She knew what Drumlin would have thought of arguments like this. Although much that Hadden had just said resonated with her own thinking, she was tired of these beguiling and confident speculations on what the Vegans had in mind. She wanted the project to continue, the Machine completed and activated, the new stage in human history begun. She still mistrusted her own motives, was still wary even when she was mentioned as a possible member of the crew on a completed Machine. So the delays in resuming construction served a purpose for her. They bought time for her to work her problems through.
“We’ll have dinner with Yamagishi. You’ll like him. But we’re a little worried about him. He keeps his oxygen partial pressure so low at night.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the lower the oxygen content in the air, the longer you live. At least that’s what the doctors tell us. So we all get to pick the amount of oxygen in our rooms. In daytime you can’t bring it much below twenty percent, because you get groggy. It impairs mental functioning. But at night, when you’re sleeping anyway, you can lower the oxygen partial pressure. There’s a danger, though. You can lower it too much. Yamagishi’s down to fourteen percent these days, because he wants to live forever. As a result, he’s not lucid until lunchtime.”
“I’ve been that way all my life, at twenty percent oxygen.” She laughed.
“Now he’s experimenting with noötropic drugs to remove the grogginess. You know, like piracetam. They definitely improve memory. I don’t know that it actually makes you smarter, but that’s what they say. So Yamagishi is taking an awful lot of noötropics, and he’s not breathing enough oxygen at night.”
“So does he behave cuckoo?”
“Cuckoo? It’s hard to tell. I don’t know very many ninety-two-year-old Class A war criminals.”
“That’s why every experiment needs a control,” she said. He smiled.
Even at his advanced age, Yamagishi displayed the erect bearing he had acquired during his long service in the Imperial Army. He was a small man, entirely bald, with an inconspicuous white mustache and a fixed, benign expression on his face.
“I am here because of hips,” he explained. “I know about cancer, and lifetimes. But I am here because of hips.
At my age bones break easily. Baron Tsukuma died from falling from his futon onto his tatami. One-half meter, he fell. One-half meter. And his bones broke. In zero g, hips do not break.” This seemed very sensible.
A few gastronomic compromises had been made, but the dinner was of surprising elegance. A specialized small technology had been developed for weightless dining. Serving utensils had lids, wine glasses had tops and straws. Foods such as nuts or dried corn flakes were prohibited.
Yamagishi urged the caviar on her. It was one of the few Western foods, be explained, that cost more per kilogram to buy on Earth than to ship to space. The cohesion of the individual caviar eggs was a lucky break, Ellie mused. She tried to imagine thousands of separate eggs in individual free-fall, clouding the passageways of this orbiting retirement home. Suddenly she remembered that her mother was also in a retirement home, several orders of magnitude more modest than this one. In fact, orienting herself by the Great Lakes, visible out the window at this moment, she could pinpoint her mother’s location. She could spend two days chatting it up in Earth orbit with bad-boy billionaires, but couldn’t spare fifteen minutes for a phone call with her mother? She promised herself to call as soon as she landed in Cocoa Beach. A communiqué from Earth orbit, she told herself, might be too much novelty for the senior citizens’ rest home in Janesville, Wisconsin.
Yamagishi interrupted her train of thought to inform her that he was the oldest man in space. Ever. Even the former Chinese Vice Premier was younger. He removed his coat, rolled up his right sleeve, flexed his biceps, and asked her to feel his muscle. He was soon full of vivid and quantitative detail about the worthy charities to which he had been a major contributor.
She tried to make polite conversation. “It’s very placid and quiet up here. You must be enjoying your retirement.”
She had addressed this bland remark to Yamagishi, but Hadden replied.
“It’s not entirely uneventful. Occasionally there’s a crisis and we have to move fast.”
“Solar flare, extremely bad. Make you sterile,” Yamagishi volunteered.
“Yeah, if there’s a major solar flare monitored by telescope, you have about three days before the charged particles hit the Chateau. So the permanent residents, like Yamagishi-san and me, we go to the storm shelter. Very spartan, very confined. But it has enough radiation shielding to make a difference. There’s some secondary radiation, of course. The thing is, all the nonpermanent staff and visitors have to leave in the three-day period. That kind of an emergency can tax the commercial fleet. Sometimes we have to call in NASA or the Soviets to rescue people. You wouldn’t believe who you flush out in solar-flare events– Mafiosi, heads of intelligence services, beautiful men and women…”
“Why do I get the feeling that sex is high on the list of imports from Earth?” she asked a little reluctantly.
“Oh, it is, it is. There’s lots of reasons. The clientele, the location. But the main reason is zero g. In zero g you can do things at eighty you never thought possible at twenty. You ought to take a vacation up here– with your boyfriend. Consider it a definite invitation.”
“Ninety,” said Yamagishi. “I beg your pardon?”
“You can do things at ninety you didn’t dream of at twenty. That’s what Yamagishi-san is saying. That’s why everyone wants to come up here.”
Over coffee, Hadden returned to the topic of the Machine.
“Yamagishi-san and me are partners with some other people. He’s the Honorary Chairman of the Board of Yamagishi Industries. As you know, they’re the prime contractor for the Machine component testing going on in Hokkaido. Now imagine our problem. I’ll give you a for-instance. There are three big spherical shells, one inside the other. They’re made of a niobium alloy, they have peculiar patterns cut into them, and they’re obviously designed to rotate in three orthogonal directions very fast in a vacuum. Benzels, they’re called. You know all this, of course. What happens if you make a scale model of the three benzels and spin them very fast? What happens? All knowledgeable physicists think nothing will happen. But, of course, nobody’s done the experiment. This precise experiment. So nobody really knows. Suppose something does happen when the full Machine is activated. Does it depend on the speed of rotation? Does it depend on the composition of the benzels? On the pattern of the cutouts? Is it a question of scale? So we’ve been building these things, and running them–scale models and full-scale copies, both. We want to spin our version of the big benzels, the ones that’ll be mated to the other components in the two Machines. Suppose nothing happens then. Then we’d want to add additional components, one by one. We’d keep plugging them in, a small systems integration job at every step, and then maybe there’d be a time when we plug in a component, not the last one, and the Machine does something that knocks our socks off. We’re only trying to figure out how the Machine works. You see what I’m driving at?”
“You mean you’ve been secretly assembling an identical copy of the Machine in Japan?”
“Well, it’s not exactly a secret. We’re testing out the individual components. Nobody said we can only test them one at a time. So here’s what Yamagishi-san and I propose: We change the schedule on the experiments in Hokkaido. We do full-up systems integration now, and if nothing works we’ll do the component-by-component testing later. The money’s all been allocated anyway.
“We think it’ll be months–maybe years–before the American effort gets back on track. And we don’t think the Russians can do it even in that time. Japan’s the only possibility. We don’t have to announce it right away. We don’t have to make a decision about activating the Machine right away. We’re just testing components.”
“Can you two make this kind of decision on your own?”
“Oh, it’s well within what they call our designated responsibilities. We figure we can catch up to where the Wyoming Machine was in about six months. We’ll have to be much more careful about sabotage, of course. But if the components are okay, I think the Machine will be okay: Hokkaido’s kind of hard to get to. Then, when everything is checked and ready, we can ask the World Machine Consortium if they’d like to give it a try. If the crew is willing, I bet you the Consortium will go along. What do you think, Yamagishi- san?”
Yamagishi had not heard the question. He was softly singing “Free-Fall” to himself; it was a current hit song full of vivid detail about succumbing to temptation in Earth orbit. He did not know all the words, he explained when the question was repeated.