"They had to get their monitoring equipment closer to the house after I set up the screens. I knew that would force their hand."
"They aren't FBI!" I wanted to shake him.
"I've been monitoring their transmissions for weeks now. Their encryption is trivial."
"And they come up on the air and say they're FBI?" I shook my head in disbelief.
He shook his head. "Of course not. They call each other agent. Those two are Agent Black and Agent Macdougall. Macdougall is the woman. Agent Diangelo is waiting for them in the command van."
I had no answer for that. The agents, if that's what they were, were scrambling over the ivy-covered stone wall that surrounds the Grafton property in a blind panic. The garden bot couldn't do anything worse than spray them with weed killer, but of course they didn't know that. Mind you, with the stuff that's in weed killer, that would be bad enough in itself.
Holmes sat up and took off the headphones. "Agent Macdougall is telling them to execute plan Bravo. I think that means they're pulling out."
I blinked and looked at him. He seemed as sane as he had ever been—granted that wasn't always very sane. Still, it was far from the strangest thing I'd seen him do. Focus on business. "You've said got something to show me on the rocket engine?"
"Oh yah, that. Here." He reached over to the kitchen counter and handed me a black rod. It was about two yards long, as thick as a piece of spaghetti and surprisingly light. It seemed rigid despite its slender dimensions, the ends didn't wobble at all when I held it in the middle and shook it.
I looked at it dubiously. "This doesn't look like a rocket engine."
"Well, no. That's a buckytube, a single-molecule hollow fiber of covalently bonded carbon. A whole lot of them really, parallel strands in a cyanate matrix. Actually they aren't hollow because I've packed them with—"
"What does that all mean?"
He smiled. "Bend it."
I tried, but it didn't bend. I put muscle into the effort, then tried bracing it with a foot and pulling. I didn't even feel it flex before I was in danger of cutting my hands. I stopped and looked at it, almost forgetting my need for a revolutionary engine and asteroid mining rights. If it was as strong as it seemed . . . Visions of dollar signs danced in my head.
Brian read my thoughts. "Its strength-to-weight ratio is about a thousand times better than steel."
"Did you say a thousand?"
"Yah, well it's a hundred times stronger and weighs about a tenth—"
"How much does it cost?"
"Well, this sample is probably ten thousand dollars a foot, but with volume production I could cut that down to five thousand, maybe four thousand."
The dollar signs vanished. That price tag made it useless for all but the most exotic uses. Advanced space propulsion systems, for example. That thought brought me back to my original purpose. "So what does this have to do with a rocket engine?"
"Well, the problem is all about strength and current density of course."
"Of course." I'm sure the connection was obvious to him.
"Chemical fuels just don't have enough energy per unit mass to make them useable. You need too much fuel to lift fuel out of the gravity well. Diminishing returns set in. So your ship has to be huge to get anywhere, hence expensive."
I saw where he was going and held up a hand. "Nuclear fuels aren't any cheaper, and we can't use them anyway. I'm not even going to talk about the liability issues."
"No no, nuclear fuels are just too dangerous; even without an accident you put a lot of radioactive waste out there. And they aren't any cheaper really. No, the solution is high-field magnetic boosting."
"Explain, please."
Holmes rolled his eyes at my failure to grasp the obvious. "The buckytubes are hollow down the center, so I pack them with C-thirty-six buckyballs doped with potassium. That way it's a one-dimensional high—temperature superconductor."
"Superconductor? I thought they were structural elements." I was used to being out of my depth with Holmes, but now I was actually drowning.
"They're both. We make a tube about twenty kilometers long, run the far end up a mountain or something; we'd have to pick the site carefully so the rate of change of slope isn't too big. So the tube is ringed with superconducting magnets, and your launch vehicle has the same thing down its long axis. Pump all the air out of the tube and turn the magnets on in sequence, changing their polarity as you go—in twenty kilometers you're at escape velocity for cheap."
"How cheap?"
"A dollar or two per kilogram. Maybe less."
"It won't be that cheap if those coils cost a thousand dollars a foot."
"Oh well, the launch tube is just the first part of the program. Once we can get materials into space cheaply we build a factory in geosynchronous orbit." He saw my blank look. "Like communications satellites, twenty-two thousand miles up over the equator, so it just seems to float there. We launch carbon to the factory, spin it into buckytubes and make a beanstalk. That's how you really get into space cheap."
"A beanstalk?"
"A space elevator. It goes from the equator to geosyn orbit, where the factory is, then another twenty-two thousand miles into space after that. You spin it out in both directions at once, and orbital forces keep it under tension and stable. You put elevators on it and you just ride right up into the sky. Its an old concept but no material has been strong enough and light enough to actually build it with, until now."
I looked at him for a long moment to see if he was serious. The scheme seemed too outlandish to possibly work, but I'd learned to trust his most insane-appearing pronouncements. He was serious, but cost was still a problem. "There's a lot of feet in twenty-two -thousand—no, forty-four thousand miles of buckytubes at five thousand dollars a foot." I picked up the thin black buckytube rod and tried to flex it again, convincing myself of its reality. "I'm figuring they're going to have to be a lot thicker than this one too."
Holmes waved a hand dismissively. "That's the actual thickness for the leader line. The actual beanstock will be up to a meter across. Five thousand dollars a foot is just making them here on Earth, and in the lab. Gravity messes up the growth process and I have to keep lasering off the ends and starting over. The power costs are tremendous. Grow them in space and they'll be cheaper than nylon. Carbon is basically free."
"How much carbon do we need?"
He stroked his chin, thinking. "The ground-to-orbit leader line is about ten tons. Total cable weight is about a million tons, but you don't have to launch all that to the factory—somewhere along the line you can start sending carbon up the cable so it's cheaper. I haven't quite worked that out yet."
There comes a point when even I can understand. The launch tube puts the factory up, the factory mass produces the buckytubes, which become the beanstalk, which makes the cost of getting to space—somehow launch seemed to be the wrong word for beanstalk climbing—dirt cheap. Plus you could start selling a cheap structural element a thousand times better than steel. Plus a high-temperature superconductor that could carry a hundred times more current than the same size copper wire—it would replace every major power grid on the planet. . . . Plus—plus who knew what else. I had one critical question.
"And these buckytubes—are they new? Can we patent them?"
"Well, not the tubes themselves, they're well known. But until now nobody's made them bigger than a fraction of a centimeter long, and my method for doing that is pretty unique."
"How long are these?"
"Around half a meter, on average. The key was nano-assembly, and as I was saying gravity is a big problem. I could make them longer if . . ."
I wasn't listening anymore. I took out my phone and dialed Julie. Or I tried to. My phone refused to connect, flashing a disconsolate "No Signal" at me.
"It's the shielding." Holmes handed me a landline. "Be careful what you say. They're listening."
I hoped Holmes' sanity lasted at least until he had imparted his breakthrough to
someone who could understand it. I dialed again and she picked up. I didn't waste words. "Brian's got something hot down here at Wild Oaks. You need to get Dale Smith and the patent team here right away."
She knew what that meant. "They're on their way. I'll send them in the helicopter."
"We're going to the asteroids. Are you up for doing the project management?"
"Try and stop me."
"You're the best, honey."
"That's why you married me."
I rang off and started pacing. Our patent team is a bunch of brilliant kids who spend their time sitting in Baker Technologies trying to come up with brilliant ideas. Sometimes they do, but that job description exists just to keep them busy until their real job comes up, which is taking what Holmes invents and turning it in to patents and products. There was a lot to do here. This technology and its spinoffs would be bigger than the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell's little baby, you may recall, was the most profitable patent in history. This is why I hold on to patent rights.
The buckytubes were going to give me my ticket to the solar system, but purely by chance the ground-based applications were going to be just as big, if not bigger. I already had Straughn as committed as he could be on the space mining deal. He might be able to pull some more in to finance the rest, but I had a better idea. First I had to be sure of my ground. I talked to Holmes some more about the manufacturing process, what was involved, what was required, how sure he was it would work. He took me into the power systems lab where had a buckytube ring magnet set up, soaking in liquid nitrogen to make it superconduct to store power. He had another ring with an opposing field that floated over the first one. The floating ring was spinning—he explained this was to prevent it from being torqued out of the null, whatever that meant, and he could stack more steel than I could lift on the spinning ring without forcing it into contact with the support disk. Down in the materials lab he had another spaghetti strand supporting two tons of assorted steel slabs on a platform suspended from the ceiling. It could hold more, he explained, but he was worried about the strength of the ceiling supports.
I was convinced enough that I didn't need to see the patent team's reports. I said goodbye to Brian and left him building some gravity-defying mobile with meter sticks while waiting for the patent team. As soon as I got back in the car I told my phone to call Georgi Stanislaski. Buckytube manufacture was going to be huge and I needed to get some serious financing put together immediately. No need to get too cozy with Straughn either. He'd probably give me more, but it's better to share the wealth. Or rather, its better to have as many other people as possible share their wealth with you. Stanislaski answered his phone himself—unusual in my circles, where it's not unheard of for personal secretaries to argue for an hour over which one's Important Person is going to come on the line first. Georgi had heard the rumors about my little adventure in asteroid mining of course, and was all ready to give me the brushoff when he spoke to me. I talked as fast as I drove, and I didn't talk about buckminsterfullerene, twenty-kilometer launch tubes or space manufacturing. I talked about building materials better than steel and high-efficiency power storage and distribution. Asteroid mining was literal pie in the sky to him. Skyscrapers and electrical power grids were subjects he could get his teeth into.
I rang off with an agreement in principle for a twenty-billion-dollar manufacturing effort to commence as soon as the processes were optimized. I didn't tell him the factory had to be in orbit, but by the time that little detail surfaced I was sure Brian would have the launch system under control.
The next three months were frantic. The patent team figured out a way to reduce the manufacturing costs on buckytubes somewhat by fabricating them in a buffered aqueous solution, which turned out to mean in saltwater, using some very special salt and precise temperature controls. How that substituted for zero gravity was beyond me, but it made them cheap enough that our twenty-kilometer launch tube was only going to cost us a million dollars a meter. That's twenty billion dollars, just to put it in perspective for you, twenty percent of my negotiated budget with Straughn before a single payload left the ground. You see now where the deal with Stanislaski came in. Most of that money would go to buy buckytube magnets built on earth, which would go to the manufacturing consortium I was setting up with Stanislaski, so a large chunk of that money would come back to my pocket where I could leverage it back into setting up the system. The details of the arrangement were complex and absorbed a lot of my attention. Meanwhile Julie had better than half of the company's brainpower focused on the development side of things. We compartmentalized everything for security—everyone knew we were building a linear accelerator launch system, a smaller percentage knew it was to feed supplies to an orbital factory, and only a few knew the factory would be building a buckytube beanstalk to space. Nobody at all knew its purpose was to make it possible to mine asteroids, although the rumors abounded. So did other rumors of course, many of which we had started on purpose to cover the deal development with Straughn.
Added to that was the headache of coping with the SEC. Burbridge had stepped up the pressure and the feds were now conducting an investigation, with which we were "voluntarily" cooperating. That means they were generating legal requests at tremendous speed and we were generating legal objections to those requests even faster. Baker Technologies is virtually the sole employer of Megan and Boyd, a law firm you won't have heard of if you're worth less than a billon dollars. Megan and Boyd occupy twenty floors at 350 Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. We pay them to worry about these things so we don't have to, which only removes about half the workload. At the same time we were negotiating, or pretending to, with Dynacore. Around month two Beijing Semiconductor got wind of that and got very upset, wanting to know if we intended to honor our exclusivity deal or not. I had to fly to China in order to smooth their ruffled feathers and explain the situation, and when I got there I found the Chinese government was involved, and also very upset. They leaned on the ambassador, which got the State Department involved, who leaned on the SEC, with the end result that I got a -foaming-at-the-mouth call from McCool himself demanding to know who the hell I thought I was. I tried to explain the situation but he didn't listen. Instead he told me that I'd turned a trivial paperwork issue into a vendetta and he swore to bury us. I told him that his man Burbridge had made it clear from the start that it was anything but trivial, at which point he hung up.
Figuring the largely male government group would be sexual putty in Julie's extremely attractive hands I traded her the job of handling the government while I concentrated on getting the launch system off the ground. It was a much more interesting assignment. Originally we had planned to build our launch facility in Colorado, but because of the issues with the SEC spreading to other branches of the government I'd vetoed that early on and we'd picked a site at Citlaltepetl, a nearly nineteen-thousand-foot extinct volcano near Mexico City. Not only was the regulatory environment better—by which I mean that cash talks even louder in Mexico than it does in Washington, but it was a taller peak than any in Colorado and, being closer to the equator, gave us better launch parameters. Or so Brian told me. If he'd told me it was better to launch from the North Pole I wouldn't have known any better.
I spent a month just flying around, talking to the site managers, getting a feel for the project. In Mexico crews there were busy putting in roads and a base camp at the remote site, and they had already installed the vast pumping array that would evacuate the tube when it was built so the vehicle could be accelerated without air resistance. More crews were stabilizing the mountain's treacherous slopes, and a system was being installed to keep the critical coil alignments intact in the face of the mountain's seismic creep. In Austin the fabrication of the huge fiberconcrete support rings for the launch tube was in progress. Outside San Francisco a two-hundred-million-dollar plant was going up to produce the superconducting buckytube fibers—a plant that would be shut down again in two years, when the orbital faci
lity came online. In Switzerland we'd hired Eurospace to design our high-orbit factory, and they already had mockups complete. It was going to be modular of course, because it was going to become our launch point for mining expeditions and our refining center for the big rocks dragged back home. They didn't know that part, they just knew they had to plan it for expansion.
I don't understand the science, but I do understand progress, and lots of it was being made. When I got back I finally got a chance to sit down and go over the initial design documents and the CAD models with Dale Smith who was running the launch side of things. We chatted for an hour about the various details of the system, but most of my attention was taken up by a three-dimensional model of the cargo vehicle. It was beautiful, a high-technology revival of the early visions of space travel, a needle fuselage on razor-thin, radically swept delta wings. The launch tube couldn't be steered, so the craft would have to use its control surfaces to fly itself onto its specific trajectory in the few seconds it would actually spend in the atmosphere. At some point I realized I hadn't seen any crew facilities in the plans and mentioned that to him.
Dale gave me a funny look. "These are unmanned launch vehicles."
"Sure, but we need a passenger module to get crew up to the orbital factory."
His funny look got funnier. "You're joking, right?" He looked at me and realized I wasn't. "You can't put people in this thing."
"Why not?"
"Because it launches at three hundred and fifty gravities. You'd put a crew in on the ground and you'd have raspberry jam in orbit."
I had a sudden sinking feeling. "It's only that high for a second."
He laughed. "You spend less than a second actually hitting the ground when your parachute doesn't open. A lot of bad things happen fast."
I looked at him in disbelief. "We're building an orbital factory. How are we supposed to put a crew on the factory?"
"Won't it be automated?"
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 25