Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  "No, there's a crew, and anyway we still have to get people to the—" I stopped myself. I'd almost said asteroids, but Dale wasn't in on that part of the plan, not yet.

  Fortunately he hadn't heard me, he was looking shocked at overlooking the people transport issue. "I figured you were going to get NASA . . ." He saw my expression and stopped. "You didn't tell me . . ."

  I was already on my way out the door with the world crashing down around my ears. He was right of course, I hadn't told him. Aside from Julie, Straughn and I, nobody knew the whole plan. I'd specifically told Dale to ignore the rumors about the asteroids, which he was inclined to disbelieve anyway, choosing to believe the less outrageously grandiose space hotel rumor. Most of the rumors we put out were less outlandish than the truth. When you intend to rule the world it's important to keep your plans to yourself.

  There was a fax waiting in my inbox. Eurospace had been talking to our people. They wanted to confirm that launch stresses for the factory were three and a half gravities and not three hundred and fifty. They apologized for asking such a silly question, since it was obviously impossible that the stresses could be even thirty-five gravities, but there seemed to be some confusion . . .

  I sat down and put my head in my hands. I should have let Julie keep doing the project management and confined myself to legal wrangling with the SEC. Thanks to my own lack of clarity my clever engineers were well on their way toward developing a system that wouldn't do what it needed to do to pay for the tremendous cost of building it. Could we use NASA to get the factory up, and our people? With enough maneuvering we might even get them to chip in for it, but their missions were booked solid for years in advance and trying to get priority through the mass of political red tape involved would be hopeless. We needed tons of gear taken up, and I couldn't allow the schedule to be pushed back whenever some clueless garn wanted a joyride. I locked the door and paced. If I halted construction I'd spook Straughn, and if not Straughn the backers he had behind him—I couldn't risk that. Anyway I needed the launch tube to get the raw carbon into orbit to build the beanstalk—no other system could get that much mass up for anything like the price I needed. I called Eurospace, talked to Jan Hortzellenberg, who with urbane good manners told me that they simply couldn't build a space habitat that would fit in the four-by-eight meter cargo bays of our launch vehicles and withstand three hundred and fifty gravities at launch.

  Could Eurospace use their own launch capacity to get the factory and people into geosynchronous orbit? Of course they could, but demand for launch capacity was so high right now—there would only be so many per year they could offer us, and it would seriously delay the project. They had understood we had our own launch capability, was that incorrect?

  I hung up and called NASA who were blunt. Neither the RSV or the shuttle were capable of getting to geosynchronous orbit at all by themselves, though they could get a payload there with a booster. When I told them the size of the factory modules we were building they nearly choked and suggested I call the Russians. Dialing with desperation I managed to get someone at the Russian Space Agency before they closed for the day—it was almost evening in Moscow. They were all bureaucratic until I mentioned the amount of money I was willing to spend, at which point they became very interested. I had to hang up, but half an hour later Yuri Glinkov, their director of operations, was on the line, promising me that his huge Energia boosters could do anything I wanted them to do, yes even get an orbital habitat into geosynchronous orbit. He sounded breathless—I suspect they'd dragged him away from the Bolshoi Ballet in their flurry to make a sale—or at least a Bolshoi ballerina.

  I breathed out in relief, then wary of being caught again, asked a question. "Would it be possible to send a payload, say, as far as Mars?" I didn't want to give too much away too soon.

  "Oh yes, this is not problem for Energia." His voice was big and booming, just as you'd expect a Russian's to be. I pictured a large, shaggy bear of a man.

  "How large a payload?"

  "As much as you like, maybe ten tons even, with proper mission profile."

  That sounded ominously low. "How much could it bring back?"

  "For sample return? Many kilograms, very easily."

  I hung up. Energia would get my factory up, it wouldn't get me to an asteroid, let alone bring one back. I'd told Brian if he could get me cheap launches I could solve every other problem. I had been thinking financially of course—it never occurred to me that a system that could launch something to the asteroids couldn't bring one back, which just goes to show how much I know about physics.

  When everything else fails at Baker Technologies, I call Brian. His number was disconnected. I tried it three times with increasing panic. You have to understand—I can't take over the world without my mad scientist, but with Brian you never know what might happen. He might have decided to go and live in Tibet. I hoped he had decided to go and live in Tibet. At least I could track him down and bring him back. He might have simply blown himself up, and that would be the end of that. I nearly sprinted to the parking lot and peeled rubber down the highway. I should have taken the helicopter, but I didn't think of that until I was halfway there.

  Brian was out on his lawn in the sunshine, surrounded by a cloud of silver butterflies. Merlin was running around batting at them with his paws, tail twitching furiously. He greeted me as I came up.

  "Did you know your phone is disconnected?"

  "The FBI was tapping it." He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially. "I've been feeding them disinformation."

  "Disinformation?" One of the butterflies fluttered right past my nose and I realized it wasn't a butterfly at all, it was a tiny flying machine with aluminum-foil wings.

  "Straight out of bad monster movies. Death rays, mutated super monsters, you name it." He smiled broadly. "They'll believe anything. It's really quite fun." He leaned forward and whispered again. "I know you want the asteroid thing kept secret."

  I decided to ignore his burgeoning paranoia—so long as it didn't affect his ability to produce. We walked under the chicken-wire canopy and inside, followed by the butterflies, which seemed to be programmed to orbit Brian's head. Pandora greeted me and held the door open long enough to let the swarm in too.

  "Brian, how am I supposed to get actual people into space with this system?"

  "You just send them up the beanstalk." He pushed a key on a computer system set up in the hall and the butterflies all flew up to the top of a bookshelf.

  "I mean to get them to the asteroids, and back again." Merlin mewled plaintively at the loss of his toys, then leapt into my arms for attention.

  "Oh that." He waved a hand dismissively. "I worked that all out with Julie a month ago. Didn't she tell you?"

  I love Julie with all my heart, which didn't stop me from nearly screaming in frustration at her neglect. She can be as self-absorbed as any technophile—but at least the problem was under control. Relief flooded over me and I slumped down in a chair. "So what's the answer?" Merlin mrrowled and I scratched his head absently. He rewarded me with enthusiastic purring.

  "I got the idea when you told me that we couldn't use nuclear fuels. It was a challenge." He paused for dramatic effect. "What do you know about carbon-catalyzed fusion?"

  I gave him a look. "Enlighten me." I can never tell if he's serious when he asks me that kind of question.

  "Its aneutronic." I gave him the look again. "Which means it isn't radioactive, basically. No neutrons."

  "Okay."

  "It's a hard reaction to make work, which means it needs more temperature and pressure, but all the easier reactions have problems. Deuterium-tritium is the easiest, but it's really radioactively dirty, that's what everyone's been researching for the last generation. Deuterium-helium-three is harder but much cleaner, but helium-three is hard to come by. Hydrogen and lithium-six or boron-eleven work, but they have neutronic subpaths and don't produce much energy anyway. Initially I was going to go for the proton-proton cha
in, but when I ran the numbers I realized I could really ramp up the pressure with the buckytubes, so I thought—why not go for carbon catalysis? It's much more efficient."

  "Makes sense to me." It made no sense to me.

  "I mean once I realized how much current I could put through a buckytube array, well, the sky is the limit as far as implosion pressure goes."

  "Implosion pressure? I don't get it."

  "Magnetic implosion, like the quarter squisher. Fusion reactions need high temperatures and pressures to happen. You've got to squish the atoms together tightly enough and have them moving fast enough that they can bang into each other and stick together. The best way to do that is with a big magnetic field, but big magnets are limited by the strength of their components. The field literally rips them apart. Plus resistive heating generates a lot of heat which tends to melt them. But with superconductor coils there's no heat problem as long as the field doesn't quench the superconductor, and since buckytubes carry a hundred times the current that copper can without quenching we can support fields of a thousand Telsa or more—they're strong enough too. So we just make a big pipeline of magnet coils, feed ionized carbon-twelve and hydrogen in the top, magnetically implode it until it fuses, then valve it out the back through an MHD coil." I looked at him blankly. "Magnetohydrodynamic." I still looked blank. "It generates electricity from the exhaust stream, so the coil provides power to run the system and throttles it at the same time. In back of that we have the reaction chamber, feed in reaction mass, for which we can use water, feed that to a thrust ramp, and bang—you're in orbit for pennies a gram. Once you're in space and have some velocity you cut back on the reaction mass feed and set course for the asteroids. Make it big enough and you've got enough power to de-orbit a big asteroid. You can use the big magnetic fields to shield the crew from deep space radiation and solar flares too." He looked at me. "Or did you already have that part solved?"

  "No, no I didn't." I breathed out, deeply relieved. "Listen, Brian—if there's any other technical problem with this whole venture that occurs to you—could you let me know now?" I hadn't been paying attention to Merlin as I listened, and he jumped down and stalked off to find something more interesting to do.

  "Oh well, there isn't one really." Brian smiled. "It's all really simple technology. Come see what I've done with these butterflies." He pushed a key and the tiny aluminum creatures flapped into the air again.

  I called Stanislaski on the way home to upsell his investment another ten billion—I could see the market for buckytubes was going to be even bigger than I'd anticipated. An hour later I pulled the Porsche around the corner to the Baker Technologies complex, feeling much better. I should have known Brian would have the solution and Julie would have the situation under control and I resolved to get her away from dealing with the government and back into running the technical program—to save me another lecture from my doctor about blood pressure, if nothing else. As soon as I turned into the driveway my equanimity evaporated. Something was wrong, badly wrong. Half a dozen police cruisers were parked at odd angles in front of the building, plus a couple of unmarked cars with temporary lights on their roofs, two white vans and a bunch of nondescript black sedans that screamed Federal Government. The usual lunchtime bustle of people in and out of the building was completely absent, but Julie was waiting on the lawn, close to the road. She waved me down and I stopped for her to get in.

  "Drive, just go."

  I didn't ask questions, I just popped the Porsche into reverse and slid out the way I'd come in. A pair of patrol cops standing by the main doors watched us leave, but made no move to stop us.

  We were back on the street and I instinctively headed for the highway. She kissed me before she spoke, a conjugal reflex no less important because it was automatic. "We have a problem."

  "I can see that. What's happening?"

  "It's the SEC. They're raiding the corporate accounts office right now, in support of an investigation for noncompetitive business practices. They've served us with a cease trade injunction effective until the matter clears the courts."

  "What!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Why didn't you call me?"

  "I started calling an hour and a half ago and I've been calling every five minutes since. Your line was busy."

  I remembered Brian's shielding and groaned—and of course I'd been on the line to Stanislaski the rest of the time, with call waiting disabled. I hadn't wanted to lose his attention. Half my wealth was committed to Douglas Straughn's performance bond and now just as Brian was getting the drive together we were getting shut down. If I failed to deliver on this deal I'd never get Straughn behind me again—or anyone else in his rarefied world. The SEC couldn't have had worse timing. "What are they going after, exactly?"

  "Anything and everything. It's a fishing trip. They have forty investigators going through the files as we speak."

  "What's their probable cause?"

  "General suspicion of un-American activity."

  I looked at her in disbelief. "For God's sake. Un-American went out with McCarthy. They didn't really put that on the search warrant did they?"

  "They don't have a warrant, it's a search carried out under the FISA by invoking the ATA anti-terrorist rules, no warrant needed."

  "What?" I exploded. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the ATA is the Anti-Terrorist Act, which they had to invoke to allow the SEC to operate under FISA. Both acts give the government tremendous power in dealing with terrorists and spies, and both were so ridiculously inapplicable here I was stunned they'd tried it at all. "How are they making that stick?"

  "The guy in charge is Warren Burbridge. Evidently we have with criminal intent signed a deal with Beijing Semiconductor so they could make the Halcion processer. That's close enough to international terrorism for their purposes."

  "That was approved by every federal department down to the Post Office. What are they claiming? That we're doing business with Communists? That went out with McCarthy, too."

  "That we're selling technology that could potentially be used in weapons to a state potentially hostile to American interests. You and I are both wanted for interviews."

  "You're joking." I knew she wasn't. The accent she put on "interviews" said it all. If they found us we'd be subject to summary arrest and detention at the government's convenience under the FISA rules, without legal counsel or in fact any outside communication, indefinitely. They weren't even obligated to inform anyone where they'd taken us. It was blatantly gerrymandering the law, but now we were in the position of having to prove they were doing it.

  "Maybe he was. I'm not." The was no humor in her voice.

  "Did anyone ever suggest to them that restraint of trade and warrantless searches were un-American?" The lawyer in me was fuming at the absolute arrogance involved in such a move.

  "Relax, everything that can be done is being done. Megan and Boyd are on the case and there's nothing we can do about it right now anyway. I just didn't want either of us to be tied up waiting for interviews at their convenience."

  "Let's call Stuller and get him digging up some dirt on McCool. This is getting to be hardball."

  She nodded and made the call while I drove, which brought up the question of where I was going. Exit thirty was sliding past as she finshed. "Where should we be going?" I asked.

  "We're going to have to vanish for a while. I only got out of the building by pretending to be my own secretary having a nervous breakdown because of all the guns."

  I raised an eyebrow. "Did you cry?"

  "Of course. They were very nice and sent me out for some air."

  I had to smile at that. Julie put herself through school in the reserves. She was one of the first women in the country to qualify as a Marine infantry officer and she's forgotten more about firepower than any paper-pushing SEC agent will ever learn.

  "You said you had Megan and Boyd involved."

  "They're on their way down with armfuls of stays and w
rits. I celled Rob Farthing from outside and hooked him up as the contact man once they arrive. I think you and I should be unavailable for comment for the next little while."

  "Good call." This was more dramatic than most of my interactions with various levels of government, but when you control an empire as large as mine you find yourself almost perpetually under investigation by several departments at once, as well as defending yourself from an unending stream of lawsuits by competitors, customers, private individuals and cranks who think you'll find it cheaper to settle their nuisance suit out of court rather than fight it. "So what do you think is the root of this?"

  "McCool is out for our heads, that's the problem."

  I nodded. "He has political aspirations, and making himself a reputation as tough on corporations is how he plans to achieve them. He's going to be running for president some day. We should give him some campaign money."

  "I think Dynacore already has. This has their fingerprints on it."

  Of course she was right. "What are they accusing us of, exactly?"

  "Other than trading with evil Communists? Our patent enforcement on the split-ring convolver technology is market restrictive."

  "Patents are supposed to be market restrictive. That's what they're for."

  "According to the SEC our licensing practices aren't allowing American competitors into the market on an equal footing with those overseas, by which they mean in China. Dynacore is of course the particular competitor whose feet we're stepping on."

  I frowned. "They're free to use other technologies if they don't like our license terms." Of course, no other technology compares to the convolver, which was the point.

  Julie smirked sardonically. "They're free to cut a deal with McCool, too."

  I pursed my lips, considering options. The full impact of what was happening was beginning to sink in. Using the anti-terrorist rules kicked in a whole lot of very serious provisions and gave the government tremendous freedom to act against us. "How bad do you think McCool wants us?"

  "Pretty badly."