The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [53]
24
The Finger of God
D endrobium macarthiae usually flowered with the coming of the southwest monsoon, but this year it was early. As Johan Rajasinghe stood in his orchid house admiring the intricate violet-pink blossoms, he remembered that last season he had been trapped by a torrential downpour for half an hour while examining the first blooms.
He looked anxiously at the sky. No, there was little danger of rain. It was a beautiful day, with thin, high bands of cloud moderating the fierce sunlight. But that was odd. . . .
Rajasinghe had never seen anything quite like it before. Almost vertically overhead, the parallel lanes of cloud were broken by a curious circular disturbance. It appeared to be a tiny cyclonic storm, only a few kilometers across, but it reminded Rajasinghe of something completely different—a knothole breaking through the grain of a smoothly planed board.
He abandoned his beloved orchids and stepped outside to get a better view of the phenomenon. Now he could see that the small whirlwind was moving slowly across the sky, the track of its passage clearly marked by the distortion of the cloud lanes.
One could easily imagine that the finger of God was reaching down from heaven, tracing a furrow through the clouds. Even Rajasinghe, who understood the basics of weather control, had no idea that such precision was now possible; but he could take modest pride in the fact that, almost forty years ago, he had played his part in its achievement.
It had not been easy to persuade the surviving superpowers to relinquish their orbital fortresses and to hand them over to the Global Weather Authority, in what was—if the metaphor could be stretched that far—the last and most dramatic example of beating swords into plowshares. Now the lasers that had once threatened mankind directed their beams into carefully selected portions of the atmosphere, or onto heat-absorbing target areas in remote regions of the earth. The energy they contained was trifling compared with that of the smallest storm; but so is the energy of the falling stone that triggers an avalanche, or the single neutron that starts a chain reaction.
Beyond that, Rajasinghe knew nothing of the technical details, except that they involved networks of monitoring satellites, and computers that held within their electronic brains a complete model of the earth’s atmosphere, land surfaces, and seas. He felt rather like an awe-struck savage, gaping at the wonders of some advanced technology, as he watched the little cyclone move purposefully into the west, until it disappeared below the graceful line of palms just inside the ramparts of the pleasure gardens.
He glanced up at the invisible engineers and scientists racing around the world in their man-made heavens.
“Very impressive,” he said. “But I hope you know exactly what you’re doing.”
25
Orbital Roulette
“I should have guessed,” said the banker ruefully, “that it would be in one of those technical appendices that I never looked at. And now that you’ve seen the whole report, I’d like to know the answer. You’ve had me worrying ever since you raised the problem.”
“It’s brilliantly obvious,” Morgan answered, “and I should have thought of it myself.”
And I would have—eventually—he told himself with a fair degree of confidence. In his mind’s eye he saw again those computer simulations of the whole immense structure, twanging like a cosmic violin string, as the hours-long vibrations raced from Earth to orbit and were reflected back again. Superimposed on that he replayed from memory, for the hundredth time, the scratched movie of the dancing bridge. There were all the clues he needed.
“Phobos sweeps past the Tower every eleven hours and ten minutes, but luckily it isn’t moving in exactly the same plane—or we’d have a collision every time it went around. It misses on most revolutions, and the danger times are exactly predictable—to a thousandth of a second, if desired.
“Now the elevator, like any piece of engineering, isn’t a completely rigid structure. It has natural vibration periods,