“I like the looks of that fellow Berkeley.”
“That’s good; he’s your twin brother from now on. Stop worrying; I’ve used him before. You’ll think you’re living in a well-run hospital. By the way, where do you live?”
“At a boarding house in the Springs.”
“That’s ridiculous. And you don’t even have a place here to sleep?” Harriman reached over to Coster’s desk, got through to Berkeley. “Jock—get a suite for Mr. Coster at the Broadmoor, under a phony name.”
“Right.”
“And have this stretch along here adjacent to his office fitted out as an apartment.”
“Right. Tonight.”
“Now, Bob, about the Moon ship. Where do we stand?”
They spent the next two hours contentedly running over the details of the problem, as Coster had laid them out. Admittedly very little work had been done since the field was leased but Coster had accomplished considerable theoretical work and computation before he had gotten swamped in administrative details. Harriman, though no engineer and certainly not a mathematician outside the primitive arithmetic of money, had for so long devoured everything he could find about space travel that he was able to follow most of what Coster showed him.
“I don’t see anything here about your mountain catapult,” he said presently.
Coster looked vexed. “Oh, that! Mr. Harriman, I spoke too quickly.”
“Huh? How come? I’ve had Montgomery’s boys drawing up beautiful pictures of what things will look like when we are running regular trips. I intend to make Colorado Springs the spaceport capital of the world. We hold the franchise of the old cog railroad now; what’s the hitch?”
“Well, it’s both time and money.”
“Forget money. That’s my pidgin.”
“Time then. I still think an electric gun is the best way to get the initial acceleration for a chem-powered ship. Like this—” He began to sketch rapidly. “It enables you to omit the first step-rocket stage, which is bigger than all the others put together and is terribly inefficient, as it has such a poor mass-ratio. But what do you have to do to get it? You can’t build a tower, not a tower a couple of miles high, strong enough to take the thrusts—not this year, anyway. So you have to use a mountain. Pikes Peak is as good as any; it’s accessible, at least.
“But what do you have to do to use it? First, a tunnel in through the side, from Manitou to just under the peak, and big enough to take the loaded ship—”
“Lower it down from the top,” suggested Harriman.
Coster answered, “I thought of that. Elevators two miles high for loaded space ships aren’t exactly built out of string, in fact they aren’t built out of any available materials. It’s possible to gimmick the catapult itself so that the accelerating coils can be reversed and timed differently to do the job, but believe me, Mr. Harrima; it will throw you into other engineering problems quite as great . . . such as a giant railroad up to the top of the ship. And it still leaves you with the shaft of the catapult itself to be dug. It can’t be as small as the ship, not like a gun barrel for a bullet. It’s got to be considerably larger; you don’t compress a column of air two miles high with impunity. Oh, a mountain catapult could be built, but it might take ten years—or longer.”
“Then forget it. We’ll build it for the future but not for this flight. No, wait—how about a surface catapult. We scoot up the side of the mountain and curve it up at the end?”
“Quite frankly, I think something like that is what will eventually be used. But, as of today, it just creates new problems. Even if we could devise an electric gun in which you could make that last curve—we can’t, at present— the ship would have to be designed for terrific side stresses and all the additional weight would be parasitic so far as our main purpose is concerned, the design of a rocket ship.”
“Well, Bob, what is your solution?”
Coster frowned. “Go back to what we know how to do—build a step rocket.”
CHAPTER FIVE