Jumping off the Planet d-1

by David Gerrold

  So, yeah, it wasn't all bad. Once in awhile it was almost nice. And later, when we got out, we stood around for a bit, just laughing and grinning. J'mee hugged his chest again and pretended to shiver even though we were standing under the tanning lamps. I just stretched my arms up and out and leaned as far back as I could, basking under the narrow-spectrum UV rays. J'mee started to do the same, then stopped when he saw me looking at him. "I'm gonna go get dressed," he said abruptly.

  "Okay, me too."

  We went back to the changing room. This time all the bathroom stalls were filled, so we had to change in front of each other—except that J'mee turned his back to me when he pulled down his shorts and then he pulled on his underwear real fast. And that's when I figured it out. "You don't have any brothers, do you?" I asked.

  "Huh? No. How can you tell?"

  I shrugged. "Just the way you change clothes. That's all. Lotsa guys are shy."

  J'mee didn't answer. He turned away and pulled off his wet T-shirt, then quickly pulled his sweatshirt on.

  "Do you have any hair yet?" I asked.

  "Huh?"

  "You know, down there."

  "Uh—"

  "Let's see," I said. "I'll show you mine." I yanked down my shorts and turned so he could see. I didn't have a lot of hair, but enough so I didn't look like a baby anymore. J'mee glanced, in spite of himself, probably just to see if I meant it—then he glanced away quickly, face reddening.

  "It's okay," I said. "You can look—"

  "No thanks," he said, sitting down to pull on his sandals.

  "Come on," I teased. "It doesn't bite."

  "No!" he shouted, a little too loudly. He grabbed his other shoe and ran out of the changing room like he was suddenly scared of me.

  Okay. So that was that. I shrugged and pulled my underwear up and finished getting dressed. When I came out of the pool area, J'mee was gone, and I couldn't find him in any of the lounges.

  So I went back to the cabin and listened to my music until Dad and Stinky and Weird came in and interrupted me. Again.

  SPACE SHAVE

  Stinky was whining about wanting to play with his new monkey and Weird had gone back to being the techno-geek and Dad was annoyed about something else, I didn't know what. They just came in like a door blown open in a sandstorm and swept around the room for a while before they settled in.

  I guess we were all tired. And not just physically. We'd been through a lot, and now it was catching up with us. Dad said that traveling was tiring, and even though most of what we'd been doing was sitting around and watching the scenery slide by, what little there was of it, I could see why he would think so. Not having anything to do is a lot more tiring than having everything to do. But I think we were tired of each other. I know I was.

  The screen was blinking with a reminder to please watch the important informational video. Weird is datatropic or something. If it's educational, he has to read it or watch it or listen to it, so he punched up the program immediately. I flung myself down on a chair and glowered while Weird watched intently. Eventually, Dad put down his book and watched too. Off in the corner, Stinky happily made up his own code phrases and taught the monkey to do silly things whenever he said them. He had the monkey belching, pretending to fart, giving the finger, mooning and waggling its butt. If he could have taught it to crap on the rug as well, I bet he would have.

  The video turned out to be a lot more interesting than it looked at first glance. It was full of funny stories about how to look like a jerk in micro-gravity. They had that red-haired comedian, you know the one, with his hair flaming out in all directions, stumbling through all the different ways to hurt yourself. So it was kind of interesting to watch after all.

  There was one part that gave us pause. The guy who was narrating said, "If you're planning to go on to Luna or any other deep-space destination, body shaving is strongly recommended. If you are heading out to any military or scientific destination, it will be required."

  "Huh?" I asked. "Body shaving?"

  The program went on to show how the body flakes off zillions of tiny bits of skin and hair every day. In micro-gravity, this stuff floats around like a nanotech snowstorm. The hair is apparently the worst, cause it can clog up the micromachinery. As a long-term maintenance measure, the Loonies shave themselves and rub stuff on their skin so it doesn't flake so much, and apparently this was now recommended for anyone who was planning to spend any amount of time in space.

  Dad said this was part of the economics involved in Elevator Theory. Macro events have micro effects; micro events have macro effects. In space body hair is a luxury. Hair holds dirt and bacteria and smells. When you have hair, your scalp also flakes a lot. And underarm hair and pubic hair gets into everything too. It's nasty.

  And if that weren't disgusting enough, the program showed how all that stuff builds up in the recycling equipment and sometimes you get pockets of goop where bacteria can live—so minimizing all those flakes of skin and hair floating around is also good for preventing the spread of infection. The show didn't specifically mention what happened on the Miranda. They didn't have to. The lawsuits still hadn't been settled.

  But they also said that without hair on your head or on your body, you don't use up as much water washing. So if you want to have hair, you have to pay for it. Dad said that there's a surcharge at some of the orbital hotels if you don't shave, because it costs more to clean up. More Elevator Theory economics.

  Then the program showed the red-haired guy shaving everything—and I mean everything—even his head. He looked real sad about losing his hair and even sillier without it, but they let him keep a real short buzz on top, so you could still tell he was the same guy. The short hair looked better on the women, for some reason.

  I thought the whole thing was a little extreme, but Dad said that it made sense to him, and the next thing I knew he and Weird were in the bathroom looking at the shaving equipment. Mostly, there was this big vacuum tube that came out of the wall with a kind of clippers in a big mouth at the end. It sucked up all the hair as fast as it clipped. The clipper was really a forest of micro-machines, first you set it for your age and your sex and how close you wanted to be shaved, and then you moved it slowly back and forth across your skin until the light on the end showed green, then you moved on to the next place. You had to do this for the hair on your head and your legs and under your arms and down below if you had anything there yet, which I did, but not really very much and I wasn't sure yet I wanted to lose it.

  Weird said we should have gone to a shaving station at Terminus, where we could have gotten the full treatment, including the services of a professional shaver, and it was too bad we hadn't taken the time, but Dad just shrugged it off. "We have twenty-four hours of travel before we reach Geostationary. The equipment here will be sufficient."

  Dad also said that the micro-economics of space were already becoming a part of Earth society. A lot of people who never went into space were shaving now, some because they thought it was sexy, but just as many were doing it to cut back on their water consumption. I could understand that. Mom was always complaining about the clean water taxes, which were almost as much as the water bill in El Paso. Now that he'd mentioned it, I realized there were a lot of bald people back home in our Tube-Town. I'd just never noticed it or thought about it before.

  Anyway, after you shaved, you were supposed to take a special shower. It wasn't a shower like on Earth where the water jets come out of the wall. Instead, you get a little sprayer at the end of a hose, which you use for getting yourself wet, then you rub yourself all over with some foamy stuff, which is supposed to keep your skin from drying and flaking so much, and then you shloop it all off with another vacuum tube. If you do it right, your skin ends up feeling all slick and slippery, as soft and smooth as a baby's ass.

  Dad went first, then Weird, then me, then Stinky. I thought we ended up looking like fat brown slugs. Bald fat brown slugs. Mom was going to kill us when we got back. A
nd it felt kind of weird to be so smooth all over. My clothes felt a lot rougher too.

  There were some nylan space-clothes in one of the closets. All different sizes, each set a different color. They were real light and soft, like one of Dad's silk shirts. When you opened the package you were automatically billed for them, but they didn't cost that much and Dad said we'd probably all be a lot more comfortable than if we tried to wear Earth-clothes. Earth-clothes are for protection from the weather. Space-clothes are for comfort and cleanliness.

  The nylan space-suit is sort of a one-piece jumpsuit that you step into and zip up the front. It's one of those nano-zippers that disappears when you zip it. You can't even feel it. The wrists and the ankles are snug-fitting. So is the collar around the neck. This is again to keep skin flakes and hairs from being spread around. There are slipperlike shoes to wear too. The whole thing is kind of like dressing for a clean-room. There were also shower caps for people who didn't want to cut their hair and other caps for people who did, but the caps were optional; we didn't have to wear them. Stinky and I both did. Dad and Weird decided not to.

  It felt like Halloween and after we were done, we all looked like Hallo-weenies. After Weird told him he was as smooth and as cute as a girl, Stinky went dancing around the room singing, "I'm a girl now, I'm a girl now." I just made a face and looked embarrassed. Was this really necessary? But Dad said we'd get used to it and we'd probably find it a lot more comfortable than trying to keep wearing our Earth-clothes. So we packed them all up in the dirty clothes bag and put them in the closet and forgot about them.

  VISION

  It takes twenty-four hours to get to Geostationary. If you take an express, you can do it in six hours, but they only run express cars two or three times a day, and they're very expensive because they use rocket assists and special tracks. There are also maintenance tracks and balance tracks. The cables are thick enough now so that they can have multiple tracks on each one.

  The balance tracks are mostly above One-Hour. They're on the opposite side of the cable from the main tracks, but every so often, you can see the long bulge of a water-pod hanging in place. There are several thousand water-pods on the Line, and they move up and down on their tracks as needed, to counterbalance any big waves in the cable, like the ones caused by Hurricane Charles below.

  Most people think the cables are rigid, but they're not. Well, they are if you look only at a small section at a time—like a few thousand meters or so—and gravity helps too. But when you consider that the cable is really thousands of kilometers long—all the way up to Geostationary and then half again as far out beyond for balance—a whole different scale of physics comes into play. Dad says that on that scale, a continent has the consistency of chocolate cake, and the cable is like a piece of spider web, so it will react to certain kinds of very big movements—like a hurricane, for instance.

  It sets up waves. That's why the water-pods are moved up and down to different places to help damp the waves. I don't really understand all of the mechanics, but it has something to do with breaking the rhythm—or maybe that's braking the rhythm. Anyway, it's like not letting all the soldiers march in step across the bridge or it'll collapse.

  This was all explained in another program. It didn't matter what time it was, there were always programs about the orbital elevator: about how it was built and when the first cars were dropped down it and when public service began and how many passengers use the cable every day and how many people there are on the cable at any given moment—stuff like that.

  There was a whole program just on the elevator cars alone, all the different types, how they work, how they're constructed inside, how they're connected to the tracks. The bigger cars have longer carriages and they stand away from the cable more. They're mounted at the tops and bottoms, so they look like handles with windows in them sliding up and down the Line.

  It's all done with magnetic induction. The car never even touches the cable unless it has to stop, in which case there are contact brakes, because the track-riding mechanisms aren't really designed for slowing and stopping; they're designed for moving a thousand miles an hour. You can't just slow an elevator down and hold it in place because magnetics don't work like that, so that's why there are contact brakes; but even contact brakes have to be specially designed, because the cars are moving so fast that to try to stop one, the brakes would generate enough heat to permanently weaken the cable. So stopping a car isn't a simple operation.

  If the car is going up, they just turn off the magnetics and let the car coast for a bit until it burns off most of its speed. When it's still going about fifty miles an hour upward, that's when the contact brakes grab hold. But stopping the car when it's going down is a whole other story; they have to reverse the magnetic inductors and slow the car, and that takes a whole lot longer to reduce its speed.

  Restarting a car is easier going down, but almost impossible going up, because the magnetic inductors are spaced too far apart for an easy start. They don't really expect cars to stop and start on the cable anyway. Weird said that in the event of a real problem, the Line engineers would rather pop the car off and either let it parachute down if it's low enough, or catch it somewhere in orbit if it's too high to land.

  The most interesting show we saw was a rerun of the Nova episode called "Breakaway Revisited" about what would happen if the cable snapped. First they showed clips from the movie Breakaway which supposedly depicted everything that would happen in such an accident. They showed all the best shots, of the cable falling and falling and falling and finally wrapping itself around the Earth, slicing across continents, jungles, deserts, oceans, mountains. They extrapolated all the damage that could occur. It was pretty scary stuff—I was surprised they were even showing it on the cable channels.

  The most likely place for the Line to break would be low Earth orbit, around the 1000-kilometer point, because that's where the most and fastest orbital junk is—and the most ionized gas too, which also has a corrosive effect. But the part that fell back to Earth would be relatively short and thin. And it would fall almost vertically. A break at the 1000-kilometer point would result in the broken end arriving at ground level about eight minutes later, at a speed of nearly 4 km/sec, about 25 km west of Terminus Station—the foothills of the Andes.

  A break higher up, though, would be much more serious. If the beanstalk snapped at Geostationary, the upper half would fly away into space, but the lower half would be 40,000 kilometers long. It would wrap itself around the planet—all the way around the planet!

  It would be like detonating nuclear weapons along every inch of the equator. The destruction could be as bad as the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. When you calculate mass and impact, you're talking about an object 40,000 kilometers long, circling the Earth and hitting the ground with the equivalent force of twenty times its own weight in TNT. It's an extinction-level event.

  We would lose millions of lives, first from the immediate destruction around the equator and vicinity, then millions more from all the after-effects. Slumbering volcanoes might be shaken back to life. Earthquakes would very likely be triggered along fault lines. Uncontrollable firestorms would be started across the Amazon and the heart of Africa. A gigantic wall of ash would climb into the atmosphere—at least as bad as anything caused by an asteroid impact—and all that soot in the air would create a nuclear autumn and probably a decade-long disruption of the seasons, maybe longer. The impact of the cable across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would cause immediate tsunamis on every coastline, and noticeable heating of tropical water temperatures as well—enough to trigger super-hurricanes. After that, the real disaster would begin: the inevitable extinction of many species; the disruption of rainfall, migration patterns on land and sea, and crop-growing seasons; long-term famines.

  Oh, and one other thing. If one Line failed in a big way, enough to wrap around the Earth, it would very likely knock down all the others with it—the one in Africa, and the one at Christmas Isl
and. And each of those failures would have equally disastrous effects.

  Of smaller import, but equally significant to human beings, would be the near-total collapse of the global economy.

  The Line represents such an enormous part of the wealth of the planet that its destruction and the destruction of property on land and in space would essentially bankrupt every insurance company in the world. The loss of capital would also bankrupt every investment company. The interconnectedness of everything would pull down everything.

  The failure of the beanstalk would also maroon many people in space with no safe way to return, simply because there wouldn't be the spacecraft available. Without regular supplies, the folks in the asteroids, the Lagrange colonies, and other bases would run out of food, water, and air. Only Luna and Mars were anywhere near self-sufficiency. The death toll in space would be proportionally more severe than the death toll on the ground. Three out of every five. As many as six million people.

  But then the show started examining all of the movie's premises and took each one apart to show that for all of the events in the movie to actually happen, the cable would have had to have been designed to fail. They showed how the individual fibers of the cable were manufactured out of superlong molecules, how they were braided, strengthened, linked, and energized by superpowerful currents—so that even if a terrorist were to succeed in planting a strong enough bomb on an elevator car, it still wouldn't destroy the beanstalk. All three cables were now cross-linked every hundred klicks, and those linkages were designed to provide enough support so that a broken cable would stay in place until a repair crew could arrive to secure it. In fact, any single one of the cables was thick enough and strong enough to hold the other two in place if a break occurred. They showed that even if all three cables were broken at different places, the beanstalk would still survive long enough to be repaired. The only way a terrorist could destroy it, he'd have to snap all three cables at the same place, which just wasn't possible because the cables were held far enough apart from each other to put them well out of each other's blast radius. Even a piece of orbiting space junk colliding with the Line could only take out one cable, not all three, because they were spaced farther apart than the size of any known piece of junk. Anything short of a nuclear device would be insufficient to snap the Line.