On Hold

McCoy's death was also the death of the renewed space program. Building up from not away from the Earth was the way to solve over-population. There was still plenty minerals on the ocean floor, that being what could not already be synthisised by AL_CHEM.

Space was a pipe dream. And history will remember McCoy as a paranoid madman, and rightly so. A tyrant, not a visionary, who put both rockets and tax through the stratosphere. A man with a dramatic sense of self-importance but not a single iota of financial acumen.

The Tenants' Authorities found Gibbs' decomposing body after two weeks. They fumigated his quarters and moved another tenant in a week later. Gibbs believed in heaven. He had been there. He believed in eternal life. It exists.

The Santa Maria remains in orbit around the globe, a shinny abandoned can, deemed too battered to salvage. But it still hovers overhead, a Silver Eagle, a radiant star, a vessel of hope.

When young star-struck children look skyward and wonder they are under its watchful eye, as it waits for of the torch of human endeavour to once again be lit.

A torch that was never fully extinguished -simply put On Hold.