The Fountains of Paradise

The photograph had been presented to Morgan on his fiftieth birthday, and it was one of his most cherished possessions. His colleagues had intended it as a sympathetic joke, Morgan's admiration for the greatest engineer of the nineteenth century being well known. There were times, however, when he wondered if their choice was more appropriate than they realised. The Great Eastern had devoured her creator. The Tower might yet do the same to him.

Brunel, of course, had been surrounded by Donald Ducks. The most persistent was one Doctor Dionysius Lardner, who had proved beyond all doubt that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic. An engineer could refute criticisms which were based on errors of fact or simple miscalculations. But the point that Donald Duck had raised was more subtle and not so easy to answer. Morgan suddenly recalled that his hero had to face something very similar, three centuries ago.

He reached for his small but priceless collection of genuine books, and pulled out the one he had read, perhaps, more often than any other – Rolt's classic biography Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Leafing through the well-thumbed pages, he quickly found the item that had stirred his memory.

Brunel had planned a railway tunnel almost three kilometres long – a "monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable" concept. It was inconceivable, said the critics, that human beings could tolerate the ordeal of hurtling through its Stygian depths. "No person would desire to be shut out from daylight with a consciousness that he had a superincumbent weight of earth sufficient to crush him in case of accident… the noise of two trains passing would shake the nerves… no passenger would be induced to go twice…"

It was all so familiar. The motto of the Lardners and the Bickerstaffs seemed to be: "Nothing shall be done for the first time."

And yet – sometimes they were right, if only through the operation of the laws of chance. Donald Duck made it sound so reasonable. He had begun by saying, in a display of modesty as unusual as it was spurious, that he would not presume to criticise the engineering aspects of the space elevator. He only wanted to talk about the psychological problems it would pose. They could be summed up in one word: Vertigo. The normal human being, he had pointed out, had a well-justified fear of high places; only acrobats and tightrope artistes were immune to this natural reaction. The tallest structure on earth was less than five kilometres high – and there were not many people who would care to be hauled vertically up the piers of the Gibraltar Bridge.

Yet that was nothing compared to the appalling prospect of the orbital tower. "Who has not stood," Bickerstaff declaimed, "at the foot of some immense building, staring up at its sheer precipitous face, until it seemed about to topple and fall? Now imagine such a building soaring on and on through the clouds, up into the blackness of space, through the ionosphere, past the orbits of all the great space-stations – up and up until it reaches a large fraction of the way to the moon! An engineering triumph, no doubt – but a psychological nightmare. I suggest that some people will go mad at its mere contemplation. And how many could face the vertiginous ordeal of the ride – straight upwards, hanging over empty space, for twenty-five thousand kilometres to the first stop at the Midway Station?

"It is no answer to say that perfectly ordinary individuals can fly in spacecraft to the same altitude, and far beyond. The situation then is completely different – as indeed it is in ordinary atmospheric flight. The normal man does not feel vertigo even in the open gondola of a balloon, floating through the air a few kilometres above the ground. But put him on the edge of a cliff at the same altitude, and study his reactions then!

"The reason for this difference is quite simple. In an aircraft, there is no physical connexion linking the observer and the ground. Psychologically, therefore, he is completely detached from the hard, solid earth far below. Falling no longer has terrors for him; he can look down upon remote and tiny landscapes which he would never dare to contemplate from any high elevation. That saving physical detachment is precisely what the space elevator will lack. The hapless passenger, whisked up the sheer face of the gigantic tower, will be all too conscious of his link with earth. What guarantee can there possibly be that anyone not drugged or anaesthetised could survive such an experience? I challenge Dr. Morgan to answer."

Dr. Morgan was still thinking of answers, few of them polite, when the screen lit up again with an incoming call. When he pressed the ACCEPT button, he was not in the least surprised to see Maxine Duval.

"Well, Van," she said, without any preamble, "what are you going to do?"

"I'm sorely tempted, but I don't think I should argue with that idiot. Incidentally, do you suppose that some aerospace organisation has put him up to it?"