The Venus Belt by L. Neil Smith Page B

“I’ve been staring at that blasted rock out there half an hour, trying to figure out what’s wrong. Koko, real planets don’t have long i tude and latitude lines!” I held a short cigar stub near an ash tray and let the suction carry it away.
    She giggled. “Yeah, that’s what it looks like. Panels in the atmospheric envelope, that’s all.” A pretzel got away from her. She snagged it from the air and chomped it down.
    “You mean there’s a big plastic bag around the entire—”
    “And every section is just one enormous molecule, holding in the air and straining out excess ultraviolet. Icarus would bump his head long b e fore his wax started to soften.” The Bonaventura slowly spiraled around the mini a ture globe, aiming for Gunter’s Landing on the north pole, the barten d ers spending a final precious hour nailing down anything that was floating loose.
    Ceres is green enough to satisfy her mythological namesake, inte r rupted everywhere by thousands of perfectly circular lakes, a legacy of countless prehistoric collisions. At least I hoped they were prehistoric. As the ship swung inward toward the planetoid, it lit up like a titanic Jap a nese lantern, the “night” side hardly an f-stop darker. I’d been keeping half an eye on the Telecom screen, where Captain Spoonbill was giving a guided tour. Now the electronic point of view swiveled from the asteroid to a dozen giant thin-film plastic mirrors hanging in orbit, trained on the surface below.
    Book-type facts don’t do it for me, somehow. I knew the miniplanet was a “mere” six hundred and twenty miles in diameter, though there was nothing out the window to give me any real perspective. The Gigacom’s built-in Encyclopedia of North America states that Ceres has about the same surface area as India—a hell of a lot of real estate most astronomers back in the States are overlooking as “insignificant.”
    The acceleration warning hooted and the planetoid dipped crazily, se t ting below the windowframe. Then it rose again all around us, the Telecom displaying an enormous, brightly lighted bull’s-eye beneath the ship. There was a bump .
    We were down.
    ***
    Ceres is a big, round refutation to the argument that massive projects like dams or highways are too big for little old private enterprise (funny how the Post Office always has to enforce its “natural” monopoly at gu n point), or that some “necessary” services can’t easily be denied to those unwilling to pay and therefore (this is where the steamroller was headed all along, of course) they should be provided “free” by the State.
    Hell, American corporations—many of which gross better yearly than three-quarters of the Duck Soup republics in the U.N.—could stack the py r amids up all over again; Confederate companies run smaller, and they do build dams and highways—though they aren’t free to steal the wher e withal, an ethical consideration that somehow misses registering on a d vocates of government construction.
    We have only one “telephone” at home, but it receives calls from tho u sands of companies, and delivers the mail, too; parcels arrive via a pneuma t ic system Edward Bellamy would envy. Cheyenne Ridge controls the weat h er as a by-product of the highly competitive po w er-generation business, strictly for PR. If you don’t like the flavor they serve, you can either move or have your own climate dropped in—as long as you don’t clutter up the neig h bors’ lawns.
    Free riders? Well, suppose you want a streetlight: you either pay for it yourself or get the neighbors to chip in. If one or two surly curmudgeons refuse, well, what’s more important, forcing old man Carruthers to cough up his negligible share, or getting the streetlight you wanted? Most likely the old bastard’ll demand you keep your crummy photons off his prope r ty!
    Ceres was developed by the same outfit that runs the Bonaventura : Ha r riman, Taggart & Hill. In a daring stroke of