by Ben Bova
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Space Weapons” copyright © 1985 by TSR, Inc.
“Nuclear Autumn” copyright © 1985 by Ben Bova.
“Freedom From Fear” copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc.
“Béisbol” copyright © 1985 by Davis Publications, Inc.
“The Jefferson Orbit” copyright © 1985 by Ben Bova.
“Isolation Area” copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press Inc.
“Space Station” copyright © 1985 by The Hearst Corp.
“Primary” copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc.
“Born Again” copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc.
“Laser Propulsion” copyright © 1984 by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“The Sightseers” copyright © 1973 by Roger Elwood; copyright © 1978 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
“Telefuture” copyright © 1985 by Omni Publications International, Ltd.
“Foeman” copyright © 1968 by Galaxy Publishing
Corp.; copyright © 1978 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc.
“Symbolism in Science Fiction” copyright © 1984 by The Writer, Inc.
To Mike Gamble, from both of us.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Foreword
Battle Station
Space Weapons
Nuclear Autumn
Freedom From Fear
Béisbol
The Jefferson Orbit
Isolation Area
Space Station
Primary
MHD
Born Again
Laser Propulsion
The Sightseers
Telefuture
Foeman
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
Symbolism in Science Fiction
Also by
THE FIRST LASER BEAM CAUGHT THEM UNAWARE
Copyright Page
Foreword
Nobody wants to militarize space, but …
The fact is that the military was in space long before anyone else.
The first man-made objects to soar past the Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere and enter the pristine domain of space were Nazi Germany’s V-2 rockets, in 1944.
World War II ended in the twin mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It did not take much imagination to realize that a nuclear weapon riding atop a long-range rocket made a formidable weapon —perhaps the “ultimate” weapon.
But by June of 1947 an eminent team of American scientists led by Dr. Vannevar Bush, of MIT, advised the U.S. government that it would be impossible to build rockets big enough and accurate enough to serve as long-range nuclear-armed missiles.
“I think we can leave that out of our thinking,” said the redoubtable Dr. Bush. “In my opinion, such a thing is impossible for many years.”
But three months earlier, the Soviet government authorized formation of a state commission to examine the feasibility of long-range ballistic missiles. Joseph Stalin told his Kremlin aides that a nuclear-armed missile “could be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper, Truman. We must go ahead with it, comrades! The problem of the creation of transcontinental rockets is of extreme importance to us.”
By 1949 the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb. By 1957 they sent the world’s first artificial satellite into orbit, announcing to the world that Soviet rockets were large enough and accurate enough to drop a hydrogen bomb on any city in the world.
The military was in space.
Yes, the scientists followed with unmanned spacecraft that eventually explored all the worlds of the solar system, out to Uranus. (And in 1989 Voyager II will fly past Neptune, cameras clicking.)
Yes, the first man to set foot on the Moon was a civilian. So was the last man. The ten in between were U.S. Air Force and Navy fliers serving with NASA.
And while we were sending men to the Moon and machines beyond the edge of the solar system, while the United States was developing the space shuttle and the Soviets put a succession of space stations into low orbit around the Earth (two of them are up there now), the military was using the “high ground” of space for its own purposes: communicatons, surveillance, weather observation, navigation, geodesy.
In 1967 the United States and the Soviet Union, together with sixty-one other nations, signed the Outer Space Treaty, which, among other things, bans nuclear weapons from space and guarantees that the Moon will not be used for military purposes.
But weapons have flown in space. The Soviets tested an orbital bombardment system before the ink was dry on the 1967 treaty. And they have developed an operational antisatellite weapon capable of destroying satellites in orbits as high as twelve hundred miles.
Both nations have worked on space-based defenses against that “ultimate” weapon, the hydrogen-bomb-carrying intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The American Strategic Defense Initiative program has received enormous publicity, and has been the center of a raging controversy ever since President Reagan startled the world with his “Star Wars” speech in March 1983. Soviet work in strategic defenses has been much quieter, but equally intense.
Why fortify heaven? Why extend human aggression into space?
You might as well ask, Why have navies? Why have armed fleets steaming in the world’s oceans?
Every major nation on Earth maintains a navy to protect its seacoasts and its maritime commerce from enemies, real and potential. Navies and war fleets have been with us for so many millennia that we never hear people say, “Let’s keep the oceans free of weaponry! Don’t militarize the seas!”
In fact, sometimes it is comforting to know that there are “good guys” out there on the high seas, willing and able to help or protect you if you need it. In a world of hijackers, pirates, and natural emergencies such as hurricanes, disciplined naval personnel can be the difference between life and death.
So it will be with space. If my vision of the future is correct (and it’s a vision I share with many men and women, both science fiction people and “mundanes”), much of the human race’s next generation of commerce and wealth will be space-based. Where your purse is, there your thieves will be also—small-time thieves such as pirates, and bigger thieves, too. The kind of people who can steal a country probably will not blanch at stealing whole worlds. Or trying to.
Even if you believe that the only legitimate purpose for a nation’s armed forces is to protect the nation against attack, it must be admitted that every square inch of land in the world is open to attack from space. ICBMs soar above the atmosphere and dive down on their targets from space.
The military is in space to stay. The question is, Can the competing nations of Earth learn to cooperate enough in this new environment of space so that their military forces can work together to prevent aggression on Earth? Satellites orbit around the whole world; they can be used to protect every nation against attack by any nation or any subnational
group.
The answer to that question will determine whether or not the twenty-first century is an era of peace. If it is not, perhaps there is not much of a future for the human race, after all.
But I am an optimist, as those of you who read my collection Prometheans know full well. I see the military cooperating in space, evolving into an International Peacekeeping Force that will play the role of an honest cop in orbit and prevent the nations of the world from destroying one another.
The sixteen stories and articles in this book deal with the prospects of war and peace in orbit, together with other glimpses of possible futures. Most of them treat directly with the military aspects of space. Others are devoted to allied facets of the human race’s expansion into the solar system.
The nonfiction articles are based on the latest factual information available at the time of their writing, interpreted through my own experiences and opinions. The fiction shows what mere facts cannot: how tomorrow’s technology will affect individual human lives.
The great strength of science fiction is that it can show the human future, it can deal with the emotions that tomorrow’s changes will stir. But without a solid basis in factual science and technology, fiction about the future becomes fantasy and loses its power to prepare us for the real world that awaits us with the next dawn.
In the sixteen works assembled here you will see:
• How an International Peacekeeping Force might actually work—even when betrayed from within.
• How energy projectors firing pinpoint beams of light may spell doom for the “ultimate” weapon.
• How baseball may become a tool of international diplomacy.
• How a new method of generating electrical power could cut your electricity bill in half—and supply the power for space-borne energy beam weapons.
• How computers may one day replace politicians.
• How telephones may become small enough to be implanted in your skull.
• How benign extraterrestrials may have already influenced human history.
• How space stations in orbit will include zero-gravity hospitals—and honeymoon hotels.
Nobody wants the military in space. But they will be there. They are already there. If we are wise, we will see to it that they serve to protect the peace and defend the human race against attack.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote, “The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”
—Ben Bova
West Hartford, Conn.
March 1987
Battle Station
“Where do you get your crazy ideas?”
Every science fiction writer has heard that question, over and over again. Sometimes the questioner is kind enough to leave out the word “crazy.” But the question still is asked whenever I give a lecture to any audience that includes people who do not regularly read science fiction.
Some science fiction writers, bored by that same old question (and sometimes miffed at the implications behind that word “crazy”), have taken to answering: “Schenectady!” There’s even a mythology about it that claims that members of the Science Fiction Writers of America subscribe to the Crazy Idea Service of Schenectady, New York, and receive in the mail one crazy idea each month—wrapped in plain brown paper, of course.
Yet the question deserves an answer. People are obviously fascinated with the process of creativity. Nearly everybody has a deep curiosity about how a writer comes up with the ideas that generate fresh stories.
For most of the stories and novels I have written over the years, the ideation period is so long and complex that I could not begin to explain—even to myself—where the ideas originally came from.
With “Battle Station,” happily, I can trace the evolution of the story from original idea to final draft.
“Battle Station” has its roots in actual scientific research and technological development. In the mid-1960s I was employed at the research laboratory where the first high-power laser was invented. I helped to arrange the first briefing in the Pentagon to inform the Department of Defense that lasers of virtually any power desired could now be developed. That was the first step on the road to what is now called the Strategic Defense Initiative.
My 1976 novel Millennium examined, as only science fiction can, the human and social consequences of using lasers in satellites to defend against nuclear missiles. By 1983 the real world had caught up to the idea and President Reagan initiated the “Star Wars” program. In 1984 I published a nonfiction book on the subject, Assured Survival. In 1986 a second edition of that book, retitled Star Peace and published by Tor Books, brought the swiftly developing story up to date.
Meanwhile, from the mid-1960s to this present day, thinkers such as Maxwell W. Hunter II have been studying the problems and possibilities of an orbital defense system. While most academic critics (and consequently, most of the media) have simply declared such a defense system impossible, undesirable, and too expensive, Max Hunter has spent his time examining how such a system might work, and what it might mean for the world political situation.
I am indebted to Max Hunter for sharing his ideas with me; particularly for the concept of “active armor.” I have done violence to his ideas, I know, shaping them to the needs of the story. Such is the way of fiction.
Another concept that is important to this story came from the often-stormy letters column of Analog magazine more than twenty years ago. Before the first astronauts and cosmonauts went into space, the readers of Analog debated, vigorously, who would make the best candidates for duty aboard orbiting space stations. One of the ideas they kicked around was that submariners—men accustomed to cramped quarters, high tensions, and long periods away from home base—would be ideal for crewing a military space station.
So I “built” a space battle station that controls laser-armed satellites, and placed at its helm Commander J. W. Hazard, U.S. Navy (ret.), a former submarine skipper.
I gave him an international crew, in keeping with the conclusions I arrived at in Star Peace: Assured Survival, that the new technology of strategic defense satellites will lead to an International Peacekeeping Force (IPF)—a a global police power dedicated to preventing war.
Once these ideas were in place, the natural thing was to test them. Suppose someone tried to subvert the IPF and seize the satellite system for his own nefarious purposes? Okay, make that not merely a political problem, but a personal problem for the story’s protagonist: Hazard’s son is part of a cabal to overthrow the IPF and set up a world dictatorship.
Now I had a story. All I had to do was start writing and allow the characters to “do their thing.”
The ideas were the easiest part of the task. As you can see, the ideas were all around me, for more than twenty years. There are millions of good ideas floating through the air all the time. Every day of your life brings a fresh supply of ideas. Every person you know is a walking novel. Every news event contains a dozen ideas for stories.
The really difficult part is turning those ideas into good stories. To bring together the ideas and the characters and let them weave a story—that is the real work of the writer. Very few people ask about that, yet that is the actual process of creativity. It’s not tough to find straw. Spinning straw into gold—that’s the great magical trick!
We should avoid a dependence on satellites for wartime purposes that is out of proportion to our ability to protect them. If we make ourselves dependent upon vulnerable spacecraft for military support, we will have built an Achilles heel into our forces.
—Dr. Ashton Carter, MIT
April 1984
The key issue then becomes, is our defense capable of defending itself …?
—Maxwell W. Hunter II
Lockheed Missiles and Space Co., Inc.
February 26, 1979
The first laser beam caught them unaware, slicing through the station’s thin aluminum skin exactly where the main power trunk and air lines fed into the bridg
e.
A sputtering fizz of sparks, a moment of heart-wrenching darkness, and then the emergency dims came on. The electronics consoles switched to their internal batteries with barely a microsecond’s hesitation, but the air fans sighed to a stop and fell silent. The four men and two women on duty in the bridge had about a second to realize they were under attack. Enough time for the breath to catch in your throat, for the sudden terror to hollow out your guts.
The second laser hit was a high-energy pulse deliberately aimed at the bridge’s observation port. It cracked the impact-resistant plastic as easily as a hammer smashes an egg; the air pressure inside the bridge blew the port open. The six men and women became six exploding bodies spewing blood. There was not even time enough to scream.
The station was named Hunter, although only a handful of its crew knew why. It was not one of the missile-killing satellites, nor one of the sensor-laden observation birds. It was a command-and-control station, manned by a crew of twenty, orbiting some one thousand kilometers high, below the densest radiation zone of the inner Van Allen belt. It circled the Earth in about 105 minutes. By design, the station was not hardened against laser attack. The attackers knew this perfectly well.
Commander Hazard was almost asleep when the bridge was destroyed. He had just finished his daily inspection of the battle station. Satisfied that the youngsters of his crew were reasonably sharp, he had returned to his coffin-sized personal cabin and wormed out of his sweaty fatigues. He was angry with himself.
Two months aboard the station and he still felt the nausea and unease of space adaptation syndrome. It was like the captain of an ocean vessel having seasickness all the time. Hazard fumed inwardly as he stuck another timed-release medication plaster on his neck, slightly behind his left ear. The old one had fallen off. Not that they did much good. His neck was faintly spotted with the rings left by the medication patches. Still his stomach felt fluttery, his palms slippery with perspiration.