Two silent stares greeted his words. He waited a moment for possible questions and then, seeing that none would be immediately forthcoming, turned toward the display terminal situated on one side of his desk.
“I’ll leave you to think about that for a minute,” he said. “It’s time we were making tracks. I’ll just call Peter and make sure he’s free.”
* * *
Two hours later, after what had seemed to them to be satisfactory and promising talks with Peter Hughes, Clifford and Aub were having lunch with Morelli in the Institute’s Social and Domestic Block. By this time Morelli was painting vivid pictures of his visions of the future of gravitic engineering, and his two guests found themselves being infused and excited by the torrent of ideas that poured, seemingly inexhaustibly, from their host’s fertile mind.
“Artificially induced weightlessness?” Clifford repeated incredulously. “You really think it could work?”
“Aw, at this stage I can’t really say,” Morelli conceded candidly. “But just suppose for a moment that it did. It’d revolutionize the whole business of transportation. Just imagine—if you could move big loads effortlessly anywhere . . . all over the world. Why bother building bridges and things when you can simply float things across rivers on a g-beam? Who needs roads and rails? They’re only ways of cutting down friction, and this way there’d be no friction—only inertia.”
“You’d be able to move a ten-ton block of stone around with a push of your hand,” Aub joined in. “Man, that’s incredible.”
“As long as you weren’t in too much of a hurry to get it anywhere,” Morelli said. “Not much acceleration, but yeah—sure—you could do it.”
“What about static fields?” Clifford asked as another possibility dawned on him. “You know—for supporting structures and such. Think that might work too?”
Morelli shrugged as he began refilling the three coffee cups from the pot that had been left on the table.
“Who knows? Why not? Anything’s possible until somebody proves it isn’t . . . not so? Structures . . . ? Sure—maybe one day we’ll even figure out how to hold up structures.”
“Hey, that could change the whole of architecture,” Aub whispered. In a louder voice he went on. “There’d be no limits of loading to worry about . . . weight-induced stresses and that kind of stuff. You could put up buildings any size or shape you wanted—all kinds of things—right up into the sky. You could make skyscrapers look like mud huts. It’s crazy.”
“Buildings . . . ? Skyscrapers . . . ?” Morelli threw out an arm to indicate there were no limits to what he could see. “Why mess around with buildings? Why not whole cities? String ’em together up into the sky like something you never dreamed of. Why not?”
Why not . . . ? Clifford found the unbridled enthusiasm of the extraordinary man that he had just met infectious. His mind soared with Morelli’s unbelievable cities as new, undreamed-of possibilities tumbled before his mind’s eye.
“And what about earth-moving?” he said. “You could move mountains maybe—literally. Resculpt the whole planet . . .”
“Move mountains? Resculpt planets?” Morelli’s voice rose to a resonant crescendo as he threw the vision out to infinity. “Think big, Brad! Move planets! Resculpt the Solar System! Do you know there’s an asteroid out there that’s reckoned to contain enough iron to meet the world’s needs at today’s rate for the next twenty thousand years? Cost a bomb to ship it back in worthless pieces though; so why not ship the whole thing back and break it up in our own back yard? Overpopulation problems? Break up another planet and park the bits in orbit round the Sun here, where it’s nice and warm; that’ll keep us going for a while. How do you break a planet up? Answer: gravitic engineering! You set up an unbalanced field around it that makes it spin faster until it pulls itself apart. Easy! Want me to go on?”
Clifford and Aub just sat and stared at him wide-eyed. Yes, it could all happen. As long as there were people with the vision and the will to make it happen, a new age of human achievement could come true. And perhaps the first hesitant steps toward such a future were already being taken right there at Sudbury at that very moment. Things that had been just dreams for centuries might come true because of what they were doing.