“That sounds like the sort of arguments I use. Come on, Rob, you’ll never make it onto Darius Regulo’s top ten of the engineering world unless you operate on pure logic.” Anson lifted a hand in farewell. “I’ll keep digging. Remember me to the fair Cornelia. Have you ever noticed that the only person who calls her Cornelia instead of Corrie seems to be her mother?”
“Not quite,” said Rob, as he reached out to cut the connection. “That’s what Regulo calls her, too. With him it’s Cornelia, never Corrie.”
And that’s something I should have noticed for myself, a long time ago, he thought, staring at the blank screen. He had put things off for too long. Much as he disliked the idea, he’d have to bring that subject up with Corrie. But he would wait for the right moment. Private conversation would be difficult on the cramped yacht that would rush the two of them out to Atlantis. It never occurred to Rob that his final thought provided him with one more excuse to delay an awkward confrontation.
CHAPTER 12: “…at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream…”
Atlantis was still moving slowly out, away from Earth and farther from the Sun. At an acceleration of only a thousandth of a gee it would take a long time to spiral out to the Asteroid Belt, to the region where Regulo was planning to perform his next project.
“Of course, what we’ll be doing this time is just a small rehearsal for the real thing,” he said to Rob, as they sat again in the big, darkened study. “I’ve picked out a tiny one, just a few hundred meters across. You may think it isn’t worth bothering with, but I want to see if everything hangs together the way I’m expecting.”
“I agree with you. Always do a trial run.” Rob looked at the other man’s gaunt face. There seemed to be an urgency and a hardness there that he had never seen before. “Have you decided yet what your `real thing’ will be?”
“I fancy Lutetia. It’s an asteroid that’s not too far out, a good deal closer to the Sun than any of the really big ones. According to Sycorax, Lutetia is loaded with metals and big enough to be interesting.”
“What’s the diameter?”
“About a hundred and fifteen kilometers, give or take a couple.”
Rob leaned back in his chair. “And you think you can mine that?”
Regulo grinned at his expression. “Sure.” He leaned slowly across the desk and placed the palm of one hand at a point on the top of it. When he took it away, the glowing sign, THINK BIG, was revealed. “See that? You’re getting there, but you have to work at it. You still let your thinking become too crowded. I told you I was going to use a new method of mining the asteroids, and I meant it. Let’s get the screens working, and I’ll show you what we’re about.”
He sat up straight, slowly and painfully in spite of the low gravity. Rob could see him wince at the movement of each joint. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked.
“Not one thing,” Regulo grunted. “I don’t feel good today, that’s all. My own fault. I should have had treatment three days ago, and I put it off because we had a problem again with those damned shipping permits. If I ran my business the way Earth handles its trade laws, I’d be bankrupt in a month.”
“I was sorry to hear about your sickness,” Rob ventured. “If you want to put off the demonstration until you feel better, let’s do it. The beanstalk is coming along well, so there’s no big reason why I have to rush back there.”
“Never.” Regulo frowned and braced himself, arms straight, on the front of the desk. “Don’t ever suggest that. What do you think keeps me going? Work, and new ideas. Stop looking ahead, and you’re finished. Anyway, who’s been opening his mouth to you, talking about sickness? I don’t like to have it advertised. Bad enough to have the disease, sympathy only makes it worse. Who told you about it?”
Rob hesitated, not sure if honesty would be the best way to handle the brusque question. “Senta Plessey,” he said at last.
Regulo sat motionless for a long moment, his battered face unreadable.
“Senta, eh?” After a few more seconds he laughed, a harsh and humorless noise deep in his throat. “Poor little Senta. Well, she was aware of my sickness, if anybody was. How is she?”
“She’s all right.” Rob hesitated again, not sure how much Regulo already knew. “Less well than she should be. She has a drug problem, I’m afraid. Taliza — she’s a total addict.”
“With taliza, that’s the only sort of addict there is.” Regulo shook his big head. “I’m sorry to hear that. I ought to have guessed it, though. She would always try anything new, anything for a fresh experience. I used to warn her, but it didn’t make any difference.” He sighed, looking past Rob with unfocused eyes. “That’s bad news. My God, but she was a beauty, thirty years ago. I’ve never seen a woman with her looks, before or since.”
His eyes came back to Rob. “She told you, did she, that we lived together?”
“She didn’t say much about it.” Rob shrugged. “Only that it was a long time ago.”
“It surely was. Back before this” — Regulo rubbed his hand along his seamed jaw — “had a real hold. It took a while to get a full diagnosis. As soon as we knew for sure that it was bad and going to get worse, Senta packed her bags. I didn’t try and talk her out of it. I was going to get more and more like a horror-holo star, and Senta had just two things she couldn’t stand: poverty, and ugliness. The second worry turned out to be stronger. You mentioned that you’d had operations, eh? I could match your sixty-two, and then some.”
He was silent for a moment, reflecting. His face showed no fear or bitterness, only a still introspection. “Always worrying about losing her looks,” he said at last. “That was her biggest fear of all. How is she now? It’s been a long time.”
“Still beautiful.” Rob struggled with this new view of Senta Plessey. One perspective from Howard Anson, one from Corrie, and now this. “Look, Regulo, it isn’t any of my business, but you say that she walked out on you. And you still provide her support?”
That earned a piercing look for Rob from those bright blue eyes. “Now where the devil did you hear that?” Regulo said softly.
“Oh, from a man back on Earth,” Rob felt embarrassment, aware that he had gone beyond the acceptable questions. “I wasn’t trying to pry. It’s just something that I’d heard.”
“It’s true enough.” Regulo’s voice sounded even gruffer than usual. “I knew what Senta’s worries were. We had some good years together, and I wouldn’t let her be miserable for nothing. We both know I’ve got enough money, more than I can ever use, more than Senta realizes. She spends, but I don’t restrain her. Why should I? It’s only money.
“Now, let’s get off that subject.” His voice took on its old, eager tone. “I want to see what you’ve been doing, and I want to show you what we’ve been at. You’ll see why I wanted you up here. Take a look at this.”
He switched on a large holoscreen that ran from floor to ceiling on one side of the study. In it appeared a view of a small asteroid, swimming free in space. Away to one side of it Rob could see a familiar shape. He frowned.
“That’s one of my Spiders. I thought they were supposed to be out in the Belt.”
“That one will be, as soon as the demonstration is finished.” Regulo adjusted the control to zoom in on part of the image, and pointed at the upper part of the screen. “Now, take a look at the top of the rock there.”
“It looks like a drive unit.” Rob reached over and increased the magnification a little further. “There’s another one at the bottom, from the look of it.”
“Quite right. You can’t see this on the image, but the whole rock has been covered with a layer of tungsten fibers. They’ll hold their strength up to nearly three and a half thousand degrees. See anything else near where the Spider is hanging?”
Rob moved the joystick and the magnified area shifted until it was centered on the dark bulk of the Spider. “I can see a housing on the surface of the rock. It looks like a power attachment,
without the rest of the powersat.”
“Right again.” Regulo was in his element. “We’ll be hooking a powersat in position four hours from now. The connections have been set up to work with either that or a power kernel, to take electricity from the power source and distribute it around the rock. Now, one more fact and then you’re on your own.” Any pain that Regulo was feeling had been pushed away from his conscious thoughts. His voice was full of a huge satisfaction. “Zoom in on the Spider, and tell me what else you see.”
Rob leaned forward, moving his head from side to side to get a better look at the holo-image. “You’ve done something to the proboscis,” he said at last. “It’s been lengthened, and it has a different reflectivity. Hm. Have you changed the composition?”
“To a high-temperature ceramic.” Regulo nodded. “I ought to brush up on my knowledge of spider anatomy. In my ignorance, I’ve been calling it a sting. All right, we’ve changed the proboscis. It will take very high temperatures, and it’s still flexible. Now you’ve seen everything, so you tell me. What game are we playing here?”
Rob stared at the image in front of him, his imagination hyperactive. Regulo wouldn’t have gone to these lengths unless he had something very real in mind. It was just a question of sorting through all the possibilities and choosing the one with the commercial slant.
“What’s the composition of this rock?” he said suddenly.
“Metals, mostly — several different ones.”
Regulo waited expectantly. After a minute or two more, Rob nodded.
“I see it,” he said. “It all seems feasible, but I’d want to explore the details.”
“Well, man.” Regulo was suddenly impatient. “Come on, tell me how you think it ought to work.”
“All right.” Rob stood up and went closer to the screen. He pointed at the drives in the rock. “Let’s start with these. You set them to provide equal and opposite thrusts, one on each side of the asteroid. You fire them tangential to the surface, and you use their torque to set the rock spinning fast about an axis. The faster, the better, provided that the tungsten sheath around the whole thing can take the strain.”
“No problem at all with a small rock like this. We might have more to worry about when we get to something the size of Lutetia.”
“Let’s finish this one first.” Rob pointed again at the image. “I’ll assume you have the powersat in position by the housing there. You picked that placing so the powersat sits on the axis of rotation of the rock. It would be a messy calculation, but the principles are easy. Now you begin to feed power in to the rock, through a grid over its surface. A lot of power. For something much bigger than this, I don’t think a powersat will do it. You’ll need a fusion plant or a power kernel, otherwise the job will take forever.”
He squinted again at the configuration on the screen. “Are you sure that the rotation will be all right? I’d expect a stability problem. It will be difficult to keep a smooth rotation about a single axis as the shape changes. I assume you looked into that and have the answers?”
Regulo nodded. “I cut my teeth on that sort of problem, calculating the change in mass and moments of inertia as the volatiles boil out of an asteroid during solar swing-by. We’ll have small adjustments to make as we go, but I have those worked out. Keep going.”
“Alternating currents,” Rob said. “Big ones, through the middle of the asteroid. When you apply those from the power source, you’ll get eddy current heating inside the rock from hysteresis effects. If you put enough power into it, you’ll melt the whole thing. You’ll produce a spinning ball of molten metals and rock. Spinning fast. I assume you’ve looked at the shapes and structures for a stable rotation? You’ll want a Maclaurin ellipsoid, with an axis of symmetry, rather than a Jacobi ellipsoid with three unequal axes.”
“You will indeed.” Regulo’s face was intent, his eyes fixed unwinkingly on Rob. “I’ve looked at the stability of the rotating mass. It will be all right. What next?”
“The rotation produces an acceleration gradient inside the rotating ball. The heaviest metals will migrate to the outside, the lightest ones will be forced to lie inside and closest to the axis of spin.” Rob was visualizing the ball, shaping it before him with his hands. “It’s like a big centrifuge, separating out the layers of melted materials. All you need now is the final stage: the Spider. It sits out on the axis of rotation, at the opposite end from the main power source. But it has that long, specialized proboscis, so it can reach any point inside the asteroid. You insert it to the depth that you want, and draw off that layer of rock or metal. Then you extrude it directly through the Spider — I already made the modifications you asked for, to permit high-temp extrusion.”
“You did.” Regulo’s eyes were gleaming. “And we can do away with all that mess that we had to use for the beanstalk. Chernick and the Coal Moles was a neat idea, but it was still a patched-up solution. With direct extrusion we’ll see a terrific improvement in what we can do. Give me access to Lutetia and I’ll spin you a cable from here to Alpha Centauri, with any material in the asteroid. No more grubbing about for different metals. They’ll come pre-sorted by density.”
He grinned at Rob’s expression. “All right, maybe not Alpha Centauri. We could certainly spin a web right through the Solar System, if we can think of a good use for one.”
“I like that. A beanstalk, all the way from Mercury to Pluto.” Rob was silent for a moment, chewing at his lower lip. “Won’t work, though,” he said at last. “You could never get it stable.”
“True enough.” Regulo leaned over the desk and cut back to a full display of the asteroid. “I’m just indulging in a little random speculation. That’s how everything starts, though I must admit I don’t see any way of making that one work — yet. There are a couple of other things that you didn’t mention about this system. How would you stop it from slowing down and stopping the rotation? You’ll have frictional losses, effects of the solar magnetic field, all that sort of thing working against you.”
“After the drives are switched off? I’d expect those to be small effects, but anyway it should be easy enough to compensate for them. It won’t be a perfectly homogeneous figure of revolution, even when it’s melted. Stick a pulsed magnetic field on it, about the rotation axis. You won’t need much torque to keep the spin rate constant.”
Regulo grunted his approval. “Where were you twenty years ago, when we were designing the Icarus solar scoop? I could have used your head on that. Most people don’t seem to be able to think straight even when they have all the facts.”
“Twenty years ago? I’d just lost my first milk tooth.”
“Aye. God knows it, I’m getting old.” Regulo rubbed at his lined forehead with a thin, veined hand. “Twenty years ago, to me it’s like yesterday. One more thing for you to think about, then we’ll pack this in and do some work on the beanstalk. From what you’ve seen of this so far, do you see any problems when we go to a really big one? Say, when we spin up Lutetia?”
Rob shrugged. “Well, there’s one obvious problem. You can’t possibly extend the proboscis far enough to penetrate through to the center of something that big. So you’ll have to mine the heavy materials on the outside first, even if that’s not the way you’d prefer to do it. I can see cases where you might want to get at the lighter metals and the volatiles first.”
“I’ve worried about that one, too. At the moment I’m playing with the idea of zone melting, but I’m not completely happy with it.” Regulo watched and waited in silence, while Rob mulled over that problem.
“I see what you mean,” Rob said at last. “You’re assuming that the materials are scattered fairly uniformly through the whole body of the asteroid. That looks like a big assumption to me — unless you’ve checked it some other way?”
Regulo shook his head. “The theory of formation suggests that most of the volatiles will be on the outside. I would melt just the first couple of kilometers in from the surface, and mine there first.
I think the Spider could tap that deeply without much trouble.”
“And leave the middle solid until you want to melt further?” Rob looked thoughtful. “I don’t have your experience on differential melting. The Spider can do it all right, that’s not the issue. But I’m still not comfortable with the idea. Let me think about this for a few days and see if I come up with anything better. It’s not efficient to switch the power on and off, and I would expect that zone melting will give you problems with rotational stability.”
“It will, but I’m used to those.” Regulo nodded. “Think about it. That’s what I pay people for. I’ve held to one principle for fifty years, and it has never let me down: there is no way that you can overpay a really good worker. Maybe I ought to have that one built into the desk, along with the others.” He was staring at Rob speculatively. “You know, I’ve been thinking about you, and what you’ll do when the beanstalk is finished and working. How would you fancy the idea of coming out to the Belt and running the mining operation on Lutetia? The whole thing. Not as an employee,” he added, reading Rob’s expression. He paused for a moment to give his words more weight. “As my partner. I’ll set up an arrangement so that you can earn your way into Regulo Enterprises.”
“Your partner!” Rob was even more startled than he looked. “I’m flattered, of course. Enormously flattered. But I’m not sure I want to be away from Earth forever. I have projects planned down there.”
“I understand that.” Regulo switched off the display and the image of the asteroid quickly faded. “It’s not a decision that you make in a minute. Think about it, that’s all I ask you to do. You’ve seen the history of technology down on Earth. Has it ever occurred to you that there’s a constant pattern? It’s been the curse of science for a thousand years. Great men have ideas, lesser men implement them — and the least men gain control of their use. Look at atomic weapons as an example, running in a straight line from Einstein to Denaga, from a super-genius to a near moron.”
The Web Between the Worlds Page 18
