Where I Wasn't Going Part 4

Several of the rivers were operating to provide fish and other marine delicacies as part of the experiment to determine the best way of converting algae to food in a palatable form.

Within, the rivers were lighted fluorescently--an apparent anomaly that was due to the fact that the problems of shielding marine life from direct sunlight in such a shallow medium had not yet been worked out; while the opaque plastic that walled the laboratories within the rivers was a concession to their strength, since the clear plastic that would have provided aquarium walls for the lab and complete inspection for a constant and overall check of the ecological experiments had been overruled by U.N. Budget Control. Portholes at various spots made the seaquariums visible from any part of the rim, but in Dr. Millie's laboratory alone were the large panels of clear plastic that gave a real view into the rivers.

This ecological maze of rivers and eddies and balance tanks; of air jets and current and micro-life; of spin-rate-control and shielding, were all keyed to servo-regulated interdependence that for this self-contained world replaced the stability achieved in larger ecologies through survival mechanisms.

Within the maze, existing by it and contributing to it, were the laboratories concerned with other things, but surrounded by the waters that had made life's beginnings possible on Earth, and the continuance of life possible in s.p.a.ce. Man might some day live in s.p.a.ce almost totally without water, but for now they had brought a bit of the mother waters with them.

Sitting in complacent control of these overall complexities that must be met with automatic accuracy was the Starrett a.n.a.logue/Digital Computer, Optical Wave type 44-63, irreverently referred to by the acronymically-minded as Sad Cow, though more frequently as the Sacred Cow, or simply Cow.

Most of the computer's intricate circuits were hidden behind the bulkhead in a large compartment between the control center and the south polar lock; but it was from this console in the control center that her operation was keyed.

From this position, every function of the wheel was ordered.

This was the bridge.

s.p.a.ced equally around its thirty-two-foot ring-shaped floor were the computer's console where Bessie presided; the com center in charge of Communications Officer Clark; and the command console where Captain Naylor Andersen, commanding officer of s.p.a.ce Lab One had his formal, though seldom-occupied post.

At the moment, Nails Andersen was present, black cigar clamped firmly between his teeth; hamlike Norwegian hands maneuvering a pencil, he was making illegible notes on a sc.r.a.p of paper--illegible to others because they were in his own form of shorthand that he had worked out over the years as he tried to make penciled notes as fast as his racing mind worked out their details.

Whether Nails were politician or scientist would be hard to say.

Certainly his rise through the ranks of U.N. Bureaus had been rapid; certainly in this rise he had been political, with the new brand of politics that men were learning--world, rather than national politics.

Certainly, also, he was a scientist; and certainly he had used his political abilities on the behalf of science, pushing and slashing at red-tape barriers.

Nails was more than most responsible for the very existence of U.N.

s.p.a.ce Lab One, and Project Hot Rod besides. He was also a sponsor of many other projects, both those that had been done and those that were yet to be done.

The justification of a s.p.a.ce project in these times was difficult indeed; for no longer could nations claim military superiority as a main reason for pushing forward across the barriers of the inner marches of s.p.a.ce; for spending billions in taxes in experimental research. For a project to achieve reality now, it must have benefits, visible benefit, for the majority of mankind. It must have a _raison d'etre_ that had nothing of a military flavor. And occasionally Nails had been hard put to explain why, to people who did not understand; to explain his feeling that men must expand or die; that from a crowded planet there could be only one frontier, and that an expansion outward into s.p.a.ce.

Of course there were, Nails admitted to himself, other frontiers. The huge basin of the Amazon had been by-pa.s.sed and ignored by man, and quite possibly would be in the future as well. The oceans, covering seventy-five per cent of Earth's surfaces also presented a challenge to man, and the possibility of a new frontier of conquest.

But these did not present the limitless frontier for expansion offered by s.p.a.ce. Men must look upon them as only temporary challenges, and cherish them as remaining problems, never to be solved for fear of a loss of the problem itself.

Yet s.p.a.ce was different. Here man's explorations could touch upon infinities that were beyond comprehension, into that limitless void man could plunge ever outward for thousands of generations without ever reaching a final goal or solving a last problem. Here was a frontier worthy of any man, against which the excess energies of a warrior spirit might be expended without harm to their fellows.

To open a crack in this frontier was Nails' supreme goal, because, once opened, men need never fight again amongst themselves for lack of a place to go or a thing to do.

s.p.a.ce Lab One had been in spin for two days.

On Earth, TV viewers no longer demanded twenty-four hours of Lab newscasts, and were returning to their normal cycles of Meet the Press, the Doctor's Dilemma, and the Lives of Lucy, and other juicier items of the imagination that, now that their lab was a functioning reality, seemed far more exciting than the pictures of the interminably spinning wheel and the interviews with scientists aboard that had filled their screens during the spin-out trial period.

On the wheel itself, life was settling into a pattern, with comments about being able to stand upright becoming old hat.

In rim sector A-9, Dr. Claude Lavalle's birds and beasts had adapted themselves to the light gravity; and their biological mentor had evolved feeding, watering, and cleaning methods that were rapidly becoming efficient.

Next door, Dr. Millie Williams' FARM had survived the "take-off" and the plants, grateful for their new, although partial gravity, were now stretching themselves towards the overhead fluorescents in a rather fantastic attempt to imitate the early growing stages of Jack's famous beanstalk.

In the machine shop, Paul Chernov carefully inspected the alignment of the numeric controlled laser microbeam milling and boring machine, brought it to a focus on a work piece, and pressed an activation switch that started the last pattern of tiny capillary holes in the quartz on which he was working. In moments the pattern was completed.

Gently removing the work piece from its mounting, he turned to the open double bulkhead that served as an air lock in emergencies and that separated his shop from the physics lab beyond, where Dr. Y. Chi Tung, popularly known as Ishie, was busy over a haywire rig, Chief Engineer Mike Blackhawk and Tombu beside him.

Reverently, Dr. Chi took the part from Paul's hands. "A thousand ancestral blessings," he said. "Confusion say the last piece is the most honored for its ability to complete the gadget, and this is it.

"Of course," he added, "Confusion didn't say whether it would work or not."

"What does the gadget do?" asked Paul.

"Um-m-m. As the European counterpart of Confusion, Dr. Heisenberg might have explained it, this is a device to confuse confusion by aligning certainties and creating uncertainties in the protons of this innocent block of plastic." The round, saffron-hued Chinese face looked at Paul solemnly.

"As the good Dr. Heisenberg stated, there is a principle of confusion or uncertainty as to the exact whereabouts of things on the atomic level, which cannot be rendered more exact due to disturbance caused by the investigation of its whereabouts. My humble attempt is to secure a sufficiently statistical sample of aligned protons to obtain data on the distortion of the electron orbits caused by an external electrostatic field, thus rendering my own uncertainties more susceptible of a.n.a.lysis in a statistical manner."

Suddenly he grinned. "It's a take-off," he said, "from the original experiments in magnetic resonance back in '46.

"The fields generated in these coils are strong enough to process all the protons so that their axis of spin is brought into alignment. At this point, the plastic could be thought of as representing a few billion tiny gyroscopes all lined up together.

"Matter of fact," he said in an aside, "if you want a better explanation of that effect, you might look up the maintenance manual on the proton gyroscopes that Sad Cow uses. Or the manuals for the M.R. a.n.a.lyzer in the chem lab. Or the magnetometer we use to keep a check on Earth's magnetic field.

"So far, about the same thing.

"What I'm trying to do is place radio frequency fields and electrostatic fields in conjunction with the D.C. magnetic field, so as to check out the effect of stretching the electron orbits of the hydrogen atoms in predictable patterns.

"I picked this place for it, because it was as far away from Earth's field as I could get. And Mike, when I get ready to test this thing, I'm going to pray to my ancestors and also ask you to turn off as many magnetic gadgets as you safely can."

Mike was squatting on his heels by the haywire rig, built into what looked suspiciously like a cha.s.sis extracted from one of the standard control consoles of the communication department.

Reaching gingerly in through the haywire ma.s.s of cables surrounding the central components, he pointed to one of the coils and exclaimed in the tones of a Sherlock Holmes, "Ah-ha, my dear Watson! I have just located the final clue to my missing magnaswedge. I suppose you know the duty cycle on those coils is only about 0.01?"

"Not after I finished with them!" Ishie grinned unrepentant. "Besides, I don't want to squash anything in the field. I just want a nice, steady field of a reasonable magnitude. As Confusion would say, he who squashes small object may unbalance great powers."

While he talked, Ishie had been busy inserting the carefully machined piece of quartz plate that Chernov had brought, into a conglomeration of gla.s.sware that looked like a refugee from the chem lab, and flipped a switch that caused a glowing coil inside a pyrex boiler to heat a small quant.i.ty of water, which must escape through the carefully machined capillary holes in the plate he had just installed. Each jet would pa.s.s through two grids, and on towards a condenser arrangement from which the water would be recirculated into the boiler by a small pump which was already beginning to churkle to itself.

"O.K.," Mike said. "I dig the magnetic resonance part. And how you're using the stolen coils. But what's this gadget?" and he pointed to the maze of gla.s.s and gla.s.s tubing.

"Oh. Permit me to introduce Dr. Ishie's adaptation of a French invention of some years previous, which permits the development of high voltages by the application of heat to the evaporation of a fluid medium such as water--of which we have plenty aboard and you won't miss the little that I requisitioned--causing these molecules to separate and pa.s.s at high speed through these various grids, providing electrostatic potentials in their pa.s.sage which can be added quite fantastically to produce the necessary D.C. field which...."

As he spoke, Mike's finger moved nearer a k.n.o.b-headed bolt that seemed to be one of the two holding the gla.s.s device to its mounting board, and an inch and a half spark spat forth and interrupted the dissertation with a loud "Yipe!"

"Confusion say," Ishie continued as Mike stuck his finger in his mouth, "he who point finger of suspicion should be careful of lurking dragons!

"Anyhow, that's what it does. There are two thousand separate little grids, each fed by its capillary jet, and each grid provides about ninety volts."

Tombu took the opportunity to inquire, "Have you got that RF field-phase generator under control yet?" He pointed to still another section of the cha.s.sis.

"Oh, yes." The physicist nodded. "See, I have provided a feedback circuit to co-ordinate the pick-up signal with the three-phase RF output. The control must be precise. Can't have it skipping around or we don't get a good alignment."