"Yeah. I told him this was all your idea. After he finished talkin' to Sherwood. You shoulda seen his face! Like he crapped in his pants!" Colt roared with laughter.
General Sherwood tried to contain his enthusiasm, but as he sat behind his big, aerodynamically clean desk listening to Kinsman, he began nodding. At first his head moved only slightly, unconsciously, as Kinsman unfolded the logic of his plan. But by the time Kinsman was summing up, the Gener- al's head was bobbing vigorously and he was smiling broadly.
Colonel Murdock was sitting on the edge of his chair, alternately watching the General intently and eyeing Kinsman suspiciously, waiting for a misstep or an outright goof. Soon, though, his own bald head was going up and down in exact rhythm with the General's. Colt sat farther from the desk, back far enough so that Kinsman could not see him.
Standing in front of the General's desk, too wrapped up in presenting the ideas to feel nervous, Kinsman ignored Murdock, ignored Colt, ignored the self-doubts that gnawed at his innards. This is the only way, he kept telling himself. We'll never get to the Moon any other way. It's this or nothing.
Finally he finished. Kinsman stood in front of the Gener- 241 al's desk, arms limp at his sides, sweat trickling down his ribs. My uniform must be soaked, he thought.
General Sherwood stopped nodding, but his smile re- mained. "Fascinating," he said, in a voice so low that he might have been talking to himself. "We can bring the Moonbase program up to full partnership with the Strategic Defense program, and bring the aerospace industry along with us."
Colonel Murdock objected slightly, "But the idea of building the satellites in orbit out of lunar materials—that's not really new."
"True enough," said the General. "But I think it's an idea whose time has arrived."
"Oh, well, of course . . ."
Sherwood turned back toward Kinsman. "Good work, Major. Very good work. Get the presentations staff and the numbers crunchers into this immediately. I want a detailed presentation of this plan before the end of the week."
AH his exhaustion blew away. "Yes, sir," Kinsman responded crisply.
The rest of the week was a madhouse of meetings, rehearsals, discussions, arguments. Kinsman raced along the Pentagon corridors from cost-computing analysts to technical artists drawing the block diagrams, from long scrambled phone conversations with industrial leaders such as Dreyer to longer face-to-face meetings with their local marketing repre- sentatives and engineers. Days, nights blurred together. Meals were sandwiches gobbled at desks, crumbs spilling onto printout sheets of numbers, coffee staining artists' sketches of lunar installations. Sleep was something you grabbed in snatches, on couches, in a chair: once Kinsman dozed off in the shower of the officers' gym.
The full-scale presentation took two hours. Deputy Sec- retary Marcot chain-smoked through it. Kinsman stood at the head of the darkened conference room, squinting at the solitary light of the viewgraph projector, half-hypnotized by the clouds of blue smoke gliding through the light beam as he explained picture after picture, graph after graph, list after list. He could not see his audience but he could tell their interest from the rapt silence and, after the lights went on 242 again, from their eager questions.
"What was the basis for the cost estimates on the lasers?"
"Latest industrial information, sir."
"And the comparison between the costs of lunar raw materials and raw materials on Earth?"
"The comparison, sir, is between finished products man- ufactured in space from lunar materials and finished products manufactured on the ground and boosted into low Earth orbit. The space-manufactured items average five to eight times cheaper, including the capital costs of the lunar facil- ity."
"That's based on what, Major?"
Kinsman grinned. "Mainly, sir, on the fact that the Moon is an airless body of natural resources that has only one-sixth the gravitational pull of the Earth. It's twenty times cheaper to launch a pound of payload from the Moon to low Earth orbit than it is to boost a pound from the Earth's surface."
Marcot's sarcastic voice offered, "And those figures are based on Isaac Newton, not some industrial contractor who wants to buy into the program. You can trust Newton. He's dead."
Everyone around the table chuckled.
They questioned Kinsman for another hour after the final slide had been shown and the overhead lights turned on. Colt fielded some of the questions, as did some of the other men and women who had worked on the presentation. But Kins- man remained at the head of the room and took most of the questions himself.
Finally Marcot got to his feet. Waving his inevitable cigarette in Kinsman's general direction, he said, "Okay. Hone it down to half an hour and be prepared to show it to the Secretary first thing next week."
Back in his own office, Colt grabbed Kinsman by the shoulders. "We're on our way, man! The Secretary of De- fense! The big brass boss his own self. Marcot bought it!"
Kinsman was too tired and numb to feel exultant.
