Ark

22

Holle said, “What?” Liu seemed quite calm. He even smiled. “Ms. Groundwater. Once, in my class, we were ruminating on a design problem that at the time seemed insuperable.”

“I-”

“The size of the warp bubble.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“On that occasion, you raised a question. Not a solution, but it provoked a chain of thought that ultimately led to a solution. It was a good question. Perhaps that is your particular talent.” His smile widened, encouraging. “Now would be a good time to ask that question again.”

Patrick said, “What the hell are you doing, Liu? What kind of pressure is that to put on a seventeen-year-old kid?”

“It’s OK, Dad,” Holle said, though it wasn’t OK, not at all. They were all staring at her, her father with anxiety and pride, Liu with intensity, Edward Kenzie with bafflement-Kelly with frank envy. She could feel her heart hammer, the blood sing in her ears. She thought she might faint. What a situation. Speak. Say the right thing. Or else in five years you’ll either be dead, or starving on a raft made of plastic trash. “It’s just something my father always said. If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.”

Liu Zheng closed his eyes and spoke rapidly. “Yes. OK. Now we have two apparently insuperable obstacles. First, the antimatter. We can’t make what we need. Then what’s the alternative to making it?”

Jerzy growled, “If you can’t make it, go find it. Mine it from somewhere.”

“Yes,” Liu said, nodding. “The question is, where and how? And second, the multiple launches. We don’t have the time to launch the Ark in fifteen pieces. Surely you are right about that, Colonel. Therefore we will have to send up a single package, a single launch, the whole Ark. Eighty people with everything to sustain them, and all the aspects of the ship’s propulsion system. All to be launched at once. How do you launch so much to orbit, in one shot?” He opened his eyes and started to hammer at the keypad in the tabletop before him.

Jerzy was smiling, a twisted gesture under his covered eye. “I see what you mean. Those are good questions. And I think I know where you can mine antimatter.”

Gordo had to grin. “Is this a setup? You old showboater.”

“I am younger than you, Colonel.”

“Where?”

And Jerzy said, “Jupiter and Io.”

Jupiter, a monstrous world with the mass of three hundred Earths, so huge it was almost a star. And Io, moon of Jupiter, circling so close to its bloated parent that tidal forces kneaded it into continual volcanism. As Io circled through Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field it created a “flux tube,” an electric current connecting Io to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, a current that gathered up charged particles and caused them to slam into the Jovian air.

Kelly, racing through material retrieved to the screen before her, saw the point quickly. “The flux tube is a natural particle collider.”

Jerzy said, “And as such it is a natural source of antimatter particles. Of course in nature such particles will annihilate with matter very quickly, but it is believed that some finish up in belts around Jupiter, analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts. And if they could be harvested-”

“How?” Gordo snapped.

“With some kind of superconducting magnetic scoop, possibly,” Liu said. “A ship with magnetic sails that could waft through the flux tube and filter out antiprotons. The amount of antimatter is small-only three or four tons of antimatter per hour are created by such processes across the solar system-but the amount we will need to harness is small too…”

And the discussion spun on as the scientists, running with the idea, explored the resources available through their computers. Even Kelly and Mel joined in, exhilarated to be released from the closure and intensity of the post-accident discussion.

Holle just sat back, bewildered. She tried to follow the swirling discussion, the bare outlines of a new mission strategy emerging from the heated speculation. Jupiter’s environment, saturated with radiation, was pretty lethal for humans. That plucky ramjet, swooping in around Io to filter out antiprotons, would have to be unmanned. But it might be controlled by a manned craft in a slow, remote orbit around Jupiter. So you would spend years in orbit, living in a tank, years in a place of huge, lethal energies where the sun was reduced to dimness, years waiting just to collect the antimatter needed to begin the mission proper. It seemed horrible to her, repellent, utterly inhuman. And yet, as the scientists talked, as Gordo let the discussion run on, this was the consensus that was emerging.

But how would you get to Jupiter in the first place?

For answer, Liu Zheng produced a video clip which he projected onto the big whiteboard at the front of the room. It was only half a minute long, and looped over and over. Scratchy, blurred, ghosted from having been copied across many formats, it showed an old man sitting in a rocking chair. He cradled some kind of model. It looked like an artillery shell, maybe a meter long, a third of a meter wide. The old man displayed the features of the gadget. That bullet-like cowl was made of fiberglass, and was pocked with holes where, it seemed, some kind of sensors had once been placed. At the base was a curved plate of aluminum, like a pie dish, or maybe an antenna. The dish was connected to the main body by a system of springs, a kind of suspension.

“This is how we may launch,” Liu said.

Jerzy Glemp cackled. “In a Jules Verne spaceship?”

“It has nothing to do with Verne,” said Liu. “But it is a spaceship-or a demonstration model of one.” He froze the image. “It was driven by explosives. You set off a charge under your pusher plate, there. The plate is driven up into the suspension system, which in turn pushes the main body forward. And you set off another charge, and another.” He mimed this with his hands, his curved left palm catching the imaginary detonations, the back of his hand pushing his right fist up in the air. “Boom, boom, boom. With this model, the charges were the size of golf balls.”

Gordo covered his face with his big hands. “Oh, shit, I heard of this. My father showed me a scratchy old film, of this thing put-putting into the air… What was it called?”

Edward Kenzie said, “Are you suggesting this might be the way to launch our Ark? What kind of explosions would you need?”

“Thermonuclear,” Liu said simply.

“Jesus Christ,” Kenzie said, and he looked at his daughter, horrified. “You’re seriously suggesting we load the last hope of mankind on top of a nuclear bomb?”

“Not just one bomb,” Liu said, unperturbed. “Several. A whole stream of them, thrown behind the pusher plate and detonated-”

“Project Orion,” Gordo snapped.

With that as the key, the others began digging into the electronic archives.

Holle quickly found that Orion had been run from 1957 to 1965 by General Atomic, a division of a company that had also built nuclear submarines and Atlas ICBMs. It was a time of extravagant dreams driven by the new technology of thermonuclear detonations, the energies of the sun brought down to Earth. One “dimensional analysis,” pushing the idea as far as possible, predicted that it would be possible to have sent humans to Saturn by 1970. She flashed the report to the whiteboard.

“This is serious stuff,” Kelly said, wondering. “They got support from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia. And look at all these technical papers: ‘A Survey of the Shock Absorber Problem.’ ‘Random Walk of Trajectory Due to Bomb Misplacement.’ Some of these are still classified!”

Gordo said, “So would this have worked?”

“You bet,” Mel Belbruno said. “I mean, you bet, sir. They never quite wrestled the technical details to the floor, as far as I can see. But the concept was surely sound. And they did fly a few demonstration models with conventional explosives.”

“So why weren’t we at Saturn by 1970?”

“Because,” Liu Zheng said, “to get to Saturn, you must first leave the Earth.”

Growing opposition to nuclear weapons through the 1960s caused the Orion concept to be viewed with suspicion. The final straw was an unwise presentation to President Kennedy of a model of a spaceborne Orion-technology battleship, bristling with nuclear missiles. Kennedy was disgusted.

“So the concept was mothballed. But it was never abandoned,” Liu said. “You will see that NASA later developed a successor design called ‘Extended Pulsed Plasma Propulsion,’ with a greater distance from weapons technology.”

“I guess it was always a good concept to have in the library,” said Gordo. “If you ever needed to get something big off of the Earth quickly.” He rubbed his eyes. “I think I remember a novel from when I was a kid. The aliens attack, and we use Orion to get at their mother ship. Footfall — something like that. Shame it isn’t a bunch of aliens we got to beat now. Xenobaths or newts or aquaphibians. By comparison, that would be easy.”

“There is, or was, a nuclear weapons plant close to Denver,” Jerzy Glemp said. “At Rocky Flats.”

Gordo laughed. “Why ain’t I surprised you know that? But if President Vasquez won’t back the idea of another antimatter factory in the middle of Denver, how do I get her to endorse building a whole fucking spaceship out of nuclear bombs?”

“And the fallout,” Patrick said earnestly. “If such a thing is launched anywhere in what’s left of the continental US-there is nowhere empty of people, certainly not in Colorado.”

Jerzy said grimly, “If we launch in 2040, or 2041, or 2042, that will no longer matter, Mr. Groundwater. And nor, I am afraid, will those left behind.”

The paramedic who monitored Jerzy had been following the discussion. Holle had never seen such bewilderment, such shock, on any human face, as they discussed spaceships driven by nuclear fire. Holle wondered if they had all gone insane.