The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [22]
He released the PAUSE button on the projector, and the frozen statue came instantly to life.
“My name is Vannevar Morgan. I am Chief Engineer of Terran Construction’s Land Division. My last project was the Gibraltar Bridge. Now I want to talk about something incomparably more ambitious.”
Rajasinghe glanced around the room. Morgan had hooked them, just as he had expected.
He leaned back in his chair and waited for the now familiar, yet still almost unbelievable, prospectus to unfold. Odd, he thought, how quickly one accepted the conventions of the display, and ignored quite large errors of the TILT and LEVEL controls. Even the fact that Morgan “moved” while staying in the same place, and the totally false perspective of exterior scenes, failed to destroy the sense of reality.
“The Space Age is almost two hundred years old. For more than half that time, our civilization has been utterly dependent upon the host of satellites that now orbit the earth.
“Global communications, weather forecasting and control, land and ocean resources, banks, postal and information services—if anything happened to their spaceborne systems, we would sink back into a dark age. During the resultant chaos, disease and starvation would destroy much of the human race.
“And looking beyond the Earth, now that we have self-sustaining colonies on Mars, Mercury, and the moon, and are mining the incalculable wealth of the asteroids, we see the beginnings of true interplanetary commerce. Though it took a little longer than the optimists predicted, it is now obvious that the conquest of the air was only a modest prelude to the conquest of space.
“But now we are faced with a fundamental problem, an obstacle that stands in the way of all future progress. Although the research work of generations has made the rocket the most reliable form of propulsion ever invented . . .”
“Has he considered bicycles?” muttered Sarath.
“. . . space vehicles are still grossly inefficient. Even worse, their effect on the environment is appalling. Despite all attempts to control approach corridors, the noise of take-off and re-entry disturbs millions of people. Exhaust products dumped in the upper atmosphere have triggered climatic changes, which may have very serious results. Everyone remembers the skin-cancer crisis of the twenties, caused by ultraviolet breakthrough—and the astronomical cost of the chemicals needed to restore the ozonosphere.
“Yet if we project traffic growth to the end of the century, we find that earth-to-orbit tonnage must be increased almost fifty percent. This cannot be achieved without intolerable costs to our way of life—perhaps to our very existence. And there is nothing that the rocket engineers can do. They have almost reached the absolute limits of performance, set by the laws of physics.
“What is the alternative? For centuries, men have dreamed of antigravity and of ‘spacedrives.’ No one has ever found the slightest hint that such things are possible; today we believe that they are only fantasy.
“In the very decade that the first satellite was launched, however, one daring Russian engineer conceived a system that would make the rocket obsolete. It was years before anyone took Yuri Artsutanov seriously. It has taken two centuries for our technology to match his vision.”
Each time he played the recording, it seemed to Rajasinghe that Morgan really came alive at this point. It was easy to see why; now he was on his own territory, no longer relaying information from an alien field of expertise. And despite all his reservations and fears, Rajasinghe could not help sharing some of that enthusiasm. It was a quality that, nowadays, seldom impinged upon his life.
“Go out of doors any clear night,” continued Morgan, “and you will see that commonplace wonder of our age—the stars that never rise or set, but are fixed motionless in the sky. We, and our parents, and their parents have long taken for granted