“Aye, Cornelia did mention the bio thing.” Regulo rubbed at his face with a thin, veiny hand. “Did she tell you just how much we fooled with that damned design, and never once sniffed at a bio-combine system? Maybe it’s time I went back for a technology refresher course.”
“You seem to do pretty well.” Again, Rob couldn’t tell if Regulo was being serious. His facial abnormalities distorted every expression. “So far, I haven’t managed to come up with anything better than your designs. But let me keep going. We get to the point where we have a hundred thousand kilometers of load cable, with power cables and drive attached to it, up near L-4. We need one more thing apart from a powersat, and that’s a ballast weight. It has to be a big one. It provides the tension in the load cable and balances the tether. We can’t attach the ballast until we make contact with the tether, so the ballast weight will be flying around the Earth in its own orbit.
“We fly the beanstalk in, and curve it down to make contact with the tether point — at Quito, if we decide that’s the best place for it. We’ll have to curl in to atmospheric entry along a spiral approach from L-4. The ballast weight swings up and contacts the end of the cable at the same time as the tether end comes in to ground contact — and we’d better not miss that tether, or the whole thing will be off like a slingshot, past the Moon and on its way to God-knows-where. I’ve checked the timing, and I don’t think we have any real problems. The inertia of the system works both ways — you have time to do things. But changing direction or speed is almost impossible unless you have a lot of time to work with.”
“We won’t miss the catch. I’ll be down there to hold and tether it myself if I have to, and damn what the doctors say.”
Regulo’s face was full of resolve. Rob wondered suddenly just what the doctors did say. If anything, the old man looked worse than at their first meeting. How much of Regulo’s body was covered with the terrible deformity that marred his face?
“All right, my lad, what are your other worries?” Regulo broke into Rob’s train of thought. “I agree with you, the fly-in from L-4 or L-5 will get around most of the problems of stability. I’ll always take a situation with dynamic stability over one with static stability, any time. What are you suggesting for the transport system itself? How many cars, how big, how fast?”
“I’m designing for six hundred; three hundred going up and three hundred coming down. There will be a continuous drive arrangement from a set of linear synchronous motors running up and down the entire length of the beanstalk. I’ve chosen a nominal load for each car of four hundred tons.” Rob pulled out his notes and glanced at them again for a moment. “You might want to think about this, see if you agree with me. If you do, it provides us a carrying capacity of about two hundred and forty thousand tons a day. It sounds a lot, but it’s completely negligible compared with the mass of the beanstalk itself. Long term, we’ll have to keep the upward and downward movements pretty well balanced or that will affect the stability, but we have nothing to worry about on a day-to-day basis. As you’ll see from my numbers, with even spacing of the cars we’ll have a velocity of about three hundred kilometers an hour. That’s respectable for travel up through the atmosphere, and not high enough to cause aerodynamic problems.”
“Hold it.” Regulo held up his hand before Rob could continue. “So far, we’ve been running along on just about the same design lines. Take a look at my calculations, and you’ll find that they parallel yours remarkably closely. But if you’re wanting a two-meter diameter load cable, then I’d suggest that we go for a bigger shipment rate. Why keep the weight of the cars so low?”
“It’s your money.” Rob shrugged. “If you’re willing to spend more, that’s no problem for the design. I can increase the load. But I sized the carrying capacity to fit with a fifteen-gigawatt supply system, because that’s what we’ll get with an off-the-shelf powersat. We could use a couple of them, or even a custom-made job, but the total cost will go up.”
“Don’t worry about that, finance is my department. Let’s have a daily carrying capacity, up or down, of a million tons. That’s a nice round number, and there’s no point in spoiling things for a few riyals. You never know, some day I may want to ship a few million tons of salt up here. Cornelia says she’s getting tired of the taste of freshwater fish.”
That was a joke, it had to be. Rob looked at Regulo closely, but still the facial expressions offered no clue. After a moment, he shrugged. “A million tons. Fine, I’ll design for that. Everything else stays the same except the size of the cargo carriers. I think we ought to keep the passenger carriers small, that gives us a more flexible service. I’ll just arrange to have more of them, and time them to run more frequently. Let me dispose of one more problem, and I’ll save the tough one for last. Earthquakes. I’m proposing a really simple-minded solution. Instead of any fancy sort of tether, I suggest that we pile a billion tons of rock on the bottom end of the beanstalk. It won’t matter how much the ground moves about, there will still be all the anchor that we need.”
“No argument with that. Simple solutions usually beat any others.” Regulo again tapped his own pile of papers. “I thought just as you did. No point in making it hard if you can make it easy. All right, what’s your other problem? So far we seem to be doing well.”
“Materials.” Rob pulled a single sheet of calculations from his notes. “We need a few billion tons of silicon and metals, and we need it close to the L-4 location where we’ll be doing the main construction. Where will we get it? I’m relying on you for an answer, because obviously it can’t come from Earth. An asteroid, of course, and we move it to where we want it. But which asteroid?”
“Fair enough.” Regulo reached over the desk and took the sheet from Rob’s hands. After studying it for a few moments he turned to the control panel by the side of the desk, and began to touch a pad there.
“How much did Cornelia tell you about the computer system here on Atlantis?” he asked.
“Nothing at all.” Rob thought of Corrie’s mysterious comment on the way out. “Unless Caliban is your computer?”
“Caliban!” Regulo raised his bushy white eyebrows. “Now, there’s a wild idea. Though when I sit here and think about it, perhaps it’s less wild than it sounds.” He laughed. “No, Caliban isn’t the computer. You’ll meet Caliban later. The computer is called Sycorax — that’s Joseph Morel’s damn fool name for it, by the way, not my choosing. But don’t let me get started on that. About forty years ago I decided that anybody who wanted to be a really good engineer ought to have the best computer system that money could buy. I still hold the same view, and I’ve been building the computer capacity that I control from here ever since. I moved the central processor to Atlantis twenty years ago, and there are satellite data banks and peripheral processors in a lot of other places — on Earth, on the Moon, in the Belt, and out on the satellite mining operations in the Jupiter and Saturn systems. But I still don’t like computers; which is why I give Joseph a free hand to do what he wants with them, and call them whatever fool names he chooses.”
As Regulo was speaking, a long table of data outputs had begun to appear on a big display screen at the side of the room. Regulo stared at it for a moment, then he keyed in more control words and the table rapidly began to change.
“These are outputs from Sycorax,” he said. “Don’t ask me where the data bank is stored. All I can tell you is that it must be somewhere on Atlantis, or the response time would be a lot longer. The records that we access most often are stored here, the rest are spotted about all over the System. Do you recognize this table?”