Something was emerging from the tunnel – the track-mounted, semi-humanoid robot that had carried the tablet into the Vault. It was almost comic to see a machine enclosed in the kind of isolation suit used as protection against deadly germs and here on the airless Moon! But no one was taking any chances, however unlikely they might seem. After all, the robot had moved among those carefully sequestered nightmares, and although according to its video cameras everything appeared in order, there was always a chance that some vial had leaked, or some canister’s seal had broken. The Moon was a very stable environment, but during the centuries it had known many quakes and meteor impacts.
The robot came to a halt fifty metres outside the tunnel. Slowly, the massive plug that sealed the Vault swung back into place, and began to rotate in its threads, like a giant bolt being screwed into the mountain.
‘All not wearing dark glasses, please close your eyes or look away from the robot!’ said an urgent voice over the mooncar radio. Poole twisted round in his seat, just in time to see an explosion of light on the roof of the vehicle. When he turned back to look at Pico, all that was left of the robot was a heap of glowing slag; even to someone who had spent much of his life surrounded by vacuum, it seemed altogether wrong that tendrils of smoke were not slowly spiralling up from it.
‘Sterilization completed,’ said the voice of the Mission Controller. ‘Thank you, everybody. Now returning to Plato City.’
How ironic – that the human race had been saved by the skilful deployment of its own insanities! What moral, Poole wondered, could one possibly draw from that?
He looked back at the beautiful blue Earth, huddling beneath its tattered blanket of clouds for protection against the cold of space. Up there, a few weeks from now, he hoped to cradle his first grandson in his arms.
Whatever godlike powers and principalities lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important – Love and Death.
His body had not yet aged a hundred years: he still had plenty of time for both.
EPILOGUE
‘Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. But it is too soon to judge them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved.’
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SOURCES
Chapter 1: The Kuiper Belt
For a description of Captain Chandler’s hunting ground, discovered as recently as 1992, see ‘The Kuiper Belt’ by Jane X. Luu and David C. Jewitt (Scientific American, May 1996)
Chapter 3: Rehabilitation
I believed that I had invented the palm-to-palm transfer of information, so it was mortifying to discover that Nicholas (“Being Digital”) Negroponte (Hodder and Stoughton, 1995) and his MIT Media Lab have been working on the idea for years…
Chapter 4: Star City
The concept of a ‘ring around the world’ in the geostationary orbit (CEO), linked to the Earth by towers at the Equator, may seem utterly fantastic but in fact has a firm scientific basis. It is an obvious extension of the ‘space elevator’ invented by the St Petersburg engineer Yuri Artsutanov, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 1982, when his city had a different name.
Yuri pointed out that it was theoretically possible to lay a cable between the Earth and a satellite hovering over the same spot on the Equator which it does when placed in the CEO, home of most of today’s communications satellites. From this beginning, a space elevator (or in Yuri’s picturesque phrase, ‘cosmic funicular’) could be established, and payloads could be carried up to the CEO purely by electrical energy. Rocket propulsion would be needed only for the remainder of the journey.
In addition to avoiding the danger, noise and environmental hazards of rocketry, the space elevator would make possible quite astonishing reductions in the cost of all space missions. Electricity is cheap, and it would require only about a hundred dollars’ worth to take one person to orbit. And the round trip would cost about ten dollars, as most of the energy would be recovered on the downward journey! (Of course, catering and inflight movies would put up the price of the ticket. Would you believe a thousand dollars to CEO and back?)
The theory is impeccable: but does any material exist with sufficient tensile strength to hang all the way down to the Equator from an altitude of 36,000 kilometres, with enough margin left over to raise useful payloads? When Yuri wrote his paper, only one substance met these rather stringent specifications – crystalline carbon, better known as diamond. Unfortunately, the necessary megaton quantities are not readily available on the open market, though in “2061: Odyssey Three” I gave reasons for thinking that they might exist at the core of Jupiter. In “The Fountains of Paradise” I suggested a more accessible source – orbiting factories where diamonds might be grown under zero-gravity conditions.
The first ‘small step’ towards the space elevator was attempted in August 1992 on the Shuttle Atlantis, when one experiment involved the release – and retrieval – of a payload on a 21-kilometre-long tether. Unfortunately the playing-out mechanism jammed after only a few hundred metres.
I was very flattered when the Atlantis crew produced The Fountains of Paradise during their orbital press conference, and Mission Specialist Jeffrey Hoffman sent me the autographed copy on their return to Earth.
The second tether experiment, in February 1996, was slightly more successful: the payload was indeed deployed to its full distance, but during retrieval the cable was severed, owing to an electrical discharge caused by faulty insulation. This may have been a lucky accident – perhaps the equivalent of a blown fuse:
I cannot help recalling that some of Ben Franklin’s contemporaries were killed when they attempted to repeat his famous – and risky – experiment of flying a kite during a thunderstorm.
Apart from possible dangers, playing-out tethered payloads from the Shuttle appears rather like fly-fishing: is not as easy as it looks. But eventually the final ‘giant leap’ will be made – all the way down to the Equator.
Meanwhile, the discovery of the third form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (C60) has made the concept of the space elevator much more plausible. In 1990 a group of chemists at Rice University, Houston, produced a tubular form of C60 – which has far greater tensile strength than diamond. The group’s leader, Dr Smalley, even went so far as to claim it was the strongest material that could ever exist – and added that it would make possible the construction of the space elevator.
(Stop Press News: I am delighted to know that Dr Smalley has shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.)
And now for a truly amazing coincidence – one so eerie that it makes me wonder Who Is In Charge.
Buckminster Fuller died in 1983, so never lived to see the discovery of the ‘buckyballs’ and ‘buckytubes’ which have given him much greater posthumous fame. During one of the last of his many world trips, I had the pleasure of flying him and his wife Anne around Sri Lanka, and showed them some of the locations featured in The Fountains of Paradise. Shortly afterwards, I made a recording from the novel on a 12” (remember them?) LP record (Caedmon TC 1606) and Bucky was kind enough to write the sleeve notes. They ended with a surprising revelation, which may well have triggered my own thinking about ‘Star City’:
‘In 1951 I designed a free-floating tensegrity ring-bridge to be installed way out from and around the Earth’s equator. Within this “halo” bridge, the Earth would continue its spinning while the circular bridge would revolve at its own rate. I foresaw Earthian traffic vertically ascending to the bridge, revolving and descending at preferred Earth loci’
I have no doubt that, if the human race decides to make such an investment (a trivial one, according to some estimates of economic growth), ‘Star City’ could be constructed. In addition to providing new styles of living, and giving visitors from low-gravity worlds like Mars and the Moon better access to the Home Planet, it would eliminate all rocketry from the Earth’s surface and relegate it to deep space, where it belongs (Though I hope there would be occasional anniversary re-enactments at Cape Kennedy, to bring back the excitement of the pioneering days.)
Almost certainly most of the City would be empty scaffolding, and only a very small fraction would be occupied or used for scientific or technological purposes. After all, each of the Towers would be the equivalent of a ten-million-floor skyscraper – and the circumference of the ring around the geostationary orbit would be more than half the distance to the Moon! Many times the entire population of the human race could be housed in such a volume of space, if it was all enclosed. (This would pose some interesting logistics problems, which I am content to leave as ‘an exercise for the student’.)