“Tell me what they’re doing.”

“Okay.” Bud pointed. “In the distance, you can see heavy-duty equipment moving those struts into place.”

“Those look like glass. The shield’s framework?”

“Yeah. Moon glass. We’re extending the structure in a spiral fashion around the Aurora, so that at any given moment we keep the center of gravity of the whole BDO right here at L1.”

She asked, “ ‘BDO’?”

Bud looked abashed. “The shield. We astronauts will have our acronyms.”

“And it stands for—”

“Big Dumb Object. Kind of an in-joke.”

Nicolaus rolled his eyes.

Bud said, “The struts are prefabricated on the Moon. But up here we’re manufacturing the skin itself—not the smart stuff coming from Earth; just the simple prismatic film that we’ll lay over most of the BDO’s area.”

He pointed to an astronaut wrestling with an ungainly piece of equipment. It looked as if she were extracting a huge balloon animal from a packing case. It was an almost comical sight, but Miriam took care to keep her face straight.

Bud said, “We use inflatable Mylar formers as molds. Designing the inflatable itself is an art. You have to figure the deployment dynamics. When you blow it up you don’t want it stretching out of shape; the Mylar is only as thick as freezer film. So we simulate backward, letting it deflate its way into the box, trying to make sure it will deploy smoothly without tangling itself up or stretching …”

She let him talk on. Bud was obviously proud of the work being performed here, meeting the challenges of an environment where the simplest task, such as blowing up a balloon, was full of unknowns. And anyhow, some space-buff piece of her was enjoying his talk of “deployment dynamics” and the rest.

“And when the mold is ready,” he was saying, pointing to another area of work, “we spray on the film.”

An astronaut supervised a clumsy-looking robot that rolled along a boom stretched out before a big inflatable disk. The robot was using a roller to smear a glassy surface on the Mylar face of the disk. The robot, working calmly, looked as if it were doing nothing more exotic than painting a wall.

“The Mylar comes up from the ground in solid blocks,” Bud said. “To make a film, you heat the stuff and force it out through hot nozzles, so you get jets of filament. You give this stuff a positive charge, and make the target surface a negative electrode, so the polymer filament is drawn out like taffy, becoming hundreds of times thinner in the process. You couldn’t do this on Earth; gravity would mess with everything. But here you just squirt it on, deflate the mold, and peel it off.”

“I want one of those robots to paint my flat.”

He laughed, but it was a bit forced, and she was painfully aware that everybody who came here must make a similar joke.

He said, “The robots and machines and processes are all very well. But the heart of this place is the people.” He glanced at her. “I come from a farming area in Iowa. As a kid I always liked to read stories of blue-collar guys just like my father and his buddies working in space, or on the Moon. Well, it can’t be that way, not for a long time. This is still space, a lethal environment, and the work we’re doing is highly skilled engineering. None of those grease monkeys out there is less qualified than a Ph.D. Blue collar they ain’t, I guess. But they have the heart—you know what I’m saying? They’re working twenty-four seven to get this job done, and some of them have been up here for years already. And without that heart none of this would get done, for all our gadgets.”

“I understand,” she said softly. “Colonel, I’m impressed. And reassured.”

So she was. Siobhan had briefed her well on Bud, but Miriam knew that Siobhan had developed a relationship with him, and one reason for coming here was to make her own assessment. She liked everything she saw about this blunt, can-do American aviator who had become so pivotal to the future of humankind; she was relieved that the project was in such evidently safe hands.

Not that her Eurasian pride would ever have allowed her to admit as much to President Alvarez.

She said, “I hope to meet some of your people later.”

“They will appreciate that.”

“So will I. I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a photo op for me; of course it is. But for better or worse this monstrous edifice will be my legacy. I was determined to come see it, and the people who are building it, before they kick me out.”

Bud nodded gravely. “We follow the polls too. I can’t believe how bad they are for you.” He smacked his fist against his palm. “They should send their damn questionnaires up here.”

She was touched. “It’s the way it goes, Colonel. The polls show people are broadly behind the shield project. But they are also suffering endless disruption because of all the wealth that is flowing off the planet and up here to this great orbiting sink of money. They want the shield, but they don’t like having to pay for it—and perhaps, beneath it all, they resent being faced with the threat of the sunstorm in the first place.”

Nicolaus grunted. “It is classic barroom psychology. When faced with bad news, after the denial comes the anger.”

Bud said, “So they need somebody to blame?”

“Something like that,” Miriam said. “Or perhaps they’re right. The shield will go on, whatever happens to me; we’ve gone too far to change direction now. But as for me—you know, Churchill lost an election right after winning the Second World War. The people judged he had done his job. Maybe my successor will do a better job of easing the day-to-day pain than I can.” And maybe, she wondered, the people sensed just how exhausted she was, how much this job had taken out of her—and how little she had left to give.

Nicolaus grunted. “You’re too philosophical, Miriam.”

“Yeah,” Bud growled. “What a dumb time to call an election! Maybe it should be postponed for a couple of years—”

“No,” she said firmly. “Oh, I suspect martial law will come to the cities before this is done. But democracy is our most important possession. If we throw it away when the going gets tough, we might never get it back—and then we’ll end up like the Chinese.”

Bud glanced sideways at Nicolaus, the furtive look of a man who had grown used to working under conditions of security. “Speaking of which—as you know we’re monitoring the Chinese from up here.”

“There have been more launches?”

“On a good day you can see them with the naked eye. You can’t hide the firing of a Long March booster. But no matter how we try, we can’t trace them after launch, by optical means, radar—we even tried bouncing laser beams off them.”

“Stealth technology?”

“We think so.”

It had been going on for a year: a massive and continuing program of space launches from China’s echoing interior, one huge mass after another hurled into the silence of space, their destination unknown. Miriam herself had been involved in efforts to figure out what was going on; the Chinese premier had deflected her probing without so much as raising a dyed eyebrow.

She said, “Anyhow it makes no difference to us.”

“Maybe,” Bud said. “But it pains me to think we’re laboring up here to save their skinny ungrateful butts too. Pardon my language.”

“You mustn’t think that way. Just remember, the mass of the people in China have little or no idea what their leaders are up to, and even less control. It’s them you are working for, not those gerontocrats in Beijing.”

He grinned. “I guess you’re right. You see, this is why you’d get my vote.”

“Sure I would …”

He pointed. “If you look up, you can see what it’s all about.”

She had to bend down to see.

There was the Earth. It was a blue lantern hanging directly opposite the position of the sun. Miriam was a million and a half kilometers from home, and from here the planet looked about the size of the Moon from Earth. And it was full, of course; Earth always was, as seen from here at L1, suspended between Earth and sun.