Pillar to the Sky Page 19

  He sighed.

  “There was a time when investors did think long-term, ten years or more, before they saw a return, such as the backers for the Brooklyn Bridge. But today? With some, if they can’t turn a profit within six hours, they aren’t interested; with government, it’s only as good as to when whoever is pitching it stands again for election and has to show a payoff back to the voters. It’s part of the reason the space program stalled. When Bush senior proposed returning to Mars but then said fifteen to twenty years, all it drew was a mighty yawn and only marginal funding—and then no funding. If on the day of his inauguration he had set it as a goal for the year 2001, or his son said by 2010, it would have lit a fire in the national soul. If I want to keep my investors, we need to start something within two years or it will start to collapse, and I fear then, as we languish, the Chinese will jump to the fore.”

  Neither Gary nor Eva spoke. Locked in their own world of design of the tower, the time factor all but disappeared, though the shock of the news Gary had received just a few days back did make him aware of his own mortality and the desire to see the job done within his now apparently limited lifetime.

  “I have to move swiftly. I have to move so fast with this that those who wish to oppose it—and will oppose it, for a multitude of reasons—do not have time to react. Never argue for permission. Get it done, then ask them if they now want it torn down. Or a fundamental lesson of Sun Tzu: to seize control of the conflict before it even starts and you then control the conflict. I can act in ways a government bureaucracy cannot. I must do it swiftly, and to do it swiftly, well, our good friends knew how to negotiate for the money to get it done.”

  He forced a smile.

  “It’s like trying to compress Apollo from seven years into two years from concept to launch.”

  “At least we have the R & D already in place,” Gary offered. “We didn’t back in 1961.”

  Franklin did not reply for a moment. Then he looked at the two and smiled.

  “There are times, my friends, I wish I had never read some of your articles, and this is one of those times.”

  Gary did not know how to reply, but Eva extended a reassuring hand and patted his knee.

  “What an adventure,” she whispered. “That is what you are buying, dear friend. Anything else would be boring to you now.”

  “Yeah, what an adventure,” Franklin replied, shaking his head, but smiling. “In two years it is going to be one hell of an adventure.”

  10

  Two Years Later

  Kiribati

  “We are at five minutes and holding. An automatic hold at five minutes for final flight readiness review.”

  Gary had been out to Kiribati five times over the last two years, and each visit was stunning; if his own morale was flagging, it was always a boost. Thousands were at work. The entire southern half of the island was now blanketed with barracks for the construction teams. There was a dining hall that could feed a thousand an hour, a recreation center, a base hospital headed, of course, by George’s wife, and a power plant to air-condition every unit under the daily boiling heat of an equatorial sun. The 6,000-foot landing strip had been completed a year earlier, and even now an additional 5,000 feet, projecting out over the north end of the island, were nearly finished. Building the airstrip was ironic in a way: it was there for the hauling in of materials during construction, but once the tower was firmly in place, for security reasons more than anything, it would be shut down, with nearly all air traffic except for specially designated aircraft landing in Tarawa instead. Back at Tarawa another strip, eventually 12,000 feet in length, was going in, along with harbor facilities for heavy shipping.

  If the residents of the island had concerns about the environmental impacts on the reefs and their way of life in general, it had gone by the wayside for the moment. Billions of dollars had been poured into the nation of little more than 100,000; unemployment, which had been over 30 percent before this project had started, was at zero for any capable of work. There had indeed been the problems of cultural dislocation: in a nation where many of the island’s communities lived much as their great-grandparents—and overnight were overwhelmed with thousands of “outsiders” pouring in—the populations of two entire islands had been dislocated. Franklin, thinking ahead on the advice of his young intern Victoria, actually had a team of experts funded to handle the societal dislocation issues. The last thing they wanted, with the fate of the entire project invested in this one location, was to go under due to a societal collapse, a revolution, or even an outright coup and the nationalization of all assets, that was suddenly “allied” to a hostile power overseas.

  The sale of alcohol was banned on the islands where construction was taking place; if workers wanted to get boozed up, they could fly back to Tahiti, New Zealand, or Hawaii. Drunkenness or the use of drugs was cause for immediate dismissal and a flight out the same day. There was a weekly meeting with Franklin, and the team handling societal issues was always on schedule to head off problems before they hit. Fortunately the president of Kiribati easily won another term against a candidate who actually was calling for the project to be stopped and a return to their traditional way of life. It didn’t hurt the president that he had a rather sufficient campaign chest and more than a few experts on global climate change pointing out that Kiribati was in a race to find ways to either slow or stop global warming or their nation would be the first to disappear if sea level rose even by a meter.

  Part of the plan, and the ever-spiraling expense, was the construction of schools, hospitals, and education centers for the citizens of Kiribati, who then had first shot at jobs they were qualified for after training, at Western rates of pay. Scholarship funds were established for those who wished to pursue university degrees off the island, in New Zealand, Australia, or America, as well as for private schooling for younger children. Franklin was able to raise money for that foundation with the argument that the best people to run most of the management of the spaceport were those who had the claim to the land it was built on.

  Not to say he was not already facing resistance. Several international environmental groups, when the full extent of what was going on could no longer be contained, had staged protests; one of their ships attempted to block the building of the airport in Tarawa by anchoring in the path of the dredging. It had not been pleasant removing them; Franklin’s appeal that the “Pillar” was the only answer for the long-term health of the planet—that “robbing Peter of a few dollars will give Paul billions in return when it comes to saving the planet”—just did not register with some.

  Even the UN was trying to step in now. Several of the nations on the equator had filed appeals, claiming that the tower would interfere with their claim that they did own space directly above them clear out to geosynch, a battle that had actually been waged decades earlier when the first geosynch communications satellites were going up.

  As for those nations with satellites in orbit, it was getting ugly quick. Franklin’s lawyers had actually turned back to a famed case from the 1850s when the steamboat interests tried to block the building of railroad bridges across the Mississippi after one of the boats ran into a bridge pier. Their claim was that the bridges presented a navigation hazard to the public. It was obvious, though, that the real intent was to kill the ability of the newer technology of railroads, a “disruptive technology,” from spanning the country and impacting the trade controlled by boats. The railroads won their case, a crucial federal ruling. It just so happened the lawyer leading the case for the railroads was Abraham Lincoln. Interestingly, it was Jason Fitzhugh, who was now a serious subject in Victoria’s life, who had passed that suggestion up to Franklin with his graduate studies in the history of industrial technology of the nineteenth century and its societal impact.

  The other resistance, subtle but perhaps far more troubling, was from oil-producing countries, who sensed in the tower a profound threat to their dominance of the global economy for the last fifty y
ears. Nothing directly overt, but there were rumors afloat and yet more tens of millions were being poured into security. The fact that their friend Senator Mary Dennison was on the Senate oversight committee for the Department of Defense was a major help, and on a regular basis now American destroyers and even an Aegis-class cruiser were conducting “exercises” in the waters around Kiribati. On this most crucial of days, a cruiser just so happened to be patrolling over the horizon.

  As the countdown continued on hold, Gary looked over to where Jason and Victoria stood nearby, hands clasped together. How she had matured in two years since the day of her solo and their shared flight into space always left him startled. She had indeed interned over the next two summers in Franklin’s office, would graduate in another year, and did indeed have her private pilot’s rating and had just completed her instrument rating and was starting in on multiengine and commercial ratings.

  She was following in her parents’ path, to a certain degree. Garlin’s “disruptive technology” thesis had left an impact, and like any young man or woman with a social conscience she did question the impact on the citizens of Kiribati, though so far Franklin had always been able to trump that concern with the global warming argument: that if they did not find a way out of the use of fossil fuels and the environmental trap of a closed ecosystem contained on the surface of the earth, this nation would cease to exist in another two generations, three at most. They had to adapt or die. It was a hard but realistic answer, and so far the islanders agreed and as an intern she had devoted most of her energy to working on this aspect of the project and thus endeared herself to George, his wife, and even the president of Kiribati.

  “All systems are go. Resuming countdown in ten seconds.”

  Their attention was fixed on the island of Abernama, four miles away, now designated as Launch Site One. It was the island the Japanese had mysteriously taken an option on fifteen years earlier but then let drop. Pillar Inc. had poured a billion into it to create a heavy launch platform, which was about to get its first use. When the time came they’d name it after some multibillion-dollar supporter or for the first one to be killed working on this mad scheme.

  “Resuming count at T-minus four minutes and fifty-five seconds and counting with all systems go.”

  All work had stopped on the runway, the living quarters, the start of the maglev track that would finally connect this island clear back to Tarawa, and the massive platform taking shape a mile off the coast. That platform would, if all went well, become the anchor point for the tower, as Gary kept insisting on calling it, and Franklin said was the pillar. A dozen square acres, built using the technology learned from the construction of hundreds of oil-drilling platforms that went ever deeper and ever farther to draw up, at yet more expense, the very oil that kept this world running at 150 dollars a barrel. The miracle of it was that it had a flexible mounting that would allow it to shift up to two hundred meters north or south.

  That had taken one hell of a lot of head scratching and calculating, the idea being that if there was no way to avert a satellite impact, then the entire tower could actually be moved laterally. Not much, but enough to send up a controlled harmonic wave since the first strand to be anchored in place would be just that, a strand two millimeters in diameter, eventually to be woven out to three centimeters, designated for right now as Construction Pillar One.

  He and Eva had approved the design reluctantly. Controlling a harmonic wave along a strand of “wire” that would eventually be 40,000 miles in length was frightful to them both until thrusters could be mounted in place as the tower was woven, just as the wires of a suspension bridge were woven after the first strand was in place. Talk of a different design concept—of an actual ribbon five meters wide, now referred to as Primary Pillar One—was still more than half a decade off and dependent on getting Construction Pillar One in place first. The construction pillar was needed before the actual work on a commercially functional “primary pillar” could begin, because the cost of lofting the “ribbon,” as it was called, up to geosynch—along with all the other equipment necessary for its deployment—cost more than actually building this first strand or “wire.” But that hard fact was “classified” out of fear investors would bolt when the true length of time until a financial return was realized.

  Also, the building of the wire would serve the same purpose that the half-forgotten Gemini Program served long ago. When President Kennedy called for the Apollo program in 1961, America’s total flight time in space was little more than fifteen minutes with Alan Shepard’s suborbital trip, and it would be more than half a year before John Glenn’s epic three-orbit flight. Back then it was going to take half of the decade, at least, to build the first Apollo rockets, command modules, and lunar landers. What was needed was a “training program,” a halfway point, and that was Gemini, a two-man spacecraft with about as much room inside for the crew as an old-fashioned telephone booth, in which the future Apollo astronauts, including both Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin, flew in space, practicing rendezvous, docking, even “space walks,” while Apollo was still on the drawing boards. It had paid off handsomely, and the first “wire” now was the Gemini Program for the ribbon design, the “Apollo” program to come: the ribbon design that would place a truly commercial pillar into space.

  “Three minutes and counting, all systems are go.”

  Gary raised his binoculars again. In the last two years the island of Abernama had been converted into a launch pad for the project. The rocket was a squat, ugly thing, not the tall, graceful pillar of Apollo but just as powerful. The primary stage was powered by four liquid fuel engines, scaled-up knockoffs of the old Soviet Soyuz design, simple and cheap, after royalties were paid, with four solid boosters strapped around it. The second stage was powered by two more Soyuz-based engines, and the payload above it in the third stage, most of it dummy weight with a single engine. No crew was on board, but there was a robotic unit carrying a five-hundred-mile spool of the “wire.” Once at geosynch the robotic unit would separate from the vehicle and maneuver into proper geosynch position directly above them, and then a small thruster unit attached to the end of the spool would pull the “wire” out to its full length, like a seamstress unwinding a bobbin of all but invisible thread, to test out all systems before the real launches to go up after this first test flight with enough wire to string out a strand clear back to earth, and a crew of three astronauts to oversee the project from geosynch.

  This day was a move aggressive in the extreme. No launch just to low earth orbit with but a few miles of wire to unwind. It was going all the way to geosynch as the first step.

  Franklin, increasingly concerned about security, especially regarding the inner workings of how the wire would be managed in space, insisted that the launch take place here. Why not test out our entire infrastructure at the same time? was his argument to increasingly reluctant investors. Test the launch facility, their own rocket system, and beyond that, as all knew, directly along the equatorial line, which they had to do anyhow, rather than the high inclination of a launch from Russia or even from the Kennedy Center. Launching from the equator also meant a heavier payload, since the rotation of the earth imparted the most energy for any object going in an easterly direction.

  Bringing it all together in this amount of time? Franklin could only shrug in private and whisper that there was never a problem that could not be solved on time if enough money was thrown at it. It had been done in the 1960s and, given fifty years of research and development after that, it could be done again … and he was about to prove it.

  He had billions and a lifetime of prestige riding on this “throwing of money.”

  “T-minus one minute and counting. All systems now on internal control, all command switched to onboard computers.”

  Gary drew in his breath, his free hand reaching out to grasp Eva’s. He needed a cane now if standing or walking for any length of time. Their dreams of a lifetime were now riding on what would
happen in the next few minutes.

  The old drama, which triggered an adrenaline rush for any who believed in the dream of Apollo—for any who had ever witnessed a shuttle launch from up close and felt its power and thunder—was unfolding yet again before them. This would be the most powerful launch of a private venture vehicle ever attempted.

  There were no formal viewing stands. The media simply had cameras deployed along the beach, although there was a cordoned off area where Franklin, the design team of the Brit and the American aircraft designer, key supporters (including now a few pro-space members of the House and Senate, with Mary Dennison leading that group), Gary, Eva, Victoria, and her boyfriend, Jason, stood silently, all with binoculars raised.

  “Fifteen seconds and counting. All systems go, gantry rollback complete and clear. Ten, nine, eight … we have liquid engine start … six, five…”

  A plume of smoke blew out sideways from the base of the rocket on the hastily built pad; odds were that liftoff with the blast from the solid boosters would shatter the pad, but a far more sturdy platform was already under construction a half mile away at the south end of the island.

  “Two … one … ignition of solid boosters! We have liftoff!”

  Gary drew in a deep breath, a gasp of surprise as the four solid boosters ignited and the nearly eight million pounds of rocket appeared to leap from the pad. From nearly four miles away he was startled that he could actually feel the heat radiating from the engines, the glare so bright that he had to squint as he followed it upward with his binoculars. The shock wave, traveling much faster through land and water, sent out a ripple across the surface of the ocean, and he could feel it in the soles of his feet—at least his left foot.

  “All systems go, we are on proper trajectory, roll complete at twelve seconds for trajectory to orbit. One kilometer downrange, all systems nominal…”