by George Lazăr
Ian fully used this seat he had inherited with his father’s company to ensure the transport of waste into Earths orbit – and not just any waste. He had left the business of managing household waste to other smaller companies that had torn each other to pieces to obtain sanitation contracts. He focused on eliminating the waste no one wanted to deal with: radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, toxic chemicals and other poisons.
After the completion of the Catapult, all that nasty stuff would be the sun’s problem.
The Catapult was a circle with a radius of a hundred kilometers, which served as a support for a linear electric motor powered by the energy produced by five hundred square kilometers of photovoltaic panels, located on the circle’s perimeter. The tubular rail was made of the same type of carbon nanofibers as the Elevator’s cable.
Theoretically, the containers, grouped together according to their masses, were going to be placed symmetrically, in batteries of sixty-four pairs, on sleighs that traveled without friction on the linear engine’s magnetic cushion. The aggregate accelerated until it reached the hundredth part of the speed of light. The impulse it received didn’t allow the containers to fall back on the Earth or on the Moon. Such speed could be reached after covering five perimeters of the circle when, due to their own inertia and to the centrifugal force, the containers were set loose from the sleighs. The launch followed an impact trajectory with the Sun. The empty sleighs continued their movement on the circle until they were stopped through a braking system within the same magnetic field, recovering thus the energy consumed during acceleration.
When it was going to work at full capacity, the Catapult was to have a launch average of four sets of containers per second.
From the geosynchronous point in which it was located, the Catapult launched only when it was oriented towards the Sun, which meant during the terrestrial day. The gravitational interferences of other planets that were in the way of the containers could in fact influence their trajectory, although no one would have protested if they happened to fall on Venus or on Mercury, or they simply got lost in the Milky Way.
After completion, the Catapult would become property of Green Clean. Its enormous price, estimated at first at ten billion dollars, was insignificant in comparison to that of the Elevator. It had been financed mostly by issuing shares that had sold like hot cakes at Stock Exchanges around the world. Even so, it was going to take at least a year until the production plants, which were also owned by Bolden, could mass produce the electromagnets and the pulse capacitors. Then they had to be brought in space and assembled on the Catapult’s circle of over six hundred kilometers – this stage was optimistically estimated to last three months. The other components had already been transported to the orbit. The circle was three-quarters assembled more due to publicity reasons. The investors were charmed by the image of the enormous space ring that took shape more and more clearly. A small part of the photovoltaic panels had also been installed in order to satisfy the energy needs of the space site.
Officially, that was the situation.
Thirty-six kilometers above the planet, right on the axis of the circle outlined by the rails, the largest and most toxic garbage dump mankind had ever produced was calmly floating. It was a compact mass of cylindrical containers, sealed and carefully anchored, that was growing every day. Each container had been equipped with clamping wedges and channels that allowed them to be connected to other containers. This huge puzzle was completed by robots without much effort, at zero gravity, as the Space Elevator unloaded its daily charge of hundreds of tons of terrestrial waste.
On arrival, the containers received a weak impulse which sent them to the reception point of the storage facility. They were sorted automatically, according to the information written on the electronic tags. The whole aggregate was quite compact due to the clamping systems of the containers. It had exceeded three million tons and it was continually growing. The shape of this whole puzzle was similar to that of a potato, which was constantly modified, bit by bit, according to the storage strategies used by the robots which arranged the containers.
The trick was keeping all that mass in orbit while the work neared completion. Because gravity kept tugging on all those poisonous containers.
Chapter 23
For Bolden, there was no place left to hide on Earth. The Guardian Angel, plainly helped by the U.S. Army was on his tail, and his destructive potential that made him easy to detect. It was as if he had a powerful beacon on his forehead.
He invested a part of his fortune in buying shares of Virgin Galactic, the developer that caused such a stir with its plans to open the first space hotel. So Bolden unscrupulously manipulated the stock market and caused a strong depreciation of Virgin stocks. The discount make it much easier for him to acquire a comfortable majority of the company.
He rushed the construction of the space hotel as much as he could, using licensed Green Clean lift capability to transport construction materials. He paid huge penalties for the infraction, and these hasty operations put huge stress on his accounts.
Travelling up to the space hotel turned out to be more difficult than he had thought. Theoretically, tourists should have reached the hotel using the Space Elevator. But Virgin Galactic hadn’t taken care of the means of transportation for the future guests, and the tourist shuttles that could have lifted passengers on the Cable hadn’t been constructed. With the exception of those used by astronauts, there were no transfer vehicles that could connect the first station of the Elevator, located on a low orbit, to the space hotel.
He couldn’t ask a space agency to transport him. In government circles, he’d become the most wanted man in the world. So he used the crisis caused by the disappearance of Los Angeles, which had deepened the global recession, and had Green Clean quickly sign a contract for the elimination of ten containers of toxic waste from research in the field of chemical weapons development. Usually, the contracting company would have been thoroughly checked by the Elevator’s security department. But the lack of orders and the decrease in the number of supervisory teams, due to financial reasons, let this contract go unchecked.
Bolden obtained without much ado the six-feet tall parallelepiped-shaped containers, with a one-meter base in which he could transport anything within the five-ton limit. It was a standard model approved by the Administration of the Elevator.
Usually, the procedure would have taken months, but there was a global recession on, and everything seemed both sketchy and negotiable. So when Elevator security couldn’t find the time to backtrack its usual checks, and when the right bribes went to the right people, there was no one around to notice when one of the ten parallelepiped containers was replaced by the robot crane with an identical one, right at the reception facility, on the night they were to be loaded for transfer. The glitch would be blamed on a software error caused by a dormant virus.
Ian Bolden had rigged the container that would carry him into orbit all by himself. In fact, he hadn’t had much to do. He modified the container’s electronic label in order to camouflage the replacement. He put on an advanced space suit, which was thermally inert and capable of recycling air, urine and sweat. He got inside the container and waited until it was filled with liquid nitrogen, as it had been established, and then closed and sealed.
The container was transported by a robot and reached the other nine in time. The virus that had made the switch possible activated, did its job, and then had self-destructed.
After an external verification, the ten containers were loaded in a special truck and transported at night by highway, in low-traffic conditions. They were left south of Mazatlan, in a port that had been especially designed for such loads.
A day after that, the containers were loaded on a transport ship and taken to Elevator Island. The load received high priority. The volatile content of the liquid nitrogen, at -196°C, was pushing the boundaries of the containers’ thermal insulation. This transport had cost four times more than
the regular ones, money that Bolden simply transferred from one pocket to another, between his companies.
But money wasn’t important as long as he was fighting to save his life.
The transport ship traveled for two days until it reached the island. Bolden suffered terribly in his suit, and only the drugs he had taken before going into the container soothed him.
He slept, but his sleep was tormented by nightmares in which thousands or even millions of people were pointing the finger at him, blaming him for killing them to save his own life.
And then there was the darkness, pierced only by the pale lights of a few displays on the helmet’s visor. Due to these tools he knew how much time had passed since he had started his journey, he knew whether it was day or night outside, or the state of his suit’s survival system. He was going to live surrounded by darkness for the rest of his life. And this was to be the shield behind which he would hide.
The gentle rocking of the freighter stopped after it docked and the unloading process began. The maximum priority of his group of containers put them at the front of the loading queue, and after they were tested for possible cracks they were taken by cranes and sent to the Elevator.
Inside his container, Bolden marked his progress with each jolt and sound. The dials of his Device, projected on the helmet’s visor, indicated low probability values, a sign that deadly dangers were still far away.
With a slight jolt, his container attached to one of the shuttles that were going up on the Cable. The Maglev started without warning.
The process was completely automatic.
He suffered terribly during the ride’s acceleration phases, but his astronaut suit was equipped with overload protection. Several tourniquets automatically fastened on his arms and legs, limiting his peripheral blood flow.
Bolden couldn’t think about anything except the blood pounding in his veins. The ordeal lasted for six hours until the vehicle reached the cruise speed of three thousand kilometers per hour.
He spent the next twelve hours dozing in and out of wakefulness. The high-gravity nightmare returned upon deceleration, a six-hour ordeal, and then the Maglev violently discharged its containers and Bolden found himself pushed by a robot, at zero gravity, towards the round-up of garbage containers. Despite the thermal insulation, the temperature inside was slowly falling, tending to equal the temperature of a few degrees Kelvin in outer space.
Bolden began the escape procedure before the nitrogen could reach the freezing point of -210°C, in which case he would have remained trapped like a prehistoric bug in a drop of resin. There was also the danger that his container could be assembled in the storage area, where he would have remained until his turn came to be tossed into the Sun.
He made a hole in the container, using a pyrotechnic igniter he had installed on it, next to his legs. The explosion blasted towards the outside, and Bolden switched on an infrared chemical lamp that he had set above his head. The nitrogen nearby quickly vaporized, and the gas pushed the liquid underneath, through the hole, causing the container to move erratically, like a balloon losing air. The container strayed from the waste storage facility, leaving behind a trail of nitrogen that froze upon exposure to the void.
A few minutes later, Bolden could move freely again.
He worked the small keyboard attached to the sleeve of his suit, entering the codes that opened the container’s lid, and then, with a jolt, he was floating in space. Now was when he needed his directional thrusters, little rocket jets that let spacewalkers move in zero gravity.
Notions of up and down became irrelevant. The planet was visible somewhere on the right, like a big circle. Even bigger was the container storage facility, located at a few kilometers to Bolden’s left. He even glimpsed the short, glimmering white jet from one of the one hundred and forty-two large rocket engines attached to different points of the storage facility. The engines were stabilizing the orbit, slightly affected by solar wind, by the insignificant pressure of the fluxes of cosmic particles and, most of all, by the attraction exerted by the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun.
A couple of times, he caught a glimpse of the unfinished circle of the electromagnetic Catapult, gleaming in the Sun. In reality, he had abandoned the construction of the Catapult for some time. His own fight for survival no longer allowed him to take care of it.
He reached the conclusion that making it work no longer interested anyone. Green Clean clients were only too happy to get rid of the waste and didn’t care at all where that waste went. The politicians were also happy with this arrangement: the planet had become cleaner. For Bolden, the Catapult had become a project he didn’t want to finalize just so that the people down on Earth, who were trying to kill him, could benefit from it. Not all of them wanted to see him dead, of course, but he was convinced that, if the rest of the world found out about how dangerous he had become, they would have joined the hunt without hesitation.
He used his computer-controlled spacesuit thrusters to launch himself into a minimum-energy trajectory. Then he swallowed a specially designed drug, which slowed his heartbeat and put him into a state of semi-conscious numbness for a week during which he slowly fell towards the Earth.
He woke up in time to enter the orbit of his space hotel, where he docked without any problems. He had flown in seeming stillness, and due to his drugged state, the week had passed in what seemed like an hour.
He had meditated on the frailness of life and, at the same time, on how precious it was. He had watched from above the planet on which he was born. It seemed as if it was rolling like a blue bowling ball, growing bigger as he approached it.
Once he reached his hotel, which revolved in outer space at three hundred kilometers above the level of the seas on Earth, he felt safe for the first time after a long while. Seen from outer space, the hotel looked like a giant spinning top. It had two thousand square meters set out on the perimeter of the Wheel that was idly revolving around its axis, the centrifugal force simulating thus the Earth’s gravity. It also had three luxury apartments, a garden and a pool. The storage rooms and a laboratory for astronomical observation had been built inside the Axis.
In order to avoid future intrusions, Bolden bought with the help of his many companies the rest of the shares of Virgin Galactic. He arranged to leak information to the press about the existence of hidden technical issues with the space hotel that made it unavailable for an indefinite period.
He started to like his new and last place of refuge, and the fact that he had left Earth gave him the soothing feeling that he could no longer cause anyone’s death. He tried to detach himself as much as possible from the planet located three hundred kilometers below, maintaining only the minimum, necessary contact with it. He still managed his business successfully. Without the substantial revenue his companies brought him it would have been impossible for him to keep his cosmic residence. The global crisis now persistently wrecking the world’s most developed economies seemed to multiply his fortune even more. He made profitable deals by exploiting the declining aspects of their economies, feeding himself, like a hyena, on corpses.
He maintained indirect contact with the space hotel’s control center. He had an automatic shuttle he sent once a month at the Elevator’s first level, to pick up one or two containers. Officially, the containers were bringing spare parts or robots. By fully using his powers as owner of the company, he arranged a last minute switch of the original load with the supplies he needed.
He learned to maintain and repair his new residence. He reached a high degree of autonomy. He sacrificed two of his apartments to set up additional laboratories for his hydroponic cultures. He produced most of his food, recycled his water and air. He kept, for as long as he could, the supply channel for delicacies and luxury goods produced on Earth.
He no longer cared what happened down on the planet. He felt like Captain Nemo, aboard the Nautilus, alone, under water. He didn’t intend to return to Earth. As a matter of fact, he seriously doubted that
he could survive the planet’s gravity. The gravity surrogate produced by the centrifugal force only reached the eighth part of the value of Earth’s gravity. His muscles had atrophied because he neglected the compulsory daily exercise.
In the long intervals when he didn’t do business, he stared for hours at the Earth. The spectacle offered by the bluish globe around which his hotel revolved, with its dry land and oceans, frequently blurred by clouds, had something fascinating about it. He learned to recognize weather phenomena and estimate the effects of the hurricanes that struck Florida or of the typhoons that devastated Asian coasts.
From the height of three hundred kilometers, the billions of people on Earth were invisible, even though their handiwork could be seen plainly. Sometimes he used the telescope and wondered about the billion people condemned to starvation and the other two billion doomed by the failure of their water sources. They were all crowding a planet they had almost destroyed by mercilessly exploiting its resources. He was convinced that too few of those on Earth cared in the least that through their excessive consumerism they were causing the suffering and death of other human beings.
What made them different from him? What made him different from them? Both they and he were trying to elbow their ways through life, even at the price of sacrificing other lives.
The optical instrument was very sensitive. He could see car numbers and other details. But even though he liked to watch them, like an unseen god, he didn’t feel more drawn to them.
At night, he recognized several metropolises from the pattern of the public lighting. The western part of Europe was bathed in light: Amsterdam, London, Liverpool, Dublin. Moscow was a drop of phosphorescent ink against a dark sea. But the dark spot where Los Angeles used to be made him feel remorseful.
In general though, he felt good. The quiet worked for him. Unlike working space stations, where different sounds marked the proper functioning of survival systems, in his hotel there was silence.