Two years ago, they had tried to get us to store “strategic assets” in the A Deck tanks. I threatened to resign, and the Foundation found the guts to refuse. That’s when the troubles had started.

Bahnz noticed my look, and smiled a knowing smile.

He thinks he holds all the aces, I thought. And he might be right.

There were some old SF stories I read when I was a kid, about space colonies rebelling against Earth bureaucracies. I had a brief fantasy of leading my crew in a “tea party,” and kicking these two jerks off our sovereign territory.

Bahnz saw the peaceful smile on my face, and must have wondered what caused it.

Of course the rebellion idea was absurd. It wasn’t what any of us wanted, and it wasn’t practical. We might be ninety-five percent free of Earth logistical support, but that last few percent would be with us for a hundred years. Anyway, without either water or new tanks every year, Mother Earth’s atmosphere would quickly pull us down.

While Don and Susan kept our side of the charade, I looked out the window, thinking.

Next year would be solar maximum, when the coronal ion wind would come sleeting in from the active sun. The upper atmosphere would heat up and bloat outward, like a high tide dragging at our knees. At solar max we could lose twenty kilometers of altitude in a single year. Maybe much more.

Our investors would be caving in within eighteen months. Even the Italians would soon be begging the U.S. administration to make a deal.

For an instant I saw the Earth not as a broad vague mass overhead, but as a spinning globe of rock, rushing air, and water, of molten core and invisible fields, reaching out to grapple with the tides that filled space. It was eerie. I could almost feel the Tank Farm, like a double-ended kite, coursing through those invisible fields, its tethers cutting the lines of force—like the slowly turning bushings of a dynamo.