"That's our Independence Task," Ben said proudly. "A rural electrification project. I'll let Colonel Begin and Captain Shamir tell you all about it."
A little while later they came to the end of the Geryon Mountains.
"We're going to turn here up Lightning Canyon," Ben said. "But if you look off to your right through that cut in the mountains, you can see Hoofprint Slump, one of the biggest single landslides on Mars. It's almost fifty kilometers wide, twenty kilometers in, and five kilometers deep. The modeling studies insist that there had to be water inside to make the flow as big as it was. That's one of the reasons we knew we would hit water when we drilled wells."
He turned the crawler south and entered the wide canyon.
"Our scientists are positive that this canyon was formed by water during a warmer period on Mars. The water would come out during the warm days, but freeze at night, forming the strange valleys that look like Earth erosion features, but fatter. Lightning Canyon reaches well into the Sinai Plains from the Mariner Valley, and the tip of the furthest tributary is not far from a 'splosh' crater. The big pile of wet-looking debris around the crater indicates that there's plenty of liquid water not too far under the surface."
Shortly after entering the canyon, Ben turned the crawler sharply left. "The grade up Lightning Canyon is easier," he said. "Only five percent. But this crawler has good motors, so we take the steep way—the Valley of Aqaba—five kilometers up in fifty kilometers."
The whine from the motors lowered in pitch, and the crawler climbed straight up the steep, Swiss-like valley, as if it were on a cog-wheel track, with only the occasional swerve to avoid a soft sandstone boulder that had rolled down to the bottom without fracturing. After three hours they reached the top.
"Welcome to the Sinai Peninsula," Ben said. "It's even shaped a little like the Sinai Peninsula of Earth, except it's a lot smaller." He headed the crawler north. "Off to the left is the Mediterranean Valley. No water in it, but then, once upon a time, the real Mediterranean Valley was dry like this one. In less than an hour, you'll be at Sinai Springs, the watering hole of Mars ..."
GUS AND Chris were met by Yitzhak Begin, director of the Sinai Springs base and former commander of the Israeli contingent during the invasion of Mars.
"We originally started our work at Solis Lacus, where the Russians had set up the base they called Novobaku," Yitzhak said. "Admittedly there are frozen salty-sand marshes there that melt into shallow ponds during the day at midsummer. That is why radar returns from the flat surfaces had been seen on Earth. But as we started building up our water table models, we were led to explore regions that were closer to the source of underground heat needed to melt the permafrost into water—in this case, the Tharsis Ridge. We kept drilling test wells along the edge of Marineris Valles until we got here. I'll let Ben Shamir, one of my ex-captains in the Israeli UN contingent, tell you the rest. He's now head of our construction team for our hydroelectric power station."
Ben Shamir took them to the edge of the Suez Cliffs along the Sinai Peninsula's northern edge, which fell precipitously into the Ius Canyon that they had traversed not long before. He pointed out the pipeline down the cliff, the many stations along the way, and the growing flood of glacier ice moving its way slowly down the valley to the right.
"When we drilled our test wells, we found liquid water at half a kilometer below the surface. The ground turned out to be porous enough that we can get a high rate of flow. So, we pump the water up to the top, pipe it over here to the edge of the Suez Cliffs, and send it back down that pipe into the valley. We have turbines at about every kilometer of drop to extract electrical energy from the falling water.
"The water goes from seventy-eight hundred meters elevation at the top of the cliff to eighteen hundred meters elevation at the outflow nozzle, a six-kilometer drop in only eighteen kilometers of pipe. Although we have to invest the energy to pump the water up half a kilometer, and we have some friction losses, we get back more than ten times as much energy as we had to put in. Later on, we hope to extend the drop pipe another twenty-five kilometers to a hole in Ius Canyon that is actually thirty meters below 'sea level', and extract even more energy."
"What's your power output?" Gus asked.
"If we ran our wells at full output, we could easily generate a hundred megawatts with the present system."
"The energy problems of Mars are solved," Chris said.
"We've still got to get the superconducting DC power grid installed," Gus said. "And we're still going to need antimatter for the hopiters and crawlers."
"Some of our engineers have been discussing antimatter factory designs with Nobel Laureate Batusov, since it would be an ideal way to utilize electrical power that is not needed elsewhere on the planet. He has some novel ideas that would increase the antimatter production rate. The question is, should I have my engineers continue to work on increasing the output of our electrical power system, or should I have them start work on an antimatter factory?"
Gus looked at Chris with a pleased expression.
"Decisions ... decisions ..." Chris said with a bemused frown.
CHAPTER 12
The Shadow Of His Wings
IT TOOK a lot to awe Jerry 5-9753, but he had to admit to himself that he felt a little scared as the military limousine dropped him off at the entrance to the Potomac Palace of the Infinite Lord. He now wished that he had something else to wear than his usual sweat suit outfit. He adjusted his yellow Cap of Contact, which was bringing him a replay of last week's inspiring sermon by Alexander, and jogged solidly up the steps, the patch that signified his two-star military rank jiggling slightly on his plump bottom.
At the top of the steps, two large women of Alexander's new Amazon Bodyguard Corps started to block his way, but some unseen Watcher, monitoring the scene through an array of video cameras, recognized him and let him pass. After walking down a long hall, Jerry came to a large room overlooking the Potomac River flowing by down at the foot of the grassy bluff that the palace stood on.
The Infinite Lord was there in all his glory, looking so wonderful that Jerry wondered how he had ever taken Alexander for granted back when he was on Alexander's Mars campaign. As Jerry had expected, the Regent Di and the head of the armed forces, General "Sam" Samuelson, were there, their purple and white Caps of Contact on, but their visors flipped back. There was also another man that Jerry didn't recognize. He didn't wear a Cap of Contact at all.
"Welcome, Jerry," Alexander boomed as Jerry walked into the room. "You are looking remarkably well."
"Becoming one of your devoted followers has been the best thing that ever happened to me, your Infinite Lord," Jerry replied, beaming with pride at the praise. "I found friends who loved me and respected me, and soon I finally began to like myself. I've dropped fifty pounds, exercise every day, and now feel better than I ever felt before in my life. I owe it all to you, my Lord."
"I'm glad things are going so well for you personally," Alexander said with a pleased smile. "How are things going with my Strategic Offense Initiative?"
"Very well, sir," Jerry replied. "With all the resources you and General Sam have supplied the SOI office over the past eighteen months, my owlies and metalbenders have made great progress." He held up a nanodisk. "I'm prepared to give you the briefing you requested ..." He hesitated, looking at the strange man in the white suit without the Cap of Contact. "It's highly classified ..."
"Don't worry about Rob," Alexander said. "He's okay. He's my right-hand man, you might say."
"All right," Jerry said, looking around for a flatscreen. General Sam went to a wall switch and curtains pulled back from one wall to reveal a floor-to-ceiling flatscreen. Jerry put the nanodisk in the slot, picked up the controller, and stepped back.
"The three major components of the SOI program are: the Winged Eyes of the Lord, to search out evil wherever it can be found; the Nuclear Rapier of the Lord, to make those that live by the nuclear sword die by their own chosen weapon; a
nd the Silver Scythes of the Lord, to cut down those who would still resist the will of the Infinite One." He switched to the next picture; it had obviously been taken from some point on the Moon. It showed the Earth half-lit by the Sun from one side. Hanging over the dark side of the Earth were two bright arcs of points stretching nearly from pole to pole, like two giant silver scythes, one over the evening side and one over the dawn side.
"The Silver Scythes were the easiest, so they are already up and in place. Everyone has seen them drifting across the sky above them at night, but few know yet why we put them up. Each of the points in the arc of a Silver Scythe is a solar sail a few kilometers across. They are not in orbit around the Earth, but instead hover motionless over the dark side, the downward gravity pull of the Earth being counteracted by the light pressure from the Sun."
Jerry switched to a close-up scene showing a cluster of long rods, each the size of a crowbar, hanging from the central truss structure of a solar sail that stretched on out of sight.
"Hanging from each sail are hundreds of heavy rods made from slag left over from processing the asteroid used for the sail material. Twice a day, at dawn and dusk, nearly every person on Earth passes underneath the Silver Scythes, and if that person is so rash as to incur the wrath of the Infinite Lord, nothing can protect him!" One of the rods gave a shiver as its connection was cut, then it started to fall to the earth below.
The image switched to computer animation showing the rod falling through the air, perturbed by random buffeting. Tiny fins in the nose and tail of the rod flicked back and forth under the control of a tiny inertial guidance unit, keeping it on course.
The next scene showed a crude building out in the middle of a test range, cameras and instrumentation all around. The camera dwelt on the thick reinforced concrete ceiling of the building, then zoomed through the open doorway to the figure of a dummy sitting in a chair inside. The dummy wore a rubber Halloween face mask of the present Russian premier, Alexin Gorki. There was an explosion downward from the ceiling. When the concrete dust had cleared, pieces of the dummy were scattered around a deep hole in the floor.
"Our CEP is down to less than one meter," Jerry said proudly.
"And believe it or not," General Sam joked, "our CIA boys say they have the toilets in the Kremlin pinpointed to the centimeter."
Alexander laughed loudly at that one and took a long time to recover.
Jerry was waiting with the next scene when Alexander had finished laughing. This showed another structure in space, a fat rectangle made up of millions of tiny components in a regular array. "The Winged Eyes of the Lord was also relatively easy, since we only need three to observe any point on Earth, and it was just a matter of adding a floater to existing facilities at geo-synch. The only trick was making all the software play—I got to write some of this code myself." He switched from the picture to a diagram.
"It's basically simple optics. If you are a long way away from something, like thirty-six thousand kilometers away from the surface of the Earth out at GEO, and you want to see something small, like the half-millimeter dot at the end of a sentence on a piece of paper, then you need an eye that is one hundred kilometers across."
"You must have used some of your owlie magic to build that one," Alexander interrupted. "You certainly didn't cast a hundred-kilometer-diameter telescope lens."
"You're right, sir," Jerry said. "Instead of combining the light in phase using a lens, then detecting it, the Winged Eye of the Lord has millions of photodetectors that detect the light first, keeping the phase information, then combine it using the computer equivalent of a lens. The result is the same, except the computer version of a lens can also compensate for atmospheric distortion and any vibrations and motion of the Eye itself. With your permission, sir, I'd like to give a live demonstration."
"Sure!" Alexander said, pleased. Jerry tapped the control buttons on the side of his Cap of Contact.
"Break Potomac region block and commence with zoom," he ordered. He took out his leather-bound, real paper, gold-leaf-edged pocket Bible of the Church of the Unifier that he had bought from an advertisement on the church video channel—guaranteed to have been blessed by the Infinite Lord himself. He opened it to the Prime Principle and walked over near the window. On the flatscreen a picture of the full Earth in sunlight appeared, growing larger as the computer in the Winged Eye of the Lord stationed over the Americas zoomed in on the East Coast of the Unified States.
"There's Washington, D.C.," Jerry said as the zoom continued. "I've removed the block that prevents anyone from imaging in the area around the Potomac Palace. There's the palace now ... and now the window ... Hi, there!" He waved out the window with one hand, still holding the Bible with the other; and in the image on the flatscreen a figure inside the window waved a quarter of a second later. The zoom continued in until it focused on the opened page of the Bible.
"For the Infinite Lord to absolve you of sin, you first must have sinned," it read.
"Do you mean that thing can peek in my window any time day or night!" Alexander exploded, his face red with rage.
Jerry, having been pleased with himself, now realized that the live demonstration was about to turn into a disaster. He quickly flicked the flatscreen blank.
"Oh! No! Sir!" he assured him. "I have set the Eye up with strict blocks on viewing any of your residences."
"You'd better," Alexander grumbled, still angry.
"I assure you, sir!" Jerry said, quickly manipulating the screen controls. "Now, let me show you some other scenes that the Watchers have collected in the past few weeks.
"This is the Fifth Red Army tank battalion on maneuvers in the occupied portion of Latvia.
"This is the right shoulder of General Kalensky, head of the Russian Air Force, holding a classified document. Those large red letters at the top mean 'top secret' in Russian."
The general turned the page, then picked his nose. Alexander laughed.
The next picture showed a man in bedouin garb furtively pouring himself a drink of scotch whisky, then hiding the bottle in a hidden compartment of a cabinet. "This is the most influential and most righteous Muslim in all of the Arab world. He must have picked up some bad habits at Cambridge. If this picture got out, he would be lucky to escape with only a loss of all his influence."
"The man has good taste," Rob said. "That was Old Pulteney."
"This last one is in multispectral infrared," Jerry said. "Even the darkness of night is as daylight to the Winged Eyes of the Infinite Lord."
"Oh!" Di exclaimed when she finally realized what she was seeing. "Look at the fucker hump!"
"Who is it?" Alexander asked, eyes fixed on the titillating infrared scene.
"The prime minister of Australia," Jerry replied. "And the young lady is not his wife."
Alexander continued to watch with interest until the scene faded. "There is a lot we could do with that," Alexander finally said. "All it takes is for the people to lose faith in their leadership, and they will turn to someone stronger."
"Now for the third element in the Unified States Strategic Offense Initiative—the Nuclear Rapier," Jerry said.
"Yes!" Alexander said, sitting back. "How do we keep the Russkies from blowing us all to hell with their damn atomic bombs? Until we can solve that problem, we can't do anything to stop the evil tide of neocommunism."
"We just had our first tests of a full-up operational system last week, and it exceeded our expectations," Jerry said. "We have always known that a neutrino telescope could spot the position of a nuclear warhead or nuclear reactor with great accuracy. That is one of the reasons that the nuclear stalemate with the new Soviet Union has been so stable: We both know where each other's bombs and nuclear submarines are at all times. But until now, it has not been possible to reach those weapons and destroy them. They are too protected by distance and hardening. The Nuclear Rapier will solve that problem."
"Great!" Alexander said, beaming. "We'll blow the bastards off the face of
the Earth."
"Actually," General Sam injected, "they'll blow themselves off the face of the Earth. The beauty of the Nuclear Rapier is that it only works on those nations that have nuclear weapons. It turns the weapons on those that brandish them."
"The explanation of how the Nuclear Rapier works is a little complicated," Jerry said, "so I had my CAD scribblers make some animated diagrams." He showed the first picture. It was an ordinary nuclear power reactor. Little white animated balls bounced randomly around inside the reactor.
"Nuclear reactors work by using neutrons. A uranium atom in the reactor emits a neutron, it bounces around for a while until it slows down, then it gets absorbed by another uranium atom, which fissions and makes three neutrons. They bounce around for a while until they slow down, then they fission three uranium atoms. Each fission releases three new neutrons, for a total of nine, and the chain reaction builds up. If there are no controls, it builds up fast and you have a bomb. If there are proper controls, it only builds up until the reactor is hot, and you can get power from it.
"The main thing to remember is that slow neutrons cause uranium to fission. If you had a gun that shot neutrons, you could shoot a flood of neutrons at a subcritical assembly of uranium orplutonium and make it explode. Unfortunately ..." He switched to another diagram showing a white ball representing a neutron sitting next to a ticking clock. The clock rapidly ticked off the minutes, and when it reached eleven, the white neutron split into a fat red particle, a small blue particle, and a fast-moving wavy line.
"The neutron has a half-life of only eleven minutes. It then decays into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino—which is why we can spot bombs with a neutrino telescope. They are always giving off a few neutrinos, even when subcritical. Now, it's possible to build bottles that will hold ultraslow neutrons without loss—the Russians have been making such bottles for years—"
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