Andy Jahns, one of Frank’s oldest corporate contacts, took him to dinner one night. Andy was angry with Chalmers, naturally, but tried to hide it, as the evening’s business consisted of the offer of a bribe thinly disguised, accompanied by threats thinly veiled. Business as usual, in other words. He offered Chalmers a position as head of a foundation which was being set up by the Earth-to-Mars transport consortium— the old aerospace industries, with their old Pentagon stash still sloshing around in their pockets. This new foundation would assist the consortium to make policy, and advise the U.N. on Mars-related matters. The position was to begin after his tenure as Secretary for Mars was over, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.
“It sounds marvelous,” Chalmers said. “I’m very interested indeed.” And over the course of the dinner he convinced Jahns he was sincere. Not only about taking the position in the foundation, but in working for the consortium immediately. This was work indeed, but he was good at it; he could see the suspicion slowly leak out of Jahns as the evening wore on. The weakness of businessmen was their belief that money was the point of the game; they worked 14-hour days in order to earn enough of it to buy cars with leather interiors, they thought it was a sensible recreation to play around with it in casinos— idiots, in short. But useful idiots. “I’ll do what I can,” Chalmers promised energetically, and outlined some strategies he would start to pursue at once. Talk to the Chinese about their need for land, get Congress back to the idea of a fair return on investments. Certainly. Make promises here and some of the pressure would subside— meanwhile the work could go on. There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.
So he went back to the conference table and carried on as before. The walk on the bridge, as it was now being called (others called it the Chalmers Shift), had broken the impasse. February 6th, 2057— Ls = 144, M-15: a red-letter date in the history of diplomacy. Now it was a matter of giving everyone else a piece, and fixing the actual numbers. As this process ground along Chalmers talked with all the first hundred observers there, reassuring them and checking their opinions. Sax, it turned out, was upset with him, because he thought that if the transnats ceased investment his terraforming would have to slow considerably. He saw all the arriving business as heat. And yet Ann too was upset with him, because a new treaty based on the shift would allow both emigration and investment, and she and the Reds had been hoping for a treaty that would give Mars a kind of world park status. That kind of disconnection from reality made him crazy. “I’ve just saved you fifty million Chinese immigrants,” he yelled at her, “and you bitch at me because I haven’t managed to send everyone back home. You bitch because I didn’t work a miracle and turn this rock into a holy shrine, right next door to a world that’s beginning to look like Calcutta on a bad day. Ann, Ann, Ann. What would you have done? What would you have done except stalk around glaring at every single fucking thing people said, and convincing everyone that you’re from Mars? Jesus Christ. Go out and play with your rocks and leave the politics to people who can think.”
“Remember what thinking is, Frank,” she said. Somehow he had made her smile for a second there, in the middle of his tirade. But she laid the same old wild glare on him before she left.
But Maya, now— Maya was pleased with him. He could feel her gaze on him when he talked in the public meetings. Millions of people watching, and he felt only that gaze. It made him angry. She was full of admiration for the bridge walk, and he told her only what she would be pleased to hear about the backstage compromises he was making in order to get it accepted. She began joining him every evening during the cocktail hour, approaching him when the first press of critics and supplicants had ebbed, standing by his side through the second and third waves, watching and easing things along with her laugh, and extricating him from time to time with reminders that they had to go out and eat. Then they would go out onto restaurant terraces under the stars, and eat and then sip coffee, looking over the orange tiles and roof gardens under one of the big mesa-topping tents, feeling the evening breeze just as if they were out in the open. The MarsFirst crowd had committed themselves to his plan, so he had most of the locals, and he had the home office, and those were the two most important single parties in the whole process, he judged, aside from the transnational leadership, which he could do little about. So it was only a matter of time before he would work the deal. As he would tell her, sometimes, late in the evenings when he had fallen a bit under her spell. Been calmed by her. “Between us we’ll get it done,” he would say as he looked up at the vivid stars in the sky, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.