The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [56]
It was fortunate for Morgan that, in this age of computer-assisted decisions, even a World Court ruling could be obtained in a matter of weeks. Naturally, the vihara had protested. Morgan had argued that a brief scientific experiment, conducted on grounds outside the temple premises, and resulting in no noise, pollution, or other form of interference, could not possibly constitute a tort. If he was prevented from carrying it out, all his earlier work would be jeopardized, he would have no way of checking his calculations, and a project vital to the Republic of Mars would receive a severe setback.
It was a plausible argument, and Morgan had believed most of it himself. So had the judges, by five to two. Though they were not supposed to be influenced by such matters, mentioning the litigious Martians was a clever move. The R.o.M. already had three complicated cases in progress, and the Court was somewhat tired of establishing precedents in interplanetary law.
But Morgan knew, in the coldly analytical part of his mind, that his action was not dedicated by logic alone. He was not a man who accepted defeat gracefully; the gesture of defiance gave him a certain satisfaction. Yet at a deeper level he rejected this petty motivation; such a schoolboy gesture was unworthy of him. What he was really doing was building up his self-assurance, and reaffirming his belief in ultimate success. Though he did not know how or when, he was proclaiming to the world, and to the stubborn monks within their ancient walls: “I shall return.”
Ashoka Station controlled virtually all communications, meteorology, environmental monitoring, and space traffic in the Hindu-Cathay region. If it ever ceased to function, a billion lives would be threatened with disaster and, if its services were not quickly restored, death. No wonder that Ashoka had two completely independent subsatellites, Bhaba and Sarabhai, a hundred kilometers away. If some unthinkable catastrophe destroyed all three stations, Kinte and Imhotep to the west or Confucius to the east could take over on an emergency basis. The human race had learned, from harsh experience, not to put all its eggs in one basket.
There were no tourists, vacationers, or transit passengers here, so far from earth. They did their business and sightseeing only a few thousand kilometers out, and left the high geosynchronous orbit to the scientists and engineers—not one of whom had ever before visited Ashoka on so unusual a mission, or with such unique equipment.
The key to Project Gossamer now floated in one of the station’s medium-sized docking chambers, awaiting the final checkout before launch. There was nothing spectacular about it, and its appearance gave no hint of the man-years and the millions in money that had gone into its development.
The dull-gray cone, four meters long and two meters across the base, appeared to be made of solid metal. It required a close examination to reveal the tightly wound fiber covering the entire surface. Indeed, apart from an internal core, and the strips of plastic interleaving that separated the hundreds of layers, the cone was made of nothing but a tapering hyperfilament thread—forty thousand kilometers of it.
Two obsolete and totally different technologies had been revived for the construction of that unimpressive gray cone. Some three hundred years ago, submarine telegraphs had started to operate across the ocean beds. Men had lost fortunes before they had mastered the art of coiling thousands of kilometers of cable and playing it out at a steady rate from continent to continent, despite storms and all the other hazards of the sea.
Then, just a century later, some of the first primitive guided weapons had been controlled by fine wires spun out as they flew to their targets, at a few hundred kilometers an hour. Morgan was attempting a thousand times the range of those War Museum relics, and fifty times their velocity. However, he had some advantages. His missile