The Good Ship Bison

We sent some of these designs off to Marge, to have them look and see if they were realistic, and what problems might come up.

And, I spent the time being a lazy bum, playing board games, reading my calc and modern european history for classes, and knowing, just KNOWING, I'd never have to set foot in a school again if I didn't want to.

We finally arrived.

Dropping into orbit, the bright side was super-bright, and the dark side had no moon to illuminate it so we had to make do with infrared scans, distorted because different elements in the dirt radiated heat away at different rates.

What was hot on the left side was cold on the right and vice versa.

Once we dropped off the satellites we'd brought, we started running scans.

HUGE, highly differentiated deposits were everywhere. The heat had concentrated them, making for every kind of 'rare earth' and actually rare metals, in sizable quantities.

Pulling them up to orbit, I knew our money problems were over.

Platinum group metals tend to be found together. The ore we had stripes, layer cakes of one type of metal over another, but sometimes it was just melted and dissolved together.

Pat also used some of the ship's magic/tech to filter out "normal" stuff like iron, silicon, aluminum, titanium, etc., since they were plentiful back home.

We bothered to bring some of the gold inside, 10 spheres of 1 meter diameter each. We had more, but with gold we really just wanted to see them in person.

The other half of the load were several large 750-meter diameter spheres each of platinum, palladium, osmium, iridium, rhodium, and caesium. I had asked Pat for the 'most valuable metals', choices based on spot prices, but when I asked the next question, the most 'useful' metals go get from Mercury, the answer was niobium, praseodymium, neodymium, and chromium (which was incredibly plentiful there).

On the outside, we started a boost back to Earth with 20 spheres trailing us, each 750 meters in diameter. Pat said this would use some energy but was nowhere near the safety margins and we'd get to Earth quite safely. Since we'd melted the exteriors enough to make them solid, Pat didn't need to wrap them completely in a force-field. That let us bring back a bunch more than just the technical limit of a single 1-km sphere.

One of those spheres we hadn't worried about smelting - it had a high percentage of gold, but the impurities were platinum-group metals, each more valuable than the next.

The ride back was a 5 day trip because Pat said it would take a while to slow the spheres into stable orbits, and we were cool with that. Slower than normal was fine with us, and we got a chance to be at a half-g for a while, which felt amazing.

At some point, during each of the 'interludes' I had with my crew, I asked (ordered, really) that person to 'obey', and to state they'd do 'anything'.

I didn't really know why I was doing it? I puzzled over that, but it seemed important to me at a deep and intuitive level so really just went with it.

There was Zero Doubt in my mind later that Pat inspired it, or ordered me subconsciously to do it. Pat probably even ordered me to be okay with being mind controlled. As my dad used to say, it's tough to fight city hall.

Nonetheless, I worried, but I couldn't do much about it, and frankly I was having WAY too much fun having sex with these girls, and they were having WAY huge amounts of fun having sex with me.

On the 2nd day of the trip back, I remember walking up behind Ella, really Dr. Fenwich but we all just called her Ella, and hugged her from the back, getting an instant positive response. I said quietly, "I'd like to take you now, if you wouldn't mind. Kiss first, then bend over?"

I wasn't even hard. I was SORT of hard, and I was for-sure super horny, but the idea of doing it, just right there in front of Jan, Alice Beth, and Kara (the others were in their bunks), seemed just so wicked fun that I thought I'd try it.

Ella laughed, threw her arms around my neck and we kissed a while, and she said, "I'm ready when you are, more or less, as long as I get some spit on you first."

She quickly unbuckled her pants, startling Jan who was looking over the scans we'd taken of Mercury for where we could get additional metals on the next trip. Jan looked up, her eyes right at Ella's waist level, and watched. Ella unbuttoned her pants, pulled them down with her panties, and bent over the table. This put Jan's face and Ella's face right in close proximity.

As I lined up, jacking a little to get myself fully up (and that only took seconds), I saw them looking at each other. I said, "Jan, Ella, kiss for a minute, let me watch, please?"

Jan raised an eyebrow, like, why, but shrugged and did as she was asked, bending forward and moving her head around to be able to match Ella's.

After I spat on my hand and smeared my head to get some lubrication, I pushed in and found no need for that, Ella was already making plenty. I wondered if she was like that full time.

I certainly wasn't objecting.

My push had jarred her, and thus Jan, and they both laughed. Jan held her mouth, over her front teeth, and said a muffled, "clinked".

"Oops. Sorry!.

"Mnnooo prorrbbem."

Just standing there, watching the screens, I had the sweet chance to just calmly rock my hip and push my cock in and out of the tight pussy.

I was in no hurry, it just felt super-nice, but Ella got more and more into it. She started coming, grabbing on to the table really hard as a bracing point, so I just kept on plowing into her, and she just kept on coming, and coming, and coming, small breaks in between but only maybe.

This was no fake orgasm. I could feel the pulses from inside, and the guttural noises she made didn't allow for incorrect diagnosis. Ella was doing a whole multi-orgasmic chain, and I'd kicked it off.

Beth and Kara came over to me, and Kara then decided she might like a go and pulled off her clothing to stand beside Ella. There's no mistaking it when a woman strips bare, bends over, and sticks her ass out in your direction.

I warned everyone I was about to move, and then, just did. Pushing into Kara, I was well-lubed already, and to be truthful, her sensations were different - slightly - not better or worse - than Ella's. I slammed in there, too, and sure enough, after a minute or two, Kara cooked off on her own cum-nanza.

I didn't last through this. I came in buckets-full, spurting and spurting into Kara, picturing it in my mind's eye filling up the cavity at the top of her vagina with hot creamy goodness.

We'd kept the original mattress made by Pat on the bridge, mostly because we didn't need to move it, and after a good relaxing breather I pulled out and headed over. My entire thought was, plop down, lay flat, relaxxxxxxxx....

Beth quickly came over and kissed me, then pulled my cock into her mouth to suck me clean.

Life was good, and I could nap when I wanted to.

== ==

We got back to Earth orbit, and I checked in with my Mom, and had everyone call their parents, just to tell them we're okay, but not to tell them too much about what we were doing.

We couldn't talk with anyone about what we'd done, just 'metallurgical experiments' and scientific geology stuff'. If we told the world? Bad plan. Doing a 10x or 100x (or more) of the entire world's rare metal reserves would drop the price incredibly fast and we'd have no wealth to use for other things.

As an initial plan, Pat got to work turning our tungsten into tungsten carbide for saw blades for Earth-based refineries. That would increase Earth's max output of PV, going forward.

As for ours, Pat created ion-gun slicing machines that would stay in ultra-high orbit and self-destruct after a month - enough time to slice up all our silicon, but not so much we'd have to worry about keeping the equipment safe.

As for the feedstock? Unwatched, it had partially failed.

The sphere was initially very molten and liquid and had reacted with the carbon to make the interior hollow and about half pure silicon, but as the pressure built on the inside and the outside had solidified, it cracked. All the CO2 had escaped, rapidly cooling the sphere. We didn't need the CO2 (it was well and truly dissipated), but the reactions hadn't totally finished like we thought they would.

Jan and Pat retrieved more coal deposits, cooked them in space to create CO2 and outgas any methane, and reduce the result to pure carbon. This Pat then placed it on the outside of the sphere evenly as a coating, and enclosed it again in a force field for heating.

The carbon, reacting to make CO2, had nowhere to go, so it suffused the entire ball, under significant pressure, and being spun back and forth with balls going through it to stir the thing up like paddles, it got all mixed in at super-high temps (not quite turning the boiling point of silicon, but almost). Once it completely reacted, we spun it up again to create density changes and put all the remaining carbon in the center.

Since an electrical charge flowing through silicon, as a liquid, would pull out any further impurities, those went to the poles.

The result was a rapidly spinning ball made entirely of eight 9's pure silicon, with only slag impurities floating on the outside or on the inside-bubble surface.

There was gold in there, too, it turned out - not more than we had already, but it wasn't nothing.

Our whole crew watched this with some fascination. I was looking at the RPM counter on the display, off to the side, showing the G-forces the ball was being subjected to, spinning inside that force field.

There is no physical way any human tech could have done that centrifuge action. At over 500 g's, the differentiation into layers of elements happened in a few hours instead of months.

After it was ready (and after calls to parents), we as a group sat around and talked through what we were going to propose, gaming it out.

We'd talked a lot about what changes were needed in the USA, and on the Earth in general. The US could be first, though, and with enough incentives, everyone else would follow.

Finally, time to call.

== CHAPTER: Extorting the President ==

"Pat, text the chief of staff to President Ortiz. Text is, "Need a callback soon, next few hours would be good. We will need to talk with the Treasury Secretary, and the Secretaries of Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture. Video conference preferred, need a number or web address."

The reply text took about mere minutes. Scheduled in 3 hours at ___. Web address ___"

This was long enough for us to fine tune and whittle down some ideas. We had our list, we were confident.

Finally it was time.

The web equivalent of "Ring, ring.." happened, and our screen resolved to the requested cabinet secretaries, the President, some functionaries, and the General I'd met at NASA Ames, in a conference room.

Pat helpfully put people's names and job titles on the video above their heads.

On our side, it showed us in a dark conference room, never mind the chairs were in a perfectly well-lit white-walled room.

"Mrs. President."

"Mr. Cooper, good to see you're back."

"You probably noticed we hauled some spheres with us."

"Yes, and we figured that your call now is in reference to that."

"Yep. First, the material we got from the Moon is mostly complete. The ones from Mercury are different."

"We'd seen that."

"We did some refining of the Moon one. It is now a sphere approximately 750 meters in diameter made from metallurgical grade, eight 9's, pure silicon."

The DOE secretary (I had Pat label who they were over their heads) gasped.

The President turned around. "Is that a lot, Dave?"

"More than the world's cumulative production, for sure... Not ... Uh... four-thirds pi r cubed..."

I interrupted, "Mr. Secretary, I'll save you the math. It's about 670 times the annual worldwide production of metallurgical silicon. Trouble is, it's not in wafers. It's also not strictly solar cell material, it has to be doped with just the right impurities, cut to wafers like I said, and leads printed on so we have a full PV panel."

They nodded.

DOE guy said, "We ... can't do that, very fast, at least. We'd need just huge amounts of electric power for that step, and the clean rooms, and wafer-die printing, and... Uh... I'm missing some steps."

"True. Here's my goal. I want to stop global warming. So, I want to set up some factories to purify this feedstock, turn it into polysilicon wafers and then panels, and sell them on the world market. This should drop the price of electric power, by the end of this maybe in a year or so, to about ten cents a megawatt hour, worldwide. The income from this venture should net at least $2 trillion dollars to me, well, and my crew."

The figure we'd worked up was closer to $30 trillion, but that number was both more-true and more fanciful than they could buy into, so I went with a fake-low number.

"That would be taxable income in the USA, provided I choose to put factories there and make sales there, etc. And, with the cleanest, cheapest power in the world, the USA would benefit."

She raised her eyebrows. "What do you want in return?"

"Your backing of a package of political reforms that will benefit the USA anyway, and which can be rolled out on their own anytime in the next month or two, at most. The list is extensive. I'm putting it in the chat window now."

Nodding, Pat pasted the text in. It was:

Free universal healthcare including dental, vision, and drugs;

free universal education from pre-k through graduate school

metric system round-number sizes for food, signs, and all packaged goods;

voting rights prohibiting gerrymandering, universal permanent registration, and mail-in ballots;

an end to fossil fuel / oil company subsidies;

speedups on permitting for lithium mining;

Designating 20% of U.S. territorial waters as marine reserves, only sport-fishing allowed.

(some other smaller items)

I saw them looking at the list and shaking their heads.

"There's no way I can sell all of this."

"I'm a U.S. citizen, ma'am, and I think I'm a pretty decent person. It looks to me like this list is really a set of stuff that should have been done already, except some powerful company or another got in the way. I'm willing to be the powerful company that is pushing back...."

They asked for a small recess to talk amongst themselves. Maybe 10 minutes later, they came back, and as they did, I asked, "Madame President?"

"Mr. Cooper?"

"I have something to sweeten the pot. I can put a deposit down on the factory land and purchase some government bonds if you like. I can pay ... in gold."

This led to silence, then the treasury secretary said, "How much gold, exactly?"

"At least a couple of hundred billion dollars worth, at yesterday's spot price. I'm willing to sell it to your government in exchange for dollars or other liquid assets. Or, I can offer it to the EU, or China. I probably should, to keep everyone feeling I'm being fair, I'm supposed to be helping the world, not just the USA."

It's worth noting that just one of the 25 one-meter spheres we had in the cargo bay was worth a $1B. That ignored the immense platinum and precious metals spheres I'd brought back from Mercury.

It's also worth noting that this was extortion.

If I put all this gold on the market at once, all the US gold reserves would drop in price drastically, and cost the US government a crap-ton of money. Or, if I sold it cheap to another country (the EU/China threat), I'd hugely empower them over the U.S.

Being nice about it and ignoring the implications, I said evenly, "Now, to help this, I can also offer to sell some amounts of other more rare earth metals as well, furthering the US strategic and commercial stockpiles."

She was squinting. I wasn't sure if she caught the implied threat, but she might have. She asked carefully, "In exchange for ... some policy changes that we're trying to get passed anyway?"

"Would it help if the companies opposing these policy changes were suddenly owned by other people?"

She laughed. "You propose to change the power structure of the entire political class in the United States, and ... you're ... "

"...In high school, yeah. Kind of a fun civics lesson."

The girls behind me smiled as well, but we didn't laugh. We knew how serious this was.

She continued, "I'm not sure I can do this. I can't officially have a position on you purchasing any other company for purposes of putting them out of business or otherwise dominating a marketplace, that's literally a felony antitrust law violation. However, I can look at your proposals and have opinions about what is presented to the public."

I nodded. She wasn't a lawyer, but she might have been getting notes on her tablet computer from some of them.

"How much will it cost to buy all the bad senators?"

Their whole room, and ours, burst out in laughter.

She said carefully, "I presume, since this call is recorded and subject to public records requests unless I classify it, that you mean 'how much lobbying do I need to do, as a political matter" and the answer is, bribery is a felony, so you need to talk to an attorney to ensure you don't accidentally break the law."

I laughed, and said I was joking around and I would never do that, that I was speaking satirically about how there's a common perception that many in Congress respond overly favorably to rich people's requests. I said I was entirely devoted to clean government, I'd make sure everything I did was beyond reproach, and that I looked forward to finding out what common interests I had with both the public and with elected officials.

They nodded and visibly relaxed.

"I'm in a hurry on the solar cell plant. How do I buy a bunch of land, fast, and build a factory on it?"

"You need cash in the bank, not just gold bullion. We can arrange a purchase, however. It would need to be handled by career officials in the Treasury department, legally, I think?"

The Treasury secretary spoke up. "Mr. Cooper. If you deliver some gold, anything over $1 million worth, to any federal reserve bank, say, the D.C. one, say, tomorrow morning at 9 am, and specify which US bank account you wish the money deposited in, we can do that. It's leftover from the 1930's, we can accept cash deposits in gold at a 'window', though no one really does that nowadays. And, it's not really a 'window', it's sort of a protected loading dock." He smiled since this was obviously an obscure, quaint thing to do and he was sort of showing off that he knew how it was done.

I smiled, "Excellent! I think I may do that. Please reach out to my lawyer where I can deposit several ONE-BILLION-DOLLAR gold 'ingots', as a practical matter of a street address and delivery method."

My smile was reserved and his eyebrows told me I made him nervous, but he said, "Okay."

"Second topic."

President Ortiz blinked. She probably thought she was done. "Yes?"

"I am willing to put a space station in orbit, of significant mass. Really, I want to, more than being willing. I need to have one. It doesn't have to be mass constrained, just construction-speed constrained - NASA has a way of taking a decade to decide whether to buy a hammer."

All of them except the Secretary of Transportation laughed.

"So, maybe something nearly already constructed, but rigged for zero gravity. I can lift almost anything. This is a good chance to get a giant space station for free."

She nodded, "I've talked with Margaret Davis, of NASA, about this. Seems you commissioned some Portuguese Azores people to build one first."

"Yep!" I laughed, "We had a great dinner together. I suggested it, as a point of pride for them. Global warming is affecting them, so, I thought, some kind of Earth observation platform. Anyway, I'm happy to help the U.S. put one up, too, a bigger one, certainly, just not FIRST. Azores one has to be first, I kinda promised them."