But if the companies were so dumb, so politically naive, as not to be able to see that NASA wasn't actually supposed to make access to space easy and routine, then the hell with them.
Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What's the rush? What you're talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That's what motivates you. You can't bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?"
gnawing shit was better than creating nothing at all, which was to be the fate, as far as Benacerraf could see, of most of Kevin's generation, as they lay in their VR-beds and pushed increasingly stale, second-hand information around the net.
He knew Xavier Maclachlan had picked up on some of what the Luddites were arguing for. The Luddites had attracted a broad band of the younger generations who responded to a core anti-science message with, it seemed to Hadamard, their guts, not their heads. And that gut response was what Maclachlan was tapping into.
White said. In fact, he had a theory you could correlate the nation's decline with the growing adversity of these younger generations to a few cold ones.
Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.
There were more rituals, as they headed out of the building towards the bus that would take them to the pad. There was a card game called Possum's Fargo that they had to play, for instance, with a couple of the techs. Rosenberg couldn't believe his eves. Here they were, the five of them, like huge insects in their glaring orange pressure suits, standing around a table to play what seemed like, to him, a kid's version of poker. But—rigid tradition had it—they couldn't leave, until the commander, Angel, in this case, had lost a hand. It took six hands.
Especially since the Chinese were adopting a strategy which some argued the Americans should have followed all along: to drop any attempt at perfect reliability, to accept lower-cost, more practical solutions—and the heroic deaths that would inevitably accompany them.
As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peace-keeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama. Army engineers set in place during the handover from the last Administration started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy. There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country's membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started—arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs—ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese—and world trade collapsed. The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan. Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan's old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his "da Vinci brains trust." The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft. And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form. Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.
It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we've reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we'll understand how it all used to work.
"If the Universe is just a puzzle box, it doesn't mean a damn thing, does it? It's not enough. Not any more; maybe it never was." Rosenberg had reached a kind of ultimate logic, she thought. He must be spending his walking time addressing the final question science couldn't answer, in this godless age: Why bother to live at all?
And who could really say what the future evolution of the sun would be like? Nobody had actually watched a star follow through its ten-billion-year evolutionary cycle, from birth to death; every theory was inferred from humankind's mayfly-like snapshot perception of the stars that happened to be scattered through the universe today.