Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  They were not traveling in the fast orbit of the lower reaches of space, where one actually did sense motion over an ever-changing landscape below; they were firmly locked in place, 23,000 miles directly above the platform, a mile south of Aranuka. He had half expected to actually be able to see that, but of course not from this altitude. Even the “wire” itself quickly disappeared from view in its long descent, adding to the sensation of hovering like guardian angels over their home world.

  But as he watched, there was indeed now a sense of movement as the demarcation line of sunset and sunrise half a hemisphere wide shifted along at nearly a thousand miles an hour at the equator.

  It actually was disorienting for a moment, even with the awareness that they were stationary above one spot, and that it was the earth rotating that was causing the demarcation lines of sunrise and sunset to shift below them.

  A strange, wondrous feeling, and he felt such a swelling of pride and joy.

  “Commander Singh”—he laughed—“I mean Selena, can I patch in a call to my wife and daughter?”

  She looked back from her station, smiled, spoke a few words into her headset, unbuckled herself from her seat, and brought an iPad over. A few seconds of static and then there was Eva looking at him, grinning, eyes tearing up.

  “Thank God you are safe!” she cried in Ukrainian.

  “Safe and sound. You got Victoria with you?”

  “Getting her now,” and as Eva spoke she was walking out on to the deck of the platform and actually looked a bit foolish as she gazed straight up as if she could actually see him, and then back at the iPad’s camera.

  “I can’t believe you are really up there!”

  “Believe it!”

  “Hey, Daddy!”

  Victoria now crowded into view beside Eva.

  “Hi, angel.”

  “How you doing up there?”

  “You two have to see this,” he cried, and switched the camera view on the iPad, pointing it out the window, Kevin quietly leaning in to help steady it, since Gary’s hands were trembling. Kevin made eye contact with him, gesturing that he’d hold the unit for him. It was a simple but so compassionate gesture. Gary talked excitedly for several minutes about the view, exclaiming with delight that he thought he could actually see Honolulu lighting up for the night.

  His two girls let him ramble on until finally he realized he was hogging the conversation and then tried to sound casual as he asked, “So how are things down there today?”

  It was a delight to hear both of them laugh. He knew they were worried sick about his ascent and relieved at last that he was safely aboard and in safe hands.

  “Just green with envy, Daddy!” Victoria cried with delight.

  “Won’t be long before you two are up here as well, and then after you millions more will eventually follow. Eva, you’re right: just this view, it changes everything. Everything about how we see our world, ourselves, our futures”—his voice choked a bit—“our daughter’s future. I can’t wait for you to see it, to paint it, for my favorite composer to come up here and write her music while seeing what I am seeing. Maybe words cannot do it, but music by someone like Constance Demby can explain it all, though if old Ray Bradbury was still alive I bet he could almost reach it.”

  He fell silent, afraid emotion would completely overtake him if he continued.

  His two “girls” were silent as well, gazing at him, smiling with joy for him.

  He looked over at Singh.

  “This is a secured channel, right?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Private channel,” she said.

  He looked back at the iPad, switching the camera view back to focus on him.

  “And don’t worry, I’m feeling just fine. Tell that busybody Dr. Bock I think we are onto something when it comes to therapy and treatment in this environment—for a lot of things.”

  He let go of the handhold and then did something reckless, pushing up, tucking his legs in, and actually somersaulting, laughing at first but then seconds later wishing he had not as Singh hurried over to steady him, Kevin reaching up to guide him back to the view port. But it had the effect he wanted down there: both Eva and Victoria were laughing with delight.

  He forced a smile, willing himself to focus back on the earth, doing as Singh had advised, thinking above him was up and he was just looking down while the fluid in his inner ear continued to slosh around.

  “I’m going to sign off for now,” he said. “Got to stow my gear and see what zero-g sleep is like. I just want the two of you to know how much I love you; Victoria, how proud I am of you. Don’t worry, up here I am actually free to again move around as I darn well please. And oh, yeah, tell Franklin thanks for what he spent on this: best damn investment in the history of humanity.”

  “I know that.”

  It was Franklin. Eva shifted the camera on her iPad to one side and his friend was standing there, grinning at him.

  “God bless you, Franklin. I look forward to the day you see from up here what you created.”

  Franklin’s dark features were creased with a wide grin.

  “What you and Eva convinced me could be real,” he replied. “Now go get some rest. The ever-hovering Dr. Bock is just out of range of this camera and ready to start swearing at you for pulling off your monitoring wires once you got a thousand miles up and we knew the lift pod would take you all the way.”

  “You’re damn right I’m upset with him,” Gary could hear off camera. “Tell Singh I want a full physical report 1800 hours our time here.”

  Gary laughed.

  “I’ll think about it,” and then he reached over and touched the iPad to turn the camera off.

  “Thanks, Kevin.”

  “Sure, Doc. Now, two things. See those smudge marks on the window?”

  “Yes,”

  “That’s from our noses pressed to it. There are times we actually argue about who gets the window, so we have a schedule for that. If the window is free, it’s yours, but if it’s on someone’s schedule … well, then it’s mine!”

  Gary could not help but laugh with understanding.

  “Technically it’s my scheduled time right now, but what the hell. You take it and enjoy it. We’ll get your bunk made up, I’ll show ya how the shower and head work, and between us two guys you do need a shower. Physical for you at 1800 hours, dinner at 1900. I’m the cook for tonight and I just might share a slice or two of Luigi’s Pizza from New York, if you think your stomach can handle it.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Don’t push it too much at the start,” Singh called from her post back at the monitoring station. “And, Kevin, you’re on EVA standby at 2100 along with Jenna, so you know the rules: no eating for six hours before EVA. We’ll have dinner after the next spinner is hooked up and on its way down.”

  “Ah, damn it.”

  “All right, then, a midnight snack.”

  Gary could hear Jenna cussing in the background that her beloved Phil’s Bar-B-Que, imported all the way from Black Mountain, North Carolina, was going to have to wait as well.

  “Doc, you just hang here for a while, enjoy the best view in the universe,” Kevin said. “The orbital mechanics are awesome with this. The only time we are in total darkness is for a few minutes when our rotation carries us around so that the earth below eclipses the sun. My God, it is incredible: everything below is dark, but the entire band of the atmosphere from pole to pole is glowing. Or just as wild when the moon behind us eclipses the sun, but down below, the earth is illuminated. That is why there are so many nose smears on the window.”

  Kevin laughed.

  “When the earth eclipses the sun, we draw cards for who gets the longest look-see. You have a small nine-inch port in your private bunk but that kinda looks just straight out. But still, you get to see the stars and, depending on the time of day, the sun or moon, but it’s not the same as looking straight down.”

  He paused.

  “You fe
el a need for the head right now?” Kevin asked.

  He did actually but shook his head. His stomach was settling down, and it did make him feel like a little kid in need of someone to show him how to use the various sanitary devices on board.

  “Sure, Doc,” and he clapped him on the shoulder with his big, beefy hand. “Couple of days from now when you get a feel for the place we’ll show you a couple of games.”

  “Games?”

  “Tag, for one,” and he looked back at Singh with a bit of a sly grin.

  “I heard that, and the rules are tag only the other person’s head.”

  Kevin chuckled.

  “Heck, locked up here for a tour of duty, it does get to you,” he whispered in a guy-to-guy voice.

  “We do some gymnastics. Jenna is the wiz on that: she can do an octuple somersault within the length of the ship. I prefer just doing the Superman routine of flying back and forth. Once your inner ear settles down, we’ll teach you the ropes.”

  Though it sounded appealing, he said nothing, keeping his focus on the earth below and trying not to think about attempting even one more somersault at the moment.

  “I’ll come back and fetch you, Doc, when we’re ready to take you around for the rest of the stuff.”

  Kevin left his side, giving him a gentle slap on the back and another “Glad to have ya aboard, sir.”

  It was so reassuring. He had worried about how these three professionals would greet what they might see as an intrusion looking over their shoulders rather than a fully trained replacement crew member even if everyone had quietly agreed that the man who had been “bumped” was a well-trained genius but had the personality of a dead wet fish. It was obvious that so far they were enjoying the fact that one of the designers of the “world” they now lived and worked in was sharing it with them.

  He hoped that in the months to come he could prove his worth.

  That wish would come true sooner than he thought.

  17

  The “Perfect Storm”

  In the two and a half months after Gary’s epic ascent, which had indeed captured the imagination of the world in the same way the Mars Curiosity mission and the advent of the suborbital launch business had triggered a renewed interest in space, much had changed 23,000 miles below.

  Proxley had barely survived a primary challenge from a very pro-space advocate and the message to him was clear. Senator Dennison had become chair of the Senate committee that had oversight on the NASA budget and she was making it abundantly clear what her vision was for America’s future: that vision was a revitalized space program and, while fiscal responsibility and budget cuts would be the order of the day, it was time NASA was placed back on the front burner of public support as a path to a better future. And the public support was growing.

  The Chinese had attempted their first launch of a wire to geosynch, and though on a professional level all with Franklin’s team wished them well, there was some tension until the announcement that the unit had failed to deploy. Franklin had actually been magnanimous and without the slightest sarcasm offered to advise and consult for free, stating that the world could eventually use a dozen towers and he held no monopoly on the concept. So far the Chinese had politely refused his offer.

  But there were problems as well. Professor Garlin’s increasingly strident attacks on the disruptive technology of the tower were gaining notice. Her latest book had reached best-seller status and she was a guest speaker at an EU conference about the future of space policy, calling for a moratorium on the entire project until its full impacts—not just on space navigation but on the actual global economy—could be “studied and evaluated.”

  Such a study, she and other opponents knew, would drag out for years, as such things tend to do, until the project just died as investors drifted away and public opinion shifted. It was an age-old tactic and usually it worked. But in defiance of a UN vote for just such a study, the nation of Kiribati stood firm in its support, and short of an actual invasion or coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, how could anyone stop them? Franklin’s wisdom of going to an independent nation which would be the first to be overwhelmed by global warming was now abundantly clear. A nation of little more than a hundred thousand citizens was telling the rest of the world what it could go do with their so-called injunctions and studies and reports and just continued to forge ahead with the dream.

  Gary thought it highly ironic that the university that had trained and launched his career also harbored someone who was now hell-bent on stopping it. At least his daughter was ready to go for her dissertation defense, and interestingly it was even drawing some national media coverage, with Franklin broadly hinting that once Victoria had her Ph.D. in hand, she was taking over as head of the subsidiary of the Pillar Inc. conglomerate dedicated to developing and distributing limitless electricity from space. There was even a flurry of news when another company, obviously with the intent of sidetracking her work, offered her ten times what Franklin was rumored to be paying her. She laughingly turned it down.

  The truly disturbing aspect was the realization, in that perpetual hot zone of global politics, the Middle East, as to what a successful ribbon tower, capable of sending nearly limitless energy back to earth, could do to the economy of nations pumping out what was left of a diminishing oil supply at ever-higher prices was now becoming clear. Oil was nearing two hundred a barrel as the nearly eight billion inhabitants of the planet scrambled for what was left, even in the face of the most optimistic projections of oil still to be found in substrata shale. Whether it was twenty years or a hundred, calculated on present demand, that demand would continue to rise almost regardless of price. Granted, oil output was nearly the same as in peak years, but it was the cost per barrel to extract from ever-greater depths that was driving prices ever higher. The long-ago days of “gushers” in the Texas plains shooting geysers of oil hundreds of feet into the air with every other drilling were now just a dream of generations past. Now half a billion or more might be spent on a deep-sea rig to explore, perhaps tap into a few million barrels and then go dry, not even recouping the investment.

  Beyond that, with each passing year—as China, India, and other former “third world” countries leapt forward to achieve the living standard of what had been once called “first world” countries—not just the demand for energy but with it the dark after-effect of CO2 output spiraling ever upward was increasingly converting even the most die-hard critics of global warming that, be it a generation from now, or a hundred years hence, the world would be in deep trouble.

  And with all these issues it was inevitable that the region of the world still seen as the primary supplier of oil, the Middle East, saw the handwriting on the wall: that their decades-long run of economic exploitation, and the political power that came with oil, was now threatened and dark rumors circulated as to the steps that might be taken.

  Someone had leaked Victoria’s dissertation, which she would soon have to defend before her graduate committee. A sudden, revolutionary under-cutting of that energy system, as proposed in Victoria’s dissertation, would trigger an economic dislocation unknown in modern history, far exceeding that of workers in nineteenth-century England and northern Europe.

  Out of the vast industrial transition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in spite of some of the darker moments of societal transition there had emerged a better life for future generations. The downside that Garlin and others dwelled on with their Cassandra-like warnings, and at times outright scare tactics, were the tragedies that had come as well and now the ever-present threat of another global war in the twenty-first century as humanity scrambled for ever dwindling resources. It was the eternal struggle between the belief in progress on one side, and the fear of the change it will create on the other side.

  As Victoria prepared for her dissertation defense, Garlin argued most persuasively that overnight there could be economic dislocation of billions, from those working in auto plants stil
l turning out gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles and across the entire economy absolute disruption of a system built up over the last hundred years based on oil. The “disruption” theory was gaining strong supporters that paid lip service to agreement that the global climate had to be addressed but to do so in a slower, more carefully thought-out pace … again the standard tactic of delay until interest and investments waned and then disappeared.

  In the academic world that Victoria still inhabited, more than a few had turned against her, and there was even pressure on her graduate committee, tasked with reviewing and expected to approve her dissertation, to instead veto it and deny her the advanced degree she had studied for. There were daily protests in the commons area of the campus, organized by graduate students of Garlin’s, to have Victoria’s work dismissed, and her dismissed as well from the university.

  To try and calm the controversy, the president of the university suggested a dialogue between the two sides, which filled the entire auditorium, one of the largest of any campus in the country. It only added fuel to the fire that a twenty-three-year-old graduate student was about to stand up to an esteemed professor as she had once stood up to a senator.

  Garlin cut deep to the millions dependent for their livelihoods on existing and so-called “proven” technologies.

  And yet, in the next breath she maintained that of course she was for a green planet and the reversal of global warming from the use of fossil fuels. But was the answer truly to be found in space rather than on earth, where green solutions could be found that would not disrupt the global economy? Were there not viable alternatives to putting the fate of the world into the hands of a Franklin Smith, who would make the economic impact of men such as Carnegie, Vanderbilt, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds seem insignificant by comparison?