Morrison shook his head. “No public assistance, no welfare, nothing like that. The program says the best way to get Wyoming back on its feet is to start a heavy launch facility. Compete with NASA for satellite launches, even manned exploration if we want to.” Brannon would have laughed if he didn’t feel so let down. Some part of him had been hoping for a miracle, hoping that this kid actually had something. But a space program? That was a pie-in-the-sky idea if he’d ever heard one. “That’s not a public feeding trough?” he asked. “Where’s the infrastructure going to come from? Who’s going to bankroll the research and development? NASA isn’t going to just give us the plans for the shuttle, you know.”
“The shuttle is obsolete,” Morrison said. “Single stage to orbit is the way to go, and there are half a dozen companies that’ve already done the R&D who are just looking for a place to put their launch site. Wyoming is perfect. Lots of open space, lots of energy, and lots of skilled labor with an overwhelmingly positive attitude about developing a new frontier. All we need is somebody to set it in motion. And the program says whoever comes up with the idea first will be governor come November.”
“Does it?” Brannon said. A space program. Sounded like a nutty idea to him. Maybe just nutty enough. Lord knows, it would take something crazy to fix his campaign.
He spent the next week checking out the feasibility of it. He wasn’t about to get behind something like this without knowing what he was getting into. But the more he learned about it, the better he liked it. Wyoming was a perfect place for a heavy launch center. It had more coal and oil reserves than most of the rest of the country combined, which meant plenty of energy to make rocket fuel with. It had plenty of open space to drop aborted launches into, and plenty of people who were used to big projects and would jump at the chance to take high-paying rocket jobs. About the only problem that Brannon could see was the high latitude, which would make equatorial orbits more expensive than launching from Florida. Not prohibitively so, however, and Brannon reminded himself that the Russians had learned to work around a worse latitude problem with their main spaceport in Baikonur. Morrison was right: it could work.
He was grinning ear-to-ear at the press conference. That played almost as well on the evening news as the shocked expressions of his opponents, who were caught flat-footed by his sudden proposal.
“There’s another side to this program, you know,” Morrison told him a few months later. Brannon hadn’t seen him much since the election; they had told the public about the forecasting program and Morrison was spending all his time at Bighorn Bell preparing it for commercial release.
“What other side?” Brannon asked, hardly looking up from his desk. He was busy with contractors’ reports and EPA reports for the new launch complex in Rock Springs. Things were moving fester than he had anticipated; it actually looked like they might launch their,first payload within three years.
“It can tell you what else we’re capable of. Wyoming doesn’t have to be a one-trick state, you know. Next election, we can offer the public a choice of growth options to choose from.”
“What kind of growth options?” Brannon asked. He had gotten to know Morrison a bit in the last few months; he wouldn’t have brought the subject up unless he’d already run the simulations.
Morrison smiled, took a sheet of paper from his hind pocket, and unfolded it. “Well, there’s revamping the park system, for starters. We’re already big on tourism, but we could do a lot better if we wanted to. Or there’s cultural expansion; theaters and museums and such for our own enjoyment and to attract a higher income class of immigrants. Or there’s building a wall around the state to keep everyone out. That turns out to be a pretty good short-term investment as far as jobs go, but I can show you why it’s bad in the long term.”
Brannon laughed. “Good thing. That’s what most Wyoming people would vote for if they thought they could get away with it.”
“True enough. There’s another couple of options we probably shouldn’t mention for the same reason, but we’ve got a dozen good solid plans to choose from. We could lay them all out for people to consider, then in a year or two have a special vote, let people decide the direction the state goes in the next decade or two.”
“The next decade or two? You can’t plan that far out, can you?”
“Only for Wyoming, where we’ve got the database. And the population here is just about optimum for the forecasting program. But I keep refining it, and Bighorn Bell is selling the program to other states, so pretty soon we’ll be able to do it for the whole country. When we get everything all coordinated, we could probably plan fifty years ahead.”
“Good God, you’re serious, aren’t you?” Brannon sat up in his chair and looked straight at Morrison.
“As serious as taxes, which, by the way, we can lower another 2 percent starting next fiscal year.”
“How?”
“Increased efficiency. Now that we’ve got a real direction, we’re not wasting so much money shuffling paper around trying to look busy for the voters.”
Brannon waved at the mountain of reports on his desk. “You mean this morass of paperwork is more efficient than my predecessor’s?”
“By a long margin.”
“Well I’ll be damned. All right, then. Let’s see what happens if we turn the crank again.”
What he didn’t expect was that the next Wyoming gubernatorial race would polarize the candidates along issues rather than party lines. It was obvious when he stopped to think about it; after four years of familiarity with the forecasting program, people weren’t going to listen to promises anymore. This time the people were voting for what they wanted, not who, and trusting the program to provide the details of how the elected official achieved it.
Twenty-twenty hindsight, Brannon thought. He should have seen it happening, but he was only looking ahead these days. To his presidential campaign.
He called his party the Futurians, and he ran on a one-plank platform: Let the people decide where the country was going, and he would be the manager.
His opponents, both Democrat and Republican, tried to attack him as a man without the strength of his own convictions, willing to change his agenda at the whim of the polls, but Brannon merely ran a ten-second spot on every TV network, saying, “I admire my opponents for their honesty in stating that they won’t listen to public opinion.” They never recovered from that ad. Six months later he walked away with the election, and began the process of paying off America’s credit card bill.
After that, with the help of Morrison’s program, he put a chicken in every pot, a multimedia station in every home, and a car in every garage. An electric one, after he ordered the defense industry to declassify the electron sieve.
All the same, he had more competition for re-election. The career politicos had learned their lesson, and were espousing their own forecasting programs, which they claimed were better than Brannon’s—which was why they disagreed with his over what was required to accomplish the public’s stated goals. Brannon stuck by Morrison’s original program, which had been continuously refined since the beginning, but he learned the hard way that public loyalty is much more fickle than the private variety. When the Republican candidate promised to eliminate taxes completely without cutting any social programs, he got nearly 80 percent of the vote.
The depression lasted only three years, thanks to an emergency session of Congress and a special election that reinstated Brannon as president. On the night of his return, he lit a bonfire on the south lawn and tossed a disk containing the Republican version of the forecasting program into the flames.