Corsi thrust the suifter back into Wagoner's hand with something more than mock fury. "That goes for you, and for nobody else," he added. "I wouldn't tell anybody else in government the best way to pound sand not unless the AAAS asked me to."

"I know you wouldn't, Seppi. That's part of our trouble. Thanks, anyhow." He swirled the brandy reflectively. "All right, then, tell me this: what's the matter with space flight?"

'The army," Corsi said promptly.

"Yes, but that's not all. Not by a long shot. Sure, the Army Space Service is graft ridden, shot through with jealousy and gone rigid in the brains. But it was far worse back in the days when a half dozen branches of government were working on space flight at the same time the weather bureau, the navy, your bureau, the air force and so on. I've seen some documents dating back that far. The Earth Satellite Program was announced in 1944 by Stuart Symington; we didn't actually get a manned vehicle up there until 1962, after the army was given full jurisdiction. They couldn't even get the damned thing off the drawing boards; every rear admiral insisted that the plans include a parking place for his pet launch. At least now we have space flight.

"But there's something far more radically wrong now. If space flight were still a live proposition, by now some of it would have been taken away from the army again. There'd be some merchant shipping maybe; or even small passenger lines for a luxury trade, for the kind of people who'll go in uncomfortable ways to unlivable places just because it's horribly expensive." He chuckled heavily. "Like foxhunting in England a hundred years ago; wasn't it Oscar Wilde who called it 'the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable'?"

"Isn't it still a little early for that?" Corsi said.

"In 2013? I don't think so. But if I'm rushing us on that one point, I can mention others. Why have there been no major exploratory expeditions for the past fifteen years? I should have thought that as soon as the tenth planet, Proserpine, was discovered some university or foundation would have wanted to go there. It has a big fat moon that would make a fine base, no weather exists at those ternperatures, there's no sun in the sky out there to louse up photographic plates it's only another zero-magnitude star and so on. That kind of thing used to be meat and drink to prisate explorers. Given a millionaire with a thirst for science, like old Hale, and a sturdy organizer with a little grandstand in him a Byrd type--and we should have had a Proserpine Two station long ago. Yet space has been dead since Titan Station was set up in 1981. Why?"

He watched the flames for a moment.

"Then," he said, "there's the whole question of invention in the field. It's stopped, Seppi. Stopped cold."

Corsi said: "I seem to remember a paper from the boys on Titan not so long ago"