laced it
alongside Brad, and folded his long frame onto it
facing the view tank.

"Just so you know, Brad," he said gently, bridging
the silence between them, "those of us who work in
Strategic Penetrations carry no formal rank. If we
did, yours would be the equivalent of a Lieutenant
Commander in the United Inner Planetary System
Space Force. Mine would be a notch or so above."

He shifted his frame about and bent a long leg
to bring his foot up to the lower rung. His tone
shifted into neutral. Cool.

"My friends call me Ram. OK?"

Brad nodded, eyeing him. Ram drew back a bit
and contemplated the control in his grasp. After a
moment he stroked the keys. A rainbow of colors
swirled and drifted off, replaced by an ash-gray
sphere. Planet Pluto spread across half the tank
with its flat stretches of methane frost broken
by low, jagged chasms, hillocks and craters. Charon
and the Slingshot Logistics Depot hung off near
the edge of the tank's flattened top.

Brad glanced at the scene, and back to Ram.

"Brad," Ram spoke slowly, quietly, "a trite
expression, repeated all too often during our
history, is 'humankind now faces its greatest
crisis'. The statement has been declared so often
across the ages that it's lost meaning, obviously
because it changes in context and perception
from one event, century or millennium to the
next. I suppose those who said it, believed it.
Nevertheless, even if the term 'crisis' never
really applied in the past, it does in these times
for humankind's destiny.

"The deficits in our nonrenewable assets, and the
many other natural substances we depend on, if
not resolved within the next few centuries, could
force us back into caves, and I don't use that word
'figuratively'. Ceramics, composites, and other
substitutes are fine as far as they go, but they
do only a tiny part of the job.

"We'll soon be running short of substitutes for
our substitutes. Building bigger and better colonies
in space over the past thousand years or so has
consumed far more of our resources than expected.
Earth is almost barren and many space colonies in
both regions can no longer meet existing needs
fromtheir regions, let alone those of the future.

"In short, our dispersed civilizations must have
access to sources for minerals and other industrial
substances, not only now but in perpetuity, in order
to survive and evolve. Our species isn't built to
accept inactivity or slipping backward. If we don