Trojan Orbit

by Mack Reynolds

  Bruce contemplated him speculatively. He said, “You know, Pete, I think I’m going to stick my neck out. How’d you like to attend a secret meeting of the Central Committee of an underground outfit that wants to overthrow the present administration of the L5 Project?”

  Pete Kapitz boggled. He got out, “Are you around the bend, Carter?”

  “Nope. I don’t think so. I ran into these people yesterday. Some of the things they told me about the workings of this project set me back plenty, in spite of the fact that I’d already heard a great deal along the same line.”

  “But, make sense, hombre, how in the hell could they expect to overthrow the Solomon Ryan administration? A strike or something?”

  “No. And nothing violent. They think that if they can get somebody to get back Earthside and reveal all the information on Lagrange Five mismanagement, that the stink will bring about a change in the upper echelons of the Lagrange Five Corporation. What the hell they expect, to happen then, I don’t know. At any rate, their leader, or one of them, invited me to sit in on a meeting of their Central Committee. It seems to me this might be the chance you’re looking for. If Roy Thomas wants to find out about the inner workings of the project, you couldn’t do better than listen to these characters beef.”

  “You think they’d let me come?”

  “We sure as hell can try. I’m to meet this Adam Bloch in about ten minutes.”

  “How do we get out of this fucking hotel without passes? They’ve got Security guards posted everywhere.”

  “Some gumshoe you are,” Bruce said, smiling. “Come along.”

  He led the way down the hall that entered into the downstairs offices of the Security department. Garbed as they were, they drew no attention. They casually stepped through the doors that led onto the street and turned left.

  “I’ll be damned,” Pete said. “Al Moore and his boys aren’t as efficient as they think they are.”

  “They probably don’t have much cause for tightening up. From what I’ve seen, the usual colonist stays as far away from Security as he can. As usual, nobody loves a cop.”

  “Huh,” the IABI man grunted.

  The park was only a few blocks down. For that matter, anything was only a few blocks away in the small, jam-packed town. All over again, Bruce Carter decided that he’d hate to spend five years of his life in the place. Not to speak of being a colonist, signed up to spend the rest of his life here.

  “You’d be better at it than me,” Bruce said to his companion. “Check to see if we’re being followed.”

  “I doubt it,” the other said. “Nobody followed us out of the hotel.”

  They remained as inconspicuous as possible among the pedestrians and bicyclists, who seemed somewhat thicker than usual. Possibly it was a shift change. They walked near the houses, rather than in the middle of the street. The freelancer had no difficulty in finding the house of Adam Bloch. As the teacher had told him, it was a small, two-storied one, constructed of gray moon brick and plastic. Bruce consulted his wrist chronometer. It was two minutes to four. Right on the dot. He came to a halt, gave a last searching look in all directions, and then stepped quickly to the door and knocked. Even the door was constructed of aluminum, he noted. Thus far, the only wood he’d seen outside the hotel were the few straggly trees that Pal Barack said that he tended in the park. For that matter, the wood at the hotel was sparse and to be seen mostly in the desks and other furniture in the more opulent offices and living quarters.

  The door was answered, not by Bloch, but by the window washer…what was his name? …Cris Everett.

  His eyes widened and he said, looking at Pete Kapitz, “Who in the hell’s this, Carter? Adam said you were coming, but he didn’t mention anybody else.”

  “I’ll explain him to Bloch,” Carter said. “Suppose you let us in off the street, before somebody spots us.”

  “Yeah, well, okay,” the small man said, though unhappily and still suspicious. He had a put-upon type face, meant to be suspicious. He stepped aside and they entered.

  The whole bottom floor was devoted to the living room and in it, on the usual metallic furniture, were seated Bloch and three others, none of whom Bruce recognized. One was a plain-faced woman, her hair done up in a scarf, wearing coveralls identical to those of the men.

  Adam Bloch stood, scowling, as Cris Everett had done, at the IABI agent.

  Bruce nodded at the assembled Central Committee and said to Bloch, “This is Peter Kapitz. He’s an IABI operative.”

  Several sucked in breath.

  Bruce said, “He has nothing to do with L5 Project authorities. In fact, he’s been sent up here secretly to nose around and find out what’s wrong with the project’s workings—if anything. So, I’d think he’s as good a contact for you people as I am. Possibly better. He’s working directly under Roy Thomas, President Corcoran’s top aide. Thomas, evidently, suspects something offbeat’s going on.”

  “How do we know we can trust him?” the woman said. She had a grating voice.

  Bruce took her in, shrugging. “How do you know you can trust me? You’re taking a chance on both of us. I vouch for him. I’ve known him off and on for years.”

  Adam Bloch nodded in resignation and extended his hand to the IABI man. “We’ve already stuck our necks out,” he admitted. “We can’t stick them out any farther. Sit down, gentlemen.”

  There was just enough seating capacity for the five Central Committee members and the two newcomers. Bruce and Pete sat on a small couch, side by side. Adam Bloch made no effort to introduce any of his companions by name.

  Bruce let air out of his lungs and said, “All right, here we are. Why are you people interested in replacing Ryan’s administration of the Lagrange Five Project?”

  Bloch, evidently as chairman of the meeting, took the ball. “Let’s put it this way, Carter. The basic contract issued by the Corporation is the one almost all of us have signed. Some specialists, technicians, engineers, get more, but most of us make thirty thousand a year, tax free. Of this, ten thousand is paid us on a monthly basis in the form of credit which we can spend here in Island One with the credit cards the corporation issues. It’s all milked from us by our buying so-called luxuries at outrageous prices.”

  Pete said, “But you also accumulate a bonus of twenty thousand a year. In short, at the end of a five-year contract, you’ve got, tax free, a hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money to save in five years for the average working stiff.”

  “Like hell it is,” Cris Everett sneered. “It’s nothing at all.”

  Both the freelander and the IABI man looked at him, frowning their lack of understanding.

  Bloch took over again. “That hundred-thousand bonus is paid in the form of LFC stock. And if the corporation went bankrupt, that stock would be worthless. It wouldn’t bring a penny a share, because the so-called assets of the Lagrange Five Corporation wouldn’t have any value to anybody. If the L5 Project fails, then all this hardware up in the sky isn’t worth a damn to anyone, not even as junk. It’d cost more to get it back than it’d be worth Earthside. Who in the hell wants an island in the sky that doesn’t work?”

  Bruce said slowly, “It goes the other way, too. If the project succeeds and the L5 Corporation starts beaming power down to Earth, as planned, then that stock of yours will boom. If you hang onto it, you’ll be rich.”

  Bloch shook his head at him. “Mr. Carter, I do not know a single colonist or contract worker who believes that Island One can be finished and succeed in beaming microwave power to Earth, in the reasonably near future. Not a single one. You two are tyros in the field. We are the people up here actually at work on the project. We are the ones who know.”

  Pete said, “Back there at the hotel are the men in charge. They’re still optimistic. Bruce here tells me that you’re just a teacher. Do you think you know more about it than Doctor Soloman Ryan, the Father of the Lagrange Five Project?”

  One of the committee members who hadn’t
been introduced to the outsiders said heatedly, “Look, I’m one of the junior engineers working on the SPS’s. Anybody can tell you that there are still a lot of kinks in the whole idea, but suppose we iron them all out, which I admit is possible, given time. Wizard. We get this first SPS operational. The power beam is formed by means of a phased-array antenna involving microwave generators, or Amplitrons, and ferrite-core phase-shifters. The beam will illuminate a target area at the Earth of some 50 square kilometers. The physical limits of the optics prevent the focusing of the beam into a smaller area. The power densities will approach a kilowatt per square meter at the center of the beam. This is somewhat less than the intensity of sunlight, so, in spite of early fears, birds and animals will in no way be fried by such beams. But consider this, now. We are spending God only knows how many billions of dollars so that, from a point in distant space, we may beam to 50 square kilometers of the Earth’s surface, somewhat less energy than the unaided sun, at least on sunny days, regularly delivers to the same area. Of course, the microwave energy continues to arrive in all weather and at night. And it’s far more easily converted to electric current than sunlight, since the inefficient heat-producing part of the conversion has already been done in space. And the steady supply eliminates the need for storage, which remains the major problem with solar conversion electricity on the Earth’s surface.”

  He paused for a moment, then added simply, “Mr. Carter, Mr. Kapitz. How many such SPSs and how many such areas of 50 square kilometers will be required in order to provide electrical power to a city the size of, say, New York?”

  Bruce and Pete were eyeing him emptily.

  Adam Bloch took over again. “Gentlemen, what it amounts to is that Solomon Ryan and his closest associates at the first projections of the space colonization scheme were wide-eyed, enthusiastic dreamers, as impractical as the most unworldly college professors. They were physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers who taught engineering rather than practicing it. What is the old truism? Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach. In common with almost everybody else in Lagrange Five, I like Sol Ryan as an individual, but I have also come to believe him a dreamer, not a realist.”

  “Those are pretty hard words to use on a man with Doctor Ryan’s achievements,” Bruce said. “How about giving us a good example of his being as, ah, naive as you seem to think him.”

  The junior engineer interrupted. “Just a minute on that achievements thing. Offhand, I can’t think of any breakthroughs Sol Ryan has made in the field. For instance, the idea of the mass driver wasn’t exactly first hit upon by him, you know. Arthur Clark developed the concept in a paper entitled Electromagnetic Launching as a Major Contribution to Space Flight, in 1950. He gave it rather wide circulation in a short story, “Maelstrom 11,” in 1962. And the idea of self-sufficient space colonies is almost as old as science fiction. Heinlein, among others, way back in the thirties or forties, had a story entitled Universe, in which he had an interstellar spaceship as large as one of Ryan’s Island Fours, and with a closed-cycle ecosystem.”

  Bruce nodded to that, but looked back to the teacher.

  Adam Bloch was thinking about the challenging question. He said, “Very well, your demand is a valid one. Let us take this example. Early in his days of promoting space colonization, Doctor Ryan seemed especially taken up with the eventual possibility of what he called homesteading in the asteroid belt. It should be called the planetoid belt, by the way, since it’s composed of small planets, rather than asteroids. At any rate, in an article in, I believe, Harper’s, he mentioned in passing that a real maverick would be free in L5 to take off with a kind of vehicle he could build himself and stock with all the basic mining and agricultural equipment he and his family would need to homestead an asteroid for possibly $50,000 to $100,000.”

  Pete said, “What’s so unrealistic about that?”

  “Everything,” Bloch told him. “Later, in his bestselling book on space colonization, he went into greater detail. He gave a thorough account of just how this homesteader could do it. His homemade spaceship, built of aluminum, would be a sphere about thirty feet across. In it he stocks food for two years for himself, his wife and infant child. It also contains the propulsion engine, air recycling equipment and, I assume, water recycling equipment as well. He also carries lots of seed, fish, chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and, of course, the feed for them. He also carries spare parts and one-of-a-kind tools. He also carries all the equipment he will need for homesteading his asteroid when he gets there, including mining equipment, agricultural equipment, and a grinder to grind up chunks of the asteroid into soil for farming, as well as chemical processing equipment. Besides all this, he carries in that 30-foot sphere a large quantity of sheet aluminum for construction.”

  The female member of the committee laughed softly. “Sounds a little crowded.”

  “Yes,” Bloch went on. “So they take off, with four similar craft built by friends. Twenty-three persons in all, similarly equipped, but also including two dogs which they expect to throw a litter of pups along the way. They expect to take a year to reach the asteroid belt. Now, mind you, this homesteader is, of necessity, a mechanic, a tinkerer, a jack-of-all-trades. Remember, he built his own spaceship. However, he is not, I assume, an M.D. In short, he is taking his infant child and his wife on a one-year trip in free fall, without a doctor available, not to speak of a dentist. It is to be assumed that the other twenty colonists are of similar background. However, let us stretch a point and say that one of them is a doctor and a dentist to boot. It is to be hoped that he includes all the equipment of a hospital, along with operating needs and a dentist’s chair and all the devices needed by dental technicians to make bridges, caps, and so forth. Even then, a real serious illness would have him in a spot since he’d be a GP rather than a specialist. I’d hate to see the need for a kidney transplant, for instance.”

  Cris Everett muttered, “I’d like to see those pigs, in free fall, throwing a litter of piglets.”

  The woman said, “I’d like to see them cleaning up after those animals in zero gravity. Are they going to recycle all the manure, or use it for fertilizer?”

  “In his description of this pioneering effort, Ryan doesn’t mention hydroponic farming along the way,” Bloch said. “It is to be assumed that most of the animal and human manure will be flushed overboard or used for fuel, which gives us a mild idea of the amount of water recycling stuff they would have to carry. At any rate, once in space, the five ships get together and, as they go, the men build an assembly bay, a cylinder 25 feet across and more than 200 feet long, of aluminum plate, which they’ve brought along.”

  “Jesus,” the woman grated. “Those thirty-foot spheres are sounding more crowded by the minute.”

  “But that’s not all they build on their way to the asteroid belt,” Bloch said. “Once the assembly bay is completed, they construct in it a number of crop-modules, which are cylinders about 20 feet across and in lengths of nearly 200 feet. When done with these, they put in a lightweight floor and under that set up pigpens and chicken coops. All from the aluminum sheets they’ve brought along with them. It doesn’t say where the fish are kept.”

  Pete had been staring at this description. Now he said in protest, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “No, I’m not,” Bloch said. “I told you the man is not to be taken seriously. He has the homesteader mention, in a fictional message back to someone Earthside, that so far everyone’s been healthy and nobody’s got any tooth problems yet. And he says that if they can last to the Belt, where there are dentists, they’ll have escaped the biggest problem that hits groups like theirs. Now, picture the obvious. The equivalent would be for a covered wagon to cross the United States and the homesteader driving the team saying to his associates, ‘When we reach California, our troubles will be over, because there are dentists in Australia.’”

  “I don’t think I get that,” Bruce said.

  Bloch looked at him. “Ry
an evidently has an uninformed idea of just what the asteroid belt is. It’s not exactly as though your wife could go over to the nearest other asteroid that’s been homesteaded and borrow a cup of sugar. The asteroid belt extends in thickness for millions of miles, largely between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. For instance, the asteroid Flora is 204 million miles from the sun and the asteroid Hygeia is 292 million miles. In short, their orbits are 88 million miles from each other.”

  Bruce began to see what he was getting at.

  Bloch continued. “There are some 2,000 asteroids large enough that we have tracked their orbits and examined them to the extent modern equipment allows. It is estimated that there might be as many as 100,000 large enough to make any difference. Then they go down in size to boulders, pebbles, and even dust.”

  “Now a hundred thousand asteroids sounds like a good many, but when you consider the sector of space involved, the number is tiny. Our homesteader is going to be lucky if he settles an asteroid that has a neighbor as near as, say, the Earth is to the moon. Each sizable asteroid, on an average, may be a million miles from the next. In short, our 23 colonists are probably going to be millions of miles from the nearest source of needed spare parts for their equipment and the other necessities of human existence, ranging from medicines, safety pins, and light bulbs, to lubricating oil, salt, and toilet paper. Such things, just possibly, might be available at the larger asteroids such as Ceres, which has a diameter of almost 500 miles and will most likely some day be mined by Earth entrepreneurs. If it is, the settlers would undoubtedly consist of considerably more than 23 souls, and would be supplied adequately from Earth.”

  “You’re making quite an argument,” Bruce admitted.

  “Here’s the biggest blooper of all,” Bloch said, obviously winding it up. “What is the cash crop to be? Conceding that they are successful in building a living habitat and that after another year in free fall, eating dehydrated food and going without medical care, they are successful, rotating their habitat to produce artificial gravity, growing their own food, and mining the homestead asteroid for the raw materials they need. When their funds run out, how are they going to trade for the endless necessities that they must have? New tools, spare parts, raw materials not available on their little asteroid, medical replacements, and all the rest. Do they expect to grow bumper crops, transport them over fabulous distances to large settlements, and compete against farmers better equipped and with more land than they have? Or are they going to mine raw materials that the larger asteroids don’t have? Such as what? Is their little asteroid going to be composed half of gold, or diamonds, so they could profitably ship their products back to Earth or Lagrange Five? Nonsense!”