When I got the Brigham Young back to Titan, the place was a mess. The Peter Principle had first applied with a vengeance, then exploded. (That’s a 20th-century concept, originally almost a joke, that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence”.) The top people at Titan would have been fine running an obscure base with a couple hundred, maybe even a few hundred, dedicated scientists and support people. But neither the leaders of the base nor the Earth government agencies funding it were prepared to handle first a thousand or so assorted scientists, support people, explorers, and engineers, who were then followed by thousands more of entrepreneurs, lawyers, merchants, and families with children, let alone the occasional con artists, plus prostitutes and madams of all genders, and missionaries—both secular and religious—dedicated to saving everyone from everything. Worse, they didn’t understand what seemed obvious to many newcomers, that being the de facto primary base for HX research meant building the population up to fifty thousand or a hundred thousand people, and a whole lot more associated infrastructure.
I still cringe at the frustration I felt upon that return. I knew I was no longer going to be a very rich man but an enormously rich man, what my pioneer ancestors would have called “filthy rich”… as soon as I could get my ship unloaded. But there was a six-month queue at the docking facilities! I seriously contemplated cutting bait on Titan at that point and heading inward for some Belt base that had room. But instead I had patience and went back into talking mode—Hulk-2 was going to be big, and Titan really was the right place to base from.
First thing after my return to Titan, I started brokering some peace between the Titan higher-ups and the boomtowner newcomers. At that time nobody arguing their pet method for growing Titan—and there were many—had clearly thought through the implications for HX exploration and, more important, exploitation. I pushed and needled all sorts of people, and within six weeks we came up with a badly needed Preliminary Master Plan for Titan’s growth, what everyone called “the Preliminary”. It was Earth-years later before a fully approved Final Master Plan appeared. In the meantime, the Preliminary changed in some way as often as every week, but it was something we could all refer to, to see what was currently needed and currently forecast, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
One element of the Preliminary that never changed was the name for where we were all living: Titan Colony.
Second, I helped in organizing the businesses that serviced the HX trade in various ways and in starting new ones. Ships needed to be outfitted for HX exploring and to be loaded and unloaded—promptly! Arriving HX materials needed to be warehoused and researched. Both the materials and the research findings needed to be cataloged and stored in ways useful to those doing more exploring and/or wanting to make some money off of this wondrous stuff.
Making money for myself and others and giving credit where credit was due were critical. I worked on both constantly. Exploiting HX technology was hugely profitable but hugely risky: Accidents happened, and that got property damaged and people maimed or killed.
The third big thing I did back then was to get everyone aware of, and to buy into, a principle I was adamant on: That lawyerism over those accidents shouldn’t slow down exploitation. Sure, reasonable precautions were essential, but they weren’t the only thing or even the most important.
This last one was a hard fight all the way. Partly in support of that fight, we put up that big sign at the space port entrance that says:
Welcome to Titan
Shit Happens Here
Yeah, I’m responsible for it. The “Shit Happens Here” part used some of the then-new HX technology to demonstrate what’s now a major cryptology component around the Solar System, an unrecordable display format. The human eye can process the display just fine as it moves by, but no camera or other video device can make a decent recording. You get either static, in the first crude implementations, or in later refinements an unrelated image. We quickly replaced the original static with the least Titan-relevant image we could think of, a man and woman sunbathing on a beach. Nowadays, they wave at you.
I have no idea how many tourists have taken pictures, or what proportion already knew what they’d get, either from the articles and guidebooks or from actually checking the preview in their device.
That sign we put up as a technological “teaser” has stayed long past that purpose, because its slogan meshes so well with Titan culture. Things do happen here, both good and bad. People make billions, people change how the whole Solar System lives, people die here from playing with stuff trying to find out what it does.
In those early days, I quickly saw what needed to be done. With each cargo that was dropped off and examined, I could see what changes needed to be made to the plan. With each load of new settlers coming from the inner worlds, I could see what they needed to be doing. What felt kind of weird was that while those around me could see what I saw after I talked about it, left to do their own thinking most of them were a bit slower and their ideas often missed part of the big picture. That made me useful to the colony, and my companies being in the right places at the right times made me even richer than I was.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make mistakes, and sometimes they were big ones. But I did enough right that people mostly remember my right choices, not my wrong ones. That’s why they’ve been honoring me at the Inaugural celebration dinner.