The Goliath Stone Read Free

after the Triple Crash, when Libertarians were elected to the White House and held the swing votes in Congress, and all seemed possible. Then the Old Guard double-teamed the Libertarians in the next off-year election, new laws were passed, and everything went toxic. Small businesses began to collapse. The first to go were based in space.
    Wyndham Launch, operating out of Ecuador, survived but did not grow. They’d planned a versatile, dependable, air-breathing first-stage launcher and a variety of disposable second stages … and built two, and drawn up some glorious designs including a manned spaceplane.
    Wyndham’s Getaway Special would lift a package into low Earth orbit, if the client could fit his package into any of the six slots in Wyndham’s Getaway Carousel. Littlemeade wanted all six slots: an entire orbiter package.
    *   *   *
    Through the long summer they waited.
    Littlemeade Operation Systems delivered three of their six Cornucopia packages. One was a nuclear power plant, clearly labeled, attached to a fearsome stack of U.S. government agency permissions. May Wyndham recognized another package as a laser sender. Both were off-the-shelf and dirt cheap after Lockheed went into receivership. One package seemed to be just a can with a pop-open lid.
    The modules sat in the Getaway Carousel in Wyndham’s warehouse, waiting. Littlemeade fell further and further behind schedule, and everyone lost money.
    The Crassen-Bodine Bill passed the House and was made law. Its list of inspections and permissions would cripple most science experiments, particularly in biology and nanotechnology.
    Littlemeade Operation Systems paid its penalties, collected its stored packages, and declared bankruptcy. The launch window passed to a new company, Watchstar, as part of the settlement.
    Watchstar was based in Westralia, the country that had been the western half of Australia. Wyndham couldn’t find out anything more.
    The following year, Watchstar turned in six packages labeled Briareus One through Six, under the same security measures, and occupying the same six slots, as Littlemeade’s Cornucopia cluster.
    “Three of these look very familiar,” May said.
    “We are lucky to get the business,” her father said. “As far as we’re concerned, anything named Watchstar must watch for Earth-grazing asteroids. Not even Crassen could object to that. That package, Briareus Two, that’s a telescope, isn’t it?”
    “Might be. New design.”
    No mention was made of nanotechnology. The Watchstar cluster was launched in November 2027.

 
    III
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
—GEORGE SMITH PATTON

 
JUNE 2052 AD
    “So how is it back in the States?”
    May slumped and pushed away the last of her dessert. “The beggars take plastic.”
    He stared, thought, and finally said, “How?”
    “With their phones. There’s a slot.”
    “Beggars have phones?”
    “It’s a civil right. Otherwise they couldn’t vote.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Toby, is this stuff inside me, making more of itself?”
    “They can’t.”
    May said, “Because that’s what scares … well, not me, of course, but the general public. Little tiny machines that make more of themselves. That’s what you were selling fifteen years ago, and that’s why they forced you out. And now you’re putting them in human bodies?”
    He was nodding. “Voters, medical patients, investors, Congress—they’re all terrified of something that goes into a vein, through the blood, into the heart and liver and brain. May, that would be immortality! But I knew I couldn’t get backing. I’m not selling that. May, it’s hard to make something that can make a working copy of itself. This stuff, the D-1 Cure, it goes through the gut and out. It’s just visiting. And of course I’m shading the law, even here, but if my customers keep talking, maybe someday. Someday we’ll try the Briareus Project