Free Boundary 1: Boundary by Eric Flint, Ryk Spoor Page A

with people like A.J. anyway, much less Joe. The problem was that the kind of people they'd get to provide them with the sort of financial backing they needed usually did not look at the world the way they did. A.J. might be self-centered in terms of his interests and his personal focus, but he wasn't a damn bean counter. Money, as such, ranked so far down on his list of priorities that it barely made the list at all—and then, only as an afterthought. Allowing for his more practical nature, the same was true of Joe.

    Jackie doubted that the Ares Project's fund-raising scheme would really work, in any event. She knew Ares had picked up enough financial backing over and above the prize money to keep their operations running—albeit always on a shoestring budget. But she thought their assessment that a successful landing on Mars would start unraveling almost three-quarters of a century's worth of international treaties forbidding the private exploitation of Antarctica and extraterrestrial bodies was . . .

    The proverbial pie in the sky. If anything, she thought it was more likely that the treaties would be strengthened. Nor could she really envision any government—certainly not ones as strong as the United States or China or the European confederation—allowing any private enterprise to build spacecraft which, push comes to shove, could serve as platforms for weapons of mass destruction.

    But, she reminded herself again, there was no reason to turn the subject into a loud argument over this particular meal. And who knew? When the dust all settled, they might wind up with an immensely complicated mixture of public and private methods. It had happened before, plenty of times. The kind of compromise that satisfied nobody, but didn't create enough resentment for anybody to really want to pick a fight over.

    A.J. still seemed to be a bit sullen. But Joe apparently shared Jackie's sentiment.

    "Enough of that," he said, pushing away his plate but obviously referring back to the earlier dispute. "Come one, Jackie, let's get to the good stuff. Tell us what it was like to test a NERVA rocket!"

     

Chapter 9

    Helen gritted her teeth, willing herself to keep still in her chair. It helped that she had clamped both hands on the armrests to make sure she didn't move. If she let go of the armrests, she'd probably leap straight over the three rows of seats ahead of her and strangle Dr. Alexander Pinchuk with her bare hands.

    Helen had first encountered Dr. Pinchuk in her second semester as a graduate student. He'd been a visiting professor. Within a month, she had come to detest the man. Nothing in the years that came after, as she encountered Dr. Pinchuk time and time again— either personally at conferences or indirectly in professional journals—had changed her opinion except to deepen it.

    Wine improved with age. Dr. Pinchuk did not. The sarcastic nickname he'd been given by graduate students— Alexander the Great —had derived from the man's egotism. A decade and a half later, coming toward the end of a career that had never been very distinguished, Pinchuk was as sour as vinegar.

     

    Dr. Myrtle Fischer, an old classmate from those graduate student days, had hinted to Helen that she might want to attend Pinchuk's talk at the conference. Not that Helen had really needed the hint, given the title of the talk.

    Frauds, Fakes, and Mistakes: An Overview of Questionable and Falsified Paleontological Evidence and Methods.

    Leaving aside Helen's personal dislike for Pinchuk—she'd spent some considerable time avoiding him over the past many years; said avoidances including one outright rejection of a pass—she'd also taken him to task in several articles and at least one conference for sloppy fieldwork, something that he'd been perennially guilty of.

    Pinchuk, among other things, had a nasty streak. He not only kept grudges, he fed them and bred them.

    At first, the presentation seemed a good review of the history of the