Lifeline

“You pointed that out a moment ago. We’re nearing self-sufficiency right now.” Brahms realized his voice remained bitter, although he should have felt triumphant about that.

McLaris brushed the comments aside. “You know what I’m talking about. The wall-kelp will keep you hanging on—us hanging on—barely surviving, even if we don’t do anything else. But you’re a closed system. If you want the colonies to grow—to expand and thrive—then we’ve got to do it in numbers. We’ve got to pool resources. You’ll never achieve that critical mass on your own—not even with the Kibalchich and the Aguinaldo thrown in.”

“So what?”

McLaris’s face seemed to jut through the holotank. “We’ve got the means to help right here on the Moon: heavy equipment, ore, smelters, the mass driver. We intend to get back on our feet. Throw in with us and bring back civilization.”

Brahms studied McLaris without emotion. His former division leader breathed heavily, his nostrils flared in excitement. Brahms couldn’t put his finger on what had lit such a spark in McLaris.

“Dammit, Duncan, you’re not giving a campaign speech. What the hell do you want?”

“I want to establish a direct, physical connection between the Moon and Orbitech 1.”

“How? You’ll never be able to get up here.”

“On the broadcasts showing Ramis and his Jump to the Kibalchich, your commentator announced that a new way had been discovered to draw the weavewire out quickly. Is there any limit to how long you can make it?”

Brahms began to get an idea of what McLaris was going to propose. For a moment, the thoughts distracted him. “Supposedly not.” Brahms furrowed his eyebrows, wondering if McLaris had knocked every screw in his head loose when he had crashed the Miranda. “Are you suggesting we have someone Jump down to Clavius Base? That’s ridiculous.”

“No, but you’ve got the general idea.” His eyes glittered on the holotank image. “We’ve come up with a stable orbit from L-5 direct to the Moon. Here, I’ll flash up some graphics.” McLaris nodded to someone out of sight of the holotransmitter. A diagram of the Moon, the two Lagrange points sixty degrees on either side, and the Earth, replaced his image. A bright dot pulsed at L-5. McLaris’s voice came over the graphic.

“If you can ballistically shoot out a line of weavewire from Orbitech 1 with the proper initial conditions, it will be forced to follow the ‘orbit’ you see on the display.” A bright yellow line left L-5 and began inching toward the Moon. “It’ll impact the Moon, and if we can catch it, we’ll establish a sort of lifeline cable between L-5 and Clavius Base—just like you’ve made between yourselves and the Kibalchich.

The graphics dissolved into McLaris’s face again. He appeared more excited. “Our original idea was to make a kind of Clarke elevator, or Artsutanov’s elevator, or whoever you want to give the credit to. But we found that wouldn’t be stable. If we tried to hold onto the weavewire, the impact signal would propagate back up to Orbitech 1, setting off nonlinear oscillations.” McLaris smiled engagingly. “At least, those are the words my engineers told me to say.”

Brahms had to admire him for his talent, though he resented being manipulated.

McLaris held up a finger. “But, if we caught the weavewire just after it hit the surface, we could attach some sort of capsule—a cargo container or elevator car, depending on how you want to look at it—and you could start hauling the wire back up to Orbitech 1.”

“Like a giant yo-yo,” Brahms said, getting the idea. “No, more like a fishhook—we cast the line down, you hook the fish on, and we haul it in.”

He became more and more frustrated inside as he felt how important McLaris’s idea could really be for their survival. Damn him again!

“Exactly! I can have some of my people talk to yours to work out the details. But the idea is so simple that even without a huge industrial base we can do this. Compared to building an actual spaceship, this would be like hammering together a wooden horse cart instead of fabricating a sports car, but it will work.”

McLaris’s eyes remained bright, and he kept speaking as if he was afraid Brahms would jump into the time lag. “Do you understand, Curtis? If this works, we can move between the colonies and the Moon. Think of what we can accomplish!”

Brahms felt the potentials rushing through his mind. It was the kind of idea he himself would dream up—grandiose and full of challenge, and with a huge payoff.

It would mean an end to the old ways—the thought of future RIFs could be thrown away forever. They had hope—a glimmer of a solid future, in McLaris’s words.

So why did that distress him? Brahms couldn’t put his finger on the anxiety it caused.

“Wait a minute. You can reel people up here, but how do you get them back down to the Moon?