Repressing a grim smile, Kinsman told himself. At least the Quakers never fell into that dogmatic tailspin. I'll bet Alexander was schooled by Jesuits.
"And who's gonna pay for these additional colonies?" Dreyer was asking.
"They'll be paid for out of the profits from the solar power satellites!" Alexander was getting edgy.
"Let's sit down," Kinsman suggested, pointing to an empty table. Most of the visitors were still clustered around the bar.
"Lemme get a refill," said Dreyer, hefting his emptied beer bottles.
The three of them pushed their way to the bar. Dreyer got another pair of beers, Kinsman another cup of the weak punch. Alexander abstained. Then they sat at one of the long mess tables, Dreyer at its head, Alexander and Kinsman flanking him on either side.
Kinsman took a sip of the punch. It felt cold and sticky-sweet.
"Now look," Dreyer said to the professor, "don't get me 233 wrong. I like the colony idea. I've liked it since O'Neill first proposed it, back in the Seventies. And I agree that solar power satellites could make a considerable profit—in time. If the government doesn't nationalize them, once they're built. But how do you raise the initial capital? You're talking about a hundred billion bucks or more."
"Over a ten-year period," Alexander said.
Dreyer shrugged. "That's still ten billion a year, mini- mum. That's a helluva lot of bread. With no payoff until way downstream, and maybe not even then. Who in hell is going to buy into this? My board of directors would toss me into the loony bin if I tried to put that past them."
"If the corporations would all work together and pool their resources ..."
"They won't. They can't! The antitrust guys would be all over us in ten minutes."
Kinsman said, "I thought NASA was involved in this."
"Only on the transportation end of it," Dreyer said. "NASA's not going to build any colonies. Congress won't appropriate that kind of money."
"Not for solar power satellites?" Kinsman wondered.
Dreyer explained, "See, the power satellites and the colonies are two different things. The power satellites are gonna get built, probably by the government, at least the first one. But nobody's going to put up the money for a colony that'll house ten thousand university professors in a big suburbia in the sky."
Alexander frowned.
They talked around and around the subject, Alexander waxing poetic and pathetic by turns, Dreyer shaking his bulldog head and insisting on the economic facts of life. Kinsman looked over his shoulder at the star-filled window and saw their reflections in the glass: Alexander in profile, earnest and ascetic as a saint; Dreyer massive and solid as reality; his own face lean, dark, bored with their arguments that circled as repetitiously as the stars outside the window. But there was something nagging at Kinsman's mind, some- thing that the two of them were overlooking. What?
Finally it hit Kinsman. He broke into their argument. "How are you going to defend this colony?"
"Huh?"
