The Space Program

It was the cocktail party from hell.

Curtis Brannon, independent candidate for governor of the state of Wyoming, had been to a few bad ones during his three months in the spotlight, but this definitely took the prize. The room overflowed with out-of-work miners, out-of-work cowboys, out-of-work oil-field hands, and dozens of other economically disadvantaged voters, none of whom had any business trying to look comfortable in a suit and tie.

There were even a few out-of-work accountants in attendance, but none of them looked particularly comfortable either. Nor did the two employed ones in charge of Brannon’s campaign. Contributions were obviously not coming in the way they had hoped. Everyone here supported Brannon’s candidacy, but none of them had the discretionary income to help him pay for it.

Another uncomfortable-looking fellow near the punch bowl didn’t fit any of the standard profiles that Brannon had learned to recognize. Unshaven, unkempt, and woefully under dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he had been watching Brannon like a hawk for the last twenty minutes and sweating like a pig the whole time, but he hadn’t yet worked up the courage to make whatever move he had come here to make. Brannon wondered if the guy had a gun, and if so whether or not he should let him use it. Right now the only sure way to jump-start his failing campaign would be to survive an assassination attempt.

The notion that the mysterious stranger might actually kill him hardly entered Brannon’s mind. This guy didn’t look like the sort of person who could hit the broad side of a bam with a bazooka. He looked, in fact, like the sort of person who would unwittingly hide inside the barn while someone more capable shot at it from outside. Yet he had come tonight to the fund-raiser, which meant that he had at least heard about Brannon, which was more than most of Wyoming’s three-quarter million residents could claim. He had to have something going for him.

Brannon decided to confront him directly and see what it was.

“Excuse me,” he said to the group of timber workers who had gathered around him to complain about the environmental laws. He stepped around them toward the hors d’oeuvre table, and as he drew close he said, “Hi, welcome to the party.” He always greeted new acquaintances that way because it implied that the person had not only joined the cocktail party but the Independent Citizens for Brannon party as well.

“Thanks,” the guy said. Now that he was closer, Brannon could see that his T-shirt had a picture of the Galaxy on it, with an arrow pointing from the words “You are here” to a spot about two-thirds of the way out. Not bad, Brannon thought. If the guy had to wear a T-shirt to a cocktail party, he at least had the sense to make it a good one.

“I’m Curtis Brannon,” Brannon said helpfully, just in case the guy didn’t know for sure.

“David Morrison. Systems analyst for Bighorn Bell.”

“Ah,” said Brannon. Bighorn Bell had started out as a fifty-customer coop twenty years ago, and had since grown to become the biggest phone company in the western states. From there they had expanded into practically everything: retail marketing, banking, real estate—anything that made money. If they got behind Brannon’s campaign, his funding woes were over.

Morrison must have seen the dollar signs in his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m on my own time here. But I do have something you might be interested in. Something that’ll go a lot further toward winning you the governor’s seat than any amount of money.”

“Oh?” said Brannon. Did he have some dirt on Paxton, the incumbent? Brannon hated the thought of using that sort of thing, but it could come in handy if Paxton started slinging mud first.

But Morrison said, “I’ve got a program that can run your campaign for you. It can tell you what to do, where to go, what to say. It can put you in the governor’s mansion, guaranteed.”

Brannon snorted. “Right.”

“I knew you’d say that. So I brought this.” Morrison reached for his hind pocket. Brannon backed up a step, ready to leap over the hors d’oeuvre table if the guy came up with a gun, but instead he pulled out a thick wad of paper and unfolded it. “This is a forecasting sheet for our last ad campaign. You remember it—two guys fishing while their car phone took care of all their business for them. Here’s our projected two-week sales figure for the autocell XT.” He pointed to a figure, and Brannon stepped closer so he could read it: 23,418.

“So?”

“So here’s the actual sales figure.” He pointed to a line farther down the page: 23,417.

“One of our potentials inherited twelve million bucks and bought the model SX instead,” Morrison explained. “Turns out his aunt’s sightseeing plane caught a downdraft over Machu Picchu and crashed into the Peruvian Andes.” He laughed softly. “We hadn’t counted on his sudden windfall.”

Brannon laughed aloud despite his manager’s coaching never to make fun of anyone’s misfortune. “Impressive numbers, if they’re true,” he said. “But what does that have to do with my campaign?”

Morrison held his paper out for emphasis. His hand shook a bit, Brannon noted. But his voice was steady as he said, “Bighorn Bell has the hottest forecasting program in the business. I know, because I wrote most of the code. It can tell you what someone will have for breakfast six months from now if you give it the right data. Or, conversely, it can tell you how to make everyone have green eggs and ham if you want them to.” He shrugged. “Or vote for Curtis Brannon. For instance.”

For a fleeting moment Brannon enjoyed the fantasy, then he laughed and said, “I don’t need a program to do that. I just promise everyone what they want, starting with free money and a winter home in Arizona. Problem is, if I want to stay in office more than one term, I have to actually deliver.”

“That’s what the program is for. It’ll tell you what you can deliver, and what it’ll take to do it. And it’ll correlate that with what people actually want. We’ve already got the database for that.”

“Sure you do,” Brannon said. If they knew what people wanted—really wanted—they would be… hmm. They’d be one of the biggest companies in the western states, at the very least.

Morrison nodded. “It’s amazing what you can learn by analyzing people’s calling habits. And buying habits, of course. And then there’s data transmission, bank records—you name it.”

“That kind of surveillance is illegal,” Brannon said.

“No, actually it’s not. Turns out that any information gathered during the course of normal business activity can be used to compile customer profiles. And Bighorn Bell does practically every type of business nowadays.”

That much was certainly true, and their success at it was undeniable. Still, even though Brannon had always heard never to argue with success, this was a bit hard to swallow.

“What does your forecasting program say I should promise people in order to get elected?” he asked.

“The same old stuff everybody’s been talking about for years,” Morrison said, smiling. All traces of his nervousness were gone now that he was in his element. “Reduce unemployment, stimulate the economy—you know the line. But the program can tell you exactly what to propose, and how to accomplish it within your first term of office.”

Brannon nodded. He’d heard many a special-interest group offer to put him in office if he’d just support their pet project. “So what kind of public feeding trough am I supposed to establish?” he asked. “And how am I supposed to pay for it?”

Morrison shook his head. “No public assistance, no welfare, nothing like that. The program says the best way to get Wyoming back on its feet is to start a heavy launch facility. Compete with NASA for satellite launches, even manned exploration if we want to.” Brannon would have laughed if he didn’t feel so let down. Some part of him had been hoping for a miracle, hoping that this kid actually had something. But a space program? That was a pie-in-the-sky idea if he’d ever heard one. “That’s not a public feeding trough?” he asked. “Where’s the infrastructure going to come from? Who’s going to bankroll the research and development? NASA isn’t going to just give us the plans for the shuttle, you know.”

“The shuttle is obsolete,” Morrison said. “Single stage to orbit is the way to go, and there are half a dozen companies that’ve already done the R&D who are just looking for a place to put their launch site. Wyoming is perfect. Lots of open space, lots of energy, and lots of skilled labor with an overwhelmingly positive attitude about developing a new frontier. All we need is somebody to set it in motion. And the program says whoever comes up with the idea first will be governor come November.”

“Does it?” Brannon said. A space program. Sounded like a nutty idea to him. Maybe just nutty enough. Lord knows, it would take something crazy to fix his campaign.

He spent the next week checking out the feasibility of it. He wasn’t about to get behind something like this without knowing what he was getting into. But the more he learned about it, the better he liked it. Wyoming was a perfect place for a heavy launch center. It had more coal and oil reserves than most of the rest of the country combined, which meant plenty of energy to make rocket fuel with. It had plenty of open space to drop aborted launches into, and plenty of people who were used to big projects and would jump at the chance to take high-paying rocket jobs. About the only problem that Brannon could see was the high latitude, which would make equatorial orbits more expensive than launching from Florida. Not prohibitively so, however, and Brannon reminded himself that the Russians had learned to work around a worse latitude problem with their main spaceport in Baikonur. Morrison was right: it could work.

He was grinning ear-to-ear at the press conference. That played almost as well on the evening news as the shocked expressions of his opponents, who were caught flat-footed by his sudden proposal.

“There’s another side to this program, you know,” Morrison told him a few months later. Brannon hadn’t seen him much since the election; they had told the public about the forecasting program and Morrison was spending all his time at Bighorn Bell preparing it for commercial release.

“What other side?” Brannon asked, hardly looking up from his desk. He was busy with contractors’ reports and EPA reports for the new launch complex in Rock Springs. Things were moving fester than he had anticipated; it actually looked like they might launch their,first payload within three years.

“It can tell you what else we’re capable of. Wyoming doesn’t have to be a one-trick state, you know. Next election, we can offer the public a choice of growth options to choose from.”

“What kind of growth options?” Brannon asked. He had gotten to know Morrison a bit in the last few months; he wouldn’t have brought the subject up unless he’d already run the simulations.

Morrison smiled, took a sheet of paper from his hind pocket, and unfolded it. “Well, there’s revamping the park system, for starters. We’re already big on tourism, but we could do a lot better if we wanted to. Or there’s cultural expansion; theaters and museums and such for our own enjoyment and to attract a higher income class of immigrants. Or there’s building a wall around the state to keep everyone out. That turns out to be a pretty good short-term investment as far as jobs go, but I can show you why it’s bad in the long term.”

Brannon laughed. “Good thing. That’s what most Wyoming people would vote for if they thought they could get away with it.”

“True enough. There’s another couple of options we probably shouldn’t mention for the same reason, but we’ve got a dozen good solid plans to choose from. We could lay them all out for people to consider, then in a year or two have a special vote, let people decide the direction the state goes in the next decade or two.”

“The next decade or two? You can’t plan that far out, can you?”

“Only for Wyoming, where we’ve got the database. And the population here is just about optimum for the forecasting program. But I keep refining it, and Bighorn Bell is selling the program to other states, so pretty soon we’ll be able to do it for the whole country. When we get everything all coordinated, we could probably plan fifty years ahead.”

“Good God, you’re serious, aren’t you?” Brannon sat up in his chair and looked straight at Morrison.

“As serious as taxes, which, by the way, we can lower another 2 percent starting next fiscal year.”

“How?”

“Increased efficiency. Now that we’ve got a real direction, we’re not wasting so much money shuffling paper around trying to look busy for the voters.”

Brannon waved at the mountain of reports on his desk. “You mean this morass of paperwork is more efficient than my predecessor’s?”

“By a long margin.”

“Well I’ll be damned. All right, then. Let’s see what happens if we turn the crank again.”

What he didn’t expect was that the next Wyoming gubernatorial race would polarize the candidates along issues rather than party lines. It was obvious when he stopped to think about it; after four years of familiarity with the forecasting program, people weren’t going to listen to promises anymore. This time the people were voting for what they wanted, not who, and trusting the program to provide the details of how the elected official achieved it.

Twenty-twenty hindsight, Brannon thought. He should have seen it happening, but he was only looking ahead these days. To his presidential campaign.

He called his party the Futurians, and he ran on a one-plank platform: Let the people decide where the country was going, and he would be the manager.

His opponents, both Democrat and Republican, tried to attack him as a man without the strength of his own convictions, willing to change his agenda at the whim of the polls, but Brannon merely ran a ten-second spot on every TV network, saying, “I admire my opponents for their honesty in stating that they won’t listen to public opinion.” They never recovered from that ad. Six months later he walked away with the election, and began the process of paying off America’s credit card bill.

After that, with the help of Morrison’s program, he put a chicken in every pot, a multimedia station in every home, and a car in every garage. An electric one, after he ordered the defense industry to declassify the electron sieve.

All the same, he had more competition for re-election. The career politicos had learned their lesson, and were espousing their own forecasting programs, which they claimed were better than Brannon’s—which was why they disagreed with his over what was required to accomplish the public’s stated goals. Brannon stuck by Morrison’s original program, which had been continuously refined since the beginning, but he learned the hard way that public loyalty is much more fickle than the private variety. When the Republican candidate promised to eliminate taxes completely without cutting any social programs, he got nearly 80 percent of the vote.

The depression lasted only three years, thanks to an emergency session of Congress and a special election that reinstated Brannon as president. On the night of his return, he lit a bonfire on the south lawn and tossed a disk containing the Republican version of the forecasting program into the flames.

Morrison came to see him the next day in the Oval Office. Still wearing his trademark T-shirt and jeans, he slouched into one of the chairs opposite Brannon’s desk and said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t tell you this was coming.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Brannon admitted.

“Because we needed this depression. You got the country back in the black, but people were still basically voting themselves bread and circuses. This was the only way to convince them to take the next step.”

“Excuse me? We’re a trillion dollars in the hole again. Unemployment’s at 30 percent. We need this like we need a nuclear war.”

“That would have done it, too,” Morrison said, “But I figured this was a better way.”

“A better way to do what? Drive the country to its knees?”

Morrison picked at a hangnail, said idly, “You ever wonder why I picked you to give the program to? Out of all the politicians in the country?”

Brannon laughed. “I always assumed it was because I was desperate enough to listen to you.”

“Right. But it wasn’t just you. Remember what Wyoming’s economy was like when we started this whole business? The whole state was desperate. It had to be desperate to get behind an unknown independent politician with a pipe dream. But they did it, and now Wyoming’s the richest state in the union. I figure—actually the program figures—that the whole US is just about desperate enough now to do the same thing.”

“We’ve already got a space program,” Brannon reminded him.

Morrison laughed. “That? Satellites and planetary probes? You call that a space program? Let me show you a space program.” He tugged a thick wad of paper from his hip pocket and unfolded it on Brannon’s desk. The top sheet was a diagram of two cylinders side by side, each one divided lengthwise into long strips. “It’s called an O’Neill colony,” Morrison said. “And it’s twenty miles long.”

Brannon didn’t see a whole lot of Morrison in the next few years. Brannon was too busy retooling the national defense industry into an orbital construction industry, and Morrison was just as busy coordinating all the private companies that would supply the colony project once the superstructure was finished.

Brannon would sometimes go outside at night and look sixty degrees to the west of the Moon, where the colony was already a naked-eye object scintillating in the perpetual sunshine of its Lagrangian orbit. He had close-up photos of it all over his office, but he preferred to look at it with his own eyes once in a while. The week they spun it up to speed he declared a national holiday and spent the entire time outside, watching through a telescope as the immense fusion engines fired long pinwheels of flame from along the dual cylinders’ entire length.

Morrison showed up a couple of weeks later. His T-shirt said, “Stay Alive In L-5,” and showed a wrinkled-up prune of an old woman grinning ear to ear as she threw her walker out the zero-g living section’s airlock.

“What do you want now?” Brannon growled at him. He was becoming a crotchety old fart in his own right nowadays, and he knew that Morrison only came to him when he wanted to stir things up.

Sure enough, as he slid into a chair opposite Brannon, Morrison said, “The first load of colonists goes up next month. Everything’s all set for them except for one little detail.”

“Yeah, right,” said Brannon. “What? Air? Water?”

“No, no, we’ve got plenty of that. Made it ourselves from Comet Goodloe. What we need now is somebody to run the place. A mayor.”

Brannon snorted. “Details, details. Good grief, you forgot to install a government?”

Laughing, Morrison said, “We didn’t forget. It just didn’t seem like a high priority. After all, the job’s mostly symbolic anymore. We’ve got voting stations in every house, and there’ll be an issues channel on the multivid, so all you’d be doing is rubber-stamping whatever—”

“House?” Brannon asked. “You have houses up there? I thought it would all be apartments.”

Morrison looked at him askance. “Haven’t you been reading the briefings I send you?”

“Of course I have!” Brannon protested, but when Morrison started to laugh he said, “Well, most of them. I can’t read everything that comes into this office, and I figured I could trust you to do your job right.”

“And you think ‘right’ is a bunch of crackerbox apartments in a tin can? Good grief, I’ve built paradise right under your nose—well, OK, over it—and you haven’t even paid attention.” Morrison laughed again. “You like to fish, don’t you?”

“When I get time,” Brannon replied, wondering what Morrison was getting at now.

The answer didn’t take long. “We’ve got four hundred miles of trout streams in either half of the colony. We’ve got two oceans. The salmon are already migrating in the east cylinder.”

“Why not in both?” Brannon asked, figuring he’d try a subject shift of his own.

“Because it’s six months out of synch, that’s why. You think we want the whole colony to have the same seasons at the same time? Boring.” Morrison propped his feet up on Brannon’s desk. “What do you say? Our job’s done here. Why don’t you blow this two-bit planet and come live where the action is?”

Brannon thought about it. President of the United States wasn’t exactly a chump job. But he had to admit, Morrison’s forecasting program had transformed it from the old power seat to a mostly managerial position. Mayor of humanity’s first space colony wouldn’t be so cushy, no matter what Morrison said about it. His program couldn’t predict all the failure modes of something as new as this. Humanity’s first permanent step away from Earth was a step into completely unexplored territory, and there would undoubtedly be problems. Brannon knew he wasn’t the most innovative thinker in the world, nor the most dynamic leader, but he figured he could do the job as well as anyone. It sounded like an interesting challenge.

And if it wasn’t—well then, fishing sounded good. Maybe Morrison’s program could even tell him what they were biting on.