Our ecological recycling system had us ninety-five percent independent of Earth resupply. Our smelter was operational and waiting for customers: We had developed the aluminum engine.
But all anyone wanted to buy was the slingshot effect. We were a glorified switching yard in orbit. And the new government clearly wanted us to stay just that.
Woke kept up his soothing apologia. I had heard it all before. I wasn’t the one to fight him, anyway. That was up to our lawyers back in Washington. My job was to come up with miracles. And right now they appeared to be in short supply.
The crewcut DOD man, Bahnz, was staring at something over my shoulder. I shifted a little to look.
Out on A Deck they were readying a Defense cargo for launch. They had peeled away the blue shrouding and set the cylinders near the edge of the deck. At the right moment the package would slip off into the starry field below us, falling away from Earth in a steep ellipse. At apogee a motor would cut in, carrying the spysat the rest of the way to geosynchronous orbit.
Bahnz had a gleam in his eyes as he observed the preparations.
You want my Farm, don’t you? I thought. You peepers fought us in the beginning, but now you see we’re the one thing keeping us ahead of the other nations in space. Now you want my Tank Farm for your own.
Two years ago, they had tried to get us to store “strategic assets” in the A Deck tanks. I threatened to resign, and the Foundation found the guts to refuse. That’s when the troubles had started.
Bahnz noticed my look, and smiled a knowing smile.
He thinks he holds all the aces, I thought. And he might be right.
There were some old SF stories I read when I was a kid, about space colonies rebelling against Earth bureaucracies. I had a brief fantasy of leading my crew in a “tea party,” and kicking these two jerks off our sovereign territory.
Bahnz saw the peaceful smile on my face, and must have wondered what caused it.
Of course the rebellion idea was absurd. It wasn’t what any of us wanted, and it wasn’t practical. We might be ninety-five percent free of Earth logistical support, but that last few percent would be with us for a hundred years. Anyway, without either water or new tanks every year, Mother Earth’s atmosphere would quickly pull us down.
While Don and Susan kept our side of the charade, I looked out the window, thinking.
Next year would be solar maximum, when the coronal ion wind would come sleeting in from the active sun. The upper atmosphere would heat up and bloat outward, like a high tide dragging at our knees. At solar max we could lose twenty kilometers of altitude in a single year. Maybe much more.
Our investors would be caving in within eighteen months. Even the Italians would soon be begging the U.S. administration to make a deal.
For an instant I saw the Earth not as a broad vague mass overhead, but as a spinning globe of rock, rushing air, and water, of molten core and invisible fields, reaching out to grapple with the tides that filled space. It was eerie. I could almost feel the Tank Farm, like a double-ended kite, coursing through those invisible fields, its tethers cutting the lines of force—like the slowly turning bushings of a dynamo.
That was what young Emily Testa had compared it to. A dynamo. We could draw power from our motion if we ever had to—buying electricity and paying for it in orbital momentum. It was a solution in search of a problem, for we already had all the power we needed.
The image wouldn’t leave my mind, though. I could almost see the double-ended kite, right there in front of me… a dynamo. We didn’t need a dynamo. What we needed was the opposite. What we needed was…
“I think we should recess,” I said suddenly, interrupting Dr. Woke in the middle of a sentence. It didn’t matter. My job wasn’t diplomacy. It was miracle-working.
“Susan, would you show our guests to some rooms? We’ll all meet again over supper in my cabin, if that’s okay with you gentlemen?”
Woke nodded resignedly. I think he had hoped to go back down right away in Pacifica. Colonel Bahnz smiled. “Dr. Rutter, will you be serving Slingshot with dinner?”
“It’s traditional,” I replied, anxious to get rid of the man.
“Good. It’s one of the reasons I came up today.” Bahnz’s grin seemed friendly enough, but there was an undertone to his voice that I understood only too well.
I waited until they had left, then turned to Ishido. “Don, go fetch Emily Testa and meet me in the power room in five minutes.”
“Sure, chief. But what…?”
“There’s something I want to try. Now shake a leg!”
I kicked off down the hallway, looking for a computer terminal. I don’t think I touched the floor twice in fifty yards.
5
For all of our Spartan lifestyle, there are a few places the crew had tried to make “posh.” One is the main lounge. Another is the “Captain’s Cabin.” My digs were given that name when the Foundation first had the idea of setting up a tourist hotel. They figured making a big deal out of dinner in my quarters would give a visit more of the flavor of a Caribbean cruise.
The aluminum walls had been anodized different pastel shades. The gold carpet had been woven from converted tank insulator material. And in wall niches there stood a dozen vacuum-spun aluminum-wire sculptures created by Dave Crisuellini, our smelter chief and resident artist.
The Captain’s Table was made of oak, brought up at six hundred dollars a pound for one purpose only, to look impressive.
Henry Woke sat to my right as the volunteer stewards served us from steaming casserole dishes. Next to Woke sat Susan Sorbanes. Across from them were Emily Testa, nervously fingering her fork as her eyes darted about the room, and Ishido. Colonel Bahnz sat across from me.
Woke looked considerably less green around the gills. His eyes widened at the soufflé a waiter laid in front of him. “I’m impressed! I’d heard that a hundredth of a gee is enough to enable the inner ear to come to equilibrium, but I hadn’t believed. Now, to be able to eat from plates! With forks!” He spoke around a hot mouthful. “This is delicious! What is it?”
“Well, most of our food is prepared from termite flour and caked algae…”
Woke paused chewing. Susan and Ishido shared a look and a smile.
“…however,” I went on, “recently we have begun raising our own wheat, and chickens for eggs.”
Woke looked uncomfortable for another moment, then apparently decided to accept the ambiguity. “Ingenious,” he said, and resumed eating.
“We have a number of ingenious people here,” Susan said. “Many of our crew served aboard the Space Stations, and came here when NASA went through cutbacks and furloughed them.
“Others were hired by the Foundation because of their varied talents. Emily here,” she said, smiling at young Testa, “is a fine example of the sort of colonist we’re looking for.”
Emily blushed and looked down at her plate. She was very tired after the last few hours, as we had furiously experimented with the Farm’s power system.
Colonel Bahnz squeezed an aluminum-foil beer bottle, his second. “You’re right about one thing, Dr. Sorbanes,” the DOD man said. “The U.S. government has subsidized this venture in many hidden ways. Most of your personnel got their training at taxpayer expense.”
“Have we ever failed in our gratitude, Colonel?” Susan spoke with pure sincerity. And to Ishido and I, the answer was obviously no. We tank farmers think of ourselves as custodians of a trust.