He was full of a boundless energy that was infectious, at least to me. We began planning our escape from the moon. Tacitus had salted away what used to be called a mutual fund when he was a young man. By that point, he was extraordinarily wealthy on interest alone. Extraordinarily, as in “as wealthy as a small country.” No one knew of this on the moon, of course, until he revealed the fact to me and suggested that he and I do something with, as he put it, his “time loot.” What Tacitus wished to do was to found a university on Mars. We traveled there and did so—he being the first president, and I the first dean. The early years of Bradbury University were lean ones, let me assure you. This was in the days of the ECHO Alliance on Earth, as students of history will remember, and scholarship—particularly groundbreaking scholarship of the kind that Tacitus and I encouraged, was, to say the least, frowned upon by the powers that were.
