"Either I meet with him personally, or there will be no agreement. It's as simple as that, Hans."
"I'm telling you, that's not possible. He doesn't hold face-to-face conferences any more; not here, or down on Earth."
"You see him often enough."
"Well, damn it, Judith, I am his assistant. Even he has to see a few people. But I have full legal authority to sign for him, if that's a worry. Check with Zurich for any questions on financing. And if you want to look at anything else on the Station, tell me and I'll arrange it."
Hans Gibbs sounded almost pleading. They were sitting in an eighth-gee chamber halfway out from the hub of Salter Station, watching the mining operations on Elmo, a hundred kilometers above them. Electric arcs sparkled and sputtered in random sequence on the surface of the Earth-orbiting asteroid, and loaded cargo buckets were drifting lazily down along the umbilical. From this distance it was a glittering filament of silver, coiling its length down to the station refining center.
Judith Niles pulled her gaze back from the hypnotic sight of the endless bucket chain. She shook her head, and smiled at the man seated across from her.
"Hans, this isn't just me being awkward. And I'm sure that you and I could conclude the deal. It's not something I want for myself, it's for my team down at the Institute. I'm asking them to give up the security of government jobs and take a flier to a private industry group in an orbital facility."
"Security?" Hans Gibbs glared at her. "Judith, that's pure crap. You know it's crap. A job with Salter Wherry is safer than any government position. Your whole group could be wiped out tomorrow if some jackass in the U.N. decided to throw his weight around. And they have plenty of jackasses. And don't give me any nonsense about your budget—Salter Wherry has better and earlier information about that than you do."
"I believe it." She sighed. "I told you, you don't have to convince me. You're preaching to the choir. I've seen our programs twisted and cut and maimed, year after year. But I need to bring twenty key scientists up here with me and I'm telling you how some of them feel. I go back to the Institute and they say to me, 'Did Salter Wherry agree to this?' And I say, 'Well, no. I signed a long-term contract—but I didn't actually see him.' Know what they'll say? They'll say that this project is pretty low on Salter Wherry's list of priorities, and maybe we should think again."
"It's top priority. Even down on Earth, most people know that he doesn't hold face-to-face meetings."
"I know." She smiled sweetly. "That's why it will be so impressive to my staff when they hear that I did meet with him. Think about it for a minute."
Judith Niles leaned back and recalled the last conversation with Jan de Vries and Charlene Bloom before she left. Negotiate hard. It had been the point they all agreed on. And if it didn't work out? Well, they would live through it. The Institute would continue somehow, even with government cuts in funding.
Across from her, Hans Gibbs groaned and eased to his feet. In the two days that they had spent together he had been forming his own impressions of the Institute director, adding to the odd perspective that had come from his cousin at the Institute.
"She's weird, I mean, like she's not shaped yet," Wolfgang had said. "She's pretty old, right?"
Hans glared at him. "Watch it, sonny. She's thirty-seven. Guess that's old if you're still wet behind the ears."
"Right. So she's thirty-seven, and she has a world-wide reputation. But she's like a little kid in some ways." Wolfgang waved his beer glass in a circle in the air. "I mean, you tell me I act like a retard, but she's the one you should talk to. I can't figure her at all. I think maybe when she was younger all her energy went into science and sex. She's just getting around to learning the rest of the world."
"Sex?" Hans raised his eyebrows. "I was right, then. Wolf, if you say she's sex-mad, she must be something. Been trying to sleep your way to the top, eh? And I thought she was all fixed up with that little man I met yesterday."
"You mean Jan de Vries?" Wolfgang spluttered his laughter through a mouthful of beer. "Cousin boy, you are all screwed up on that one. No chance of an affair between him and JN, not if you locked 'em up together and fed 'em Spanish Fly for a year. I like Jan, he's a great guy, but he's got his own ideas on sex. He makes friends easily with women, but for his love life he only looks at men."
"But you're sure about her?"
"I'm sure. Not from personal experience, though. She's not like me. JN's discreet, she never plays bedroom games around the Institute. But she disappears for nights and weekends."
"She could be working."
"Bullshit. It takes one to know one. She's horny as I am."
Hans shrugged. His own impressions had been formed back when he first saw her photograph. "All right, so she's horny as you are. God help her. But if she's not shaped and still changing, what will she be like when she is shaped?"
Wolfgang Gibbs' face took on a different expression. He was silent for a moment.
"She could be anything," he said at last. "Absolutely anything. Even the cocky ones at the Institute admit it, she's way above them on technical matters."
"Even you, cousin? Since when? I thought the mirror on the wall said you were smartest of them all."
Wolfgang placed his beer glass down on the window sill. He looked very serious. "Even me, cousin. Remember what one of France's old generals said when he came out of his first meeting with Napoleon? 'I knew at once that I had met my master.' That's how I felt after my first one-on-one with JN. She's a powerhouse. And when she wants something, she's hard to stop."
"I've met more than one like that. But where does she get her kicks? If we're going to have a deal, I need to understand her motives."
But at that point Wolfgang Gibbs had only shaken his head and picked up his beer again. And now, thought Hans, looking at Judith's unreadable face, we're one-on-one and I'm experiencing the push for myself. An audience with Salter, she says, or no deal. He began to move slowly toward the exit.
"Okay, Judith. I'll try. Salter Wherry is here on the Station, and I have to see him anyway about some other stuff. Give me half an hour—if I can't do anything in that time, I can't do it at all. Wait here, and dial Central Services if you need anything while I'm gone. But don't get your hopes up. The only thing I can tell you is that he wants the Institute up here so bad he can taste it—he says the narcolepsy problem is top priority. Maybe it will make him break his own rule."
Judith Niles was left with her own thoughts. The words of Jan de Vries kept drifting back to her. "Salter Wherry is a manipulator, the best in the System." And now she was hoping to manipulate the system he had created. Wherry didn't know it, but she had little choice. She had her own urgencies. The experiments she wanted to do couldn't be conducted down on Earth. If he were to suspect that . . .
She looked again out of the concave viewing port. Salter Station was powerful evidence of the effectiveness of that manipulative power. From where she was sitting, Elmo was continuously visible. It was the first of the Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids to be steered into stable six-hour orbit around the Earth: but as Salter Wherry had promised the United Nations, the story had not ended there.
Looking at the panorama of development above her, Judith Niles was forced to marvel. Wherry's asteroid mining operations had provided the base metals to create and then expand Salter Station. But at the same time, as no more than a by-product, they also extracted enough platinum, gold, iridium, chromium, and nickel to make up almost half of the world's supply. Bans against import of products from Salter Station into most countries had been totally useless. The shipments of metal were "laundered" through neutral spaceports in the Free Trade Zones, and at last arrived where they were needed—fifty percent more expensive than they would have been on direct purchase.
Wherry's operations were strong enough to withstand a challenge from any government, his defense systems rumored to be capable of meeting a combined Earth attack. The Institute could be moved here, safe from withering cuts and changes of direction. But would it be worth it? Only if she and the rest of the staff had real freedom to pursue their work. That was the promise that she must extract from Salter Wherry. And an ironbound legal contract had to go with it. When you dealt with a master manipulator, you couldn't afford to leave loopholes.
She lay back in her seat, staring upward. A faint glimmer of light caught her eye, drifting past her field of view. She realized that she was witnessing one of the infrequent transits of Eleanora, the sixth and most ambitious of the giant arcologies. It was in an orbit nearly a thousand kilometers higher, and it passed the station only once every three days. Initially dubbed as "Salter's Folly" by the skeptical media, the first arcology had been started fourteen years ago and had grown steadily. Until the great space station was completed, Salter Wherry seemed content to let the original jeering name serve as the official one. Then he had finally renamed it Amanda, assisted its population of four thousand to establish themselves there, and apparently lost all interest. His mind was focused on construction of the second arcology, then the third . . .
Curious, Judith dialled into the Station's central computer and requested a high-resolution image of Eleanora. The half-built arcology blinked into full-color display on the screen. The skeleton was finished now, a seven-hundred-meter spherical framework of metal girders. Wall panels were going in over half the structure, so that she could estimate the size of the rooms and the internal corridors that would exist in the final ship. Allowing for power, food, maintenance and recreational areas, the final Ark would comfortably house twelve thousand people—the biggest one yet. And it had more facilities and living-space per person than the average family enjoyed on Earth. Two more arcologies were starting construction in higher orbits, each supposedly even bigger than this one.
Judith stared out of the port, seeing again her own office back at the Institute. The group's move up here (if it happened; Hans Gibbs had been gone a long time) had seemed such a big thing when it was first proposed. Compared with what Salter Wherry was planning for the arcologies, it was nothing. They were designed to be self-sustaining over a period of centuries and more, free-ranging through the Solar System and beyond if they chose, independent even of sunlight. From a kilo or two of water, self-contained fusion plants would provide enough power for years. As a backup to the recycling systems, each arcology would tow along an asteroid several hundred meters across, to be mined as needed.
Judith shook her head thoughtfully. She swung her chair to look out of the Earthside ports. It was daylight below, and she could see the great smudge that shrouded most of central Africa. Parts of the desiccated equatorial rain forest were still ablaze, casting a dark shadow across a third of the continent. The drought-ridden area stretched from the Mediterranean past the Equator, and no one could predict when it would end. It was hard to imagine what life must be like down there, as the climate changes made the old African life styles impossible. And across the Atlantic, the vast Amazon basin was steadily drying, too, becoming the tinder that would flame in just a few more months unless weather patterns changed.
A turn of the head brought Eleanora back into view, far above. Down on Earth the arcologies seemed remote, the daydream of one man. But once you were up here, watching the ferry ships swarming between the Station and the distant, twinkling sphere of Eleanora . . .
"Interested in taking that trip?" said Hans Gibbs' voice from behind her. "There's plenty of space available for qualified people, and you'd be a prime candidate for a colonist."
The spell was broken. Judith realized that she had been staring out mindlessly, more fascinated than she had ever expected. She looked around at him questioningly.
"It's yes," he said at once. He shook his head in a puzzled way. "I'd have bet my liver that he wouldn't even consider seeing you—I told you, Salter Wherry never meets with anybody except a few aides these days. So what does he do? He agrees to see you."
"Thank you."
Hans Gibbs laughed. "For Christ's sake, don't thank me. All I did was ask—and I didn't expect anything except a quick refusal. He agreed so quickly, I wasn't ready for it. I started to give him arguments why he should make an exception in this case, then my brain caught up with my mouth. I suppose that proves how little I know him, even after all these years. If you're ready we can go over right now. His suite is on the other side of Spindletop, directly across from here. Come on, before he changes his mind."