Contact - Carl Sagan [126]
Yamagishi interrupted her train of thought to inform her that he was the oldest man in space. Ever. Even the former Chinese Vice Premier was younger. He removed his coat, rolled up his right sleeve, flexed his biceps, and asked her to feel his muscle. He was soon full of vivid and quantitative detail about the worthy charities to which he had been a major contributor.
She tried to make polite conversation. "It's very placid and quiet up here. You must be enjoying your retirement."
She had addressed this bland remark to Yamagishi, but Hadden replied.
"It's not entirely uneventful. Occasionally there's a crisis and we have to move fast."
"Solar flare, extremely bad. Make you sterile," Yamagishi volunteered.
"Yeah, if there's a major solar flare monitored by telescope, you have about three days before the charged particles hit the Chateau. So the permanent residents, like Yamagishi-san and me, we go to the storm shelter. Very spartan, very confined. But it has enough radiation shielding to make a difference. There's some secondary radiation, of course. The thing is, all the nonpermanent staff and visitors have to leave in the three-day period. That kind of an emergency can tax the commercial fleet. Sometimes we have to call in NASA or the Soviets to rescue people. You wouldn't believe who you flush out in solar-flare events- Mafiosi, heads of intelligence services, beautiful men and women…"
"Why do I get the feeling that sex is high on the list of imports from Earth?" she asked a little reluctantly.
"Oh, it is, it is. There's lots of reasons. The clientele, the location. But the main reason is zero g. In zero g you can do things at eighty you never thought possible at twenty. You ought to take a vacation up here- with your boyfriend. Consider it a definite invitation."
"Ninety," said Yamagishi. "I beg your pardon?"
"You can do things at ninety you didn't dream of at twenty. That's what Yamagishi-san is saying. That's why everyone wants to come up here."
Over coffee, Hadden returned to the topic of the Machine.
"Yamagishi-san and me are partners with some other people. He's the Honorary Chairman of the Board of Yamagishi Industries. As you know, they're the prime contractor for the Machine component testing going on in Hokkaido. Now imagine our problem. I'll give you a for-instance. There are three big spherical shells, one inside the other. They're made of a niobium alloy, they have peculiar patterns cut into them, and they're obviously designed to rotate in three orthogonal directions very fast in a vacuum. Benzels, they're called. You know all this, of course. What happens if you make a scale model of the three benzels and spin them very fast? What happens? All knowledgeable physicists think nothing will happen. But, of course, nobody's done the experiment. This precise experiment. So nobody really knows. Suppose something does happen when the full Machine is activated. Does it depend on the speed of rotation? Does it depend on the composition of the benzels? On the pattern of the cutouts? Is it a question of scale? So we've been building these things, and running them-scale models and full-scale copies, both. We want to spin our version of the big benzels, the ones that'll be mated to the other components in the two Machines. Suppose nothing happens then. Then we'd want to add additional components, one by one. We'd keep plugging them in, a small