The Fountains of Paradise Page 11

  “We’ll definitely have to get a World Court ruling. If the Court agrees that it’s a matter of overwhelming public interest, our reverend friends will have to move. . . . Though if they decide to be stubborn, there would be a nasty situation. Perhaps you should send a small earthquake to help them make up their minds.”

  The fact that Morgan was on the board of General Tectonics was an old joke between him and Kingsley; but GT—perhaps fortunately—had never found a way of controlling and directing earthquakes, nor did it ever expect to do so. The best that it could hope for was to predict them, and to bleed off their energies harmlessly before they could do major damage. Even here, its record of success was not much better than seventy-five percent.

  “A nice idea,” said Morgan. “I’ll think it over. Now, what about our other problem?”

  “All set to go. Do you want it now?”

  “Okay—let’s see the worst.”

  The office windows darkened, and a grid of glowing lines appeared in the center of the room.

  “Watch this, Van,” said Kingsley. “Here’s the regime that gives trouble.”

  Rows of letters and numbers materialized in the empty air—velocities, payloads, accelerations, transit times. Morgan absorbed them at a glance. The globe of the earth, with its circles of longitude and latitude, hovered just above the carpet; and rising from it, to little more than the height of a man, was the luminous thread that marked the position of the Orbital Tower.

  “Five hundred times normal speed; lateral scale exaggeration fifty. Here we go.”

  Some invisible force had started to pluck at the line of light, drawing it away from the vertical. The disturbance was moving upward as it mimicked, via the computer’s millions of calculations a second, the ascent of a payload through the earth’s gravitational field.

  “What’s the displacement?” asked Morgan as his eyes strained to follow the details of the simulation.

  “Now about two hundred meters. It gets to three before—”

  The thread snapped. In the leisurely slow-motion that represented real speeds of thousands of kilometers an hour, the two segments of the severed tower began to curl away from each other—one bending back to earth, the other whipping upward to space. But Morgan was no longer fully conscious of this imaginary disaster, existing only in the mind of the computer. Superimposed upon it now was the reality that had haunted him for years.

  He had seen that two-century-old film at least fifty times, and there were sections that he had examined frame by frame, until he knew every detail by heart. It was, after all, the most expensive movie footage ever shot, at least in peacetime. It had cost the State of Washington several million dollars a minute. . . .

  There stood the slim (too slim!) and graceful bridge, spanning the canyon. It bore no traffic, but a single car had been abandoned midway by its driver. And no wonder, for the bridge was behaving as none before in the whole history of engineering.

  It seemed impossible that thousands of tons of metal could perform such an aerial ballet. One could more easily believe that the bridge was made of rubber than of steel. Vast, slow undulations, meters in amplitude, were sweeping along the entire width of the span, so that the roadway suspended between the piers twisted back and forth like an angry snake. The wind blowing down the canyon was sounding a note far too low for any human ears to detect, as it hit the natural frequency of the beautiful, doomed structure. For hours, the torsional vibrations had been building up, but no one knew when the end would come. Already, the protracted death throes were a testimonial that the unlucky designers could well have foregone.

  Suddenly, the supporting cables snapped, flailing upward like murderous steel whips. Twisting and turning, the roadway pitched into the river, fragments of the structure flying in all directions. Even when projected at normal speed, the final cataclysm looked as if shot in slow motion; the scale of the disaster was so large that the human mind had no basis of comparison. In reality, it lasted perhaps five seconds. At the end of that time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had earned an inexpungible place in the history of engineering. Two hundred years later, there was a photograph of its last moments on the wall of Morgan’s office, bearing the caption “One of the more expensive products.”

  To Morgan, that was no joke, but a permanent reminder that the unexpected could always strike from ambush. When the Gibraltar Bridge was being designed, he had gone carefully through Theodore von Kármán’s classic analysis of the Tacoma Narrows disaster, learning all he could from one of the most expensive mistakes of the past. There had been no serious vibrational problems even in the worst gales that had come roaring in from the Atlantic, though the roadway had moved a hundred meters from the centerline—precisely as calculated.

  But the Space Elevator was such a leap forward into the unknown that some unpleasant surprises were a virtual certainty. Wind forces in the atmospheric section were easy to estimate, but it was also necessary to take into account the vibrations induced by the stopping and starting of the payloads—and even, on so enormous a structure, by the tidal effects of the sun and the moon. And not only individually, but acting all together; with, perhaps, an occasional earthquake to complicate the picture, in the so-called worst-case analysis.

  “All the simulations, in this tons-of-payload-per-hour regime, give the same result. The vibrations build up until there’s a fracture at around five hundred kilometers. We’ll have to increase the damping—drastically.”

  “I was afraid of that. How much do we need?”

  “Another ten megatons.”

  Morgan could take some gloomy satisfaction from the figure. That was close to the guess he had made, using his engineer’s intuition and the mysterious resources of his subconscious. Now the computer had confirmed it. They would have to increase the “anchor” mass in orbit by ten million tons.

  Even by terrestrial earth-moving standards, such a mass was hardly trivial. It was equivalent to a sphere of rock about two hundred meters across. Morgan had a sudden image of Yakkagala, as he had last seen it, looming against the Taprobanean sky. Imagine lifting that forty thousand kilometers into space! Fortunately, it might not be necessary; there were alternatives.

  Morgan always let his subordinates do their thinking for themselves. It was the only way to establish responsibility, it took much of the load off him, and on many occasions his staff arrived at solutions he had overlooked.

  “What do you suggest, Warren?” he asked quietly.

  “We could use one of the lunar freight launchers, and shoot up ten megatons of moon rock. It would be a long and expensive job, and we’d need a large space-based operation to catch the material and steer it into final orbit. There would also be a psychological problem—”

  “Yes, I can appreciate that. We don’t want another San Luiz Domingo.”

  San Luiz had been the—fortunately small—South American village that had received a stray cargo of processed lunar metal intended for a low-orbit space station. The terminal guidance had failed, resulting in the first man-made meteor crater—and two hundred and fifty deaths. Ever since that, the population of planet Earth had been very sensitive on the subject of celestial target practice.

  “A much better answer is to catch an asteroid. We’re running a search for those with suitable orbits, and have found three promising candidates. What we really want is a carbonaceous one. Then we can use it for raw material when we set up the processing plant. Killing two birds with one stone.”

  “A rather large stone, but that’s probably the best idea. Forget the lunar launcher—a million ten-ton shots would tie it up for years, and some of them would be bound to go astray. If you can’t find a large enough asteroid, we can send the extra mass up by the elevator itself—though I hate wasting all that energy if it can be avoided.”

  “It may be the cheapest way. With the efficiency of the latest fusion plants, it will take only twenty dollars’ worth of electricity to lift a ton up to orbit.”

  “Are you sur
e of that figure?”

  “It’s a firm quotation from Central Power.”

  Morgan was silent for a few minutes. Then he said: “The aerospace engineers really are going to hate me.” Almost as much, he added to himself, as the Venerable Parakarma.

  No—that was not fair. Hate was an emotion no longer possible to a true follower of the doctrine. What he had seen in the eyes of former Dr. Choam Goldberg was merely implacable opposition. But that could be equally dangerous.

  21

  Judgment

  One of Paul Sarath’s more annoying specialties was the sudden call, gleeful or gloomy, as the case might be, which invariably consisted of the words: “Have you heard the news?” Though Rajasinghe had often been tempted to give the general-purpose answer “Yes—I’m not at all surprised,” he had never had the heart to rob Sarath of his simple pleasure.

  “What is it this time?” he answered, without much enthusiasm.

  “Maxine’s on Global Two, talking to Senator Collins. I think our friend Morgan is in trouble. Call you back.”

  Sarath’s excited image faded from the screen, to be replaced a few seconds later by Maxine Duval’s, as Rajasinghe switched to the news-analysis channel. She was sitting in her familiar studio, talking to the Chairman of the Terran Construction Corporation, who seemed to be in a mood of barely suppressed indignation, probably synthetic.

  “Senator Collins, now that the World Court ruling has been given—”

  Rajasinghe shunted the entire program to RECORD, with a muttered “I thought that wasn’t until Friday.” As he turned off the sound and activated his private link with ARISTOTLE, he exclaimed, “My God, it is Friday!”

  As always, Ari was on line at once.

  “Good morning, Raja. What can I do for you?”

  That beautiful, dispassionate voice, untouched by human glottis, had never changed in the forty years that he had known it. Decades, perhaps centuries, after he was dead, it would be talking to other men just as it had spoken to him. (For that matter, how many conversations was it having at this very moment?) Once, this knowledge had depressed Rajasinghe; now, it no longer mattered. He did not envy ARISTOTLE’s immortality.

  “Good morning, Ari. I’d like today’s World Court ruling on the Astroengineering Corporation versus the Sri Kanda Vihara case. The summary will do. Let me have the full print-out later.”

  “Decision 1. Lease of temple site confirmed in perpetuity under Taprobanean and World law, as codified 2085. Unanimous ruling.

  “Decision 2. The construction of the proposed Orbital Tower, with its attendant noise, vibration, and its impact upon a site of great historic and cultural importance would constitute a private nuisance, meriting an injunction under the law of torts. At this stage, public interest not of sufficient merit to affect the issue. Ruling 4 to 2, one abstention.”

  “Thank you, Ari. Cancel print-out. I won’t need it. Good-by.”

  Well, that was that, just as he had expected. Yet he did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

  Rooted as he was in the past, he was glad that old traditions were cherished and protected. If one thing had been learned from the bloody history of mankind, it was that only individual human beings mattered: however eccentric their beliefs might be, they must be safeguarded, so long as they did not conflict with wider but equally legitimate interests. What was it that the old poet had said? “There is no such thing as the State.” Perhaps that was going a little too far; but it was better than the other extreme.

  At the same time, Rajasinghe felt a mild sense of regret. He had half convinced himself (was this merely co-operating with the inevitable?) that Morgan’s fantastic enterprise might be just what was needed to prevent Taprobane (and perhaps the whole world, though that was no longer his responsibility) from sinking into a comfortable, self-satisfied decline. Now the Court had closed that particular avenue, at least for many years.

  He wondered what Duval would have to say on the subject, and switched over to delayed playback. On Global Two ( sometimes referred to as the Land of Talking Heads), Senator Collins was still gathering momentum.

  “—undoubtedly exceeding his authority and using the resources of his division on projects that did not concern it.”

  “But surely, Senator, aren’t you being somewhat legalistic? As I understand it, hyperfilament was developed for construction purposes, especially bridges. And isn’t this a kind of bridge? I’ve heard Dr. Morgan use that analogy, though he also calls it a tower.”

  “You’re being legalistic now, Maxine. I prefer the name ‘Space Elevator.’ And you’re quite wrong about hyperfilament. It’s the result of two hundred years of aerospace research. The fact that the final breakthrough came in the Land Division of my—ah—organization is irrelevant, though naturally I’m proud that my scientists were involved.”

  “You consider that the whole project should be handed over to the Space Division?”

  “What project? This is merely a design study—one of hundreds that are always going on at TCC. I never hear about a fraction of them, and I don’t want to—until they reach the stage when some major decision has to be made.”

  “Which is not the case here?”

  “Definitely not. My space-transportation experts say that they can handle all projected traffic increases—at least for the foreseeable future.”

  “Meaning precisely?”

  “Another twenty years.”

  “And what happens then? The Tower will take that long to build, according to Dr. Morgan. Suppose it isn’t ready in time?”

  “Then we’ll have something else. My staff is looking into all the possibilities, and it’s by no means certain that the Space Elevator is the right answer.”

  “The idea, though, is fundamentally sound?”

  “It appears to be, though further studies are required.”

  “Then surely you should be grateful to Dr. Morgan for his initial work.”

  “I have the utmost respect for Dr. Morgan. He is one of the most brilliant engineers in my organization—if not in the world.”

  “I don’t think, Senator, that quite answers my question.”

  “Very well; I am grateful to Dr. Morgan for bringing this matter to our notice. But I do not approve of the way in which he did it. If I may be blunt, he tried to force my hand.”

  “How?”

  “By going outside my organization—his organization—and thus showing a lack of loyalty. As a result of his maneuverings, there has been an adverse World Court decision, which inevitably has provoked much unfavorable comment. In the circumstances, I have had no choice but to request—with the utmost regret—that he tender his resignation.”

  “Thank you, Senator Collins. As always, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

  “You sweet liar,” said Rajasinghe as he switched off and took the call that had been flashing for the last minute.

  “Did you get it all?” asked Sarath. “So that’s the end of Dr. Vannevar Morgan.”

  Rajasinghe looked thoughtfully at his old friend for a few seconds.

  “You were always fond of jumping to conclusions, Paul. How much would you care to bet?”

  III

  The Bell

  22

  Apostate

  “Driven to despair by his fruitless attempts to understand the universe, the sage Devadasa finally announced in exasperation:

  “‘All statements that contain the word God are false.’

  “Instantly, his least-favorite discipline, Somasiri, replied:

  “‘The sentence I am now speaking contains the word God. I fail to see, oh Noble Master, how that simple statement can be false.’

  “Devadasa considered the matter for several Poyas. Then he answered, this time with apparent satisfaction:

  “‘Only statements that do not contain the word God can be true.’

  “After a pause barely sufficient for a starving mongoose to swallow a millet seed, Somasiri replied:

  “‘If
this statement applies to itself, oh Venerable One, it cannot be true, because it contains the word God. But if it is not true—’

  “At this point, Devadasa broke his begging bowl upon Somasiri’s head, and should therefore be honored as the true founder of Zen.”

  From a fragment of the Culavamsa,

  as yet undiscovered

  In the late afternoon, when the stairway was no longer blasted by the full fury of the sun, the Venerable Parakarma began his descent. By nightfall, he would reach the highest of the pilgrim renthouses; and by the following day, he would have returned to the world of men.

  The Mahanayake Thero had given neither advice nor discouragement, and if he was grieved by his colleague’s departure, he had shown no sign. He had merely intoned, “All things are impermanent,” clasped his hands, and given his blessing.

  The Venerable Parakarma, who had once been Dr. Choam Goldberg, and might be so again, would have had great difficulty in explaining all his motives. “Right action” was easy to say; it was not so easy to discover.

  At the Sri Kanda Maha Vihara he had found peace of mind—but that was not enough. With his scientific training, he was no longer content to accept the Order’s ambiguous attitude toward God. Such indifference had come at last to seem worse than outright denial.

  If such a thing as a rabbinical gene could exist, Dr. Goldberg possessed it. Like many before him, Goldberg-Parakarma had sought God through mathematics, undiscouraged even by the bombshell that Kurt Gödel, with the discovery of undecidable propositions, had exploded early in the twentieth century. He could not understand how anyone could contemplate the dynamic asymmetry of Euler’s profound yet beautifully simple e + 1 = 0 without wondering if the universe was the creation of some vast intelligence.

  Having first made his name with a new cosmological theory that had survived almost ten years before being refuted, Goldberg had been widely acclaimed as another Einstein or N’goya. In an age of ultraspecialization, he had also managed to make notable advances in aero- and hydrodynamics—long regarded as dead subjects, incapable of further surprises.