He broke off and, shoving past now-furiously-scribbling engineers, threaded his way to the head of the table, behind Sargon, clasping the now very befuddled Miner, right hand thrust forward.
“Sir, I want to shake your hand—” momentary confusion—“er, hands. What is your name, sir?”
The Miner made a burbling warble.
Asach smiled. “Might I suggest Alhacen?”
As the engineers huddled in working groups to put meat on the bones of this concept, Asach and the accountants helped with the arduous process of translating the mathematical notations to understandable equations, and the numerical notations to base ten from base twelve. Even the civil administrators followed along eagerly, but this left the ecumenical council with little to do. Until the High Church primate cleared his throat.
“I have a—concern.”
Michael looked up. “Yes?”
“Am I to understand that the SunFish—breaks up?”
One of the engineers looked up. “Burns up, more like. It’ll be diving down the throat of—”
“Yes, yes. I see. But my concern is: What happens to the pilot? Does he—or she—parachute out?”
The engineer laughed. “Oh, there’ll be no parachuting. That’d burn up too.”
“So, I repeat, what happens to the pilot?”
Suddenly, the light came on. “Oh. Uh, well, he—”
“Or she.”
“Yeah. Uh. Either way. He. Or she. It’ll be, uh…”
“A one-way trip?”
“Well, yeah. A fast one. Pretty much as soon as they dive in. They’ll flash, break up, and burn. See, the capsule will protect whoever’s going on up, but…”
“But we will be sending the pilot on a suicide mission.”
“Pretty much.”
The primate spoke up. “Is there anyone in this room aside from myself who finds this morally reprehensible?”
He was looking directly at Sargon.
“It is for the ar.”
“We hold to rather higher standards regarding the sanctity of human life.”
“The ar is all. We would never like to destroy a line, but the ar is all.”
“I cannot condone it. To send someone on a mission of certain death? To gain a political end regarding political status?”
There was a murmur of assent from among the council.
Sargon understood this. The undercurrent was clear. Sargon did not yet understand humans very well, but there’d been chance enough in battle to understand this much: This man would not even know the pilot. The pilot would go willingly. So this was not really about the principle. This was about control. Sargon boomed. One Warrior stepped forward. The movement was fast, sure, over.
“This Warrior will go. This Warrior has get and children. This Warrior’s lines are secure. You will teach this Warrior to fly the Phoenix. This Warrior will defend the ar.”
The primate fell silent. The SunFish engineer was already texting his office, and mentally calculating the Warrior’s mass. The primate spoke again.
“And in the capsule? Who will go in the capsule.?”
The engineers waved the doctor and Doctor over. They joined the huddle, discussing time, g-forces, mass, and oxygen.
18
Opportunity Investment
An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very flexible in purpose. (7) Very little development will be required. It will use off-the-shelf components. (8) The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.
On the other hand a practical reactor can be distinguished by the following characteristics: (1) It is being built now. (2) It is behind schedule. (3) It requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items. (4) It is very expensive. (5) It takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems. (6) It is large. (7) It is heavy. (8) It is complicated.
The tools of the academic designer are a piece of paper and a pencil with an eraser. If a mistake is made, it can always be erased and changed. If the practical-reactor designer errs, he wears the mistake around his neck.
—Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, Paper Reactors, Real Reactors, 1953
Bonneville, New Utah
DAZ-E line number six ran continuously. Retooled from machining solar reflector “flowers,” it now stamped and sealed silvery inverted mushrooms atop silvery inverted cones, sandwiching in tiny chips for brains, transmitters that looped twenty seconds of speech, and deployable hair-wire antennae.
The bigger stuff was on line number three. There, SunRail engineers struggled to mount a magnetic bearing into a larger version of the mushroom, and use it to suspend an insulated tin can, around which the mushroom-cone sandwich could then spin, in vacuum, without friction, freely, like an inside-out centrifuge. They called in more experts from the wind turbine fields to help them stabilize vibration.
Their first three attempts lost internal alignment and blew apart spectacularly. They retooled, retried, and got it working up to three thousand rpm. Then six. Then eight. Then ten.
They had to work around the bearings they had. There was no time to customize them. They measured and re-measured essential payload. They calculated and recalculated air compression. They stripped out all safety margins. They called the physiologists again. How much could their phoenix chicks take?
They revisited SunFish cargo bay plans. They put together a mock-up, correct in size and weight. They started miniature launch tests. They moved real equipment in place.
Swenson’s Mountain (Beacon Hll), New Utah
It looked like a deranged, open-air bottling plant. In fact, some of it was from a bottling plant, disassembled in Bonneville and shipped to OLaM Station by express SunFreight. It was a testament to brute labor. Flingers dropped canisters filled with parts onto landing pads down near the lake. Hundreds of Porters hiked them up over the rim for assembly. The Eye itself crawled with Miners, polishing imperfections away in a process they could barely explain, but that was reviewed and approved by DAZ-E mirror manufacturers. The islands set up bunk tents and mess lines. Enheduanna’s Side kept the manna flowing.
The bottles were replaced by the silvery inverted mushrooms atop their pointy inverted cones, held vertical by tiny brackets that allowed them to initiate rotation. During launch windows, Miners cleared the Eye, and the tiny satellites whipped off the edge of a ski-jump gantry as lines of spinning tops. They flashed as they hit the Eye’s photon stream, invisible in the broad light of day, sputtered to life as each base superheated, and twinkled up, up, up out of view like a squadron of heaven-bound fairies. Each of their little chips of brains ticked off its list of imperatives: Count off the seconds. Use yourself as a flywheel. Pop open your solar collector-sail. Spin away into the cold, black vacuum. Poke out your little antenna. Beep.
They didn’t all make it. Some burned through. Stabilization was tricky. Some wheeled out of control, falling back as chunky, silver hail. Some lost attitude, tumbling along in decaying orbits only to wink back to earth, burning up as miniscule shooting stars somewhere over a New Utah sea. Some shot too far, escaping orbit altogether to sail into endless, black infinity. The engineers did not sleep. They tinkered with the coatings. They tinkered with the gyroscoping flywheels. They tinkered with the delivery line. They tinkered with the gantry. They tinkered with the initial rotation, and with the timing of release. They got better, daily.