Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  Once in place, what was to prevent Franklin and company putting a stranglehold on the global economy, enriching themselves by trillions of dollars while billions of workers would see their livelihoods vanish?

  By the end of the “discussion,” Garlin, with two generations of experience over her young rival, had gained something of an upper hand, though Victoria’s poise, eloquence, and solid scientific arguments—even if they fell on some deaf ears—essentially ensured that her graduate committee would not succumb to any kind of pressure when in a few weeks she went before them.

  The two views of the future were on a collision course, but then again, throughout most of history, that had always been the case.

  Thus, even while the arguments were fought out at a university in Indiana, there were increasing warnings coming to Franklin via friends in Washington that covetous eyes and even dangerous gazes were shifting toward the Pillar.

  Gary followed the news on the daily uplinks or was informed by Eva of the latest gossip, while Franklin briefed him every day on what was happening and sought his advice as he always did.

  His initial childlike enthusiasm of the first few weeks on board the station had never fully settled down. Though of course he was deeply concerned for his daughter, especially when told by Franklin on a private encoded link that Victoria for the time being had an armed security detail.

  In contrast he felt totally free of all constraints. He was free from daily meetings, seemingly endless debates, and he was free as well from the confines of wheelchair and crutches, and for a while he argued with himself over whether the palliative effect was psychosomatic or real. He actually felt better and his mind had regained a certain acuity that it had been losing of late. He had enjoyed the “zero-gravity” dances—all proper, of course, since he was a married man—and beamed down to Eva endless thoughts about the prospects of art, ballet, and even sports when they would one day construct a sphere several hundred meters across for such activities. His musings on a game of zero-gravity soccer or a sport he dubbed “falcon flying”—in which competitors would don small wings for propulsion, have a streamer tied to one of their feet, then swoop and dive as they attempted to take the streamers from their opponents until only one was left—had triggered an entire issue of Sports Illustrated titled “Sports of the 21st Century.”

  He had settled into the routine of life aboard the station, gaining favor with his crewmates by taking on the daily tasks of cooking dinner, thereby freeing each of them up for an additional hour. He had trained with the EVA suit but had not been let outside, other than to briefly poke his head out of the airlock while Kevin labored to properly secure a spinner and send it on its way downward.

  They had gone to the new upgrade of spinners now that the tower was strengthening, and his own ascent had proven its overall capability. Spools twice as big as before were being sent up, and although there was concern about the adhesiveness of the primary cable, it was hoped that subsequent layers would tamp the first threads into place. Another conductivity layer was added in as the first “wire” was buried under subsequent layers and an additional spool was sent up to reinforce the counterweight out to 40,000 miles.

  He had helped monitor the docking of the supply ship, the off-loading of the rolls of thread and the first rolls of the new ribbon with which they were to beginning to test deployment, stapling, and lamination.

  And then the first warning came in. The solar cycle, quiet at the moment, had nevertheless put out enough storms and CMEs to affect the upper atmosphere, one of them of such intensity that the crew had to spend nearly a day in the tight confines of the descent capsule, heat shield pointed straight at the sun to block out the dangerous gamma rays. It had, as a result, shifted orbits of thousands of items, from satellites to bolt-size debris in the lower and even middle zone thousands of miles up, and after a couple of days of tracking and computing it looked as if two strikes on the tower would occur within the month: one by a fist-size piece of debris, but then, chillingly, another by a long-defunct Soviet surveillance satellite of several tons, expected to hit the tower dead-on.

  The fist-size chunk was a remnant of a booster stage that had lofted a satellite to geosynch. It had been on a long, slow retrograde spiral down for years, and only in the last month had it finally shown up on the complex tracking computers as a threat, its trajectory calculated for impact, followed only hours later by the catastrophic threat of the surveillance sat.

  It was thirteen days off, plenty of time for debate uplinked and downlinked over the secured lines.

  The fist-size chunk of metal, if off even by a few centimeters, would pass harmlessly by, and it was admitted that calculations down to a few centimeters would not be accurate until minutes before impact. But the large Soviet-era satellite? That was all but a guaranteed hit. Thus Franklin, with the concurrence of Gary and Eva, decided they were going to have to go for a harmonic wave by shifting the base and at the same time using the positioning thruster on Station One. The concept had haunted Gary’s nightmares for over two decades, always the memory of “Galloping Gertie,” the bridge over the Tacoma Narrows. And he thanked God he was up here, at least able to play an active part, even though he could feel that, regardless of the joyful rejuvenation of being in microgravity, Parkinson’s was still working its ravages.

  The planning session the night before the potential impact was an intense meeting of the four on board the station, and he wondered for a moment if Singh trusted his judgment after all as he reviewed the plan that he, Eva, and a hundred techs had hatched on the ground. Six hours before the impact of the first object, the station would start to set up a wave that would vibrate down the tower like the vibration on a string plucked on a violin. They needed only shift by several meters to save the wire from a nearly five-mile-per-second impact by an object weighing several kilos, which, when one did the math, was a lot of kinetic energy—something that a ribbon could easily endure, but a single strand? Final calculations had yet to be run on its trajectory, but the probability of a hit by “the fist,” as it was being called, was going up.

  The big one was six hours later. Hours before that, the base platform itself would shift back and forth laterally, timing each shift to match the upward pulse and then magnify that pulse as it raced back down the wire, until they were shifting the entire tower nearly thirty meters away from where the satellite would pass, thus avoiding collision. They then set up a counter pulse to dampen out the harmonic wave.

  The reassuring argument was that if Galloping Gertie had had modern technology and computing power as backup, the destructive wave could have been dampened down in a few minutes and the structure preserved intact.

  Easy to say; now it was time to prove it.

  The plan for the station was that all would don for EVA; there was the threat that the harmonic wave would tear the entire unit clear of the tower with possible hull puncture. Spinners were dropped to clear the path down the entire length. The manned ascent and descent pod was loaded with emergency repair equipment if part of the tower was damaged.

  Then it was hang on and wait.

  Franklin did make this crisis public. It was impossible not to when the Russians announced that it would be their satellite that would apparently strike the tower, offering many apologies and then a shrug that there was nothing to do about it; then shortly after that they claimed that the satellite was still functional and, if damaged by the tower, they would hold Franklin’s firm liable for damage, which, of course, would run into the billions. Given that the tower was the realm of primarily American investors, they really had nothing to lose and much to gain by just sitting back, though the close-knit community of space scientists, who often transcend the foolishness of nationalism, privately communicated that there was not an ounce of thruster fuel left on that long-abandoned satellite. Their own calculations showed that the game of orbital pinball between a strand of filament now a couple of centimeters wide and 23,000 miles long, versus 20,000 objects whizzing
around the earth, had finally come up as a hit.

  The fact that a smaller object was supposed to strike several hours earlier up near geosynch had triggered more than a few bloggers and media casters to call this the first real test of the tower and the “perfect storm” scenario. At least, down on the surface, the tropical weather was calm, though winds aloft for the day at 20,000 feet were predicted at nearly one hundred miles per hour. Nothing major, but still, an additional factor.

  At upper impact zero minus thirty-one minutes, Singh was ordered to fire up the lateral thrusters for thirty seconds, and Gary could feel the disconcerting nudge as the tower they were attached to actually did shift. And like the crack of a whip, the bowing-out of the tower started to race down its length. With far more distance to travel, the shifting of the tower at ground level was initiated six hours and fifty minutes before potential impact, the massive support frame anchoring the tower in place shifting to the south by the entire width of the platform off of Aranuka, then rapidly shifting back via the tracks embedded on the ocean floor.

  Gary—and for that matter everyone around the world who was watching—could sense the tension; nothing like this had occurred since the days of shuttle launches, when all held their breath as Mission Control told the ascending vehicle “You are go at throttle up,” the last words spoken to Challenger before it disintegrated.

  There was really nothing dramatic to watch after the platform had shifted back and forth three times, sending up three “bows” in case the calculations of the satellite passage were off by even a few seconds—still hard to calculate, given the fluctuations in the earth’s atmosphere even as the solar storm sent out a final short burst of intensity.

  “We are ten seconds from potential upper impact,” Singh announced, and Gary could actually feel the tower shifting back and forth and then heard Singh exhale with relief.

  “Whoever did this calculation is a jerk!” she snapped, whipping off her headset and turning off the open comm link. “Our radar is showing at least a hundred-meter miss without even having to shift!”

  The “whip” that was coming up from below now buffeted them, traveled on up to the top of the ever-extending outer counterweight, made up of expended launch vehicles and empty spinner reels, then came racing back down, jarring them again.

  Nightmare images of Galloping Gertie flooded Gary’s mind as he strapped himself in beside Singh, watching the monitors, and for the moment his mind did feel clear, even though his legs were trembling uncontrollably.

  “I think we got it,” he muttered, “but we should deploy the pod out on to the tower, manned and ready to go instantly.”

  “For what?” Singh asked.

  “We’ve got one of four scenarios. The second object misses and in space one inch off is as good as a thousand miles. Second, it hits and does not cut us in half, but there is damage. We need a repair unit on the spot and the only way to really do that is with an EVA. We can drop down a hell of a lot faster than sending a unit up via the cable.

  “The strike point is calculated at 10,200 miles, give or take a few miles, which makes me doubt their calculation anyhow.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “Scenario three,” he continued, “it cuts the cable, and then we are all screwed anyhow, though supposedly anything above 12,700 miles will remain in orbit, while everything below that will collapse.”

  “Nightmare,” Singh whispered.

  “Or fourth, my big fear, we’ve triggered a harmonic wave. It’s going to take split-second timing to dampen that out along 23,000 miles. Someone should be down near the halfway point to measure the exact intensity of the wave and feed information both up and down. The small thrusters aboard the pod can even help dampen it as well.”

  Singh looked at him.

  “And you are suggesting…?”

  He smiled.

  “Yes: me. I helped design this. This whole Galloping Gertie nightmare: the first summer my wife and I worked on this back at Goddard, our mentor told us to find the movie of it at the National Archives, and it has haunted me ever since. I see it as much of, if not more than, a threat as any impact. We need precise, down-to-the-millisecond measurements of the harmonic passages—how much of a lateral shift—and that means someone at the midway point to feed the data. We have yet to install any sensing devices on this tower; we are blind as to what is happening along most of it. We need somebody in the middle to at least try to coordinate. The pod has a small rocket unit on board, transferred from one of the reels; if stationed near the impact point, it can help nudge the tower to help suppress the harmonic wave afterward.”

  “That would be Kevin’s job,” she said softly, nodding to where his friend was floating at the far end of the station, fully suited up and ready to go.

  “You need him up here. Come on, Singh, if the crap really hits the fan and this tower fractures apart, who do you want up here more, him or me?”

  She said nothing.

  “Have the guts to make a command decision, damn it, right now, and don’t go asking for advice back on the ground. Make your decision based on what you need up here.”

  She sighed.

  “I’ll need him more.”

  “End of debate,” Gary said with a smile.

  The pod having already been swung into place, Singh simply announced they had decided to start sending the pod down to monitor the harmonic and be ready for potential impact and repair, to which ground concurred. No one even mentioned who was going, the assumption simply being it was Kevin.

  When told to get Gary ready to take his place, Kevin kicked up one hell of a cussing streak, threatening to get on the comm link, but Singh shouted him down in the most direct New York City language she could muster, saying that if the stuff hit the fan, and there was a cut in the tower, he would be needed up here.

  There was an icy glare from Kevin to Gary.

  “You are making me out to be the wimp in all of this,” Kevin snapped.

  “Kevin, chances are we’ll get this under control, but if not, who is needed more aboard this station? You know the answer to that.”

  Kevin continued to glare even as he locked Gary’s helmet into place and guided him to the airlock. It was far more difficult getting in wearing an EVA suit than it had been on his ascent two and a half months earlier. Kevin, muttering under his breath, helped buckle him into the couch, then finally did extend a hand, which Gary grasped.

  “Don’t do anything stupid, Doc. I’m the one trained in repair.”

  “And I wrote the training manual years ago,” Gary shot back.

  Kevin forced a smile.

  “Doc, once down there, if all works out, maybe you should just head for home. You can go into a free drop once below 12,700 miles and be on the surface within a day. A climb back up will take three days.”

  “Let me guess: you want the pod returned with a real astronaut and a half dozen more pizzas, is that it?”

  Kevin smiled but shook his head.

  “I’ve loved working with you, Doc. I prefer your company to that other guy they were going to send up.”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s been an honor. Now, damn it, take care of your ass, OK?”

  Gary smiled, shook his hand, then settled back in as Kevin closed the pod hatch, secured the locks, slammed shut the outer airlock to the station, and then retreated, closing the inner airlock.

  “Pod initiate detachment on my mark,” Singh announced. “I’ll give the signal when you can fire off for rapid descent.”

  Gary found he was actually enjoying himself as he felt the traction wheels engage. Looking up, he saw the station appear to move away from him as he started the downward trek. At times up there he had felt like a third wheel on a scooter, in everyone’s way; but as he fell into the rituals and rotations of duty, he had come to bond closely to the team. During their rare free moments they had, like wide-eyed kids, peppered him with a host of questions about how he and Eva had first conceived this dream, their
meeting with Franklin, and what the legendary Erich was like, and in turn inspired him with their generation’s absolute belief that they were the pioneers of the future and would stake their lives on the years of calculations and planning that he and Eva had started with long ago as interns even younger than they were now.

  “Station, Pod. You are cleared for descent fire.”

  It hit with a kick, slamming him up against his harness, pushing up to three negative g’s; but after two and a half months up there he felt like an old space hand, though he did swallow hard more than once. Kevin, while briefing him, said the real fear of astronauts on EVA was vomiting inside their helmets, as chances were they would asphyxiate; if Gary was going to be sick and he was still inside the pod, he should snap his visor up and to hell with where it went.

  No need: he was feeling fine, even enjoying the ride. The Parkinson’s tremors were hitting him rather hard, though, and to divert himself in those first minutes he tried to run through the calculations of harmonic waves and how to dampen them out; but he was also aware that if the tower was damaged by an impact, he would actually have to go EVA at the impact point and use a patch kit—again part of the team that had worked with him and Eva had designed it.

  He was a good fifteen minutes into his drop, traction wheels withdrawn, guidance tube around the tower keeping him attached while barely touching it, dropping down at nearly 2,000 miles an hour. The velocity would have been impossible for the tower to sustain when only the first strand was connected; they were pushing the edge of it now, but the long months of work by the spinners enabled it to withstand the stress of the pod dropping at high velocity. Expected impact at 10,000 miles was now five hours off; he would barely get there in time to witness what, if anything, happened.

  It was only then that Tower Control finally caught on to who was actually in the pod.

  After repeated queries to “Kevin Malady, Pod One,” he finally responded.

  “Wrong number, Tower Control. This is Morgan in the pod.”