Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  Lara sat up straighter. "You are not finished, Victor," she said firmly. "Not if you fight back."

  His expression went from despair to disgust. "Fight back," he growled. "You can't fight them."

  "You can if you have the courage to do it," she snapped, feeling angry with her husband's self-pity, angry at the vicious fools who did this to him, angry at whoever caused this disaster. "You don't have to let them walk all over you. You can stand up and fight."

  "You don't know-"

  "Someone sent you a message, didn't they?"

  "Yes, but-"

  "You have a record of that message?"

  "In my files, yes."

  Lara said, "Whoever sent that message to you probably put those Martian rocks at the site you found."

  Molina blinked several times. "Yes, but McFergusen and the others think that I set that up using a stooge."

  "Prove that they're wrong."

  "How in hell-"

  "Find the man who set you up," Lara said. "He had to come to Mercury to plant those rocks at the site. He's probably still here."

  "Do you think..." Molina fell silent. Lara studied his face. He wasn't bleating any more. She could see the change in his eyes.

  "I don't think anybody's left Mercury since I arrived here. Certainly none of the team down at the base on the surface. None of Yamagata's people, I'm pretty sure."

  "Then whoever set you up is probably still here."

  "But how can we find him?"

  Before Lara could think of an answer, they heard a soft rap at their door.

  "I'll get it," she said, jumping to her feet. "You go wash up and comb your hair."

  She slid the door open. Bishop Danvers's big, blocky body nearly filled the doorway.

  "Hello, Lara," he said softly. "I've come to do what I can to solace Victor and help him in his hour of need."

  Lara almost smiled. "Come right in, Elliott. We're going to need all the help we can get."

  In his bare little office at Goethe base, Dante Alexios heard the news directly from Yamagata.

  "It was all a hoax!" Yamagata was grinning from ear to ear. "The rocks were planted here. They actually came from Mars."

  "Molina salted the site?" Alexios asked, trying to look astonished.

  "Either he or a confederate."

  "That's... shocking."

  "Perhaps so, but it means that the blasted scientists have withdrawn their interdict on our operations."

  "So soon?"

  Yamagata shrugged. "They will, in a day or so. In the meantime, I want you to come up here to Himawari first thing tomorrow morning. We must plan the next phase of our operation."

  "Building powersats here, out of materials from Mercury itself."

  "Yes. Using nanomachines."

  Alexios nodded. "We'll have to plan this very carefully."

  "I realize that," Yamagata said, his grin fading only slightly. "That's why I want you here first thing in the morning."

  "I'll be there."

  "Good." Yamagata's image winked out.

  Alexios leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. Victor's finished, he said to himself. Now to get Danvers. And then my dear employer, Mr. Saito Yamagata, the murderer.

  BOOK II

  TEN YEARS EARLIER

  And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

  And Horror the soul of the plot.

  THE SKYTOWER

  Lara Tierney couldn't catch her breath. It wasn't merely the altitude, although at more than three thousand meters the air was almost painfully thin. What really took her breath away, though, was the sight of the tower splitting the sky as the ancient Humvee rattled and jounced along the rutted, climbing road. Mance, sitting beside her, handed her a lightweight pair of electronic binoculars.

  "They'll lock onto the tower," he shouted over the grinding roar of the Humvee's diesel engine. "Keep it in focus for you."

  Lara put the binoculars to her eyes and found that they really did make up for some of the bumps in the Humvee's punishing ride. The skytower wavered briefly, then clicked into sharp focus, a thick dark column of what looked in the twin eyepieces like intertwined cables spiraling up, up, higher and higher, through the soft clouds and into the blue sky beyond, up into infinity.

  "It's like a banyan tree," she gasped, resting the binoculars on her lap.

  "What?" Mance Bracknell yelled from beside her. They were sitting together on the bench behind the driver, a short, stocky, dark-skinned mestizo who had inherited this rusting, dilapidated four-wheel-drive from his father, the senior taxi entrepreneur of the Quito airport.

  Lara took several deep breaths, trying to get enough air into her lungs to raise her voice above the noise of the Humvee's clattering diesel engine.

  "It's like a banyan tree," she shouted back, turning toward him. "All those strands... woven together... like a... banyan." She had to pull in more air.

  "Right! That's exactly right!" Mance yelled, his dark brown eyes gleaming excitedly. "Like a banyan tree. It's organic! Nanotubes spun into filaments and then wrapped into coils; the coils are wound into those cables you're looking at."

  She had never seen him so tanned, so athletically fit, so indestructibly cheerful. He looks more handsome than ever, she thought.

  "Just like a banyan tree," he repeated, straining to make himself heard. "Damned near a hundred thousand individual buckyball fibers wound into those strands. Strongest structure on the face of the Earth."

  "It's magnificent!"

  Bracknell's smile grew wider. "We're still almost thirty kilometers away. Wait'll you get up close."

  Like the beanstalk of the old fairy tale, the skytower rose up into the heavens. Lara spent the jouncing, dusty ride alternately staring at it and then glancing at Mance, sitting there as happy as a little boy on Christmas morning opening his presents. He's doing something that no one else has been able to do, she thought, and he's succeeding. He has what he wants. And that includes me.

  All during the long flight from Denver to Quito she had wondered about her impulsive promise to marry Mance Bracknell. For the past three years all she'd seen of him was his quick visits back to the States and his occasional video messages. He had gone to Ecuador, asked her to marry him, and she had agreed. She had flown to Quito once before, when Mance was just starting on the project. He was so busy, so happily buried in his work that she had quietly returned home to Colorado. He didn't need her underfoot, and he barely raised more than a perfunctory objection when she told him she was going back home.

  That was more than three years ago. I have a rival for his attentions, Lara realized. This tower he's building. She wondered if her rival would always stand between them. But when Mance called this latest time and asked her to come to Ecuador and stay with him, she had agreed immediately even though he hadn't mentioned a word about marriage.

  Once she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport terminal in Quito, the way his whole face lit up when he caught sight of her, the frenetic way he waved to her from the other side of the glass security partition as she went through the tiresome lines at customs, the way he smiled and took her in his arms and kissed her right there in the middle of the crowded airport terminal-she knew she loved him and she would follow him wherever he went, rival and marriage and everything else fading into trivia.

  "...if it works," he was hollering over the rumble of the truck's groaning engine, "we'll be able to provide electricity for the whole blinking country. Maybe for Colombia, Peru, parts of Brazil, the whole blasted northwestern bloc of South America!"

  "If what works?" she asked.

  "Tapping the ionosphere," he answered. Gesturing with both hands as he spoke, he shouted, "Enormous electrical energy up there, megawatts per cubic meter. At first we were worried that the tower would be like a big lightning rod, conducting down to the ground. Zap! Melt the bedrock, maybe."

  "My god," Lara said.

  "But we insulated the outer shell so that's not a problem."


  Before Lara could think of something to say, Mance went on, "Then I started thinking about how we might tap some of that energy and use it to power the elevators."

  "Tap the ionosphere?"

  "Right. It's replenished by the solar wind. Earth's magnetic field traps solar protons and electrons."

  "That's what causes the northern lights," Lara said, straining to raise her voice above the laboring diesel's growl.

  "Yep. If we work it right, we can generate enough electricity to run the blinking tower and still have enough to sell to users on the ground. We can recoup all the costs of construction by selling electrical power!"

  "How much electricity can you generate?" she asked.

  "What?" he yelled.

  She repeated her question, louder.

  He waggled his right hand. "Theoretically, the numbers are staggering. Lots of gigawatts. I've got Mitchell working on it."

  That's a benefit no one thought about, Lara said to herself. The original idea of the skytower was to build an elevator that could lift people and cargo into space cheaply, for the cost of the electrical energy it takes to carry them. Pennies per pound, instead of the hundreds of dollars per pound that rocket launchings cost. Now Mance is talking about using the tower to generate electricity, as well. How wonderful!

  Then a new thought struck her. "Isn't this earthquake territory?" she shouted into Mance's ear.

  His grin didn't fade even as much as a millimeter. He nodded vigorously. "You bet. We've had two pretty serious tremors already, Riehter sixes. The world's highest active volcano is only a couple hundred kilometers or so from our site."

  "Isn't that dangerous?"

  "Not for us. That's one of the reasons we used the banyan tree design. The ground can sway or ripple all it wants to-the tower's not anchored to the ground, just tethered lightly. It won't move much."

  Lara realized she looked unconvinced because Mance added, "Besides, we're not on a fault line. Nowhere near one. I got solid geological data before picking the site. The ground's not going to open up beneath us, and even if it did the tower would just stand there, solid as the Rock of Gibralter."

  "But if it should fall... all that weight..."

  Mance's smile turned almost smug. "It won't fall, honey. It can't. The laws of physics are on our side."

  DATA BANK

  Skyhook.Beanstalk. Space elevator. Skytower. All these names and more have been applied to the idea of building an elevator that can carry people and cargo from the Earth's surface into orbital space.

  Like many other basic concepts for space transportation, the idea of a skytower originated in the fertile mind of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian pioneer who theorized about rocketry and astronautics in relative obscurity around the turn of the twentieth century. His idea for a "celestial castle" that could rise from the equator into orbital space, published in 1895, may have been inspired by the newly built Eiffel Tower, in Paris.

  In 1960, the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov revived the concept of the space elevator. Six years later an American oceanographer, John Isaacs, became the first outside of Russia to write about the idea. In 1975, Jerome Pearson, of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, brought the space elevator concept to the attention of the world's scientific community through a more detailed technical paper. The British author Arthur C. Clarke popularized the skyhook notion in several of his science fiction novels.

  Although it sounds outlandish, the basic concept of a space elevator is well within the realm of physical possibility. As Clarke himself originally pointed out, a satellite in geostationary orbit, slightly more than thirty-five thousand kilometers above the equator, circles the Earth in precisely the same time it takes for the Earth to revolve about its axis. Thus such a satellite remains constantly above the same spot on the equator. Communications satellites are placed in geostationary Clarke orbits so that ground-based antennas may be permanently locked onto them.

  To build a skytower, start at geostationary orbit. Drop a line down to the Earth's surface and unreel another line in the opposite direction, another thirty-five thousand kilometers into space. Simple tension will keep both lines in place. Make the line strong enough to carry freight and passenger elevators. Voila! A skyhook. A beanstalk. A skytower.

  However, in the real world of practical engineering, the skytower concept lacked a suitable construction material. All known materials strong enough to serve were too heavy for the job. The tower would collapse of its own weight. A material with a much better strength-to-weight ratio was needed.

  Buckyball fibers were the answer. Buckminsterfullerene is a molecule of sixty carbon atoms arranged in a sphere that reminded the chemists who first produced them of a geodesic dome, the type invented by the American designer R. Buckminster Fuller. Quickly dubbed buckyballs, it was found that fibers built of such molecules had the strength-to-weight ratio needed for a practical space elevator-with a considerable margin of error to spare. Where materials such as graphite, alumina, and quartz offer tensile strengths in the order of twenty gigapascals (a unit of measurement for tensile strength) the requirements for a space elevator are more than sixty gigapascals. Buckyball fibers have tensile strengths of more than one hundred gigapascals.

  By the middle of the twenty-first century all the basic technical demands of a skytower could be met. What was needed was the capital and the engineering skill to build such a structure: a tower that rises more than seventy thousand kilometers from the equator, an elevator that can carry payloads into space for the price of the electricity used to lift them.

  Backed by the nation of Ecuador and an international consortium of financiers, Skytower Corporation hired Mance Bracknell to head the engineering team that built the skytower a scant hundred kilometers from Quito. People in the streets of the Ecuadorian capital could see the tower rising to the heavens, growing thicker and stronger before their eyes.

  Many glowed with pride as the tower project moved toward completion. Some shook their heads, however, speaking in worried whispers about the biblical Tower of Babel. Even in the university, philosophers spoke of man's hubris while engineers discussed moduli of elasticity. In Quito's high-rise business towers, men and women who dealt in international trade looked forward to the quantum leap that the tower would produce for the Ecuadorian economy. They saw their futures rising as high as the sky, and quietly began buying real estate rights to all the land between Quito and the base of the tower.

  None of them realized that the skytower would be turned into a killing machine.

  CIUDAD DE CIELO

  "It's huge," Lara said, as she stepped down from the Humvee. Inwardly she thought of all the phallic jokes the men must be making about this immense tower.

  "A hundred meters across at the base," Bracknell said, heading for the back of the truck where her luggage was stored. "The size of a football field."

  The driver stayed behind his wheel, anxious to get his pay and head back to the airport.

  "It tapers outward slightly as it rises," Bracknell went on. "The station up at geosynch is a little more than a kilometer across."

  The numbers were becoming meaningless to her. Everything was so huge. This close, she could see that each of the interwound cables making up the thick column must be a good five meters in diameter. And there were cables angling off to the sides, like the roots of a banyan, except that there were buildings where the cables reached the ground. They must be the tethers that Mance told me about, Lara thought.

  "Well," he said, grinning proudly as he spread his arms, "this is it. Sky City. Ciudad de Cielo."

  It was hard to take her eyes off the skytower, but Lara made the effort and looked around her. At Mance's instruction, the taxi had parked in front of a two-story building constructed of corrugated metal walls. It reminded her of an airplane hangar or an oversized work shed. Looking around, she saw rows of such buildings laid out along straight paved streets, a neat gridwork of almost identical structures, a prefabricated little city. Sky
City. It was busy, she saw. Trucks and minivans bustled about the streets, men and women strode purposively along the concrete sidewalks. Very little noise, though, she realized. None of the banging and thumping that usually accompanied construction projects. Of course, Lara thought: all the vehicles are powered by electrical engines. This city was quietly intense, humming with energy and purpose.

  Then she smiled. Somewhere down one of those streets someone was playing a guitar. Or perhaps it was a recording. A softly lyrical native folk song, she guessed. Its gentle notes drifted through the air almost languidly.