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Dakota, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Wyoming, and was the major stockholder in a fabulous new racetrack in Montana.
    And when the dust had cleared five years later, he was no longer a millionaire, or even a multimillionaire, but had risen to the level of billionaire, and figured to amass his second billion in less than a year.
    He looked around again, applying the same principle, and tried to determine where they weren’t hitting ’em that year. The landscape was covered with enterprises and innovations, and for the first time, he couldn’t spot his next move.
    Until he looked
up
.
    Then he knew. There was the biggest untouched target of all. Men had walked on it in 1969, and the stars were ours. A colony on the Moon by 1990, on Mars by 2010, then the moons of Jupiter, and surely by 2030 we’d have found a way around Einstein’s theory and would be on our way
rapidly
to the stars.
    Science said it couldn’t be done, that there were laws that governed the universe—but Blackstone knew he came from a race of lawbreakers. Tell a man something can’t be done, and he’ll set about proving you wrong out of sheer cussedness.
    Mars, the outer planets’ satellites, the Oort Cloud, the stars, we’d reach them all. But first, the Moon. The government never had any interest in it, except for reaching it before the Russians did. We’d turned our backs on it a long time ago, and it was time to get that colony built. There’d be a mining section, and a low-grav hospital for heart patients (he’d figure out how to get them there, all in good time), and an astronomical observatory, and a refueling point for trips to Mars, and maybe Venus if he could develop space suits that could withstand the heat. Then on to Io and Europa and Ganymede.
    And because he knew that this was his last great business venture, because he knew he would spend the rest of his life on it, Blackstone determined not to be just a figurehead but to learn it from the ground up. He spent time in the Public Relations Department, acquired some basic lab skills, even underwent training as an astronaut (though he hated the word and wanted his own term for it, preferably something that incorporated the word
Bucky
or
Blackstone
).
    He even considered running for office on a platform of going back into space. Name recognition was no problem; he was a handsome, self-made billionaire, and he and his two ex-wives, both as eye-catching as Miss 42, were featured every week in the supermarket tabloids. But as a senator, he’d be one of one hundred, and he would have to convince fifty very independent—and often very foolish—men and women to vote with him, then hope the House could find 218 members in agreement, and further hope that the president didn’t veto whatever initiative he’d launched. He could run for president, of course, and he was sure he could win, but it would take three or four years of organizing and money-raising. He didn’t want to take three years away from the Moon to organize a political campaign, and while he could pay for the campaign out of his pocket, he didn’t want anyone saying that he bought the presidency.
    So, instead of becoming a member of the government, he decided that his best course of action was to
rival
the government, to do what it was too broke or too reluctant or too timid to do, to go back to the Moon and claim it for Blackstone Enterprises (and, incidentally, for the United States of America).
    At first, the Congress ignored him, and the press made fun of his ambitious new project. That lasted about six months, until his first successful suborbital flight. By the time a year had passed, a Blackstone ship had made an orbital flight—after all, the technology had existed for half a century—and suddenly Congress decided that he meant business and was in dire need of congressional oversight.
    He decided otherwise, only to find himself the object of a scare campaign. He wanted to put missiles on the Moon and fire them at