"Ten gees," she said. "Crew capsules. Ten gees for a minute and a half."

"Isn't that close to human tolerance?"

"Not really." Her voice was cold and distant. "I took it. And if I can-"

He finished the thought for her. "Hansen Enterprises employees will damn well have to. Or starve."

"I want no one who goes only for the money."

They watched the three personnel capsules rise; then the trains brought up more of the unmanned thirty-g cargo capsules, and the pregnant machine gun began again. "And this was what it was all for. Your crusade," he said.

Her smile was wistful, full of triumph and regret. "Yes. I'm not proud of all I've done, Aeneas. You've seen La Paz. Todos Santos. Cabo. Ugly, changed, not what they were when we-not what they were. But the men in Cabo don't go to the mainland looking for work while their families starve. I've done that."

"Yes. You've done that."

"But it was all only fallout, Aeneas. This is what it was for. Heimdall. The rainbow bridge to the stars! And by God it was worth it! You haven't seen the station, Aeneas. And I want you to."

He said nothing, but he looked out at the launching field. The lasers were off now. The great crippled rocket engines were silent. The power from the reactors was back on line, fed to the Baja industries, to Southern California; to the pumps even now cooling the laser installations. To the watermakers that made Baja fertile, for a while. But all that was incidental, because she hadn't lost the dream they'd shared, a dream she'd learned from him in his anger when America retreated from adventure…

She hadn't lost it. He thought he had, once. Not entirely; but he'd been willing to sacrifice it to a larger dream.

Yet what dream was larger than a bridge to the stars?