usual, by her internal troubles. Africa has been kept backward. Australia is the center of the surviving British, and may one day become an important nation—but it will take time. South America, however, is intact, and looks to me to be the natural focus of world power in the immediate future; and that means either Brazil, or the Argentine. I should be very much surprised indeed if it were to turn out to be Argentina. So we shall go to Brazil."
To Brazil, then, he went, offering his technical knowledge. Almost immediately he was put in charge of the then rudimentary Space Division of the Brazilian Skyforce to organize the annexation of the battered Satellites, dispatch provision-missiles to the British Moon Station, and then to direct its relief, the rescue of its company—including his father—and its annexation, together with that of the entire Lunar Territory, to the Estados Unidos do Brasil.
The cost of this enterprise, particularly at such a time, was considerable, but it proved to be well justified. Prestige has varied sources. In spite of the fact that the Moon Stations and the Satellites had exerted an infinitesimal, and almost self-cancelling, effect upon the Northern War, the knowledge that they were now entirely in Brazilian hands—and perhaps the thought that whenever the moon rose one was being overlooked from Brazilian territory—undoubtedly made a useful contribution to the ascendancy of the Brasilieros at a time when the disordered remnant of the world was searching for a new center of gravity.
Once he had the space project well in hand, my grandfather, though not yet a Brazilian citizen, was given the leadership of a mission to British Guiana, where he pointed out the advantages that an amputated colony would derive from integration, on terms of full equality of citizenship, with a powerful neighbor. The ex-colony, already uneasily conscious of pressure on its western border from Venezuela, accepted the offer. A few months later, Surinam and French Guiana followed its example; and the Caribbean Federation signed a treaty of friendship with Brazil. In Venezuela, the government, bereft of North American support and markets, fell to a short, sharp revolution whose leaders also elected for integration with Brazil. Columbia, Ecuador, and Peru
