Pillar to the Sky (40 page)

That wish would come true sooner than he thought.

17

The “Perfect Storm”

In the two and a half months after Gary’s epic ascent, which had indeed captured the imagination of the world in the same way the Mars
Curiosity
mission and the advent of the suborbital launch business had triggered a renewed interest in space, much had changed 23,000 miles below.

Proxley had barely survived a primary challenge from a very pro-space advocate and the message to him was clear. Senator Dennison had become chair of the Senate committee that had oversight on the NASA budget and she was making it abundantly clear what her vision was for America’s future: that vision was a revitalized space program and, while fiscal responsibility and budget cuts would be the order of the day, it was time NASA was placed back on the front burner of public support as a path to a better future. And the public support was growing.

The Chinese had attempted their first launch of a wire to geosynch, and though on a professional level all with Franklin’s team wished them well, there was some tension until the announcement that the unit had failed to deploy. Franklin had actually been magnanimous and without the slightest sarcasm offered to advise and consult for free, stating that the world could eventually use a dozen towers and he held no monopoly on the concept. So far the Chinese had politely refused his offer.

But there were problems as well. Professor Garlin’s increasingly strident attacks on the disruptive technology of the tower were gaining notice. Her latest book had reached best-seller status and she was a guest speaker at an EU conference about the future of space policy, calling for a moratorium on the entire project until its full impacts—not just on space navigation but on the actual global economy—could be “studied and evaluated.”

Such a study, she and other opponents knew, would drag out for years, as such things tend to do, until the project just died as investors drifted away and public opinion shifted. It was an age-old tactic and usually it worked. But in defiance of a UN vote for just such a study, the nation of Kiribati stood firm in its support, and short of an actual invasion or coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, how could anyone stop them? Franklin’s wisdom of going to an independent nation which would be the first to be overwhelmed by global warming was now abundantly clear. A nation of little more than a hundred thousand citizens was telling the rest of the world what it could go do with their so-called injunctions and studies and reports and just continued to forge ahead with the dream.

Gary thought it highly ironic that the university that had trained and launched his career also harbored someone who was now hell-bent on stopping it. At least his daughter was ready to go for her dissertation defense, and interestingly it was even drawing some national media coverage, with Franklin broadly hinting that once Victoria had her Ph.D. in hand, she was taking over as head of the subsidiary of the Pillar Inc. conglomerate dedicated to developing and distributing limitless electricity from space. There was even a flurry of news when another company, obviously with the intent of sidetracking her work, offered her ten times what Franklin was rumored to be paying her. She laughingly turned it down.

The truly disturbing aspect was the realization, in that perpetual hot zone of global politics, the Middle East, as to what a successful ribbon tower, capable of sending nearly limitless energy back to earth, could do to the economy of nations pumping out what was left of a diminishing oil supply at ever-higher prices was now becoming clear. Oil was nearing two hundred a barrel as the nearly eight billion inhabitants of the planet scrambled for what was left, even in the face of the most optimistic projections of oil still to be found in substrata shale. Whether it was twenty years or a hundred, calculated on present demand, that demand would continue to rise almost regardless of price. Granted, oil output was nearly the same as in peak years, but it was the cost per barrel to extract from ever-greater depths that was driving prices ever higher. The long-ago days of “gushers” in the Texas plains shooting geysers of oil hundreds of feet into the air with every other drilling were now just a dream of generations past. Now half a billion or more might be spent on a deep-sea rig to explore, perhaps tap into a few million barrels and then go dry, not even recouping the investment.

Beyond that, with each passing year—as China, India, and other former “third world” countries leapt forward to achieve the living standard of what had been once called “first world” countries—not just the demand for energy but with it the dark after-effect of CO
2
output spiraling ever upward was increasingly converting even the most die-hard critics of global warming that, be it a generation from now, or a hundred years hence, the world would be in deep trouble.

And with all these issues it was inevitable that the region of the world still seen as the primary supplier of oil, the Middle East, saw the handwriting on the wall: that their decades-long run of economic exploitation, and the political power that came with oil, was now threatened and dark rumors circulated as to the steps that might be taken.

Someone had leaked Victoria’s dissertation, which she would soon have to defend before her graduate committee. A sudden, revolutionary under-cutting of that energy system, as proposed in Victoria’s dissertation, would trigger an economic dislocation unknown in modern history, far exceeding that of workers in nineteenth-century England and northern Europe.

Out of the vast industrial transition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in spite of some of the darker moments of societal transition there had emerged a better life for future generations. The downside that Garlin and others dwelled on with their Cassandra-like warnings, and at times outright scare tactics, were the tragedies that had come as well and now the ever-present threat of another global war in the twenty-first century as humanity scrambled for ever dwindling resources. It was the eternal struggle between the belief in progress on one side, and the fear of the change it will create on the other side.

As Victoria prepared for her dissertation defense, Garlin argued most persuasively that overnight there could be economic dislocation of billions, from those working in auto plants still turning out gasoline- and diesel-fueled vehicles and across the entire economy absolute disruption of a system built up over the last hundred years based on oil. The “disruption” theory was gaining strong supporters that paid lip service to agreement that the global climate had to be addressed but to do so in a slower, more carefully thought-out pace … again the standard tactic of delay until interest and investments waned and then disappeared.

In the academic world that Victoria still inhabited, more than a few had turned against her, and there was even pressure on her graduate committee, tasked with reviewing and expected to approve her dissertation, to instead veto it and deny her the advanced degree she had studied for. There were daily protests in the commons area of the campus, organized by graduate students of Garlin’s, to have Victoria’s work dismissed, and her dismissed as well from the university.

To try and calm the controversy, the president of the university suggested a dialogue between the two sides, which filled the entire auditorium, one of the largest of any campus in the country. It only added fuel to the fire that a twenty-three-year-old graduate student was about to stand up to an esteemed professor as she had once stood up to a senator.

Garlin cut deep to the millions dependent for their livelihoods on existing and so-called “proven” technologies.

And yet, in the next breath she maintained that of course she was for a green planet and the reversal of global warming from the use of fossil fuels. But was the answer truly to be found in space rather than on earth, where green solutions could be found that would not disrupt the global economy? Were there not viable alternatives to putting the fate of the world into the hands of a Franklin Smith, who would make the economic impact of men such as Carnegie, Vanderbilt, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds seem insignificant by comparison?

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.