Tales of the Flying Mountains

by Poul Anderson

  Though the room over which Stanhope presided was duly cooled, Junius Harleman sweated. He was almost glad of the absence of spectators—not because this hearing was secret, merely because news media and public alike were monumentally uninterested. The men who sat around the long table looked equally bored; all except Stanhope. Uncle Scrooge saw a chance to kill a federal agency. His ears virtually quivered.

  After the oath had been gabbled, the old man spoke. Magnolia blossoms dripped from his lips. “Welcome, suh. Ah’m sure you’re tired of appearin’ befoah this group, and others, each yeah. Ah sympathize. We’ll try and make this a short, easy session, ri-ight?”

  “Thank you, sir.” Since two others were already smoking, Harleman dared start a cigarette. Drawing the pungency into his lungs, he remembered he was overdue for an anticancer shot. “I quite understand that NASA must explain its plans and justify its requests for appropriations like any other bureau. I am prepared to do so.”

  “Well, now, that’s mighty good of you, Mr. Harleman.” Stanhope bridged the fingers of his liver-spotted hands. The wattles wagged beneath his chin. “Ah’m mighty pleased to see such cooperation. Believe me, it’s a seldom thing. Too many of these bureaucrats seem to believe they have a divine right to their jobs and their projects.”

  “I have been a civil servant throughout my working life, sir,” Harleman answered, and added automatically, “The entire thrust of my action orientation has been toward a meaningful decision-making dialogue.”

  Stanhope cocked one bushy eyebrow. You’re an incompetent hack, he refrained from saying, as witness the fact that you allowed yourself to be maneuvered into the directorship of NASA, a wretched blind alley where no one wants to be and which I intend to brick off.

  “Dialogue,” he did say. “Ye-es, Ah think we might just do a little talkin’ today. A little down-to-earth conversation. Down to Earth,” he repeated with an audible capital. “Ah do believe it’s past time we spoke about fundamentals. Ah mean, suh, the reason why NASA should be continued at all.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” said the gentleman from Nebraska. “Point of order. Did not the same act which commanded this agency to dispose of its oversized Houston facilities and headquarter itself in Washington … did not that act specifically extend its life for a minimum of twenty years?”

  “Why, yes, Mr. Bryan, it did,” Stanhope purred. “But legislation can be amended or repealed, can’t it, now? And Ah do feel this committee should consider whether it oughtn’t to put moah emphasis on the ‘science’ part of its function and distract itself less with the ‘space’ part.”

  I knew this was coming, Harleman thought, and braced himself.

  “Let us be frank, suh,” Stanhope said in his direction. “It’s no service to you, either, to preetend that the space program’s not in deep trouble. And not only our space program; the Russians, the West Europeans, the Asian League, ever’body’s is falterin’. Befoah we go into such matters as the budget you propose to propose, why don’t we take an hour or two and ask ourselves what produced this situation?”

  And get your oratory into the Record and mail copies to your constituents … franked, Harleman dared not say. Aloud: “I am at your service, Congressman. I am as much in favor as you are of generating escalation of focus on multilinked problem-complexes.”

  Stanhope smiled tigerishly. “Thank you, suh. Now let’s pree-tend foah about five minutes that Ah’m one of yoah agency’s outright foes. You know it’s very possible that Mr. Ruysdale will be a candidate in the next presidential election, and you know he openly advocates abolishin’ NASA. Suppose Ah take the position of one of the many people who agree with him. A hypothetical position only, you realize, Mr. Harleman. Only foah the purpose of hearin’ youah counterarguments, which Ah’m sure are good.”

  As a matter of fact, Harleman thought, they’re lousy, and you know it and I know it and I don’t really want to save NASA, just my own career, and you know that and I know that.

  For a moment he locked eyes with the old man. It was almost like telepathy. If we go through the motions, in the next three or four years we can help each other achieve our ends. You can kill the further development of astronautics; I can get the directorship of a viable agency. But the motions include a ritual combat.

  “I’m familiar with the position you describe, Congressman,” he said. “Naturally, I consider it untenable. But if you would like me to refute it for your minutes, please do set it forth.”

  “Thank you, suh.” Stanhope glanced at a bescribbled sheet of paper on the table before him. “The points are really quite simple, as you know.

  “Let’s admit the o-riginal impetus of the various national space programs was military and political rivalry. Well, that’s fadin’ out, foah a while at least, along with the twentieth century itself. We’ll soon be enterin’ a whole new millennium with its special problems. Those problems are so serious they’re partly responsible for the decline of international tensions. Everybody’s got too much to do at home—what with overpopulation, poverty, unrest, exhaustion of resou’ces, pollution of environment, and growin’ sho’tage of chemical fuels. Ah might remark that the giant rockets have contributed a good share to those sho’tages and that pollution. And what have they given us in exchange?”

  Harleman drew breath. Stanhope gestured for silence. “Oh, yes,” he continued, “weather satellites, communication relays, knowledge in biology and astronomy and stellar physics and planetary structures.… Ah’m not a yut, suh, in spite of the image certain people project of me. Ah’m aware of the benefits. But Ah’m also aware that we’re long past the point of diminishin’ returns.

  “No place but Earth is habitable without the most ee-laborate life support systems. No natural resou’ces out yonder are worth the cost of transportation heah. Each expedition we send out brings back less new knowledge; and the knowledge it does bring has less impo’tance; but the price tag hasn’t been lessened any, no, suh. I have testimony from moah than one authority; we’re about at the end of the line as far as improvin’ the rocket goes. They talk and talk about ‘break-throughs,’ but the last one was the reusable booster, and that was a generation ago.

  “We don’t want to discontinue the useful programs, like relays and monitors. But those have long since become so standard that they’ve gone under the jurisdiction of othah agencies, like the FCC or the Weather Bureau. What’s left foah NASA? A rare interplanetary exploration. The Lunar base, the orbital stations—but if we can get othah countries to close down theirs, and it looks like we can, then we’ll be closin’ down ours, at a mi-ighty big annual savin’.

  “The fact is, except foah work in the immediate neighborhood of Earth, space is costin’ us too much and givin’ us too little. We can’t affo’d that any longer, what with so many domestic problems cryin’ out foah an answer, not least the problem the o’dinary citizen’s got, keepin’ enough money after taxes to suppo’t his children.

  “And let’s be blunt, Mr. Harleman, maybe impolitely blunt, but we’re talkin’ as friends today, aren’t we? Isn’t it a fact that NASA’s own personnel are aware of this? Aren’t they quittin’ in droves, not simply because of reduced appropriations, but because nothin’ is left that appeals to any ambitious young man?

  “Shouldn’t we maybe try foah an international agreement to suspend the whole futile scramble? Won’t you confess that NASA has outlived its usefulness?”

  Stanhope leaned back and waited, still smiling.

  Harleman gathered in his wits. The ancient intimidated him. And so did the others, especially the liberals, like intensely staring Thomasson of Massachusetts. Their purpose in starving his agency was not to save money but to release it for welfare expenditures. That suited Harleman fine—if he could get a decent post disbursing part of that money. He wouldn’t, if he made too much trouble now. On the other hand, they would feel there was something wrong about an administrator who did not put up a spirited fight for the bureau he already headed. Scylla and Charybdis.�
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  He bought a few seconds by stubbing out his cigarette, and several more by talking while he marshalled his thoughts:

  “Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of this committee, I wish to express my appreciation of your foresight as well as your graciousness in offering me this opportunity to contribute to the illumination of those polymorphously reticulated interrelationships, sociological and humanistic as well as technological and economic, which determine the forwarding of a nonalienated and viable infrastructure. This is probably not the appropriate body before which to disseminate multigraphic and quantitative scientific and engineering presentations. Rather, it would appear evident to my perception of the situation that the aegis of this distinguished group is superimposed on the intricacy of era-characteristic fields of inquiry falling more under the rubric of basic philosophical justifications, while simultaneously concerning ourselves not to lose sight of the over-all necessity for action-oriented orchestration of innovative inputs.”

  Three or four representatives shifted in their chairs and glanced at their watches. Stanhope let his eyelids droop.

  “In short,” Harleman finished, gauging his moment, “we are about to start off on a whole new tack.”

  “Tacking in space?” Thomasson muttered.

  “No one disputes that NASA has exhausted certain possibilities.” For just an instant the buried dream flickered in Harleman, that he had known in the eerie rising of Sputnik One before dawn, and in man’s first landing on the moon. He could not but add, quietly: “No basic reason for that, gentlemen. If we’d had more vision, if we’d worked only a little harder, we could have succeeded with the tools we had. We could have built larger and better Earth-orbital stations; supplied them from a colonized, really colonized moon; developed the nuclear-powered reaction drive to its true limits; built our giant ships in space and kept them there, so they needn’t contaminate this planet and needn’t fight their way up through its gravity well. We could have gone to the ends of the Solar System. By now, perhaps, we might already be thinking about the stars. Maybe then our young people wouldn’t be playing at gangsterism and political radicalism. They’d have had better things to do.”

  Bitterness tinged his words, for he remembered how he had become estranged from his only son. But he saw he was losing them and sprang back in haste:

  “Well, never mind. We confront an existing situation. We need a whole new approach. And I think we’ve found one.”

  Stanhope opened his eyes wide. “Indeed?” he murmured. “Might Ah ask what?”

  “I’m delighted to explain. Have you heard of gyrogravitics?”

  Stanhope shook his knaggy head. Carter of Virginia said, slowly, “Has to do with atomic theory, doesn’t it.”

  “That’s right,” Harleman answered. “I don’t claim to follow the mathematics myself, but I’ve had scientists give me a lay explanation. It grew out of the effort to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. Those two branches of physics, both indispensable, were at odds on certain fundamental questions. Is nature or is nature not deterministic—describable by differential equations? Well, you may have read how Einstein once declared he couldn’t believe that God plays dice with the world, while Heisenberg thought cause-and-effect was nothing but the statistics of large numbers, and Bohr suggested in his complementarity principle that both views might be true. Later, building on the work of such as Dyson and Feinberg—” Harleman saw them drifting away again. Damn! I spent too much time with Emett last night. That jargon of his soaked into my skin.

  “Well, the point is, gentlemen,” he said, “in the newest theory, matter and energy are described by their properties from the equations, equations like those of a rotating force-field. Including gravitation.”

  Carter jerked to an upright sitting position. “Wait a minute!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t leading up to antigravity, are you? I happen to know what the Air Force has been doing in that line for the past fifty years. It’s no secret they’ve drawn absolute blanks. Antigravity belongs with witches on broomsticks. I could reach Mars easier by … by astral projection.”

  “Not antigravity, sir,” Harleman told him. “Gyrogravitics.”

  “A change of labels doesn’t——”

  “Please sir. I’ve had some most interesting discussions with a Mr. Quentin Emett. Some of you may have heard of him: an independent investigator——”

  “Means he hasn’t got his Ph.D.,” Thomasson said grimly.

  “Well, yes, he does happen to lack a union card,” Harleman replied, and saw a bit of approval in Stanhope. “The academic establishment doesn’t like him. However, the academic establishment—” He shrugged and smiled at Stanhope. Huge tax subsidies. Left-wing professors. Unruly students. “Frankly, he probably wouldn’t have gotten my ear if he weren’t a close relative of Senator Lamphier. But I need hardly assure you, gentlemen, the senator is no nepotist.” He’s the most majestic nepotist on Capitol Hill, as you know better than I. But you also know you’re well advised to stay on the good side of him. “He satisfied himself as to Mr. Emett’s qualifications before sending him to me. In the course of talks occupying almost a year, I have likewise satisfied myself.

  “Mr. Emett’s ideas are unorthodox, true. He proposes to develop a generator which, by means of nuclear resonance rotations, will create fields that we can call gravitational, or antigravitational, or pseudogravitational, or whatever we like. I think ‘gyrogravitic’ is probably the best word, though if we can get this work authorized, the R and D effort should have a more suitable name such as, for example, Project Dyna-Thrust.”

  Carter sneered. “And you’ll make your spaceships weightless and float them right off Earth, eh?”

  “No, sir.” Emett had carefully rehearsed Harleman. “Conservation of energy and momentum are not violated. In effect, a gyrogravitic drive should react against the entire mass of the ambient universe. You’ll still need power to rise, or accelerate, or maneuver in any other way. But it’ll be minimum power; you won’t be throwing energy out in exhaust gases. The power plant can be minimal too; since you can hover free, or nearly free, you don’t need a huge motor to raise you as fast as possible. Any energy source will do—fuel cells, batteries, nuclear reactors, I suppose even steam engines—though no doubt as a side benefit we’ll get small, portable fusion plants. A ship like this would be almost one hundred percent efficient, silent, unpolluting, economical to build, capable of going anywhere. The capability would derive in part from interior gyrogravitic fields. These would provide weight though the ship be in free fall, cushion against pressure when it accelerates, ward off solar-storm particles, meteoroids, and similar hazards.” Harleman ratcheted up his enthusiasm. “In short, gyrogravitlcs can give us the whole Solar System.”

  “So can sorcery,” Carter grumbled, “if only we can discover how to make it work.”

  Harleman talked nominally to them all, actually to Stanhope: “My belief is, the United States can’t write off its huge investment in NASA, and in any case, positively not overnight. Research must go on. One advantage of Mr. Emett’s proposal is its modest cost. If we establish Project Dyna-Thrust, it should be feasible to discontinue various other activities and thus reduce the total budget—without feeling that we have broken faith with our predecessors or abandoned the Endless Frontier of Science.”

  More quasi-telepathy: Give NASA this crank undertaking for two or three years. It’ll provide the necessary excuse and cover for phasing out most of everything else. Let’s not shock the voters and endanger both our careers by letting the end come too abruptly, too rudely.

  “Well, now, Mr. Carter,” Stanhope said, “we might just go a little further into this. Mr. Harleman’s testimony has barely begun, and already it sounds interestin’. Yes, mighty interestin’, I must say. Ri-ight?”

  Of course, Emett was not altogether alone in his hopes. Enough reputable physicists conceded some theoretical possibility of success—though no useful probability, understand, for at least the next fi
ve hundred years—that the idea could safely be described as “worth study.” Enough personnel were willing to join in the effort that it could be organized. These tended to be far-out specialists who were skeptical of a space drive but who welcomed the chance to do basic research with expensive equipment; and graduate students desperate for thesis material; and engineers who didn’t have what it took to hold down any top-flight job, but who would work with plodding competence wherever they were paid.

  Harleman felt rather proud when he had finished rounding up that crew. It hadn’t been easy. Therefore he was doubly hurt when Emett protested: “B-b-b-but I don’t want that many!”

  “I beg your pardon?” Harleman wondered if his ears were failing him. These damned D.C. summers—and so few occasions for running down to the breezes of the Cape.…

  “A, uh, a small team,” Emett tried to explain. “Selected, uh, by myself. We, well, what we need is merely the, the, the use of different facilities—computer time, for instance, and, uh, access to the Astroelectronics Lab, and … well, these other people running around, they’ll, they’ll take up my time finding work for them!”

  “I see.” Harleman stroked his cheek and looked across his desk at the little man who jittered in a visitor’s chair. “I’m afraid you don’t see, though. It surprises me, when your original suggestion—that this project would keep NASA going a while—that was such a shrewd thought, I’m surprised you don’t realize that in government there is no such thing as having too many people working under you.”