“And then?”
“Listen.”
The doctor threw one of the numerous switches on his desk console, and a sweet mezzo-soprano voice remarked in a conversational tone: “I think you should sit down and rest for about ten minutes.” After a brief pause, it continued: “It would be a good idea to lie down for half an hour.” Another pause. “As soon as convenient, make an appointment with Dr. Smith.” Then:
“Please take one of the red pills immediately.”
“I have called the ambulance. Just lie down and relax. Everything will be all right.”
Morgan almost clapped his hands over his ears to cut out the piercing whistle.
“THIS IS A CORA EMERGENCY! WILL ANYONE WITHIN RANGE OF MY VOICE PLEASE COME IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS A CORA EMERGENCY! WILL—”
“I think you get the general idea,” said the doctor, restoring silence to his office. “Of course, the programs and responses are individually tailored to the subject. And there’s a wide range of voices, including some quite famous ones.”
“That will do nicely. When will my unit be ready?”
“I’ll call you in about three days. Oh yes—there’s an advantage of the chest-worn units I should mention.”
“What’s that?”
“One of my patients is a keen tennis player. He tells me that when he opens his shirt, the sight of that little red disk has an absolutely devastating effect on his opponent’s game. . . .”
34
Vertigo
There had once been a time when a minor, and often major, chore of every civilized man had been the regular updating of his address book. The universal code had made that unnecessary, since once a person’s lifetime identity number was known, he could be located within seconds. And even if his number was not known, the standard search program could usually find it fairly quickly, given the approximate date of birth, his profession, and a few other details. (There were, however, problems if the name was Smith, or Singh, or Mohammed.)
The development of global information systems had also rendered obsolete another annoying task. It was necessary only to make a special notation against the names of those friends one wished to greet on their birthdays or other anniversaries, and the household computer would do the rest. On the appropriate day (unless, as was frequently the case, there had been some stupid mistake in programming) the right message would be automatically flashed to its destination. And even though the recipient might shrewdly suspect that the warm words on his screen were entirely due to electronics—the nominal sender not having thought of him for years—the gesture was nevertheless welcome.
But the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks had created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.
Most men updated their PIP on New Year’s Day or their birthday. Morgan’s list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the flood of information, unless they were like those notorious pranksters who enjoyed setting up news alerts on their consoles for such classic improbabilities as:
Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of
Circle, squaring of
Atlantis, re-emergence of
Christ, Second Coming of
Loch Ness monster, capture of
or, finally
World, end of.
Usually, of course, egotism and professional requirements insured that the subscriber’s own name was the first item on every list. Morgan was no exception, but the entries that followed were slightly unusual:
Tower, orbital
Tower, space
Tower, (geo)synchronous
Elevator, space
Elevator, orbital
Elevator, (geo)synchronous
These words covered most of the variations used by the media, and ensured that he saw at least ninety percent of the news items concerning the project. The vast majority were trivial, and sometimes he wondered if it was worth searching for them. The ones that really mattered would reach him quickly enough.
Morgan was still rubbing his eyes, and the bed had scarcely retracted itself into the wall of his modest apartment, when he noticed that the ALERT was flashing on his console. Punching the COFFEE and READOUT buttons simultaneously, he awaited the latest overnight sensation.
ORBITAL TOWER SHOT DOWN
said the headline.
“Follow up?” asked the console.
“You bet,” replied Morgan, now instantly awake. During the next few seconds, as he read the text display, his mood changed from incredulity to indignation, and then to concern. He switched the whole news package to Warren Kingsley with a “Please call me back as soon as possible” tag, and settled down to breakfast, fuming.
Less than five minutes later, Kingsley appeared on the screen.
“Well, Van,” he said with humorous resignation, “we should consider ourselves lucky. It’s taken him five years to get around to us.”
“It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of! Should we ignore it? If we answer, that will only give him publicity. Which is just what he wants.”
Kingsley nodded.
“That would be the best policy—for the present. We shouldn’t overreact. At the same time, he may have a point.”
“What do you mean?”
Kingsley had become serious, and even looked a little uncomfortable.
“There are psychological problems as well as engineering ones,” he said. “Think it over. I’ll see you at the office.”
The image faded from the screen, leaving Morgan in a somewhat subdued frame of mind. He was used to criticism, and knew how to handle it; indeed, he thoroughly enjoyed the give-and-take of technical arguments with his peers, and was seldom upset on those rare occasions when he lost. It was not so easy to cope with Donald Duck.
That, of course, was not his real name; but Dr. Donald Bickerstaff’s peculiar brand of indignant negativism often recalled that mythological twentieth-century character. His degree (adequate, but not brilliant) was in pure mathematics; his assets were an impressive appearance, a mellifluous voice, and an unshakable belief in his ability to deliver judgments on any scientific subject. In his own field, he was quite good. Morgan remembered with pleasure an old-style public lecture by the doctor that he had once attended at the Royal Institution. For about a week afterward, he had almost understood the peculiar properties of transfinite numbers.
Unfortunately, Bickerstaff did not know his limitations. Though he had a devoted coterie of fans who subscribed to his information service—in an earlier age, he would have been called a pop scientist—he had an even larger circle of critics. The kinder ones considered that he had been educated beyond his intelligence. The others labeled him a self-employed idiot.
It was a pity, thought Morgan, that Bickerstaff couldn’t be locked in a room with Dr. Goldberg/Parakarma. They might annihilate each other like electron and positron—the genius of one cancelling out the fundamental stupidity of the other. That unshakable stupidity against which, as Goethe lamented, the gods themselves contend in vain.
No gods being currently available, Morgan knew that he would have to undertake the task himself. Though he had much better things to do with his time, it might provide some comic relief; and he had an inspiring precedent.
There were few pictures in the hotel room that had been one of Morgan’s four “temporary” homes for almost a decade. Most visitors could not believe that its components were all perfectly genuine.
It was dominated by the graceful, beautifully restored steamship, ancestor of every vessel that could thereafter call itself modern. By her side, standing on the dock to which she had been miraculously returned a century and a quarter after her launch, was Dr. Vannevar Morgan. He was looking up at the scroll-work of the painted prow; and a few meters away, looking quizzically at him, was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, hands thrust in pockets, cigar clenched firmly in his mouth, and wearing a very ru
mpled, mud-spattered suit.
Everything in the photo was quite real. Morgan had indeed been standing beside the Great Britain, on a sunny day in Bristol the year after the Gibraltar Bridge was completed. But Brunel was back in 1857, still awaiting the launch of his later and more famous leviathan, whose misfortunes were to break his body and spirit.
The photograph had been presented to Morgan on his fiftieth birthday, and it was one of his most cherished possessions. His colleagues had intended it as a sympathetic joke, Morgan’s admiration for the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century being well known. There were times, however, when he wondered if their choice was more appropriate than they realized. The Great Eastern had devoured her creator. The Tower might yet do the same to him.
Brunel had been surrounded by Donald Ducks. The most persistent was one Dr. Dionysius Lardner, who had proved beyond all doubt that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic.
An engineer could refute criticisms based on errors of fact or simple miscalculations. But the point that Donald Duck had raised was more subtle and not so easy to answer. Morgan recalled that his hero had to face something very similar, three centuries ago.
He reached toward his small but priceless collection of genuine books, and pulled out the one he had read more often, perhaps, than any other: Rolt’s classic biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Leafing through the well-thumbed pages, he quickly found the item that had stirred his memory.
Brunel had planned a railway tunnel almost three kilometers long—a “monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable” concept. It was inconceivable, said the critics, that human beings could tolerate the ordeal of hurtling through its Stygian depths. “No person would desire to be shut out from daylight with a consciousness that he had a superincumbent weight of earth sufficient to crush him in case of accident . . . the noise of two trains passing would shake the nerves . . . no passenger would be induced to go twice. . . .”
It was all so familiar. The motto of the Lardners and the Bickerstaffs seemed to be: “Nothing shall be done for the first time.”
And yet—sometimes they were right, if only through the operation of the laws of chance. Donald Duck made it sound so reasonable.
He had begun by saying, in a display of modesty as unusual as it was spurious, that he would not presume to criticize the engineering aspects of the Space Elevator. He wanted to talk only about the psychological problems it would pose. They could be summed up in one word: vertigo.
The normal human being, he had pointed out, had a well-justified fear of high places. Only acrobats and tightrope artistes were immune to this natural reaction. The tallest structure on earth was less than five kilometers high—and there were not many people who would care to be hauled vertically up the piers of the Gibraltar Bridge.
Yet that was nothing compared to the appalling prospect of the Orbital Tower. “Who has not stood,” Bickerstaff declaimed, “at the foot of some immense building, staring up at its sheer precipitous face, until it seemed about to topple and fall? Now imagine such a building soaring on and on through the clouds, up into the blackness of space, through the ionosphere, past the orbits of all the great space stations—up and up until it reaches a large fraction of the way to the moon! An engineering triumph, no doubt, but a psychological nightmare. I suggest that some people will go mad at its mere contemplation. And how many could face the vertiginous ordeal of the ride—straight upward, hanging over the empty space, for twenty-five thousand kilometers, to the first stop, at the Midway Station.
“It is no answer to say that perfectly ordinary individuals can fly in spacecraft to the same altitude, and far beyond. The situation then is completely different, as indeed it is in ordinary atmospheric flight. The normal man does not feel vertigo even in the open gondola of a balloon floating through the air a few kilometers above the ground. But put him at the edge of a cliff at the same altitude, and study his reactions then!
“The reason for this difference is quite simple. In an aircraft, there is no physical connection linking the observer and the ground. Psychologically, therefore, he is completely detached from the hard, solid Earth far below. Falling no longer has terrors for him. He can look down upon remote and tiny landscapes that he would never dare to contemplate from any high elevation.
“That saving physical detachment is precisely what the Space Elevator will lack. The hapless passenger, whisked up the sheer face of the gigantic Tower, will be all too conscious of his link with Earth. What guarantee can there possibly be that anyone not drugged or anesthetized could survive such an experience? I challenge Dr. Morgan to answer.”
Dr. Morgan was still thinking of answers, few of them polite, when the screen lit up again with an incoming call. When he pressed the ACCEPT button he was not in the least surprised to see Maxine Duval.
“Well, Van,” she said, without any preamble, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m sorely tempted, but I don’t think I should argue with that idiot. Incidentally, do you suppose that some aerospace organization has put him up to it?”
“My men are already digging. I’ll let you know if they find anything. Personally, I feel it’s all his own work. I recognize the hallmarks of the genuine article. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“I haven’t decided. I’m still trying to digest my breakfast. What do you think I should do?”
“Simple. Arrange a demonstration. When can you fix it?”
“In five years, if all goes well.”
“That’s ridiculous. You’ve got your first cable in position. . . .”
“Not cable—tape.”
“Don’t quibble. What load can it carry?”
“Oh—at the Earth end, a mere five hundred tons.”
“There you are. Offer Donald Duck a ride.”
“I wouldn’t guarantee his safety.”
“Would you guarantee mine?”
“You’re not serious!”
“I’m always serious, at this hour of the morning. It’s time I did another story on the Tower, anyway. That capsule mock-up is very pretty, but it doesn’t do anything. My viewers like action, and so do I. The last time we met, you showed me drawings of those little cars the engineers will use to run up and down the cables—I mean tapes. What did you call them?”
“Spiders.”
“Ugh—that’s right. I was fascinated by the idea. Here’s something that has never been possible before, by any technology. For the first time you could sit still in the sky, even above the atmosphere, and watch the Earth beneath. Something that no spacecraft can ever do. I’d like to be the first to describe the sensation. And clip Donald Duck’s wings at the same time.”
Morgan waited for a full five seconds, staring Duval straight in the eyes, before he decided that she was perfectly serious.
“I can understand,” he said rather wearily, “just how a poor struggling young media girl, trying desperately to make a name for herself, would jump at such an opportunity. I don’t want to blight a promising career, but the answer is definitely no.”
The doyen of media people emitted several unladylike, and even ungentlemanly, words, not commonly transmitted over public circuits.
“Before I strangle you in your own hyperfilament, Van,” she said, “why not?”
“Well, if anything went wrong, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Spare the crocodile tears. Of course my untimely demise would be a major tragedy—for your project. But I wouldn’t dream of going until you’d made all the tests necessary and were sure it was one hundred percent safe.”
“It would look too much like a stunt.”
“As the Victorians—or was it the Elizabethans?—used to say, so what?”
“Look, Maxine, there’s a flash that New Zealand has just sunk; they’ll need you in the studio. But thanks for the generous offer.”
“Dr. Vannevar Morgan, I know exactly why you’re turning me down. You want to be the first.”
“As
the Victorians used to say, so what?”
“Touché. But I’m warning you, Van—just as soon as you have one of those spiders working, you’ll be hearing from me again.”
Morgan shook his head.
“Sorry, Maxine,” he answered. “Not a chance.”
35
Starglider
Plus Eighty
Extract from God and Starholme, Mandala Press, Moscow, 2149
“Exactly eighty years ago, the robot interstellar probe now known as Starglider entered the solar system, and conducted its brief but historic dialogue with the human race. For the first time, we knew what we had always suspected: that ours was not the only intelligence in the universe, and that out among the stars were far older, and perhaps far wiser, civilizations.
“After that encounter, nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, paradoxically, in many ways little has changed. Mankind still goes about its business much as it has always done. How often do we stop to think that the Starholmers, back on their own planet, have already known of our existence for twenty-eight years, or that, almost certainly, we will be receiving their first direct messages only twenty-four years from now; and what if, as some have suggested, they themselves are already on the way?
“Men have an extraordinary, and perhaps fortunate, ability to tune out of their consciousness the most awesome future possibilities. The Roman farmer, plowing the slopes of Vesuvius, gave no thought to the mountains smoking overhead. Half the twentieth century lived with the hydrogen bomb; half the twenty-first, with the Golgotha virus. We have learned to live with the threat, or the promise, of Starholme. . . .
“Starglider showed us many strange worlds and races, but it revealed almost no advanced technology, and so had minimal impact upon the technically orientated aspects of our culture. Was this accidental, or the result of some deliberate policy? There are many questions one would like to ask Starglider, now that it is too late—or too early.