The Complete Mars Trilogy. Kim Stanley Robinson
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biggest of them all. Currently the rooms that were finished were crowded with Praxis executives, or executives of some of the other transnationals who had subcontracts on the elevator project; among them representatives of Amex, Oroco, Subarashii, and Mitsubishi. And all their efforts were being coordinated by Phyllis, who was now apparently Helmut Bronski’s assistant in charge of the operation.
Helmut too was there, and after John had greeted him and Phyllis, and been introduced to some of the visiting consultants, he was led into a big high room with a window wall. Outside the window swirled clouds of dark orange dust dropping down into the caldera, so that it seemed that the room ascended, uncertainly, in a dim fluctuating light.
The room’s only furnishing was a globe of Mars one meter in diameter, resting waist-high on a blue plastic stand. Extending from the globe, specifically from the little bump that represented Pavonis Mons, was a silver wire about five meters long. At the end of the thread was a small black dot. The globe was rotating on the stand at about one rpm, and the silver wire and its terminating black dot rotated with it, always remaining above Pavonis.
A group of about eight people ringed this display. “Everything is to scale,” Phyllis said. “The areosynchronous satellite distance is 20,435 kilometers from the center of mass, and the equatorial radius is 3,386 kilometers, so the distance from the surface to the areosynchronous point is 17,049 kilometers; double that and add the radius, and you have 37,484 kilometers. We’ll have a ballast rock at the far end, so the actual cable won’t have to be quite as long. The diameter of the cable will be about ten meters, and will weigh about six billion tons. The material for it will have been mined from its terminal ballast point, which will be an asteroid that starts at around thirteen and a half billion tons, and ends up when the cable is finished at the proper ballast weight of around seven and a half billion tons. That’s not a very big asteroid, about two kilometers in radius to begin with; there are six Amor asteroids crossing Mars’s orbit that have been identified as candidates for the job. The cable will be manufactured by robots mining and processing the carbon in the asteroid’s chondrites. Then, in the last stages of construction, the cable will be maneuvered to its tethering point, here.” She pointed at the floor of the room in dramatic fashion. “At that point, the cable will be in areosynchronous orbit itself, barely touching down here, its weight suspended between the pull of the planet’s gravity and the centrifugal force of the upper half of the cable, and the terminal ballast rock.”
“What about Phobos?” John asked.
“Phobos is way down there, of course. The cable will be vibrating to avoid it, in what the designers call a Clarke oscillation. It won’t be a problem. Deimos will also have to be avoided by oscillation, but because its orbit is more inclined this won’t be such a frequent problem.”
“And when it’s in position?” Helmut asked, his face bright with pleasure.
“A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system. There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimized. It will also be possible to use the cable’s rotation as a slingshot; objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars’s rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed take-off. It’s a clean, efficient, extraordinarily cheap method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it toward Earth. And given the recent discoveries of strategic metals, which are becoming ever more scarce on Earth, a cheap lift and push like this is literally invaluable. It creates the possibility of an exchange that wasn’t economically viable before; it will be a critical component of the Martian economy, the keystone of its industry. And it won’t be that expensive to build. Once a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread. There will be very little to do but wait. The cable plant as designed will be able to produce over three thousand kilometers of cable a year – this means we need to start as soon as possible, but after production begins, it will only take ten or eleven years. And the wait will be well worth it.”
John stared at Phyllis, impressed as always by her fervor. She was like a convert giving witness, a preacher in a pulpit, quietly and confidently triumphant. The miracle of the skyhook. Jack and the Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculous to it. “Really, we don’t have much choice,” Phyllis was saying. “This gets us out of our gravity well, eliminating it as a physical and economic problem. That’s crucial; without that we’ll be bypassed, we’ll be like Australia in the nineteenth century, too far away to be a significant part of the world economy. People will pass us by and mine the asteroids directly, because the asteroids have mineral wealth without gravitational constraints. Without the elevator we could become a backwater.”
Shikata ga nai, John thought sardonically. Phyllis glanced very briefly at John, as if he had spoken aloud. “We won’t let that happen,” she said. “And best of all, our elevator will serve as an experimental prototype for a Terran one. The transnational who gain expertise in building this elevator will be in a commanding position when it comes to bidding the contracts for the much larger Terran project that is sure to follow.”
On and on she went, outlining every aspect of the plan, and then answering questions from the executives with her usual polished brilliance. She got a lot of laughs; she was flushed, bright-eyed, John could almost see the tongues of fire flickering from her mass of auburn hair, which in the storm light looked like a cap of jewels. The executives and project scientists glowed under her look; they were onto something big, and they knew it. Earth was seriously depleted in many of the metals they were finding on Mars. There were fortunes to be made, enormous fortunes. And someone who owned a piece of the bridge over which every ounce of metal had to pass would make an enormous fortune as well, probably the greatest fortune of all. No wonder Phyllis and the rest of them looked like they were in church.
Before dinner that evening John stood in his bathroom, and without looking at himself in the mirror took out two tabs of omegendorph and swallowed them. He was sick of Phyllis. But the drug made him feel better; she was just another part of the game, after all; and when he sat down to dinner he was in an expansive mood. Okay, he thought; they have their gold mine of a beanstalk. But it wasn’t clear that they would be able to keep it to themselves; highly unlikely in fact. So that their fat-cat complacency was a bit silly, as well as grating, and he laughed in the middle of one of their enthusiastic exchanges and said, “Don’t you think it unlikely that an elevator like this will stay private property?”
“We don’t intend for it to be private property,” Phyllis said with her brilliant smile.
“But you expect to be paid for its construction. And then you expect concessions to be granted. You expert to make a profit from the venture, isn’t that what venture capitalism is all about?”
“Well, of course,” Phyllis said, looking offended that he had spoken of such things so explicitly. “Everyone on Mars will profit from it, that’s its nature.”
“And you’ll skim a percentage of every percentage.” Predators at the top of the chain. Or else parasites, up and down the length of it… “How rich did the builders of the Golden Gate Bridge get, do you think? Were there great transnational dynasties formed from the profits of the Golden Gate Bridge? No. It was a public project, wasn’t it. The builders were public employees, making a standard wage for their work. What do you want to bet that the Mars treaty doesn’t stipulate a similar arrangement for infrastructural construction here? I’m pretty sure it does.”
“But the treaty is up for revision in nine years,” Phyllis pointed out, her eyes glittering.
John laughed. “So it is! But you wouldn’t believe the support I see around this planet for a revised treaty that sets even tighter limits on Terran investment and profit. You just haven’t been paying attention. The thing you have to remember is that this is an economic system being built from scratch, on principles that make sense in scientific terms. There’s only a limited carrying capacity here, and to create a sustainable society we’ve got to pay attention to that. You can’t just lift raw materials from here