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sergeant-at-arms scuffled with the person and ejected him. Ramis felt a surge of despair ripple through the gathered people. After watching the War on Earth, this was too much in one day. Ramis no longer felt proud to think of the part his parents had had in Sandovaal’s work. Dobo looked up, frowning at Sandovaal’s attitude.
    Magsaysay looked beaten. He held up his hands. His low voice barely projected over the rising din. “Quiet! Please allow Dr. Sandovaal to continue.” When the sounds ceased, the dato turned to his chief scientist. “Luis, are your numbers correct?”
    “The calculations are simple—you will find no errors. But I was talking about something much more important when you interrupted me. Several years ago we succeeded in producing a highly efficient feed substitute.
    “When you tasked me this morning with projecting the Aguinaldo’s food supply, you placed ridiculous restrictions on what we are capable of doing. You said ‘using our current supply of foodstuff and allowed for nothing else.’ That is nonsense. The answer is staring you in the face. Maybe a few hunger pangs will improve your intellect.” He cracked his knuckles in front of the microphone pad, making a sound like muffled gunshots.
    “Now, this second set of charts is also correct.” Dobo quickly changed graphs in the holotank.
    Sandovaal allowed the people to study the new curves in silence. He seemed to be forcing down a smug smile. The red and blue lines in the holotank held an uneasy balance, but never intersected. The supply of food remained above the consumption level.
    Magsaysay stared and frowned. “What does this show?”
    “What do you think? It is certainly not a new idea. A few minutes ago I tried to explain our only way to survive, but you were not interested. You wanted only the bottom line, so I gave it to you. By continuing our present course, wasting too much time and too many resources on inefficient crops, we will starve in a few months.
    “We must act immediately if we are going to save the Aguinaldo. As you can see from the curves, we have little margin for hesitation or error. If we decide quickly, we can survive—we can all survive.”
    “What is it we have to do?” Magsaysay asked. “Make it plain for those of us who are stupid.”
    Sandovaal turned to stare at him. He didn’t seem to notice the slight sarcasm in the dato’s tone. “Just look at the data! What do the curves tell you?
    “We must grow wall-kelp on a massive scale. Use all our available space. Cover the viewport end, the athletic fields, the grazing lands.”
    The senator from Cebu interrupted. Her accent was heavily Americanized, since she had grown up near the bases. “But wall-kelp tastes like water buffalo manure. And it damn well looks like it, too.”
    Ramis thought Dr. Sandovaal was going to jump over the table and strangle her. “I presume you have tasted both?” he asked.
    Over the snickers, the chief scientist shook his fist at the statistics displayed in the holotank. “We have the means to survive—for all people on the Aguinaldo. But we must act now. So what if the wall-kelp’s original purpose was animal feed? Will that make you lose sleep at night when you are starving? So what if it tastes worse than tofu or taro? It is protein, and we can produce it fast enough to meet our needs.”
    The chamber erupted into scattered shouting. Ramis found himself realizing with a half-smile that Dr. Sandovaal had done it again: shocked his audience, then rubbed their noses in the only possible answer.
    ***

Chapter 4
    ORBITECH 1—Day 1
    Fifteen minutes! Duncan McLaris fought with himself not to call up the time again. He sat in the plush viewing chair in the Orbitech 1 observation alcove. His five-year-old daughter Jessie squirmed and tugged her hand from his grip.
    “Not so hard, Diddy!”
    He had turned all the lights down so that the reddish glow did not interfere with the panorama of stars. Normally the ocean of space