“On the other hand, it did discuss many matters of philosophy and religion, and in these fields its influence was profound. Although the phrase nowhere occurs in the transcripts, Starglider is generally credited with the famous aphorism ‘Belief in God is apparently a psychological artifact of mammalian reproduction.’
“But what if this is true? It is totally irrelevant to the question of God’s actual existence, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate. . . .”
Swami Krisnamurthi (Dr. Choam Goldberg)
36
The Cruel Sky
The eye could follow the tape much farther by night than by day. At sunset, when the warning lights were switched on, it became a thin band of incandescence, slowly dwindling away until, at some indefinite point, it was lost against the background of stars.
Already, it was the greatest wonder of the world. Until Morgan put his foot down and restricted the site to essential engineering staff, there was a continual flood of visitors—pilgrims, someone had ironically called them—paying homage to the sacred mountain’s last miracle.
They would all behave in exactly the same way. First they would reach out and gently touch the five-centimeter-wide band, running their finger tips along it with something approaching reverence. Then they would listen, an ear pressed against the smooth cold material of the ribbon, as if they hoped to catch the music of the spheres. There were some who claimed to have heard a deep bass note at the uttermost threshold of audibility, but they were deluding themselves. Even the highest harmonics of the tape’s natural frequency were far below the range of human hearing.
And some would go away shaking their heads, saying, “You’ll never get me to ride up that thing!” But they were the type who had made similar remarks about the fusion rocket, the space shuttle, the airplane, the automobile—even the steam locomotive.
To these skeptics, the usual answer was: “Don’t worry—this is merely part of the scaffolding, one of the four tapes that will guide the Tower down to Earth. Riding up the final structure will be exactly like taking an elevator in any high building. Except that the trip will be longer, and much more comfortable.”
Maxine Duval’s trip, on the other hand, would be very short, and not particularly comfortable. But once Morgan had capitulated, he had done his best to make sure that it would be uneventful.
The flimsy spider—a prototype test vehicle that looked like a motorized bo’sun’s chair—had already made a dozen ascents to twenty kilometers, with twice the load it would be carrying now. There had been the usual minor teething problems, but nothing serious; the last five runs had been completely trouble-free. And what could go wrong? If there were a power failure—almost unthinkable in such a simple battery-operated system—gravity would bring Duval safely home, the automatic brakes limiting the speed of descent. The only real risk was that the drive mechanism might jam, trapping the spider and its passenger in the upper atmosphere. And Morgan had an answer even for this.
“Only fifteen kilometers?” Duval had protested. “A glider can do better than that!”
“But you can’t, with nothing more than an oxygen mask. Of course, if you’d like to wait a year, until we have the operational unit with its life-support system. . . .”
“What’s wrong with a spacesuit?”
Morgan had refused to budge, for his own good reasons. Though he hoped it would not be needed, a small jet crane was standing by at the foot of Sri Kanda. Its highly skilled operators were used to odd assignments; they would have no difficulty in rescuing a stranded Duval, even at an altitude of twenty kilometers.
But there was no vehicle in existence that could reach her at twice that height. Above forty kilometers was no man’s land—too low for rockets, too high for balloons.
In theory, a rocket could hover beside the tape, for a very few minutes, before it burned up all its propellant. But the problems of navigation and actual contact with the spider were so horrendous that Morgan had not even bothered to think about them. It could never happen in real life, and he hoped that no producer of video drama would decide that there was good material here for a cliff-hanger. That was the sort of publicity he could do without.
Duval looked rather like a typical Antarctic tourist as, glittering in her metal-foil thermosuit, she walked toward the waiting spider and the group of technicians around it. She had chosen the time carefully. The sun had risen only an hour ago, and its slanting rays would show the Taprobanean landscape to best advantage. Her remote, even younger and huskier than the one used on the last memorable occasion, recorded the sequence of events for her systemwide audience.
She had, as always, been thoroughly rehearsed. There was no fumbling or hesitation as she strapped herself in, pressed the BATTERY CHARGE button, took a deep draught of oxygen from her face mask, and checked the monitors on all her video and sound channels. Then, like a fighter pilot in some old historical movie, she signaled “thumbs up” and gently eased the speed control forward.
There was a small burst of ironic clapping from the assembled engineers, most of whom had already taken joy rides up to heights of a few kilometers. Someone shouted, “Ignition! We have lift-off !” Moving about as swiftly as a brass birdcage elevator in the reign of Victoria I, the spider began its stately ascent.
This must be like ballooning, Duval told herself. Smooth, effortless, silent. No—not completely silent. She could hear the gentle whirr of the motors powering the multiple drive wheels that gripped the flat face of the tape.
There was none of the sway or vibration that she had half expected. Despite its slimness, the incredible band she was climbing was as rigid as a bar of steel, and the vehicle’s gyros were holding it rock steady. If she closed her eyes, she could easily imagine that she was already ascending the final Tower.
But she would not close her eyes. There was so much to see and absorb. There was even a good deal to hear. It was amazing how well sound carried; the conversations below were still quite audible.
She waved to Morgan, and looked for Kingsley. To her surprise, she was unable to find him. Though he had helped her aboard the spider, he had now vanished. Then she remembered his frank admission—sometimes he made it sound almost like a wry boast—that the best structural engineer in the world couldn’t stand heights.
Everyone had some secret, or perhaps not-so-secret, fear. Duval did not appreciate spiders, and wished that the vehicle she was riding in had some other name. Yet she could handle one if it was really necessary. The creature she could never bear to touch—though she had met it often enough on her diving expeditions—was the shy and harmless octopus.
The whole mountain was now visible, though from directly above it was impossible to appreciate its true height. The two ancient stairways winding up its face might have been oddly twisting level roads. Along their entire length, as far as she could observe, there was no sign of life. One section had been blocked by a fallen tree, as if Nature had given advance notice, after three thousand years, that she was about to reclaim her own.
Leaving camera one pointed downward, Duval started to pan with number two. Fields and forests drifted across the monitor screen, then the distant white domes of Ranapura, then the dark waters of the inland sea. And, presently, there was Yakkagala. . . .
She zoomed onto the Rock, and could just make out the faint pattern of the ruins covering the entire upper surface. The Mirror Wall was still in shadow, as was the Gallery of the Princesses—not that there was any hope of making them out from such a distance. But the layout of the pleasure gardens, with their ponds and walkways and massive surrounding moat, was clearly visible.
The line of tiny white plumes puzzled her for a moment, until she realized that she was looking down upon another symbol of Kalidasa’s challenge to the gods—his so-called Fountains of Paradise. She wondered what the King would have thought could he have seen her rising so effortlessly toward the heaven of his envious dreams.
It was almost a year since she had spoken to Ambassador Rajasinghe. On a sudden im
pulse, she called the villa.
“Hello, Johan,” she greeted him. “How do you like this view of Yakkagala?”
“So you’ve talked Morgan into it. How does it feel?”
“Exhilarating—that’s the only word for it. And unique. I’ve flown and traveled in everything you can mention, but this feels quite different. . . .”
“‘To ride secure the cruel sky . . .’”
“What was that?”
“An English poet, early twentieth century: ‘I care not if you bridge the seas, / Or ride secure the cruel sky. . . .’”
“Well I care, and I’m feeling secure. Now I can see the whole island—even the Hindustan coast. How high am I, Van?”
“Coming up to twelve kilometers, Maxine. Is your oxygen mask on tight?”
“Confirmed. I hope it’s not muffling my voice.”
“Don’t worry—you’re still unmistakable. Three kilometers to go.”
“How much gas is left in the tank?”
“Sufficient. And if you try to go above fifteen, I’ll use the override to bring you home.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. And congratulations, by the way. This is an excellent observation platform. You may have customers standing in line.”
“We’ve thought of that. The comsat and metsat people are already making bids. We can give them relays and sensors at any height they like. It will all help to pay the rent.”
“I can see you!” exclaimed Rajasinghe suddenly. “Just caught your reflection in the scope. . . . Now you’re waving your arm. . . . Aren’t you lonely up there?”
For a moment, there was an uncharacteristic silence. Then Duval answered quietly: “Not as lonely as Yuri Gagarin must have been, a hundred kilometers higher still. Van, you have brought something new into the world.
“The sky may still be cruel—but you have tamed it. There may be some people who could never face this ride: I feel very sorry for them.”
37
The Billion-Ton
Diamond
In the last seven years, much had been done, yet there was so much to do. Mountains—or at least asteroids—had been moved. Earth now possessed a second natural moon, circling just above synchronous altitude. It was less than a kilometer across, and was rapidly becoming smaller as it was rifled of its carbon and other light elements. Whatever was left—the core of iron, tailings, and industrial slag—would form the counterweight that would keep the Tower in tension. It would be the stone in the forty-thousand-kilometer-long sling that now turned with the planet once every twenty-four hours.
Fifty kilometers eastward of Ashoka Station floated the huge industrial complex that processed the weightless, but not massless, megatons of raw material and converted them into hyperfilament. Because the final product was more than ninety percent carbon, with its atoms arranged in a precise crystalline lattice, the Tower had acquired the popular nickname “the Billion-Ton Diamond.” The Jewelers’ Association of Amsterdam had sourly pointed out that (a) hyperfilament wasn’t diamond at all, and (b) if it was, then the Tower weighed five times ten to the fifteenth carats.
Carats or tons, such enormous quantities of material had taxed to the utmost the resources of the space colonies and the skills of the orbital technicians. Into the automatic mines, production plants, and zero-gravity assembly systems had gone much of the engineering genius of the human race, painfully acquired during two hundred years of spacefaring. Soon all the components of the Tower—a few standardized units, manufactured by the million—would be gathered in huge floating stockpiles, waiting for the robot handlers.
Then the Tower would grow in two opposite directions—down to earth and simultaneously up to the orbital mass anchor, the whole process being adjusted so that it would always be in balance. Its cross section would decrease steadily from orbit, where it would be under the maximum stress, down to earth; it would also taper off toward the anchoring counterweight.
When its task was complete, the entire construction complex would be launched into a transfer orbit to Mars. This was a part of the contract that had caused some heartburning among terrestrial politicians and financial experts now that, belatedly, the Space Elevator’s potential was being realized.
The Martians had driven a hard bargain. Though they would wait another five years before they had any return on their investment, they would then have a virtual construction monopoly for perhaps another decade. Morgan had a shrewd suspicion that the Pavonis tower would merely be the first of several. Mars might have been designed as a location for Space Elevator systems, and its energetic occupants were not likely to miss such an opportunity. If they make their world the center of interplanetary commerce in the years ahead, good luck to them; Morgan had other problems to worry about, and some of them were still unsolved.
The Tower, for all its overwhelming size, was merely the support for something much more complex. Along each of its four sides must run thirty-six-thousand kilometers of track capable of operation at speeds never before attempted. This had to be powered for its entire length by superconducting cables, linked to massive fusion generators, the whole system being controlled by an incredibly elaborate, fail-safe computer network.
The Upper Terminal, where passengers and freight would transfer between the Tower and the spacecraft docked to it, was a major project in itself. So was Midway Station. So was Earth Terminal, now being lasered into the heart of the sacred mountain. And in addition to all this, there was Operation Cleanup.
For two hundred years, satellites of all shapes and sizes, from loose nuts and bolts to entire space villages, had been accumulating in Earth orbit. All that came below the extreme elevation of the Tower, at any time, now had to be accounted for, since they created a possible hazard. Three quarters of this material was abandoned junk, much of it long forgotten. Now it had to be located, and somehow disposed of.
Fortunately, the old orbital forts were superbly equipped for this task. Their radars—designed to locate oncoming missiles at extreme ranges with no advance warning—could easily pinpoint the debris of the early Space Age. Then their lasers vaporized the smaller satellites, while the larger ones were nudged into higher and harmless orbits.
Some, of historic interest, were recovered and brought back to Earth. During this operation, there were quite a few surprises—for example, three Chinese astronauts who had perished on some secret mission, and several reconnaissance satellites constructed from such an ingenious mix of components that it was quite impossible to discover what country had launched them. Not that it now mattered a great deal, since they were at least a hundred years old.
The multitude of active satellites and space stations, forced for operational reasons to remain close to Earth, all had to have their orbits carefully checked, and in some cases modified. But nothing could be done about the random and unpredictable visitors that might arrive at any time from the outer reaches of the solar system. Like all the creations of mankind, the Tower would be exposed to meteorites. Several times a day its network of seismometers would detect milligram impacts; and once or twice a year, minor structural damage could be expected.
Sooner or later, during the centuries to come, it might encounter a giant that could put one or more tracks out of action for a while. In the worst possible case, the Tower might even be severed somewhere along its length.
That was about as likely to happen as the impact of a large meteorite upon London or Tokyo, which presented roughly the same target area. The inhabitants of those cities did not lose much sleep worrying over this possibility.
Nor did Vannevar Morgan. Whatever problems might lie ahead, no one doubted now that the Orbital Tower was an idea whose time had come.
V
Ascension
38
A Place of
Silent Storms
Extract from Professor Martin Sessui’s address, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, Stockholm, 16 December 2154:
“Between heaven and Earth lies an invisible region of whi
ch the old philosophers never dreamed. Not until the dawn of the twentieth century—to be precise, on 12 December 1901—did it make its first impact upon human affairs.
“On that day, Guglielmo Marconi radioed the three dots of the Morse letter s across the Atlantic. Many experts had declared this to be impossible, because electromagnetic waves could travel only in straight lines, and would be unable to bend around the curve of the globe. Marconi’s feat not only heralded the age of world-wide communications, but also proved that, high up in the atmosphere, there exists an electrified mirror capable of reflecting radio waves back to earth.
“. . . The Kennelly-Heaviside layer, as it was originally named, was soon found to be a region of great complexity, containing at least three main layers, all subject to major variations in height and intensity. At their upper limit they merge into the Van Allen radiation belt, whose discovery was the first triumph of the early Space Age.
“This vast region, beginning at a height of approximately fifty kilometers and extending outward for several radii of the Earth, is now known as the ionosphere. Its exploration by rockets, satellites, and radio waves has been a continuing process for more than two centuries. I would like to pay a tribute to my precursors in this enterprise—the Americans M. A. Tuve and G. Breit, the Englishman E. V. Appleton, the Norwegian F. C. M. Størmer, and, especially, the man who, in 1970, won the very award I am now so honored to accept, your countryman Hannes Alfvén. . . .
“The ionosphere is the wayward child of the sun; even now, its behavior is not always predictable. In the days when long-range radio depended upon its idiosyncrasies, it saved many lives—but more men than we shall ever know of were doomed when it swallowed their despairing signals without trace.
“For less than one century, before the communications satellites took over, it was our invaluable but erratic servant—a previously unsuspected natural phenomenon, worth countless billions of dollars to the three generations who exploited it.