Beyond that, Rajasinghe knew nothing of the technical details, except that they involved networks of monitoring satellites, and computers that held within their electronic brains a complete model of the earth’s atmosphere, land surfaces, and seas. He felt rather like an awe-struck savage, gaping at the wonders of some advanced technology, as he watched the little cyclone move purposefully into the west, until it disappeared below the graceful line of palms just inside the ramparts of the pleasure gardens.
He glanced up at the invisible engineers and scientists racing around the world in their man-made heavens.
“Very impressive,” he said. “But I hope you know exactly what you’re doing.”
25
Orbital Roulette
“I should have guessed,” said the banker ruefully, “that it would be in one of those technical appendices that I never looked at. And now that you’ve seen the whole report, I’d like to know the answer. You’ve had me worrying ever since you raised the problem.”
“It’s brilliantly obvious,” Morgan answered, “and I should have thought of it myself.”
And I would have—eventually—he told himself with a fair degree of confidence. In his mind’s eye he saw again those computer simulations of the whole immense structure, twanging like a cosmic violin string, as the hours-long vibrations raced from Earth to orbit and were reflected back again. Superimposed on that he replayed from memory, for the hundredth time, the scratched movie of the dancing bridge. There were all the clues he needed.
“Phobos sweeps past the Tower every eleven hours and ten minutes, but luckily it isn’t moving in exactly the same plane—or we’d have a collision every time it went around. It misses on most revolutions, and the danger times are exactly predictable—to a thousandth of a second, if desired.
“Now the elevator, like any piece of engineering, isn’t a completely rigid structure. It has natural vibration periods, which can be calculated almost as accurately as planetary orbits. So what your engineers propose to do is to tune the elevator, so that its normal oscillations—which can’t be avoided anyway—always keep it clear of Phobos. Every time the satellite passes by the structure, it won’t be there; it will have side-stepped the danger zone by a few kilometers.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the circuit.
“I shouldn’t say this,” said the banker at last, “but my hair is standing on end.”
Morgan laughed.
“Put as bluntly as this, it does sound like—what was it called?—Russian roulette. But remember, we’re dealing with exactly predictable movements. We always know where Phobos will be, and we can control the displacement of the Tower simply by the way we schedule traffic along it.”
“Simply,” thought Morgan, was hardly the right word, but anyone could see that it was possible. And then an analogy flashed into his mind that was so perfect, yet so incongruous, that he almost burst into laughter. No—it would not be a good idea to use it on the banker.
Once again, he was back at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, but this time in a world of fantasy. There was a ship that had to sail beneath it, on a perfectly regular schedule. Unfortunately, the mast was a meter too tall. . . .
No problem. Just before it was due to arrive, a few heavy trucks would be sent racing across the bridge at intervals carefully calculated to match its resonant frequency. A gentle wave would sweep along the roadway from pier to pier, the crest timed to coincide with the arrival of the ship. And so the masthead would glide beneath, with whole centimeters to spare. . . . On a scale thousands of times larger, this was how Phobos would miss the structure towering out into space from Mons Pavonis.
“I’m glad to have your assurance,” said the banker, “but I think I’d do a private check on the position of Phobos before I took a trip.”
“Then you’ll be surprised to know that some of your bright young people—they’re certainly bright, and I’m assuming they’re young because of their sheer technical effrontery—want to use the critical periods as a tourist attraction. They think they could charge premium rates for views of Phobos sailing past at arm’s length at a couple of thousand kilometers an hour. Quite a spectacle, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I prefer to imagine it. But they may be right. . . . Anyway, I’m relieved to hear that there is a solution. I’m also happy to note that you approve of our engineering talent. Does this mean we can expect a decision soon?”
“You can have it now,” said Morgan. “When can we start work?”
26
The Night
Before Vesak
It was still, after twenty-seven centuries, the most revered day of the Taprobanean calendar. At the May full moon, according to legend, the Buddha had been born, had achieved enlightenment, and had died. Though to most people Vesak now meant no more than did that other great annual holiday, Christmas, it continued to be a time for meditation and tranquillity.
For many years, Monsoon Control had guaranteed that there would be no rain on the nights of Vesak plus and minus one. And for almost as long, Rajasinghe had gone to the City of Gold two days before that full moon, on a pilgrimage that annually refreshed his spirit. He avoided Vesak itself; on that day, Ranapura was too crowded with visitors, some of whom would be guaranteed to recognize him, and disturb his solitude.
Only the sharpest eye could have noticed that the huge yellow moon lifting above the bell-shaped domes of the ancient dagobas was not yet a perfect circle. The light it gave was so intense that only a few of the most brilliant satellites and stars were visible in the cloudless sky. And there was not a breath of wind.
Twice, it was said, Kalidasa had stopped on this road when he had left Ranapura forever. The first halt was at the tomb of Hanuman, the loved companion of his boyhood; and the second was at the Shrine of the Dying Buddha.
Rajasinghe had often wondered what solace the haunted King had gathered—perhaps at this very spot, for it was the best point from which to view the immense figure carved from the solid rock. The reclining shape was so perfectly proportioned that one had to walk right up to it before its real size could be appreciated. From a distance, it was impossible to realize that the pillow upon which the Buddha rested his head was itself higher than a man.
Though Rajasinghe had seen much of the world, he knew no other spot so full of peace. Sometimes he felt that he could sit here forever, beneath the blazing moon, wholly unconcerned with the cares and turmoil of life. He had never tried to probe too deeply into the magic of the shrine, for fear that he would destroy it, but some of its elements were obvious enough. The very posture of the Enlightened One, resting at last with closed eyes after a long and noble life, radiated serenity. The sweeping lines of the robe were extraordinarily soothing and restful to contemplate; they appeared to flow from the rock, to form waves of frozen stone. And, like the waves of the sea, the natural rhythm of their curves appealed to instincts of which the rational mind knew nothing.
In timeless moments such as this, alone with the Buddha and the almost full moon, Rajasinghe felt that he could understand at last the meaning of nirvana—that state which can be defined only by negatives. Such emotions as anger, desire, greed no longer possessed any power; indeed, they were barely conceivable. Even the sense of personal identity seemed about to fade away, like a mist before the morning sun.
It could not last, of course. Presently he became aware of the buzzing of insects, the distant barking of dogs, the cold hardness of the stone upon which he was sitting. Tranquillity was not a state of mind that could be sustained for long. With a sigh, Rajasinghe got to his feet and began to walk back to his car, parked a hundred meters outside the temple grounds.
He was just entering the vehicle when he noticed the small white patch, so clearly defined that it might have been painted on the sky, rising over the trees to the west. It was the most peculiar cloud that Rajasinghe had ever seen—a perfectly symmetrical ellipsoid, so sharp-edged that it appeared almost solid. He wondered if someone was flying
an airship through the skies of Taprobane; but he could see no fins, and there was no sound of engines.
Then, for a fleeting moment, he had a far wilder fancy. The Starholmers had arrived at last. . . .
But that, of course, was absurd. Even if they had managed to outrun their own radio signals, they could hardly have traversed the whole solar system—and descended into the skies of Earth!—without triggering all the traffic radars in existence. The news would have broken hours ago.
Rather to his surprise, Rajasinghe felt a mild sense of disappointment. And now, as the apparition came closer, he could see that it undoubtedly was a cloud, because it was getting slightly frayed around the edges. Its speed was impressive; it seemed to be driven by a private gale, of which there was no trace here at ground level.
So the scientists of Monsoon Control were at it again, testing their mastery of the winds. What, Rajasinghe wondered, would they think of next?
27
Ashoka Station
How tiny the island looked from this altitude! Thirty-six thousand kilometers below, straddling the equator, Taprobane appeared not much bigger than the moon. The entire country seemed too small a target to hit; yet he was aiming for an area at its center about the size of a tennis court.
Even now, Morgan was not completely certain of his motives. For the purpose of this demonstration, he could just as easily have operated from Kinte Station and targeted Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya. The fact that Kinte was at one of the most unstable points along the entire stationary orbit, and was always jockeying to remain over Central Africa, would not have mattered for the few days the experiment would last.
For a while, he had been tempted to aim at Chimborazo; the Americans had even offered to move Columbus Station, at considerable expense, to its precise longitude. But in the end, despite this encouragement, he had returned to his original objective—Sri Kanda.
It was fortunate for Morgan that, in this age of computer-assisted decisions, even a World Court ruling could be obtained in a matter of weeks. Naturally, the vihara had protested. Morgan had argued that a brief scientific experiment, conducted on grounds outside the temple premises, and resulting in no noise, pollution, or other form of interference, could not possibly constitute a tort. If he was prevented from carrying it out, all his earlier work would be jeopardized, he would have no way of checking his calculations, and a project vital to the Republic of Mars would receive a severe setback.
It was a plausible argument, and Morgan had believed most of it himself. So had the judges, by five to two. Though they were not supposed to be influenced by such matters, mentioning the litigious Martians was a clever move. The R.o.M. already had three complicated cases in progress, and the Court was somewhat tired of establishing precedents in interplanetary law.
But Morgan knew, in the coldly analytical part of his mind, that his action was not dedicated by logic alone. He was not a man who accepted defeat gracefully; the gesture of defiance gave him a certain satisfaction. Yet at a deeper level he rejected this petty motivation; such a schoolboy gesture was unworthy of him. What he was really doing was building up his self-assurance, and reaffirming his belief in ultimate success. Though he did not know how or when, he was proclaiming to the world, and to the stubborn monks within their ancient walls: “I shall return.”
Ashoka Station controlled virtually all communications, meteorology, environmental monitoring, and space traffic in the Hindu-Cathay region. If it ever ceased to function, a billion lives would be threatened with disaster and, if its services were not quickly restored, death. No wonder that Ashoka had two completely independent subsatellites, Bhaba and Sarabhai, a hundred kilometers away. If some unthinkable catastrophe destroyed all three stations, Kinte and Imhotep to the west or Confucius to the east could take over on an emergency basis. The human race had learned, from harsh experience, not to put all its eggs in one basket.
There were no tourists, vacationers, or transit passengers here, so far from earth. They did their business and sightseeing only a few thousand kilometers out, and left the high geosynchronous orbit to the scientists and engineers—not one of whom had ever before visited Ashoka on so unusual a mission, or with such unique equipment.
The key to Project Gossamer now floated in one of the station’s medium-sized docking chambers, awaiting the final checkout before launch. There was nothing spectacular about it, and its appearance gave no hint of the man-years and the millions in money that had gone into its development.
The dull-gray cone, four meters long and two meters across the base, appeared to be made of solid metal. It required a close examination to reveal the tightly wound fiber covering the entire surface. Indeed, apart from an internal core, and the strips of plastic interleaving that separated the hundreds of layers, the cone was made of nothing but a tapering hyperfilament thread—forty thousand kilometers of it.
Two obsolete and totally different technologies had been revived for the construction of that unimpressive gray cone. Some three hundred years ago, submarine telegraphs had started to operate across the ocean beds. Men had lost fortunes before they had mastered the art of coiling thousands of kilometers of cable and playing it out at a steady rate from continent to continent, despite storms and all the other hazards of the sea.
Then, just a century later, some of the first primitive guided weapons had been controlled by fine wires spun out as they flew to their targets, at a few hundred kilometers an hour. Morgan was attempting a thousand times the range of those War Museum relics, and fifty times their velocity. However, he had some advantages. His missile would be operating in a perfect vacuum for all but the last hundred kilometers; and its target was not likely to take evasive action.
The Operations Manager, Project Gossamer, attracted Morgan’s attention with a slightly embarrassed cough.
“We still have one minor problem, Dr. Morgan,” she said. “We’re quite confident about the lowering. All the tests and computer simulations are satisfactory, as you’ve seen. It’s reeling the filament in again that has Station Safety worried.”
Morgan blinked rapidly. He had given little thought to the matter. It seemed obvious that winding the filament back again was a trivial problem compared to sending it out. All that was needed, surely, was a simple power-operated winch, with the special modifications needed to handle such a fine, variable-thickness material. But he knew that in space one should never take anything for granted, and that intuition—especially the intuition of an earth-based engineer—could be a treacherous guide.
Let’s see—when the tests are concluded, he thought, we cut the Earth end and Ashoka starts to wind the filament in. Of course, when you tug, however hard, at one end of a line forty thousand kilometers long, nothing happens for hours. It would take half a day for the impulse to reach the far end, and for the system to start moving as a whole. So we keep up the tension. . . . Oh!
“Somebody did a few calculations,” continued the Operations Manager, “and realized that when we finally got up to speed, we’d have several tons heading toward the station at a thousand kilometers an hour. They didn’t like that at all.”
“Understandably. What do they want us to do?”
“Program a slower reeling-in, with a controlled-momentum budget. If the worst comes to the worst, they may make us move off station to do the windup.”
“Will that delay the operation?”
“No. We’ve worked out a contingency plan for heaving the whole thing out of the airlock in five minutes, if we have to.”
“And you’ll be able to retrieve it easily?”
“Of course.”
“I hope you’re right. That little fishing line cost a lot of money—and I want to use it again.”
But where? Morgan asked himself as he stared at the slowly waxing crescent Earth. Perhaps it would be better to complete the Mars project first, even if it meant several years of exile. Once Pavonis was fully operational, Earth would have to follow, and he did not doubt that, somehow, the last
obstacles would be overcome.
Then the chasm across which he was now looking would be spanned, and the fame that Gustave Eiffel had earned three centuries ago would be utterly eclipsed.
28
The First
Lowering
There would be nothing to see for at least another twenty minutes. Nevertheless, everyone not needed in the control hut was already outside, staring up at the sky. Even Morgan found it hard to resist the impulse, and kept edging toward the open door.
Seldom more than a few meters from him was Maxine Duval’s latest remote, a husky youth in his late twenties. Mounted on his shoulders were the usual tools of his trade—twin cameras in the traditional right forward, left backward arrangement, and above those a small sphere not much larger than a grapefruit. The antenna inside that sphere was doing very clever things, several thousand times a second, so that it was always locked on the nearest comsat despite all the antics of its bearer. At the other end of that circuit, sitting comfortably in her studio-office, Duval was seeing through the eyes of her distant alter ego and hearing with his ears—but not straining her lungs in the freezing air. This time, she had the better part of the bargain. It was not always the case.
Morgan had agreed to the arrangement with some reluctance. He knew that this was a historic occasion, and had accepted Duval’s assurance that “my man won’t get in the way.” But he was keenly aware of all the things that could go wrong in such a novel experiment—especially during the last hundred kilometers of atmospheric entry. On the other hand, he also knew that Duval could be trusted to treat either failure or triumph without sensationalism.