DOSSIER: CARTER NELSON MCCLINTOCK
From those to whom much is given, much is expected. Carter McClintock had heard that old saw all his life, and he hated it.
The McClintock clan had made its fortune originally in whaling. During the Civil War, when President Lincoln created the National Academy of Sciences, a McClintock was named to its directing committee. He was clever enough to invest in railroads, and his son was even cleverer: he got the family out of railroads and into chemicals.
McClintock money helped to finance the Spanish-American War, and the family profited greatly from the growth of the munitions industry. World War I was a bonanza. By then, one of the McClintock boys was backing the fledgling aviation industry. While barnstormers and explorers were killing themselves pushing the envelope of aviation technology, McClintock investments financed the fledgling commercial airlines.
One of the McClintocks lost billions when the dot-com bubble burst in the 1990s, but his brothers and cousins bailed him out with money they had made in energy, transportation, and real estate.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, it was a McClintock partnership with the Masterson family that allowed the ill-starred Masterson clan to make commercial spaceflight profitable.
The onset of the catastrophic climate shift that wrecked the lives of hundreds of millions brought new opportunity for the family. Carter McClintock’s father quoted Andrew Carnegie’s dictum, “It’s a valuable citizen who has money during a panic,” as he poured billions into nuclear fusion power generation and solar-power satellites.
Young Carter was more interested in fine art than finance. He raised funds to protect the city of Venice from being inundated by the rising Adriatic Sea. He salvaged the Acropolis reclamation projection when the European Union reneged on its commitment because of all the other demands on its resources, stretched to the breaking point by the hordes of refugees fleeing their flooded homelands. Almost singlehandedly, he saved the ancient temples of Cambodia from the mobs of squatters who had moved into them.
Carter had no interest in space. The activities of high-tech nerds in strange and dangerous places bored him—or so he told himself. Actually, those strange and dangerous places frightened him. Floating around in weightlessness? Walking on the dead and deadly surface of the Moon? Spending months in a coffinlike spacecraft heading to Mars? No, thank you. Carter preferred Earth, battered by the greenhouse shift though it may be.
Inevitably, he clashed with his father. “Space is where the action is, boy,” the elder McClintock insisted. “It’s the frontier now, and the frontier is where new fortunes are made.”
Carter was quite content with the family’s existing fortune. He had no desire to enlarge it. Let his father and brothers see to that. He wanted to spend the family’s money on worthy causes. He wanted to be admired by the people who meant something to him: people of status, of taste, of cultivation.
Yet his father persisted. When Professor Jason Uhlrich, of Selene University, visited Philadelphia as part of his effort to raise money for his cherished Farside Observatory project, the elder McClintock invited the abstemious professor into his home for a quiet little dinner and chat.
At first, Uhlrich struck Carter McClintock as a man of the Old World: cultured, well mannered, obsequious in the presence of enormous wealth. But once the astronomer began to talk about his dream of an observatory on the Moon, Carter saw that the man was just another techie fanatic, so narrowly focused on his arcane goal that nothing else mattered to him.
Yet Carter’s father was fascinated by Uhlrich and his hope of beating the IAA to be the first to acquire visual imagery of New Earth. To Carter’s stunned consternation, his father suggested that he might help finance the observatory with funds from the McClintock Trust.
“Why?” Carter asked his father, once Professor Uhlrich had finished bowing and scraping and had left their home. “Why on Earth would you—”
“It’s not on Earth,” his father said, beaming happily from behind his thick gray moustache. “It’s on the Moon. The far side of the Moon, at that.”
“Ridiculous,” Carter groused.
“You won’t think so after you’ve been up there for a while.”
“Me!” Carter fairly screeched. “Never!”
“I want you to look out for our interests up there,” his father insisted. “See if this observatory the professor wants to build is really worth investing in.”
“I won’t go.”
“You will, if you want to keep receiving your allowance.”
Carter had seen his father twist other arms artfully. But this … “It’s extortion!” he bellowed.
His father smiled and nodded and lit a non-carcinogenic cigar. “Yes, it is a bit of extortion, isn’t it?” Then the old man’s expression hardened. “But Anita Halleck is heading the IAA’s astronomy project.”
“You’re not still angry at her,” McClintock said. But he could see that his father plainly was.
“Her and that bastard Randolph. She’s thrown the contract for assembling her telescopes in space to his Astro Manufacturing Corporation.”
“I didn’t know…”
His face hardening brutally, the elder McClintock promised, “I’m going to break that Aussie bitch if it’s the last thing I do. And you’re going to help me do it!”