Chin glanced at his own weblink. “So you are,” he said, reaching for the bill.
“And don’t be stingy with the tip,” said Hauptmann, consulting his own display again. “Dave Preston from Peoria posted that you only left five percent when he went out to dinner with you last year.”
Chin smiled good-naturedly and reached for his debit card. “You can’t get away with anything these days, can you?”
The owners of the White House had been brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
The message, received by people all over Earth, had been simple: “This is Captain Joseph Plato of the UN SAOlduvai to Mission Control. Hello, Earth! Long time no see. Our entire crew has been revived from suspended animation, and we will arrive home in twelve days. It’s our intention to bring our landing module down at the point from which it was originally launched, the Kennedy Space Center. Please advise if this is acceptable.”
And while the rest of the world reacted with surprise—who even remembered that an old space-survey vessel was due to return this year?—the owners of the White House sent a reply. “
Of course, that signal was beamed up into space; at the time, no one on Earth knew what had been said. But everyone heard the reply Plato sent back. “We’d be delighted to land at the White House! Expect us to touch down at noon Eastern time on August 14.”
When people figured out exactly what had happened, it was generally agreed that the owners of the White House had pulled off one of the greatest publicity coups in post-governmental history.
No one had ever managed to rally a million people onto the Mall before. Three centuries previously, Martin Luther King had only drawn 250,000; the four separate events that had called themselves “Million-Man Marches” had attracted maybe 400,000 apiece. And, of course, since there was no longer any government at which to aim protests, these days the Mall normally only drew history buffs. They would stare at the slick blackness of the Vietnam Wall, at the nineteen haunted soldiers of the Korean memorial, at the blood-red spire of the Colombian tower—at the stark reminders of why governments were not good things.
But today, Hauptmann thought, it looked like that magic figure might indeed have been reached: although billions were doubtless watching from their homes through virtual-reality hookups, it did seem as if a million people had come in the flesh to watch the return of the only astronauts Earth had ever sent outside the solar system.
Hauptmann felt perfectly safe standing in the massive crowd. His weblink would notify him if anyone with a trustworthiness rating below 85 percent got within a dozen meters of him; even those who chose not to wear weblinks could be identified at a distance by their distinctive biometrics. Hauptmann had once seen aerial footage of a would-be pickpocket moving through a crowd. A bubble opened up around the woman as she walked along, people hustling away from her as their weblinks sounded warnings.
“There it is!” shouted Chin, standing next to Hauptmann, pointing up. Breaking through the bottom of the cloud layer was the
The lander grew ever bigger in Hauptmann’s view as it came closer and closer to the ground.
Hauptmann applauded along with everyone else as the craft settled onto the lawn of what had in days of yore been the president’s residence.
It was an attractive ship—no question—but the technology was clearly old-fashioned: engine cones and parabolic antennas, articulated legs and hinged hatches. And, of course, it was marked with the symbols of the pre-freedom era: five national flags plus logos for various governmental space agencies.
After a short time, a door on the side of the craft swung open and a figure appeared, standing on a platform within. Hauptmann was close enough to see the huge grin on the man’s face as he waved wildly at the crowd.
Many of those around Hauptmann waved back, and the man turned around and began descending the ladder. The mothership’s entire return voyage had been spent accelerating or decelerating at one g, and Franklin’s World had a surface gravity 20 percent greater than Earth’s. So the man—a glance at Hauptmann’s weblink confirmed it was indeed Captain Plato—was perfectly steady on his feet as he stepped off the ladder onto the White House lawn.
Hauptmann hadn’t been crazy enough to camp overnight on the Mall in order to be right up by the landing area, but he and Chin did arrive at the crack of dawn, and so were reasonably close to the front. Hauptmann could clearly hear Plato saying, “Hello, everyone! It’s nice to be home!”
“Welcome back,” shouted some people in the crowd, and “Good to have you home,” shouted others. Hauptmann just smiled, but Chin was joining in the hollering.
Of course, Plato wasn’t alone. One by one, his two dozen fellow explorers backed down the ladder into the summer heat. The members of the crowd—some of who, Hauptmann gathered, were actually descendants of these men and women—were shaking the spacers’ hands, thumping them on the back, hugging them, and generally having a great time.
At last, though, Captain Plato turned toward the White House; he seemed somewhat startled by the holographic Great Eats sign that floated above the rose garden. He turned back to the people surrounding him. “I didn’t expect such a crowd,” he said. “Forgive me for having to ask, but which one of you is the president?”
There was laughter from everyone but the astronauts. Chin prodded Hauptmann in the ribs. “How about that?” Chin said. “He’s saying, ‘Take me to your leader’!”
“There is no president anymore,” said someone near Plato. “No kings, emperors, or prime ministers, either.”
Another fellow, who clearly fancied himself a wit, said, “Shakespeare said kill all the lawyers; we didn’t do that, but we did get rid of all the politicians… and the lawyers followed.”
Plato blinked more than the noonday sun demanded. “No government of any kind?”
Nods all around; a chorus of “That’s right,” too.
“Then—then—what are we supposed to do now?” asked the captain.
Hauptmann decided to speak up. “Why, whatever you wish, of course.”
Hauptmann actually got a chance to talk with Captain Plato later in the day. Although some of the spacers did have relatives who were offering them accommodations in their homes, Plato and most of the others had been greeted by no one from their families.
“I’m not sure where to go,” Plato said. “I mean, our salaries were supposed to be invested while we were away, but…”
Hauptmann nodded. “But the agency that was supposed to do the investing is long since gone, and, besides, government-issued money isn’t worth anything anymore; you need corporate points.”
Plato shrugged. “And I don’t have any of those.”
Hauptmann was a bit of a space buff, of course; that’s why he’d come into the District to see the landing. To have a chance to talk to the captain in depth would be fabulous. “Would you like to stay with me?” he asked.
Plato looked surprised by the offer, but, well, it was clear that he
Hauptmann’s weblink was showing something he’d never seen before: the word “unknown” next to the text, “Trustworthiness rating for Joseph Tyler Plato.” But, of course, that was only to be expected.
Chin was clearly jealous that Hauptmann had scored a spacer, and so he made an excuse to come over to Hauptmann’s house in Takoma Park early the next morning.
Hauptmann and Chin listened spellbound as Plato regaled them with tales of Franklin’s World and its four moons, its salmon-colored orbiting rings, its outcrops of giant crystals towering to the sky, and its neon-bright cascades. No life had been found, which was why, of course, no quarantine was necessary. That lack of native organisms had been a huge disappointment, Plato said; he and his crew were still arguing over what mechanism had caused the oxygen signatures detected in Earth-based spectroscopic scans of Franklin’s World, but whatever had made them wasn’t biological.
“I really am surprised,” said Plato, when they took a break for late-morning coffee. “I expected debriefings and, well, frankly, for the government to have been prepared for our return.”
