The Web Between the Worlds

by Charles Sheffield

  Rob had been watching her closely as she talked, evaluating her manner more than her words. He nodded and peered forward through the front screen. “I’ll risk a day or two. We’ll be at Suget Jangal in twenty minutes. I want a hot bath and a hot meal, then I’ll be ready to go with you. Where is Regulo now?”

  “He’s waiting in temporary space quarters, in geostationary orbit above Entebbe. We’ll have to get there in two jumps. From here to Nairobi in this ship, that will take about three hours, then it’s a Tug from there to geosynch. How soon can you be ready to leave? Don’t forget that you’ll have to find a way to avoid the other groups back at the hotel.”

  “I’m experienced at doing that.” Rob shrugged. “They can’t make me talk to them. But won’t it take a while to see when the next Tug is scheduled? It might be anything up to twenty-four hours from now. Is there any point in rushing over there if we have to wait around at Nairobi ?”

  Cornelia Plessey had returned to the controls and was preparing for a landing on the primitive airfield at Suget Jangal. It was little more than a long cleared patch of flat rock. She turned back to Rob for a moment, an amused look in her pale blue eyes.

  “You’ll have to get used to the idea that things are different if you work for Darius Regulo. I doubt if there is a Tug scheduled for departure in less than twelve hours. There will be by the time that we get over there. How long before you can be back at the plane here?”

  “Give me an hour.” Rob began to climb out as the craft halted in a ground hover. Then he turned and hesitated in the doorway. “I’ll leave my pack in here to save time. Just as a matter of curiosity, what would you have done if your argument hadn’t worked? Suppose I had told you to go and get lost when you tried to persuade me to go up and see Regulo?”

  Corrie smiled. “I’d have tried another approach, what else? It’s something that Regulo taught me. When you get up there, take a look at the top of his desk. You’ll see little signs built into the top of it. One of them says: `There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.’ I looked at that sign for years and years, with no idea what it meant — and then finally I understood why he had it there. Now, I keep on trying, one method after another, until I get one that works.”

  Years and years.

  Rob looked puzzled. He seemed about to ask another question, then changed his mind and climbed out of the plane. As he walked across the rocky surface of the landing strip toward the small town, Corrie stared into the camera mounted on the wall of the ship. “Still there, Regulo?”

  “Yes.” There was a pause before the gravelly voice spoke again. “Well done, Cornelia. I have already sent a message to have a Tug ready for you at Nairobi in five hours.”

  “We’ll be there. Any other instructions?”

  “None. One question, though. I was watching Merlin closely just before he left you. Something seemed to have him worried for a moment, or surprised. I wasn’t watching what you were doing, but I wondered if you had done something we didn’t catch over the cameras.”

  “I didn’t notice any odd reaction from him.” She was pensive for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t recall doing anything peculiar or out of place.”

  “Keep thinking about it.” The voice was reflective. “He’s a very sharp young man. Be careful what you say to him. And I see what you meant about his eyes. He’s twenty-seven, but his eyes could be those of a six-year-old. You know, Caliban says we shouldn’t consider using Merlin at all — at least, we think he says that. You know how hard it is to interpret anything that he transmits to us.”

  “So why am I here?”

  “I have decided to over-ride Caliban’s input in this case, despite Joseph’s objections to such an action. But we will have to deal with Merlin very carefully. Remember that when you talk to him. I’ll be waiting for you here, eight hours from now.”

  CHAPTER 2: A Look at Jacob’s Ladder

  From a distance there was no way of judging the size of Regulo’s space station. Corrie had told Rob that it was no more than a temporary home, where Regulo was waiting for his meeting with them. That suggested a small structure. It was only when they were near enough to see the entry lock and use it to provide a sense of scale that Rob realized again that Regulo thought big. The whole cylindrical assembly must be more than a hundred meters long, and at least fifty across.

  “He doesn’t believe in stinting himself,” he said to Corrie, as they sat side-by-side in the passenger section of the Tug.

  “Why should he? But this is nothing, just a home for a few days. His real base is about a million kilometers from here at the moment. He’s itching to get back there. I told you, Regulo put himself to a lot of trouble to meet with you. His first idea was that I should bring you to home base, but after I’d talked to him for a while he agreed that was too much to expect without some real incentive.”

  As she spoke, the Tug was drifting gently in for a docking with the central lock of the cylindrical station, adjusting position and velocity with tiny bursts of the control jets. When they finally docked there was no bump, just a smooth and brief acceleration as the ship achieved final position and was coupled electromagnetically to the central station cavity. The electronic checks were completed in a few more seconds and the locks opened silently to the interior of the big station. At the hub the effective gravity was almost zero. Corrie led the way confidently towards the outer sections, with Rob floating after her. His experience of low-gee environments was small, and despite the drugs for vestibular correction he felt some lack of orientation. There was no sign of any other person as they moved steadily outward, to the point where the centrifugal acceleration had increased to almost a quarter of a gee. Rob’s discomfort dwindled as the sense of weight returned.

  Corrie had kept a sympathetic eye on him as they moved outward.

  “You’ll feel all right in a few minutes,” she said. “And next time out you won’t feel nearly as bad. It’s something you have to adjust to, and everybody goes through it.”

  They came at last to a big sliding door. Corrie opened it without knocking and led the way inside. The room they entered had been furnished as a study, with data terminals along one wall, displays along the opposite one, and a big desk and control console in the middle. The lighting level was so low that it was difficult to make out the details of many of the fittings. The smooth curve of the cylindrical floor was covered by a soft, dense carpet, deep red in color, that seemed to glow softly with a ruby light. The top of the desk was made of pink veined material, like a fine marble, that also seemed to add light to the room rather than absorbing it. Rob took in those features with just a brief glance. His eyes were on the man seated behind the great desk.

  Darius Regulo was tall and thin, with long, skeletal hands and a stooped posture. The hair on his big head was sparse and white, hanging in an uncombed lock over his high forehead. Clearly, if there had ever been rejuvenation treatments, another was long overdue. Rob had never seen a man or woman who looked so old, so frail. Then he looked at Regulo’s face and skin, and the other factors became irrelevant. The eyes were still bright and alert, frosty blue with pale gray rims, but they looked forth from a face that was a mockery of humanity. Regulo’s features seemed to have run and melted. The skin that covered them was like furnace slag, grey, granular and withered. Suddenly it was easy to guess at the reason for the low level of illumination in the big room. Rob forced himself to keep his gaze steadily on Regulo, without looking aside or flinching.

  “Come on in, Merlin.” The deep voice sounded granular and worn also, as though it had suffered the same fate as Regulo’s face. The voiced consonants grated forth as though from a throat full of rough sand. “I’m sorry my condition prevented a meeting with you on Earth. Please sit down in the chair there.”

  He turned to Corrie. “Well done, my dear. Merlin and I will need some time together, and I don’t think you would find our conversation of great interest. Might I suggest
that you should go and visit Joseph and receive an update on his progress? He thinks he has some new results for us.”

  Corrie grimaced. “You know I don’t like to be with him, especially when you’re not there.”

  “I know.” Regulo chuckled. “But I also know that you are as interested as I am in following his projects. Don’t deny it, my dear, I could cite you fifty incidents that support my statement. We’ll contact you as soon as we are finished. And I’m keeping the Tug on stand-by so that you two will be able to go back down to the surface later in the day.”

  He turned again to Merlin, as Corrie left the study. “So, you’re the man who invented the Spider, eh.” His voice, despite its harsh tone, sounded warm and interested. “If you don’t mind my asking you, how long did it take you to do it?”

  Rob was startled by the question. It was an unexpected beginning to the conversation. “It took about a year. But most of that time went on programming and fabrication.”

  “One year.” Regulo whistled softly to himself and shook his head. “I don’t want to make you conceited, but do you know my staff put in over fifty man-years of reverse engineering, trying to figure out how the damned thing works — and we still don’t know? It proves what I’ve always said, work without ideas is worse than no work at all.” He sniffed. “There’s a trick, right?”

  “There is.” Rob smiled. “And before you ask, let me point out that’s not for sale.”

  “I thought not.” Regulo was watching Rob closely with those crackling blue eyes. “But it’s available for hire, in the Spiders, right? Oh, you don’t need to tell me, I know you’re not in need of money. That last contract on the Taiwan Bridge must have made you billions. What was the main span on it, a hundred and twenty kilometers?”

  “A bit more than that. More like a hundred and forty. Maybe even one forty-five.”

  “Fair enough.” Regulo had an amused expression on his battered face. “It’s hard to keep things straight on the small jobs, eh? You handled the extrusion of all the support cables?”

  Rob had kept his face expressionless at the mention of “small jobs.” The Taiwan Bridge was one of the biggest in the world — so where was Regulo heading? “All the extrusion, and all the fabrication,” he replied. “The Spider lets you start right from the basic raw materials and makes a cable that’s all dislocation-free monofilaments.”

  “Just so.” Regulo turned his big chair to the side of the desk and picked up a page of print-out. “I’ve spent enough time on the Spider to at least know what it does, even if we don’t understand how. Now then, come around here and take a look at this. It’s the abstract of a paper that came out just last year, in the Solid State Review.” He tapped it with a skeletal finger. “You may not believe me when I say it, but I’ve been waiting forty years for this paper to be written. Take a look at it and tell me what you think.”

  Rob moved around to the side of the desk, next to Regulo, and the two men stared at the listing in silence for a few minutes.

  “It’s clear enough what it’s saying,” said Rob at last. “If the author is accurate, he can make doped silicon whiskers, dislocation-free, that are twenty times as strong as the toughest that we’ve been making from graphite. He only quotes the strength under tension, so my first question would be to ask him about the strength under compression and shear.”

  “I did ask him. The shear strength is not bad, the compressive strength is lousy. Very much the same as with graphite whiskers.”

  Rob shrugged. “So you could make a load-bearing cable out of doped silicon, instead of graphite. I don’t see why that would be especially valuable. We don’t need anything stronger for any of the bridges I know about, not even the ones on the design cards — and that includes the Tasmanian Bridge, with a planned main span of three hundred and forty kilometers.”

  “Quite right.” Regulo leaned over his desk and ran his fingers across one part of the top. Under the pressure of his hand a glowing legend appeared, set in block letters in the pink surface: “THINK BIG.”

  “That’s what you have to learn to do, Merlin. Think big, not small. I’m interested in something that’s orders of magnitude beyond any piffling bridges. If you had no limit on funds, do you think you could modify the Spider so that it could fabricate and extrude doped silicon cable, instead of graphite?”

  Rob hesitated. He was still looking curiously at the top surface of Regulo’s desk. He leaned across and rubbed the place where Regulo had touched it. Again, the glowing red sign, THINK BIG, appeared.

  “Piezoelectric effects?”

  Regulo laughed harshly. “Not quite that. You’ll have time to figure out the details if we work together. Press the surface a few other places, see what you get.”

  Each part of the desk top responded to slight pressures from Rob’s hand: “WIN SMALL”; “IDEAS-THINGS-PEOPLE”; “ROCKETS ARE WRONG” — Rob stared hard at that one. It was exactly in line with what Corrie had said about Regulo. The older man was watching with undisguised pleasure as the red signs glowed from the desk top, then faded after a few seconds to the usual smooth pink.

  “I’ve got my working philosophy built into that desk,” he said. “You should take a half hour and go over the whole thing — but not right now. I still want your answer: can you modify the Spider?”

  Rob nodded. “It would take me maybe a month’s work, but I could do it. I designed the Spider with a lot of flexibility of operation.”

  “And it could still extrude any shape of taper, same as it did for your work on the bridges?”

  Rob nodded again, this time without comment. Regulo sat up straighter in his chair, grunting as he came upright from his stooped posture.

  “All right, then.” He placed both hands flat on the desk. “I have one more question, then I’ll answer some of the ones I’m sure you have. If I made the money available, could you speed up the Spider? Could you increase the maximum production rate of extruded cable from ten kilometers a day up to something like two hundred a day?”

  Rob frowned, biting his lip in concentration. “That’s a tougher one,” he said at last. “I’ll have to have time to think about it before I can give you a definite answer. I don’t know of any specific reason why I couldn’t, off-hand, but that’s not the sort of answer you need. Why would you ever want to do it, though? When I designed the Spider, I made it so that it would work faster than every other component of the bridge-building operation. I don’t see any point in speeding it up — nothing else would be able to keep pace with it.”

  “I’ll tell you why.” Regulo held out his hand. “Look at that. Look at the rest of me. I’m an old man, right — and that means I’ve not got the time to wait about that you have. Don’t let anyone try and tell you that it’s the young men who are in a hurry. It’s the old ones, who have learned how precious time can be. I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to sit about for ten years, waiting for a supporting cable to be extruded. One year, maybe — we’ll need that much time to arrange everything else. But no longer than one year. I want this fast.”

  Rob sat down again in the chair facing Regulo. “You know there’s an old saying about engineering projects. Fast — cheap — good. You can only have two out of three.”

  Regulo waved a hand. “Oh, I know, I know. I’ve already made my pick. You give me fast and good, and let me worry about the costs.”

  Rob stared hard at the ruined face, trying to read the feelings behind the deformed mask. It was impossible. Only the eyes were human, and they glittered with an intense intellectual interest. “All right. Fast and good. It’s still your ball. You realize that an extrusion rate of two hundred kilometers a day could spin a supporting cable out of the Spider in one year to go twice around the Earth? At ten kilometers a day we’d have thousands of kilometers of cable — more than we’d ever need. What are you playing at, designing bridges to put on Jupiter?”

  “No. Something a lot more interesting and a lot more useful.” Regulo leaned across to the co
ntrol panel at the side of the desk and pressed a sequence of keys. The big display screen on the right-hand wall came alive with the stylized image of the Earth-Moon system, roughly to scale. “You already know my view of rockets, from the motto in the top of the desk. I’m responsible for hauling more material up from Earth than anyone else, and we use rockets for all of that; but I happen to believe that I’m working with an obsolete piece of technology. Even with the best nuclear propulsion systems, it still takes an awful lot of energy to hoist a payload up from the surface of Earth into orbit. And it takes just as much energy and reaction mass to get the damned stuff back down again.

  “Now, Rob, you’re trained in physics as well as engineering. I checked that much of your background, before I ever asked Cornelia to try and bring you up here. So you know very well that a Newtonian gravitational field is conservative. A potential function exists for it. What does that mean? I’ll tell you: it means that in principle you should be able to take a mass from one point of the field — let’s say the surface of the Earth — out to some other point — let’s say geosynchronous orbit — using a certain amount of energy. Then you should be able to take it back down to Earth — and you should recover all the energy you expended to get it up in the first place. That’s the whole point of a conservative field, what you used going up, you should recover when you come back down again.”

  Rob shrugged. “I understand the ideas behind potential fields. They don’t help at all in practice. The Earth’s gravitational field is very close to conservative, true enough, but you still have to use energy to get the rockets up into space from the surface. And you still need reaction mass and energy to stop them falling too fast when you want to go back down.”

  “We do. Isn’t that a terrible situation, from the point of view of engineering efficiency? So there’s where we have to begin.” Regulo pressed another key on the control console and the wall display became animated, showing the Earth and Moon rotating together about their common center of mass, with the Earth also rotating on its axis.