Read Online Pinball by Alan Seeger - Free Book Online Page A

space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” Steven smiled at that, for he recognized that Tokugawa had stolen the bulk of his speech from the famous proposal made by President Kennedy in 1961 that the U.S. land a man on the Moon and return him to Earth.
    He read on to discover that Tokugawa’s proposal had been taken to heart. A base had been established on the Jovian moon Europa in 2085, and from there, mankind had explored as far out as Pluto, which had been restored to full planetary status, in 2096, and reached the inner sector of the Kuiper Belt in 2115. Mining of the minor planets there had revolutionized the raw materials market on Earth as well as in the colonies.
    Steven sat back in the chair, his mind spinning in amazement.
     

Chapter 16
    Steven went back to the reference to AmerAsia and took a side link that brought up information on the governments of Earth; he found that the U.S. economy had rallied for a few years after the crisis of 2008-2010, but that in 2017, after the Republican presidential nominee, a near-unknown independent candidate named Richard Fannin, had succeeded Barack Obama in his bid for re-election, a near-total financial collapse shook the industrialized nations of the West. After several years of struggle and negotiation, during which the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China fell apart, the governments of the U.S., Japan, the newly reunified Korea and the Republic of Free China entered into an agreement in 2023 to form the United States of AmerAsia, a massive union with a population of over two billion people, dwarfing Europe’s estimated 750 million.
    During the same period of time, the European Union drafted a new constitution which made the member nations states in a European federation which was officially christened Europa Nova, but universally referred to simply as Europa, which produced more than a little confusion in many people’s minds when discussing the topic of colonizing the Jovian moon of the same name.
    He learned that many residents of the former United States of America had emigrated to South America, mainly Brazil, after the founding of AmerAsia. This was due in part to an increased amount of saber rattling by the Europeans, notably the European Prime Minister, Ricoletto Gianinni, who denounced the AmerAsian union as “an effort to undermine the security of the planet” and “a marriage born in Hell.” Rio de Janeiro had become a Mecca for expatriate Americans. Some had fled there out of dislike of the AmerAsian government, while others emigrated out of fear of a possible AmerAsian-European conflict, so much so that it was relatively rare to hear Portuguese spoken in the streets of Rio after 2025.
    Steven returned to the section on interstellar exploration and discovered that, in part, the vision set forth by the Star Trek TV series and films had come true; a sort of warp drive had indeed been invented, though by a corporate thinktank at General Electric Mitsubishi (GEM), not Trek ’s fictional Zefram Cochrane. Ironically, however, the first flight of a ship equipped with the revolutionary drive system took place on April 5, 2062, one year to the day prior to the date given for the first warp driven space flight in the fictional Trek universe.
    Unlike Trek ’s first contact story, however, humans did not make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization on that maiden voyage, nor, in fact, had they at all as of the publishing of the softpedia he was reading. He thought of blue-skinned Vraath, whom Randolph had pointed out to him as they walked down the main road, and smiled to himself. They’ll need to revise that one of these days, he thought. Space is a big place.
    Steven looked up and realized it was growing dark outside. He had mixed emotions about what to do next; he knew that the longer he stayed, the greater the possibility that an inordinate amount of time might have passed at home, but he was also incredibly