in from space. Five and a half centuries after Europe began the exploitation of the New World, all of Earth was beginning to benefit from the exploitation of cislunar space—a harsh frontier that was rich in real wealth and entirely unpopulated, except for the ten thousand or so men and women of Earth who went there to find their fortunes.
Slowly the Earth was healing from the wounds inflicted by the Industrial Age. Slowly the smokestacks were being replaced by fusion or solar energy. Slowly the petroleum-burning engines were converting to methane or synfuels. Slowly the burgeoning population of Earth was stabilizing at the twelve-billion level.
Too slowly.
Vasily Malik was not concerned, at this precise moment, with these great questions of wealth and the environment. Head of the Russian Federation’s delegation to the Global Economic Council, Malik was deep in conversation with the woman who had been the chief conciliator at the trial of Willard Mitchell.
“You have all the necessary documentation?” Malik asked.
He studied the conciliator’s face while his words headed toward the Moon at the speed of light. She had a lean, hard face, not easily given to smiling. A spinster’s face, Malik thought, knowing that it was chauvinist of him but thinking he was right just the same.
Vasily Malik was handsome enough to be a video star. He was tall for a Russian, brushing six feet; broad-shouldered and heavily muscled, he kept his body in good trim through a rigid schedule of daily exercise. Once he had worn his golden hair modishly long. Now it was trimmed to an almost military burr. His ice blue eyes could sparkle with laughter, but at this moment they were glittering with hope born of a deep and abiding hatred.
“Yes,” said the chief conciliator. “He talked Mitchell into selling out to him. If we had known that it would be Randolph we were dealing with we would have tripled the fine. Quadrupled it!”
Malik’s broad features eased into a relaxed smile. “You did your best. Randolph is a clever rascal, we must grant him that.”
When his words reached her, she nodded bitterly. “It’s not fair. Mitchell was guilty. He should have been driven out of business. But now Randolph owns his company and he’ll continue to operate.”
Malik made a few sympathetic noises and ended the conversation by asking her to send all the documentation on the trial to him immediately.
Then he leaned back in his imposing leather chair, put his booted feet on his immaculately gleaming desktop, and waited for the fax machine to begin spitting out Dan Randolph’s comeuppance. I only wish it were his death sentence, Vasily Malik said to himself.
Nearly three hours later, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Paris time, the weekly meeting of the Global Economic Council’s executive committee convened in the small conference room down the corridor from Malik’s office.
Muhammed Shariff Sibuti of Malaysia, chairman of the committee for this session, was already seated at the head of the gleaming table when Malik entered the room. A lightweight, in every dimension, thought Malik. Sibuti looked shriveled and old, too small for the chair in which he sat. His starched white high-collared shirt made his wrinkled dark skin look almost as black as the leather of the chair’s padding.
“We must begin,” Sibuti said, in a voice that sounded like rusty hinges groaning. “We have a very long agenda. A very difficult agenda.”
The other committee members were milling around the room, largely ignoring their chairman. Malik saw Jane Scanwell at the long table that had been set out with refreshments and finger foods.
He went to her, under the pretext of pouring himself a glass of hot tea from the silver samovar in the center of the table.
“I have good news from Copernicus,” he said softly.
Jane Scanwell glanced up from the coffee cup she had just filled.
The former President of the United States was a handsome