Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  With the arrival of the new team and all that was packed aboard their ship it was time to test run her own dream of the future.

  The test run required two distinct elements, one of which was in the payload bay of this final launch, the other which would be sent up from Kiribati and anchored at the thousand-mile point. There had been general agreement on the design of the first, upper-level deployment. But the second? What appeared to be the simpler, more logical solution had created howls of protest that Victoria’s scheme multiplied the hazards it created.

  But on her side it was suddenly quite helpful indeed to have three governors, one of them most influential indeed, from the most populous state in the Union, along with their bevy of congressional and senatorial representatives on board as well supporting the experiment.

  In the weeks leading up to the test, an all-out effort was made to build up the lower part of the tower to handle the stress loads.

  When she went out on the EVA to observe the unpacking of the equipment, she was a bit overawed. Kevin floated beside her, muttering, “Isn’t this a bit much?”

  In what were now the “old days” of the wire, it would have indeed been a bit too much; but after months of building up the strength of the ribbon tower, the stress load both for the lower package and upper pack she was now staring at had been reviewed again and again. It was, for her, the ultimate reason of the tower anyhow, and time to test it out for real and to do so quickly before the various protest groups—and there were many—were able to ram through some injunction.

  The new crew member supervising the unpacking, Andy Metziger, one of the new crew members selected by Victoria to oversee the transition of this project from design to deployment, now chuckled as he maneuvered the “experiment” over to the ribbon.

  “Doc, you ain’t gonna believe what happens next,” he said on a private comm channel.

  Though they had gone over it a score of times in teleconferencing, he explained yet again that the next step, which was to maneuver the “box” (about the size of a small SUV) to the side of the ribbon opposite that to which the station was anchored. The two clamps extending from the box almost looked like jumper cables, with Andy taking over strapping them onto the Ribbon, then stitching them in place. Kevin, who rightly saw himself as the only true master working on stitching, floated a few feet away, watching and saying nothing, but ready to push in if he felt Metzger was doing something wrong. Additional straps, to secure the “box” to the ribbon, were now anchored in. They were down to a safety margin for their EVA suits of only an hour by the time this was done and Andy suggested they go back inside, rest a bit, recharge their suits, then come back out.

  “Like hell,” Victoria replied. “We got two hours, actually; the safety margin allows for an hour of additional air, I want to see this deployed.”

  “Your command, then,” Andy replied, carefully moving to the far side of the box and releasing several latches. A panel on the side of the box lit up, looking almost like an iPad touch screen.

  “Doc, just push the button,” Andy said with a flourish.

  There was a moment of polite arguing with Andy and Kevin, but this was indeed something she really did want and in fact had devoted her dissertation to, so she did not argue too long. Some wag had programmed onto the screen: it’s all yours, Dr. Morgan, now push the red button!

  Was it time for a speech, a comment? There was a comm link feed showing the operation, beaming it down to earth, and without doubt many were watching.

  No, just go ahead and do it.

  She pressed a gloved finger against the button, then floated back and away several meters, Metziger and Malady by her side.

  After a few minutes Kevin actually chuckled. “Like watching a dozen clowns climb out of a miniature car!”

  Not the most poetic description, Victoria thought, but certainly apt. What was deploying out of the box was a solar panel, folded over again and again. The mounting system was ingenious, flexible nanotubing that, once deployed out, would lock the flexible units together into a rigid whole. Stretched between each row of tubing, solar panels mounted on a wafer-thin Mylar sheet. In fifteen minutes, deployment was complete: more than five acres in area, a built-in guidance system slowly turned it so that it faced the sun directly. As the upper end of the Pillar did its once-a-day orbit around the earth, it would constantly track on the sun to capture the maximum amount of energy, except in the rare moments when the earth eclipsed the sun; there would be constant energy, no night, no clouds, no atmosphere to block the limitless stream of energy that had been shooting past earth since the beginning of time.

  She looked at the monitor on the side of the box and gasped. It was already soaking up nearly 100 kilowatts of power.

  Now would come seven days of fretful waiting. Once the “clear and operational” signal was announced from above, Tower Control gave permission to loft up from the ground the second component, which took half a day to climb out to its semi-permanent position at the 1000-mile mark, followed up a few hours later by the first two-man pod of astronauts to oversee deployment. The package locked into place; the drop thrusters were eased out and positioned.

  But this was not the go-for-broke 23,000 miles of wire dropping down from geosynch; each reel was holding only 1,700 miles of wire. After all the years of planning, practice, and work in space, it almost looked routine, except for one factor: these beefed-up thrusters were deploying out not to do a direct descent but instead a lateral drop back down to the earth’s surface, the wire they were carrying configured for superconductivity capability.

  Once well clear of the tower, the thrusters ignited, spinning out their payload behind them, heading in nearly direct opposite directions from each other, one to the southwest, the other to the northeast, arcing away. The two astronauts in the pod watched, monitoring, and if one unit should jam and they could not free it in a matter of minutes, orders were to cut both units loose and return to earth, the test a failure.

  For Victoria, observing tensely from over 22,000 miles above, it was nail-biting time. She had been there during ribbon deployment, and in spite of tragedy was directly part of the effort. This time? Well, Franklin had warned her that the toughest part of the job was not actually doing it yourself but sitting back and letting others do it who you had planned with, trained with, and now trusted to see the job through.

  Touchdowns from the descent stages were timed within minutes of each other, both splashing down within a mile of their targets, where they were quickly snatched by waiting crews aboard tow ships, hauled to their offshore platforms, and firmly locked in place, the slack in the wires then gradually, ever so carefully brought in. The stress on the Pillar was clearly noticeable; Victoria swore she could feel it in the soles of her feet even as the tower ever so gently swayed in support of the five tons of wire, the load sustained not vertically by the centrifugal force of the earth’s rotation but instead borne by the tower itself.

  The anchoring of the northern strand to its offshore platform had nearly been halted by several protest groups that tried to maneuver boatloads of protesters in front of the retrieval ship towing it to the platform a dozen miles off the coast. It had been a close-run game of bluff and counterbluff, while overhead a pilot of a small plane announced he was going to ram the wire, until at last talked out of it by a protest leader who finally concurred that he would only succeed in cutting his plane in half, with the added threat of a Black Hawk flying alongside him making it clear it would shoot out his engine if he got any closer.

  * * *

  There was another day of calibrating, of testing, and without public knowledge a sneak test just to make sure the entire venture did not turn into a public relations laughingstock that would far outshine the legend of Al Capone’s safe that had humiliated a then famous broadcaster a few decades earlier.

  The moment had come.

  The video links were hooked in … Victoria up at Station One—or as it was now called, Morgan Station. Franklin w
as not in Kiribati for this, having instead winged northward to Hawaii, where he was joined by Eva, Senator Dennison, and the governors of Hawaii and California, while in the other direction the president of Kiribati and the Brit and his partner now stood with the governor of American Samoa.

  Now was indeed the crucial first test.

  There were the usual speeches, all promising to take only a minute, but the governor of California waxing on for ten; many could forgive that, however. His lifelong support of space exploration was crucial when it came to the senators and congressmen of his state.

  Then at last the moment had come. The solar panels aloft were properly arrayed and now pushing out over 120 kilowatts of electricity. In the long debates about how to send it down, the choices had ranged from laser relays, to fiber-optic relay, to superconductive carbon nanotubing. That had won out, for the moment, because of the weight factor. As the tower continued to be strengthened, eventually with hundreds of ribbons stitched together, far heavier equipment could be deployed for the laser transfer from middle and high levels.

  There had been serious debate about whether to go conservative with this first test, and it would have been far easier to just spread out an acre or so of solar panels down at the 1000-mile position, but Victoria successfully argued to go all the way from the top of the tower and thus prove up front its viability along its entire length even though the bulk of the energy would be lost to resistance on the way down.

  The trick was this actual first test of her “wagon spokes” thesis. For this first run, two wires, like wagon spokes or support wires for a 1,000-foot-high radio antenna, sloped down from the 1000-mile transfer point, spreading out 1400 miles in opposite directions, one northward to the Hawaiian Islands, the other in the near opposite direction to American Samoa.

  For the first time in history, the world was about to receive its first “taste” of clean, limitless electricity “wired” down from space.

  Though they had secretly tested it the evening before, there was now a moment of tension and then playful banter as a friendly argument ensued about who had the honor of “throwing the switch.” The president of the United States, patched in as well, was offered the chance but she most graciously deferred, saying, “There is only one person truly deserving of this moment, and that is Dr. Eva Petrenko Morgan. And I know beside her with her heart will be her daughter, Victoria, and in spirit her husband. It is yours, Eva, and God bless you.”

  With tears in her eyes, Eva threw an old-style electrical switch, and an instant later the semi-darkened room in the governor’s mansion in Honolulu burst forth with light, the same phenomena occurring simultaneously in the governor’s office of American Samoa.

  Electricity, only a century and a half earlier, hailed as the liberator of humanity from drudgery, had in turn all but come to enslave with the demands for more and yet more—which had, for nearly all alive on the planet, become a routine background of life, even as its production was increasingly threatened now blazed forth from a truly limitless source, solar energy harvested in spree … At that moment, all in the those two rooms looked about them in wonder.

  “Is it really coming from space?” the governor of Hawaii whispered in awe.

  “It is indeed,” his counterpart from California whispered, tears in his eyes … and then he chuckled. “And by the way, since it’s an import, I think, my friend, with the minimal tax you can put on it, you’ve just balanced your budget. And I want a cable too.”

  He looked straight over at Franklin and took his hand.

  “How soon can you string a wire to California so I can tax it and balance my own budget, sir?” he said with a grin.

  And for once, perhaps in decades, someone could speak of creating a tax that could come to generate trillions, and all were in agreement and laughed.

  Even while those down below celebrated, Victoria, eyes fixed on the readouts, was already evaluating the energy lost due to resistance, an inescapable fact of any long-distance electrical transfer. She was a bit disappointed with output up at geosynch compared to delivery on earth, but still, it was sufficient for this first test run. Someday soon, the square miles of solar panels deployed farther down “the line,” transferring primarily with laser via improved carbon nanotube superconductive material or enhanced fiber optics, would radiate out from transfer stations set high enough that the “wagon spokes” could literally span the Pacific Ocean from coast to coast. And with this now proven, towers would begin to spring up around the world.

  There would be problems aplenty: orbital debris impacts had become infinitely more complex, although to Victoria’s delight the Swiss had recently stepped forward with a plan for an orbital unit, armed with lasers, to start systematically cleaning up the space junk. If any other nation had proposed it, there would have been howls about it also being a militarization of space … but the Swiss? Of course they would charge a handsome fee for the service, along with a tax-free share of electricity as well.

  And she knew as well that the full realization of what the tower was now achieving was truly setting in. Already political and economic commentators were chattering away about a third wave of the Industrial Revolution: first steam, then internal combustion, and now space energy. Over a hundred years of economic infrastructure built around oil was signaled this day to be at an end. With literally trillions of dollars at stake, even if it was the first step in a true proactive global attempt to control global warming, those whose economies had been built on oil, and with near limitless financial resources behind them, would not just sit back and let this revolution happen without a fight.

  The Pillar, even as it was hailed as the gateway into the twenty-first century, had opened up a whole new series of questions and threats as well … but as a consultant to Franklin Smith prompted him to declare, thus it had always been since the beginning of history.

  “Now, Dr. Victoria Morgan, don’t you think it is time you came home?”

  The oh-so-familiar voice interrupted her thoughts. It was Franklin.

  “I am home,” she said softly, “but yes, it’s time at least for a visit back down there.”

  24

  Sixteen Months Later

  So much had transpired in the months after her return to earth. She had forbidden any hoopla with parades and such, insisting that her first duty was to visit the parents of Maury Hurt and then to attend the wedding of her friends Jenna and Bill Sanders, who had declared they would wait until she came back down.

  As the tower continued to be strengthened, two more wires went out, these testing the absolute limits, one to Auckland, the other to San Diego. The Auckland wire had failed on deployment, thus necessitating the cutting away of the San Diego line to maintain balance with the tower. The new governor of California was unfazed by the temporary delay, given that with each passing month what went from test runs to true hard deployments with ever-increasing energy loads leapt from computer designs to realities. For those living within the Pacific basin, there were new stars in the heavens, now half a dozen square miles of solar arrays that, when the angle was just right, shimmered as bright as Venus with reflected light.

  Upon her return, it had taken Victoria long weeks to adjust to gravity; even months later, if she awoke in the middle of the night, at times she actually fell out of her bed when, without thinking, she simply pushed off with her hands, expecting to float to where she wished to go.

  Of course she was happy to be back on earth. There was Franklin to work with, time to spend with her mother, who had resigned from actual design work and now headed up a nonprofit affiliated to Pillar Inc. that was promoting artists and spiritual leaders to use the tower as a means of finding new expressions for their talents and insights. And then there was Jason.

  That had been heartbreak, and she wondered if perhaps she was destined to be like one of the monks and nuns of old, her cloister a module up in geosynch. Jason admitted finally that he was perhaps one of those creatures destined to be earthbound and how c
ould they even consider a normal married life aboard a module in space? Her heart, it was clear, was in the heavens.

  She wept bitterly the night she returned his ring. At the beginning, when she was up there, her thoughts were so often drawn down to earth. But once back on earth, increasingly her thoughts were drawn skyward, and she finally came to understand that although she loved him, something beyond him called, at least for now.

  In her work in the ensuing months, once she had regained her “earth legs,” they crossed paths often. There would be an exchange of glances, at times a hurtful turning away by one or the other, but she knew the distance of the heart, which could be even vaster than the distance of space itself, was gradually pulling them away from each other.

  * * *

  Several crews had rotated up; there were now ten on board, devoting their efforts to deploying more and yet more solar panels, which were finally being carried up aboard the ribbon from earth, overseeing the ever-widening expansion of additional ribbon on top of and alongside existing ribbon and even adroitly handling the next impact; this one, by a micrometeor that was indeed fist-size, had punctured clean through two ribbons in the center of the array, shutting down all operations for two days until a team descended and in a little more than three hours had stapled on a patch. They almost made it look routine, and Kevin, one of the two team members, was, as usual, nonchalant about his effort, other than to use it as a continued argument for he and Singh mutinously remaining aloft.

  And then the day that Victoria had dreamed about came at last.

  Of course there was an air of celebration about the event, though for once Franklin tried to actually make it seem low-key. She wondered if after all that had transpired he just might be a bit nervous.

  This day was to be the day of the official opening of the Pillar, its formal transfer from a work in progress to an open commercial venture.