Watching from the shade of a jacaranda tree and sipping cool drinks, Chase and the boy's parents applauded. On the other side of the placid water and beyond the terraced tiers of residential gardens they could see the cylindrical core, a polished shaft of fretted aluminum three hundred meters in diameter rising several thousand meters in the air.
Insects zoomed and ticked in the undergrowth; a butterfly wafted erratically by; somewhere a bird sang, claiming territory or looking for a mate.
'Did you teach him that?' Chase asked, watching the boy's bright head break the surface. His grandson leaped and twirled like a lithe brown seal.
'All the kids can dive like that,' Dan said. 'They don't need teaching. There's a kid in Nick's tutor group who can stay in the air so long you'd swear he was actually flying. I tried it once and went arse-over-tip and landed flat on my back. You need natural low-g coordination, which youngsters have and we don't. I'll stick to hang-gliding; at least there your earthbound conceptions and reflexes aren't violated.'
'I don't know about that,' Jo said archly, prodding him with her bare foot under the table. 'Your other earthbound reflexes adapted quite well.'
'Pure instinct,' Dan grinned. 'And of course the trampolinists' revised edition of the
Jo kicked him again, harder.
It was late afternoon and the mirrors were angled by computers to throw slanting rays that mimicked the setting sun. Three light planar mirrors, each ten kilometers by three, beamed the sunlight into the revolving island colony through huge transparent panels tinted blue to give the impression of a blue sky. As the day wore on the mirrors were tilted fractionally to give an approximation of the sun's path through a 180-degree arc and were then turned away for the eight-hour night. It seemed that human beings needed darkness.
Seen from a distance the colony had the appearance of a large silvery globe attached by tubular spokes to a doughnut. Here, inside the central globe, were the recreational areas, parklands, and, because of its reduced gravitational stress, the homes of the older residents. Its proper name was Globe City, though of course it was known to everyone as the Geriatric Gardens. Chase and Ruth had a five-room apartment here, just a few hundred yards from the lake. Being ten years younger than he, Ruth objected with a few well-chosen phrases to the popular description.
Five spokes, or thruways, connected the globe to the outlying torus: the encircling tube that housed the main population as well as the multilevel crop beds and animal farms.
At the topmost level in enclosed chambers, fishponds stocked with a wide variety of edible species filtered down and irrigated the lower levels, supplying waste effluent to the wheat, soybeans, vegetables, and forage below. Given the near-perfect conditions of sunlight, temperature, humidity, and nutrients--and a controlled supply of carbon dioxide--each of the seven-hundred-acre fields could produce seventeen hundred pounds of grain crops and forage a day, enough to feed a population of ninety-thousand people. The half-a-million fish stocks provided everyone with a ten-ounce fillet once a week.
Canton Island had originally comprised just the central globe, with living space for ten thousand people--the first settlers, who were scientists, technicians, engineers, and construction workers. The torus and connecting thruways had been added later, and indeed work was still going on to complete the external radiation shielding.
Nick ran up the shelving beach of white sand and jumped, wet and dripping, into Chase's lap.
'Take me to the flying fish. Take me, Grandad, please!'
'Nick, now stop that!' Jo reprimanded him sharply. She reached for her son and flashed a look at Dan, who gave a slight shrug.
'I think we're too late today, Nick,' said Chase with a rueful smile. 'They don't allow visitors after four o'clock. Some other time, okay?'
The experimental fish farms within the cylindrical core were a favorite and endlessly fascinating attraction for children and adults alike. There in zero-g, freed of gravity, which made their gills collapse, fish swam weightlessly through an atmosphere of 100 percent humidity, which kept them moist. To see them was almost dreamlike: fish 'flying' through the air.
They returned to the apartment, where Ruth and Jen were preparing a meal. Chase rode in his electric wheelchair, which the medics had insisted he use when traveling any distance. He detested the contraption, which made him feel old and senile, but reluctantly obeyed the decree because of his 'condition.' What that condition was precisely, nobody could agree on. Chase thought it might be anoxia, a legacy from the past that was only now rearing its ugly head; if so, nobody was prepared to admit it. One of the medical specialists, Dr. Weinbaum, was coming tomorrow to carry out more tests, and probably, Chase thought resignedly, to start him on yet another course of treatment.
Nick settled down to watch 'Psychic Space Cats' on TV, one of his favorite programs about a race of highly intelligent telepathic cats that had adventures on exotic worlds in distant galaxies. Chase hadn't yet figured out whether the cats were puppets, animated models, or the real thing, they were so amazingly lifelike.
'When's your next lunar trip?' Chase asked Dan as they were eating.
'Six weeks from now, October tenth,' Dan said. 'We're flying out to Censorinus where the new mass-driver is being installed. They're planning to lift seven thousand tons of graded ore for aluminum smelting. Hey--' he suddenly remembered '--the whole thing will be televised, so you'll have a chance to see it in operation.'
'Where's the ore being processed?' Ruth asked.
'The construction shack off Long Island.' Dan picked at a chicken leg. 'You know, we get enough oxygen as a by-product of the smelting process to sustain all the islands and to use as rocket propellant. About forty percent of lunar rocks are oxidized.'
The bulk of the building materials for the colonies had come from the moon: It was easier and cheaper to transport vast quantities of ore with the low-energy mass-driver from the lunar surface and process it in one of the four construction shacks that were reorbited in the vicinity of the island being built.
Each construction shack weighed over 10,000 tons, with a power plant of 3,000 tons, and housed 2,300 workers in 36 modules.
Currently a million tons a year were being mined, then launched into space and brought to the ring of colonies for processing. The mass-driver accelerated pods bearing forty-pound payloads of ore along a superconducting magnetic track--no wheels--on the lunar surface, traveling two miles in 3.4 seconds, at which speed the pods dropped away and the payloads achieved lunar escape velocity. For nearly two hundred miles, or two minutes of flight time, the payloads weren't high enough to clear the mountain ranges, which meant that the mass-driver had to be located in one of the broad flat plains, such as Censorinus, filled with lava three billion years ago.
Once in free flight the payloads continued to a target point 40,000 miles out in space. Two days after launch they arrived at the catcher, a storage craft 300 feet wide and a quarter of a mile long. There the payloads were caught in a rotating conical bag of nine-ply Kevlar fabric, the material used to make bulletproof vests that could stop a .44 magnum shell fired point-blank. Once full the catcher became an ore transporter and, like the huge supertankers on earth, began the long slow haul to the colonies 240,000 miles away.
Mercifully Dan didn't have to endure the weeks of tedium suffered by the crew of five. As one of the transport coordinators he was able to fly in, do his job, and return by fast passenger craft. The round trip usually took about three weeks.
Jen helped herself to more salad. 'Did any of you see the newscast last week of the shuttle from Emigrant Junction?' She shook her head, pensive and sad. 'Those poor people . . .'
Jo said, 'I thought conditions were so bad that no one outside an enclosure could remain alive, yet they keep coming. It has to end sometime.'
'It isn't the same everywhere,' Ruth said. Her smooth tan and the sweep of graying hair over her forehead successfully camouflaged the disfiguring scar. 'Some places have survived almost untouched. There was that story about the isolated village in the Philippines where the way of life had hardly changed.' 'Yes, I remember that,' Dan said sardonically. 'They were living off giant frogs. I wouldn't call that 'normal,' would you?'
'Oh--
'Sure it was,' Dan said, straight-faced. 'Frog quiche. Frog a la mode. Frog on toast. Frog Supreme. Frog--'
