“I like that. A beanstalk, all the way from Mercury to Pluto.” Rob was silent for a moment, chewing at his lower lip. “Won’t work, though,” he said at last. “You could never get it stable.”
“True enough.” Regulo leaned over the desk and cut back to a full display of the asteroid. “I’m just indulging in a little random speculation. That’s how everything starts, though I must admit I don’t see any way of making that one work — yet. There are a couple of other things that you didn’t mention about this system. How would you stop it from slowing down and stopping the rotation? You’ll have frictional losses, effects of the solar magnetic field, all that sort of thing working against you.”
“After the drives are switched off? I’d expect those to be small effects, but anyway it should be easy enough to compensate for them. It won’t be a perfectly homogeneous figure of revolution, even when it’s melted. Stick a pulsed magnetic field on it, about the rotation axis. You won’t need much torque to keep the spin rate constant.”
Regulo grunted his approval. “Where were you twenty years ago, when we were designing the Icarus solar scoop? I could have used your head on that. Most people don’t seem to be able to think straight even when they have all the facts.”
“Twenty years ago? I’d just lost my first milk tooth.”
“Aye. God knows it, I’m getting old.” Regulo rubbed at his lined forehead with a thin, veined hand. “Twenty years ago, to me it’s like yesterday. One more thing for you to think about, then we’ll pack this in and do some work on the beanstalk. From what you’ve seen of this so far, do you see any problems when we go to a really big one? Say, when we spin up Lutetia?”
Rob shrugged. “Well, there’s one obvious problem. You can’t possibly extend the proboscis far enough to penetrate through to the center of something that big. So you’ll have to mine the heavy materials on the outside first, even if that’s not the way you’d prefer to do it. I can see cases where you might want to get at the lighter metals and the volatiles first.”
“I’ve worried about that one, too. At the moment I’m playing with the idea of zone melting, but I’m not completely happy with it.” Regulo watched and waited in silence, while Rob mulled over that problem.
“I see what you mean,” Rob said at last. “You’re assuming that the materials are scattered fairly uniformly through the whole body of the asteroid. That looks like a big assumption to me — unless you’ve checked it some other way?”
Regulo shook his head. “The theory of formation suggests that most of the volatiles will be on the outside. I would melt just the first couple of kilometers in from the surface, and mine there first. I think the Spider could tap that deeply without much trouble.”
“And leave the middle solid until you want to melt further?” Rob looked thoughtful. “I don’t have your experience on differential melting. The Spider can do it all right, that’s not the issue. But I’m still not comfortable with the idea. Let me think about this for a few days and see if I come up with anything better. It’s not efficient to switch the power on and off, and I would expect that zone melting will give you problems with rotational stability.”
“It will, but I’m used to those.” Regulo nodded. “Think about it. That’s what I pay people for. I’ve held to one principle for fifty years, and it has never let me down: there is no way that you can overpay a really good worker. Maybe I ought to have that one built into the desk, along with the others.” He was staring at Rob speculatively. “You know, I’ve been thinking about you, and what you’ll do when the beanstalk is finished and working. How would you fancy the idea of coming out to the Belt and running the mining operation on Lutetia? The whole thing. Not as an employee,” he added, reading Rob’s expression. He paused for a moment to give his words more weight. “As my partner. I’ll set up an arrangement so that you can earn your way into Regulo Enterprises.”
“Your partner!” Rob was even more startled than he looked. “I’m flattered, of course. Enormously flattered. But I’m not sure I want to be away from Earth forever. I have projects planned down there.”
“I understand that.” Regulo switched off the display and the image of the asteroid quickly faded. “It’s not a decision that you make in a minute. Think about it, that’s all I ask you to do. You’ve seen the history of technology down on Earth. Has it ever occurred to you that there’s a constant pattern? It’s been the curse of science for a thousand years. Great men have ideas, lesser men implement them — and the least men gain control of their use. Look at atomic weapons as an example, running in a straight line from Einstein to Denaga, from a super-genius to a near moron.”
“I agree with that.” Rob looked at Darius Regulo, his face showing his doubt. “But do you believe that you can change the system? I’m skeptical.”
“You can’t change it down there,” Regulo said impatiently. “The pattern on Earth is fixed. But there’s plenty to be done in the System, and most of it isn’t on Earth. It’s out in the Belt and beyond. That’s where the action is. That’s where there’s a chance to break the old way of doing things. If Morton is right, the Halo ought to be full of power kernels. With enough available energy you can do almost anything. A few more generations, and all the top engineers will be working out past Pluto. We can be at the beginning of that, with a head start on everybody in the System.”
There was an edge of passion — almost a religious fervor — in the harsh voice. It made Rob feel uncomfortable. He felt an obsessive power in Regulo that went beyond Rob’s own limits.
“I’ve seen Morton’s analysis,” he said. “It’s an impressive piece of work. The move outward is your prediction, too?”
“Mine, and Caliban’s.” Regulo glanced over to the camera set in the opposite wall of the study. “I don’t go along with all his analyses, as you know, but I can’t argue with him on this one. I base my conclusions on engineering. Lord knows where his come from.”
Rob had followed the quick look. “Is that camera transmitting to him now, out there in the aquasphere?”
“All the time. There are inputs going to him from all over Atlantis — from everywhere in the System. We argue about the kind of logic that he uses, but whatever it is he can’t draw conclusions without input data. Sycorax stores the ones that come in as parallel data streams, and Caliban takes them when he can. He’ll be busy there for the next four or five hours, absorbing the new data that came in with your ship.”
Regulo glanced idly at the wall clock as he was speaking, then brought his full attention to it. “We’d better move on and look at the beanstalk. Do you know how long this chat has taken? That’s your trouble, Merlin — you talk about the things that really interest me.”
He started to stand up, then gasped and grabbed at the front of the desk. His face went white with pain. Rob moved quickly around the desk and took him by the arm.
“Can I help?”
Regulo nodded. “Call Morel,” he said through clenched teeth. “Tell him I’ll be over in a few minutes for some more of his damned injections.”
He slowly straightened in the chair. “I sometimes wonder if that man is killing me or curing me. Help me stand up. I’ll have to postpone talking about the beanstalk until I’m in better shape.” His forehead was beaded with perspiration, but his voice was firmly controlled. “This session with Morel will take three or four hours. He won’t let me rush it. If I do, we have to start the whole thing over — I learned that the hard way. We’ll have to postpone our meeting until after the sleep period.”
He moved out from behind the desk, waving away Rob’s proffered hand, and steadied himself against the wall.
“And tell Cornelia that I need to see her, too, will you, as soon as I’m through with Morel. She ought to be over in the recreation area.” He managed to smile, though there was little humor in it. “You may not believe this, but there was a time when I could beat her in a swimming race. That was a long while ago, though.”