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too well by now still lay ahead of him, Emerson yawned again. Even the compliant morons either side of him in their fresh white denims—adults, but as figuratively wet behind the ears as he was literally himself—had begun shifting from one foot to another. “...that neither the United N a tions nor other governments on the face of our Depression-ravaged home planet possessed spaceships of its own or the resources necessary to build an atmospheric envelope and develop Pallas.”
    Because, Emerson finished the thought, there wasn’t anybody left to steal them from. At his age—the same as the Chief Administrator’s son, he’d heard—born on Earth in the western half of what were still techn i cally the United States, he didn’t know the words “precociously cynical.” He remembered secondhand his grandparents’ tales of dirty Asian pol i tics before, during, and after the war in Vietnam: life had been cheap, liberty a joke, the pursuit of happiness a privilege reserved to politicians and their families who did whatever they wished with ordinary people and then—the only difference democracy had ever made—went through the motions of justifying it afterward. Nor, according to what he’d learned bit by bit from his highly apolitical parents, had it been much different in the gerrymandered satrapies of Los Angeles. And Pallas was only smaller and farther away.
    “Instead”—the Chief Administrator’s petulance came clearly over the public address system—“Two Lions’s ultrareactionary founder, William Wilde Curringer, the infamous South African trillionaire polluter and exploiter, was able to use his obscene wealth to foist Mirelle Stein’s s o cially regressive ‘Hyperdemocratic Covenant’ on anyone who wished to pioneer this asteroid. As if he hadn’t already inflicted enough damage on the fragile biosphere and the political ambience of Earth.”
    The political ambience of Earth. Seeing his fellow workers in the long white rows around him taking it all in, Emerson shook his head in disb e lief. He always felt embarrassed for them, and it wasn’t a feeling he liked. His grandparents had been “boat people”—among millions of political and economic refugees who’d escaped from war-shattered, Commu n ist-controlled Southeast Asia in the latter part of the last century. They’d been among the fortunate thousands who’d actually made it to the promised land of opportunity in America—only to find that most avenues to personal betterment they’d looked forward to had been barred decades earlier by a tangle of arbitrary rules and regulations, as well as by long-established attitudes and practices which discriminated against Asians.
    Life had been better in California than in Vietnam or Cambodia, or at least more secure, and their standard of living undeniably higher. In the end, they’d swallowed their disappointment and settled down to become the most unquestioning Americans they could. It wasn’t always easy. Each day, it seemed, another law was passed to impoverish and diminish them, punishing them for whatever success they achieved and rewarding their less competent and industrious neighbors.
    Another wave of itching swept his body. He resisted with inadequate, invisible twitches set to the tune of a growling stomach. One of the l a borers beside him smirked.
    A generation later, the refugees’ American children, Emerson’s pa r ents, thrilled by rumors leaking past the biased mass media of an open, market-oriented society being built among the asteroids, had believed the Curringer Trust’s advertisements which were saturating TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines—“TO PALLAS, FOR THE OPPORT U NITY OF A LIFETIME! TO PALLAS, FOR A LIFETIME OF O P PORTUNITY!”—embellished by promises and reassurances from thousands of unemployed social workers hired to recruit exclusively for the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project.
    The only means of getting there they could afford, however, was under UN