Destination: Saturn

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The moose stood atop a low hill and stared ruminatingly through a row of evergreens at the long, low-slung house beside the shores of Great Slave Lake. And you couldn’t blame this fine specimen of Alces americanus for staring, for this particular structure was an eye-stunner even by the sophisticated standards of 2080.

After all, you expect the home of one of Earth’s youngest and most adventurous multibillionaires to be a bit on the palatial side. And so it was: almost an acre of glistening plastic, elaborately sculptured and friezed in a flamboyant, Imperial style of architecture that might be best described as Neo-Napoleonic Baroque with a few touches of Ivan-the Terrible Pseudo-Gothic added for extra impressiveness. As a modest little lakeside cottage, it had everything, including an artfully camouflaged private airport, a lake-front harbor filled with new-model racing craft of the air-cushion type currently popular, and a complete staff of robot servants. And there it was, right smack in the center of the chill Canadian wilderness, kept comfortably warm by concealed electronic mirrors placed amid the exotic flowering shrubbery.

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