And then, as everybody began to rise, he said, “Oh, one more thing. You’re all invited to the end-of-term party at my house. Don’t dress any differently than you do for class, and don’t bring any house gifts but yourselves. But do come. You’ll hurt my mother’s feelings if you don’t.”
One of the things that Ranjit liked best about his astronomy teacher—apart from such unexpected surprising joys as end-of-term parties—was that Dr. Vorhulst didn’t actually spend a lot of time in the normal practice of teaching. When, at the end of each session, Dr. Vorhulst told the class what the next session was going to be about, Vorhulst knew perfectly well that his hundred eagerly motivated space-cadets would look all that material up long before the next session started. (The few who hadn’t started out all that motivated—the ones who had entertained the false hope of a snap course and an easy A—either soon dropped or were reformed by the enthusiasm of their fellows.) Thus, each time, Dr. Vorhulst had that next session to play.
This time, however, Ranjit couldn’t hit the search engines right away. He had other obligations. First there was the terminally tedious hour and fifty minutes of philosophy to get through. Then came the quick gulping of a detestable sandwich and a lukewarm bag of some anonymous variety of juice, which was lunch, all swallowed in a hurry so he could get to the two o’clock bus that would take him to the library.
But just outside the lunchroom his seatmate in Astronomy 101 was standing with a few of his fellows, and he had news for Ranjit. “You didn’t hear what Dr. Vorhulst had promised for our next session? I was just telling my friends the news about it. The Artsutanov project, you know. Vorhulst says we might get the project built right here! In Sri Lanka! Because the World Bank’s just announced that it has received a request for financing a study of a Sri Lankan terminal!”
Ranjit was just opening his mouth to ask what all that meant when one of the others said, “But you said it might not pass, Jude.”
Jude looked suddenly brought down. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “It’s the damn Americans and the damn Russians and the damn Chinese that have all the power—and all the money, too. They’re just as likely as not to hold it up, because once you’ve got an Artsutanov lifter going, any damn little pipsqueak country in the world can have a space program of its own. Even us! And there goes their monopoly! Don’t you think?”
Ranjit was saved the embarrassment of not having an answer for that—indeed, of not having any really good idea of what Jude was talking about in the first place—by the Sinhalese group’s growing hunger. And then in the library—search engines working—Ranjit was soaking up information at a high rate of knots. The more he learned, the more he shared Jude’s excitement. That tough first step of getting from Earth’s surface to LEO? With an Artsutanov skyhook it was no problem at all!
True, feasibility studies were a long way from an actual car that you could hop into and have drawn at high speed up to low earth orbit, no million-liter oceans of explosive liquid propellant required. But it might happen. Probably would happen, sooner or later, and then even Ranjit Subramanian might be one of those lucky ones who would circle the moon and cruise among Jupiter’s satellites and perhaps even walk across the hopelessly dry deserts of Mars.
According to what the search engines turned up for Ranjit, as far back as 1895 Russia’s first thinker on space travel, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, got a look at Paris’s Eiffel Tower and then came up with his idea. A good way to get a spacecraft into orbit, he said, was to build a really tall tower with a built-in elevator and hike your ship up to the top before turning it loose to roam.
However, in 1960 a Leningrad engineer named Yuri Artsutanov read Tsiolkovsky’s book and quickly saw that the plan wouldn’t work. It was a lesson the ancient Egyptians had learned long ago—as had the Maya, a few thousand years later and on the other side of the world. The lesson was that there is a limit to how tall you can build a tower or a pyramid, and that limit is set by compression.
In a compression structure—which is to say, any structure that is built from the ground up—each level must support the weight of all the levels above it. That would be hundreds of kilometers of levels, to reach low earth orbit, and no imaginable structural material could support that weight without crumbling.
Artsutanov’s inspiration was to realize that compression was only one possible way to build a structure. Another equally viable way was tension.
A structure based on tension—one made up of cables attached to some orbiting body, for example—was a theoretically elegant but practically unattainable notion when considered from the point of view of an engineer who had only mid-twentieth-century materials to make the cables out of. But, Artsutanov contended, who was to say that the advanced cable materials that might be developed a few decades on wouldn’t be up to that challenge?
When at last Ranjit got himself to go to bed that night, he was smiling—and kept on smiling even in his sleep, because for the first time in quite a while he had found something that was really worth smiling about.
• • •
He was still smiling the next morning at breakfast, and was counting the hours (there would be almost a hundred and forty of them) until the next session of Astronomy 101. There was no doubt in Ranjit’s mind that his astronomy sessions were the brightest spots in his academic year….
That being so, why not change his major from math to astronomy?
He stopped chewing long enough to think that over, but not to any successful conclusion. There was something in his head that wouldn’t let him take the official step of giving up on math. Rightly or wrongly that felt too much like giving up on Fermat’s theorem.
On the other hand, it was pretty strange—as his guidance counselor had pointed out in the one session he had been willing to allow her—to be a math major who wasn’t taking any mathematics courses.
Ranjit knew what to do about that, and he had a whole free morning to do it in. As soon as the counselor was in her office, Ranjit was there to clear up his status with her, and by noon he was officially registered as a late entry into the course in basic statistics. Why statistics? Well, it was, after all, a kind of mathematics. But entering the class so late, how would that work? No problem, Ranjit assured the counselor; there was no undergraduate math course that he couldn’t pick up in no time at all. And so by lunchtime Ranjit had solved at least one of his problems, even though it was a problem he hadn’t really thought important enough to be worth solving. All in all, Ranjit attacked his boring lunch quite cheerfully.
Then things went bad.
Some fool had left the radio news on at high volume instead of the murmur of music the college students were willing to put up with at their meals. Nobody seemed to know how to turn it off, either.
Of course, it was inevitable that the principal news stories that day were exactly the sort of stories Ranjit didn’t want to hear, because that was pretty much all the world news there was.
Now that the news was on, however, Ranjit dutifully listened to it. Predictably the news was bad—all the little wars were still thriving, and new ones were being promised, just like always. And then the news turned to local Colombo stories. These were not of much interest to Ranjit, until one word caught his attention. The word was “Trincomalee.”
Then he gave the news his full attention. It seemed that a man from Trincomalee had been stopped because he had failed to give way in his old van to a police car with its siren going. (Actually the police in the car had been heading toward a place to eat lunch.) When they pulled him over, the police naturally looked around the van. That was when they caught him with a load of toasters, blenders, and other small domestic appliances, and no good explanation for how they came to be in his possession.