ranches. I just want to be able to see one marker from another along an edge. I was thinking twenty-five kilometers square."

April tried to visualize a flat surface that big. It was breath taking. Then it hit her. "What about the Moon itself. Do you own the rocks and dirt where your land is?" she expressed as well as she could.

"With real estate, you own the mineral rights, in a wedge all the way to the center of the planet. In reality you run out of technologies to dig, long before the sides angle in. They can only dig a few kilometers on Earth and drill a bit deeper. Luna is cooler and less gravity so I imagine you can go deeper, but I don't know how far."

 April tried to imagine owning that much
stuff
. More material than Home was made of. A lot of it would be junk but it was still mass. And there would be a considerable amount of aluminum and titanium, a bit of silicon and iron, even a bit of calcium and potassium, oxygen too although it would be bound tightly. That's OK, power is cheap. She had to look at the studies of regolith composition again.

"I need your help, so what I'm offering is this: Tell me how big a hunk you want and I'll plow off your boundaries and mark them. I'll do the same for myself and any other partners, but we have to be reasonable. We can't spend weeks marking off big lots and run up expenses, before we mark some out for sale. Later when we have some sales, we can mark some more out for ourselves. It might be good to have holdings spread around anyway. You never know how things will develop and which land will end up more valuable years from now. The rover should be able to average about twenty kilometers an hour, the guys who have driven one tell me. So it could plow off the outside of four lots bundled in a shift. That would be a square fifty kilometers on a side. Would that be enough to satisfy you for a start?"

"I'll be honest. I don't think I can even picture that big an area in my mind very well. It's more than I can get a handle on. I'd be very happy with that. Do you have any idea where you want to do this?" April asked.

"When I ran it past Jeff, he told me to put it smack on the equator. I had no idea why, but he said that's where you'd want to put a Lunar Beanstalk. You know the materials and problems, still make it iffy to make an Earth Beanstalk, but Jeff says a Lunar one is a lot easier and we have materials for it now, so it would make the site much more valuable."

April wrinkled her nose up. "Luna turns so slow. The geostationary orbit must be way out there. How far would it have to reach?"

"With a Lunar stalk you never reach a real geostationary orbit. That would be at the Earth's center, on the nearside. So you just build to the balance point - L1 - and then hang a counterbalance to the earth side a little to keep it under tension. It's pretty far. About fifty eight thousand kilometers."

"And there'll really be a market for something that slow? Are you sure it won't be passed by when better ships come into service?"

"Jeff says they had a similar thing with railroads on Earth. They are slow and not convenient at all, but they are still there today, because nothing is cheaper at moving bulk goods. He also pointed out something I would have never have thought of. You don't have to take the cable all the way to the end. You can build platforms at different levels and land and take off from them, easier than dropping to the surface. He figured you could build hotels and apartments along the cable also and the view would be much nicer than off a spinning station."

"I know two other people that you should recruit," April offered. "This looks so good to me, because we are so limited here what we can do with cubic. Jon has wanted a range where he can train and qualify his people with guns. He already mentioned maybe somebody on Luna had a range we could use. You could offer him a whole
area
to run exercises for the militia. I'd ask for his support and help and offer to dedicate a nice piece of land for Security. I'd try to find something that isn't just a flat plain. Something with some hills or mountains too, for interesting training. He'd make a fine ally."

"Sounds good. In fact we should set aside sections for a town square, a park and room for a university and a spaceport. Why not Public Safety too? Who else?"

"The King of Tonga. He's in about the same situation as we are. They have very limited land. No way to expand. And land is very important to them. Owning land is a
right
under their system, but they just don't
have
the land to give everybody a piece. I bet they would be your first permanent residents if you wanted. They
did
jump right in and recognize us and work for the Japanese to lift Tongan flagged vessels to bring us supplies. We owe them and they can give you guarantees of Earth landing rights, in exchange for land and access to lunar trade. I think you should make Tongan vessels free of any port fees and give them special protection and priority. You can either offer him his own territory near ours, or some kind of special guarantees of access for Tongan citizens. He's tied to Home already. I've seen Pa 'anga notes circulating already. I just don't know how he would feel about so many of his people mixing in with an electronic democracy. He might think it would undercut his government. You have to think of some way to make everyone feel secure."

"Maybe if we adapted a constitutional monarch, they could buddy and irritate the hell out of the Americans together," Heather suggested.

April laughed at that. "But who would be King?" she chuckled.

Chapter 13

April canceled her other plans for the day, to see her gramps about this mystery envelope. She headed home to meet him there. He had partitioned off a section of their cubic for his own apartment, with a separate entry on the corridor, but it was cramped and they all met in the big apartment if they could. When her parents were out during the day it didn't hurt anyone's privacy. With both her and her older brother growing up, she could see that dividing the space further would reduce the space left to her parents, to a cramped uncomfortable volume. Fortunately she could also see, that in just a few years, having enough money free to buy a sizable place of her own, was going to be no problem. Living at home still was no particular burden yet, since they were rarely all there at once. She was just grateful her parents were not in any rush to move her out and have a more spacious place.

But she was aware her brother seemed to have no such inclination. At one of the rare dinners recently, where they had all managed to get together to eat, he had brought up the idea he would be needing a place of his own. His dad had immediately agreed that would be a fine thing. He went on to quickly say they could remodel if he did that and they could have a walk in closet and add some room back onto the living area. Bob had scowled at his plate and not brought up the idea again, as spending his own money for cubic was not where he'd been going with the idea. April had always gotten along with her brother, compared to a lot of siblings pairs she knew, but as time went along she felt he was getting more and more selfish in personality. Their courier business was doing fine and he had other businesses in which she had no interest. But it seemed as he gained wealth, he got cheaper instead of loosening up.

When she got home her grandpa was sitting on the sofa working off his pad, linked to the big thin screen on the wall. He shut that down once she showed up, picked up a plain white paper envelope and offered it to her. She sat close beside him and pulled the aikuchi and inserted the blade in the gap at the end of the gummed flap, slitting the long side open. The letter inside was handwritten on plain sheets. It had been such a long since she had read anything other than a short note in cursive, that it looked odd, but it was in a lovely hand, neatly done and legible. Her grandpa didn't lean in to read along, letting her go through it first, waiting patiently. It said:

Dear Miss Lewis,

I am Lieutenant Isaac Freidman and my associate is Lieutenant Eric Brockman, who was my comrade in the Naval service of the USNA.

During the recent campaign Home carried out against the USNA we were assigned to the personal protection unit, guarding the person of the President. That was the duty we were discharging when your forces destroyed the deep bunkered facility in West Virginia, known as the Deepwell complex, or now referred to in the media as the Charleston Bunker.

If you are not aware of it, the President and a number of his line of successors were at the Deepwell facility when it was destroyed. Lt. Brockman and I however did succeed in extracting President Hadley overland to a civilian area of safety, outside the complex.

 We were loyal and honorable officers, serving to the best of our ability. We had neither hidden sympathies, nor interest in acting on your behalf. However circumstances changed, so that President Hadley and several of his detail died at our hands, not by your military action.

It was generally unknown and may never be known by the public, that the day to day conduct of the Office of the Presidency had deteriorated, to where it was run by simple whim and decree, rather than any orderly process of law. During the period of hostility with Home, a large number of high officials and ranking military men were imprisoned and even executed, for simple displeasure with their service by President Hadley.

In our case we followed all the established procedures to remove the President from harm's way. However president Hadley resisted removal and would have died in Deepwell if we had not forcibly removed him. He repeatedly and irrationally attempted to return, after the facility was collapsed and destroyed.

Upon delivering the President to outside forces we witnessed him demanded our immediate execution within his sight, before he would consent to continue his evacuation.

Asked to surrender our weapons and face an immediate firing squad by such illegal orders, we engaged the members of his receiving detail in a gun battle and prevailed. Although we are aware of the amnesty program you demanded, we doubt we would be regarded as beneficiaries of that plan, given the circumstances we just related. From a practical perspective, nothing has changed since the Republic's surrender. It is still the normal order of business for people to be snatched from public view, to be held without public accusation or trial.

Although this affair did not start that way, we now see allying ourselves with Home and attempting to travel there as our best option. We feel we can embrace the political atmosphere and goals to which Home is working, better than any place we could seek shelter on Earth. We desire to be contacted by laser com at -70.3478 W. 45.6231 N. where we will monitor for the next month. If you have occasion to send any representatives to the continent, we ask you to consider having such persons escort us on safe transport to lift for Home.

We decided to communicate with you Miss Lewis, because of the few individuals from Home visible in the media, you both risked yourself for freedom and have gained no office or title from it. Obviously our trust of people with political aspirations is seriously compromised.

We await your communication and hopefully a meeting.

Sincerely,

Isaac Freidman and Eric Brockman

April passed the letter to her gramps and got up. "I'm getting tea would you like some?"

"Please, little gal. That would be nice."

When she came back she waited for him to finish the long letter.

"Wordy fellow, but it makes sure we know exactly where they are coming from." he said.

"The way they say we don't have agents to enforce their surrender, makes me wonder if we did the right thing. Perhaps we should not have demanded anything we can't enforce. If they can get away with stopping travel to Home, maybe that will embolden them to try lifting an armed shuttle next, which we really would respond to with arms." April offered.

"Possibly. But we can't back up now and grant them leave to close travel. It's too late even if it was a mistake. But yes, it could help them get slowly get bolder, working themselves up to defying us. President Wiggen was put in to finish Hadley's term, but there are those already pushing for her impeachment for surrendering. I don't think they'll succeed in bringing that, but still I doubt she'll get another term."

"What other choice did she have? Can't people see that?"

"Seems the greater part of the public doesn't agree. They stayed safe in their homes and the power never went out. They lost their sat TV, or the phones didn't work well for awhile. They had a disruption because the stores had to distribute things without check outs. But for most people it wasn't a hardship. For some of them, it was free food for a couple months. Sometimes better than what they would have bought. They are already used to not traveling and the government has already been very skilled at covering up the death of troops, because of occupying the Trans Arabic Protectorate and other areas around the globe."

"How do they do that? Aren't there funerals and upset relatives?"

"They stopped shipping the bodies of enlisted men home and now if you tell others you lost a family member, it's considered a breach of national security. So they can strip the family of badly needed death benefits. If any of the rest of the family are military, their career effectively ends also if they blab. That's quite a lever on people, who join the service for a job and security. They'd all end up on the pavement, with no insurance and no housing. The prospects of a civilian job aren't very good with a black mark against you either. Nothing we can do about that. We can't take on the job of reforming North America."

"What I'm fretting about, is who will replace Wiggen when she goes? The choices are mostly bad and worse. The choices are between somebody that wants to hit us right away, or one that wants to wait a bit, to build up their forces first. You can see them cranking up the propaganda machine already, to fight us again. We have been getting terrible press. A few of us older guys talked about broadcasting video, to show our side of things, but a we finally decided it was pointless. We examined how that sort of program has been working for the Americans in the Pan Arabic Protectorate and the Greeks in Macedonia. The time such a propaganda machine worked is just over. Anybody with an I.Q. bigger than their shoe size doesn't even believe video images now. What we need, is for the media outlets to pursue us. Just like when Genji Akira did that web piece on you. That piece and the video off the
Happy
left such an impression, you still have high public recognition when people are tested."