by David Brin
My respect for Bahnz rose two notches. He might be an SOB, but he knew how to get his way. “Oh, there won’t be any need for that.” I laughed.
“You see, Colonel, we need all that solar power to drive our new motor.”
“Motor? What motor?”
“The motor that’s enabling us to raise our orbit without spending a bit of mass—no oxygen, not even a shred of aluminum. It’s the motor that’s going to make it possible for us to pull a profit next year, Colonel, even under the terms of the present contract.”
Bahnz stared at me. “A motor?”
“The biggest motor there is, my dear fellow. It’s called the Earth.”
He blinked, his mind obviously struggling to figure out what I meant.
“Have a good trip, Colonel,” I said. “And any time you’re in the neighborhood, do stop by for a Slingshot.”
“Rutter!”
I turned away and launched myself toward the window at the far end of the control room.
“RUTTER!”
The voice faded behind me as I drifted up to the crystal port. Outside, the big, ugly tanks lay like roc eggs in a row, waiting to be hatched. I could almost envision it. They’d someday transform themselves into great birds of space. And our grandchildren would ride their offspring to the stars.
Bright silvery cables seemed to stretch all the way to the huge blue globe overhead. And I know, now, that they did indeed anchor us to the Earth… an Earth that does not end at a surface of mountain and plain and water, nor with the ocean of air, but continues outward in strong fingers of force, caressing her children still.
Right now those tethers were carrying over a hundred amps of current from B Deck to A. There, electrons were sprayed out into space by an array of small, sharp cathodes.
We could have used the forward process to extract energy from our orbital momentum. I had told Emily Testa earlier today that that would solve nothing. Our problem was to increase our momentum.
Current in a wire, passing through a magnetic field… You could run a dynamo that way, or a motor. With more solar power than we’ll ever need, we can shove the current through the cables against the electromotive force, feeding energy to the Earth, and to our orbit.
A solar-powered motor, turning once per orbit, our Tank Farm rises without shedding an ounce of precious mass.
I smiled as I looked out on the fleecy clouds of home and the tanks in a row, like presents waiting to be opened. I felt Susan come up beside me. “Pacifica’s gone,” she said, grinning. “And our acceleration’s climbed to three microgees, Ralph.”
I nodded. “Have Don ease back a bit for now. We don’t want to push the motor too hard on its first day. I’ll check in later.”
“Where are you going?”
I caught a rung by the hatch. “I’m going to go unwind by spending some time puttering in my garden.”
Susan shook her head and muttered “Yuck” under her breath.
I pretended I didn’t hear.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
I have had the great privilege of working as postdoctoral fellow with Dr. James Arnold and the California Space Institute… ecotopia’s mini-micro version of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At Calspace we performed NASA-contracted studies of space station automation, space industrialization, and potential uses of tethers and external tanks.
Ironically, what we thought would be obvious—the need to find ways to use external tanks in space—has met with substantial resistance by the aero-space community. Tethers on the other hand, an idea we thought would be seen as “California freaky” have been taken up with enthusiasm as an important future component in space transportation.
Calspace’s Joseph Carroll (one of the brightest fellows I know) has carried the work of the late Italian physicist Guiseppe Colombo into the field of tether dynamics. Experiments will be flown aboard the shuttle in the near future.
The technological fix has been a mainstay of science fiction since the “golden age” of the thirties. There is still room for fiction whose purpose is to elucidate some point of science. Often this can be done while still maintaining a mix of art, characterization, and drama, but for this propaganda piece, I make no such claim.
Next, we move on to a very special subgenre, a tale about a parallel world in which evil has gained an unfair advantage. First, a warning: never judge a story by its title.
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