Pillar to the Sky Page 6

  To make his point, he held up a straw, then put a finger atop it and pressed down until it buckled.

  He tossed the broken straw aside and now held up three straws and did the same, but this time they were bundled together in his hand and did not buckle.

  “So tie three straws together but then you have to do perhaps two straws for the next ones atop the first three, and so on.”

  He took two more straws, positioning them atop the three.

  “We could play around with building a tower ten feet high now with these,” he said as he used a bit of tape to secure the three straws into a bundle, then did the same to the two atop the first three, and then the one atop the two. He set it on his desk and pressed down on the top straw with a finger until finally the structure collapsed.

  It was obvious Erich had thought this little demonstration out the day before, and Gary inwardly smiled. It was more befitting of a high school science class, but it definitely illustrated the points he was making.

  “Now, if my budget allowed for additional straws, I’d bundle six straws together, then put five on top of them, then four, and so on, and maybe we could build a tower fifty feet high of straws, but in the end it will collapse.

  “Which definitely tells us we cannot build this tower of soda straws”—there was a bit of a playful smile—“unless we build a base inside the entire beltway around Washington and cover over the entire city.”

  He paused.

  “Actually, not a bad idea,” he muttered.

  “So,” and he wrote a C next to the downward arrow, “first there is compression, which can be defeated only by expanding the base to an utterly absurd width.”

  He then put a finger next to the arrow pointing up.

  “So now we have our second problem, and that is vertical tensile strength. Not much of a problem for an earthbound tower a few miles high. But go out 23,000 miles?”

  He shook his head.

  “The centrifugal force imparted by the rotation of the earth will actually be trying to fling that tower up and away once you get out past…” He paused.

  “Around 18,000 kilometers up,” Eva interjected, “but, yes, sir, that upper part will be imparting a tensile or extension pressure. But to a certain extent that relieves the compression. Also—and this is crucial—gravity decreasing at an inverse ratio becomes significant even when just a thousand kilometers up. This is where the entire formula gets very complex. The higher you go, the less the compression weight created by gravity and then eventually the tensile effect of it trying to pull itself apart from above. In part, this does cancel out the issue of compression once above a certain height.”

  Erich smiled, as if pleased with an exceptional student, even as he fished a few more straws out of the pack and put all but one aside.

  He held up the remaining straw, held one end, then pulled on the other, and it quickly stretched out and became distorted.

  “So, even if you have something that can withstand the compression weight, it still has to hold up to the force that will try to stretch it out until it breaks and the upper part just goes flying off into space because of the momentum imparted by the earth’s rotation. That is one tough formula to play with, Miss Eva.”

  She nodded without replying. It was obvious the old man had already prepared these responses and was a step ahead of any intern.

  “Now, finally, the third force, which is lateral stress.”

  This time he held up one straw and pushed at the midpoint: it buckled over.

  “The difference in angular momentum the higher up you go and lower down within the atmosphere can be impacted even by terrestrial weather. You ever been up a tall building, like the World Trade Center towers in New York, during a storm? Those buildings are designed to sway as much as six feet, and they are only a thousand feet tall. Some people have to quit their jobs there because they keep getting motion sickness. In fact, NASA has helped more than one building designer with wind-tunnel testing.

  “You figure out the square footage of a side of the tower: it gets hit by a hurricane all the way up through and beyond the stratosphere, and the lateral stress loads are enormous. Out in space you even have, of all things, the solar wind, minute but impacting during a major solar event. Along over 20,000 or more miles of structure, it would be noticeable, especially if there is a major solar storm or coronal mass ejection storm.

  “Now let’s add in the fact that there are slight but noticeable anomalies in gravity, depending upon where you are above the earth’s surface. That really threw us off-balance when the first satellites were going up and their orbits seemed a bit odd because of that difference in gravity over different locations because the earth is not a perfect sphere. And then let’s add in the influence of the moon’s gravity, even the sun’s gravity. It all adds up to one heck of a calculation.”

  He looked at the broken straws on his desk, sighed, and sat back down.

  “What about meteors, space debris, and satellite impacts?” Gary now threw in, and he almost regretted asking the question, because it was obvious that Eva, who was looking at the straws, was more than a little crestfallen at the moment.

  Erich nodded in agreement.

  “There are something like 10,000-plus objects in orbit as we speak, ranging from fingernail-size fragments, to an astronaut’s glove, a rather expensive camera someone let float away, and satellites weighing several tons. All of them cross the equatorial plane twice in each orbit around the earth. On any given day, chances are one will come very close indeed to the tower. I’d guess that at least a few times a year, though we’ve yet to model it on a computer, a tower even a few centimeters wide would suffer an impact. And as Gary mentioned, meteor impacts are an unknown quantity but have to be anticipated, from something the size of a grain of sand to a darn big boulder tumbling along.”

  Eva sighed and finally said softly, “So you think it is impossible, sir.”

  Erich was silent for a moment, picked up one of the straws, twirled it around, then inserted a second one into it, then a third, and let the end drop into his empty coffee cup so the small tower leaned up and out at a drunken angle.

  “No, I don’t think it impossible at all. If I believed in that word, Apollo never would have gone further than that whiteboard”—he smiled—“and you would not be my intern this summer.

  “You just told me your research project for the summer. And amongst other things some Cray time to try to model how many impacts per year striking a one-centimeter-wide tower would give us a solid number beyond mere guesswork for now.”

  She looked at him in surprise, a delighted grin creasing her features, green eyes sparkling.

  “I’m running a lot of different things here, most of them crackpot, and I’m already late for my next group. We’ll meet here same time every morning to talk things over, and once a week I’ll want a written report from both of you as to the progress you’ve made. First things first: the latest data—declassified, of course—on carbon nanotube development, which will most likely be the only material that could withstand the forces involved.”

  “‘We,’ sir?” Gary asked, a bit confused.

  Erich gave him a smile and he wondered, just wondered, if the old man was enjoying himself a bit too much at this moment.

  “That’s right, Mr. Morgan. You and Miss Eva are teamed for the summer and this is now your project as well.”

  “Sir?” Eva asked, looking at Erich with open surprise, but there was now a flash of anger in her eyes. “Do I not have the right to decide who I am going to work with on this idea?”

  “Not here,” Erich said with a tight-lipped smile. “Remember, Miss Petrenko, you are here as an exchange guest, and there are more than a few of the old Cold War crowd that would prefer if you were not here at all. I was already informed that you were to be paired with an American intern for whatever project you were assigned to, with access only to declassified information.”

  “You mean he is my KGB handler,” she mut
tered softly.

  His features changed in an instant in a flash of anger.

  “No,” he said coldly.

  She lowered her head.

  “My apologies.”

  “Nor will there be FBI, NSA, CIA, or”—he paused, eyebrows knitted—“Gestapo following you around. This is America of the 1990s, Miss Eva. So drop that line of thinking while you are our guest.

  “We are scientists working on shared dreams. But doing research in conjunction with American interns is part of your package, and I’ve just selected who you work with, and that is final.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gary looked from Erich to Eva and suddenly wondered if he should ask for a transfer after all. Any fantasies he harbored that perhaps he could work his way toward a date with Eva had just been dashed by Erich.

  “Uh, sir, I am of the opinion that this idea is sci-fi at best. It will never work.”

  Erich glanced at Gary and nodded.

  “And that is why I am teaming you together. Sometimes the best science of all comes out of debate between those who say it is impossible and those who dream it is not. The one reaches up while the other keeps their feet on the ground.”

  He smiled again.

  “And maybe, just maybe, the pragmatist learns to float a bit as well and believe in dreams. In the early days of Apollo, there were damn near duels using slide rules as swords.”

  “Slide rules?” Gary asked.

  “Ancient instruments of calculation not requiring batteries,” Erich said and now there was a smile again.

  “Now, you two get to work, and no dueling!”

  3

  Today

  “I feel as if the last eighteen years have been a waste,” Gary sighed, gazing morosely into the teacup that Erich had filled with several ounces of Scotch.

  He looked up at Erich, who was silent, the old man’s gaze steady. Erich was not the type of person to pour out a line of self-pity to. He recalled that the first time he had done so, Erich had shut him off with an angry wave of his hand and asked him if he had ever been shot, been left behind by his comrades, had a friend press a pistol into his hand with the obvious message that he would have to finish himself off, because an SS unit was sweeping the field, looking for survivors of the recent fight. The SS did not take prisoners when it came to commandos, though they did entertain themselves by extracting what information they could before finishing their prisoners off. A Yugoslav resistance fighter found him first, and it was a five-mile hike to a safe haven, where a doctor finally took the bullet out of his chest, with only a single shot of morphine to deaden the pain—a bit. For years he kept the bullet pulled out of him and that pistol in his desk—empty, of course—until firm rules were sent out that any firearm was forbidden at the center. He said that when any adversity beset him, the pistol and bullet were a reminder that he had gone through worse.

  After that brief story, Gary never went for self-pity again.

  Eva sat by his side, sipping her tea without comment, while Victoria, sensing the three wanted to be alone and talk freely, had taken her iPad and was sitting outside. Gary could see her outside the office window, sitting against a tree, iPad set to one side, just staring off in the distance. He felt a swelling of pride and love just looking at her. At sixteen, she was far beyond her years in maturity, already focused on following her parents, and had already been accepted at the end of her junior year in high school to Purdue, to pursue a degree in aerospace engineering as well. She was almost up to the same level as they were on the engineering that would go into a space elevator. While other girls her age had posters of the latest rock phenomenon plastered around their rooms, she had photos up from Curiosity, a mission that absolutely enthralled her, and the classic old photo of a wild-haired Einstein. For her birthday, they had given her a somewhat beat-up old Subaru, but what made her grin was that her parking place in their driveway had a sign with “Genius Parking Only” and a picture of Einstein on it.

  “The next step,” Erich grumbled, interrupting his thoughts.

  “What next step?” Gary asked, attention focused back on his mentor.

  “There is always a next step,” Erich replied.

  Gary did not reply. After the grilling and humiliation of this morning, he felt all their dreams had been permanently dashed.

  “You have any plans for the next week?” the old man asked.

  “Well, if my wife and daughter would let me, I think I’d just go home and get drunk, sir. It is the end of the road. Our positions are cut, as you know. Eva can find a teaching position, but me? You know I was never the one to stand in front of a class of freshmen and give a lecture. Write a book and try to sell the public that way? Doubt if that would work; you need a storyteller for that, not someone who juggles calculus problems in their head.”

  He instantly regretted saying that. He and many others had been pestering Erich for years to write his autobiography, to which the old man growled he was not ready for that final act of retirement before fading into the night.

  Again the icy stare, but this time Gary, filled with frustration, returned the gaze.

  “Why do you ask if we are free this next week?” Eva interjected, putting a calming hand on Gary’s shoulder. She had caught on, whereas Gary had not, that Erich must have something up his sleeve.

  Erich smiled. Almost from their first day together she had Erich wrapped around her finger, the way a father would feel toward a special daughter.

  “Actually, I am thinking about young Victoria out there. Her schedule?”

  “She doesn’t start college for a month,” Eva replied.

  “Excellent. There is room on the flight for her as well.”

  “Sir, I’m not sure I follow you on this,” Gary said.

  “Go home, pack your bags.” He paused to look at his old-fashioned wristwatch. “You’ve got four hours to get to BWI Airport. A friend of ours will have his corporate jet waiting for you.”

  Gary stirred from his morose mood.

  “Who?”

  “A friend of ours who has taken great interest in the events of today. He expected this debacle. The moment the hearings closed and it was clear that NASA would be forced to entirely drop this line of research, he was already in flight from Seattle.”

  “Seattle?” Gary said, and there was now a touch of recognition.

  “A friend who thinks it is time he stepped into this mad scheme of ours.”

  “Who, may I ask?” Gary whispered.

  Erich smiled and pointed behind his desk, where an old battered suitcase was on the floor.

  “Go home, pack bags for all three of you for a week, then come back here to pick me up.”

  “And do you mind if I tag along?” he added as he broke into a rather uncharacteristic grin.

  Eighteen Years Earlier

  “You are utterly impossible to work with,” Eva snapped, getting up so swiftly from her chair on the other side of the table that she knocked it over.

  “I need some fresh air,” she announced, and stalked out of the room.

  Gary yet again wondered if Dr. Rothenberg had teamed them together out of some perverted sense of humor, but as he watched her leave the room, he could not help himself. Intellectually he could barely stand to be with her for more than a few minutes, especially when forced to sit by the hour going over every tidbit of information they could dig out of the center’s archives or, worse yet, down at the Library of Congress, pulling up obscure Russian aerospace journals, which she read out loud to him on their drive back to Goddard. Her nationalistic pride demanded she first translate into Ukrainian, then into English, and often it would be so confusing, he could barely understand what she was saying.

  And yet, his attraction to her was evident to anyone watching the nuances of their interactions. Dates had been far and few between, and when he did get a date, either he was bored silly or within an hour it was obvious the girl could not wait for the evening to be over. Was there not a young woman out there
who might enjoy sitting up late over cups of coffee, talking about dreams of space?

  It was still a time when, in spite of the rise of feminism, it was felt that “women just don’t go into math or the sciences.” What absolute idiocy: he’d die to meet such a young lady, and at both a professional and personal level wished the gender ratio were the same. As a grad student he had taught freshman-level math classes, the usual three-credit prerequisite course for all students no matter what their majors were. When he had a female student who was obviously gifted in the subject, he would appeal to her to continue in that field, but for whatever reasons few rarely did. It was a brain drain of those who could potentially be the best in the field, and it saddened him.

  Granted, he did have several female friends—“fellow nerds,” they called each other—but there was never a sense of attraction like the one Eva triggered.

  He got up, followed Eva out the door, stopped in the snack room to get a diet soda, then stepped outside into the boiling humid heat of a D.C. summer. To the northwest, dark clouds were gathering and there was a distant rumble, perhaps offering the momentary relief of a cooling rain, which an hour later would turn back into humid heat again.

  She had sat down against a tree and just stared at nothing. He approached and held out the soda as a peace gesture.

  “Thank you,” she sighed in Ukrainian, popping the lid and taking a sip.

  “Why are you so damn obstinate?” she asked, looking at him, but at least without the anger of five minutes ago.

  “It’s our job to ask for the hard facts,” he replied. “Your whole premise for building this tower of yours is based on a what-if.”

  “It will come far sooner than nearly anyone realizes.”

  “Eva, you just assume that this talk about Japanese research on nanotube carbon fibers is going to surge forward and in another decade we will have something with the strength to build the tower. A snap of the fingers and the magic material that can withstand all the forces that can rip a tower apart will appear. But they are not even halfway to the tensile and compression strength you dream of, and our job here this summer is hard science.”