There had been no question of Sevigny and Maura staying together. He helps her to make her escape and covers her tracks. Then, he will:
help the authorities to round up (some of) the bad guys;
enjoy a well-earned rest in a Canadian forest preserve;
happily return to his work in the Lunar air mines.
In this case, the happy ending is preservation of a beneficial and desirable status quo.
But what of cases where the status quo is undesirable or at best a stopgap?
"'It can't go on this way forever. The present system is frankly meant as a stopgap.'"
-"License," p. 159.
At The End Of "License"
Rheinbogen will:
stop his summer job as a gangster;
work as a psychodynamicist in one of Dulac's industries;
thus, stay in touch with Dulac's daughter, Marie;
research psychodynamics to find a longer term solution for society.
In this case, the happy ending is going beyond the status quo, first personally, then globally.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
More precisely Sevigny goes back to working on a beneficial and desirable terraforming project. I still recall how one engineer to whom I quoted the relevant parts of "Bedfellows" actually said he thought such a terraforming of the Moon was doable!
More often than not, humans being what we are, stopgaps are the best we can hope for, buying time for something better to arise.
Ad astra! Sean
I recall a short story in Analog, in which a comet large enough to cause the extinction of much life on earth was on a collision course with earth. An expedition was sent to divert it. A faction within the expedition instead made sure it collided with the moon to give the moon an atmosphere and so make the moon better for humans to live on than it is.
The backstory has space travel being rather stagnant and the expedition using much of what space travel capability exists, so that faction wants a habitable moon to jumpstart a revived space program.
Kaor, Jim!
Now that's interesting! Do you remember the title of the story and the author's name? And would or could colliding such an extinction level asteroid onto the Moon make it more habitable for humans?
I'm very glad Elon Musk has jump started for real a far too long stagnant space program!
Ad astra! Sean
Long-term planning doesn't work. You just try to keep things going.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Which makes me think, again, that "stopgaps" are often the best we can hope for.
Ad astra! Sean
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