The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [30]
He paused, looking with a sorrowful expression at his class. He was waiting for some student to rise to the occasion, and after a bit, one of the girls did. “That’s because it has to get out of the Earth’s gravity well, isn’t it, Dr. Vorhulst?”
He gave her a big smile. “Exactly right, Roshini,” he said, looking up at the class timer that had just turned amber. “So you see, it’s that first step that’s a killer. Is there anything we can do to make it easier? We’ll try to find out next time. But if any of you guys just can’t wait for the answer, hey, that’s what search engines are for.”
And then, as everybody began to rise, he said, “Oh, one more thing. You’re all invited to the end-of-term party at my house. Don’t dress any differently than you do for class, and don’t bring any house gifts but yourselves. But do come. You’ll hurt my mother’s feelings if you don’t.”
One of the things that Ranjit liked best about his astronomy teacher—apart from such unexpected surprising joys as end-of-term parties—was that Dr. Vorhulst didn’t actually spend a lot of time in the normal practice of teaching. When, at the end of each session, Dr. Vorhulst told the class what the next session was going to be about, Vorhulst knew perfectly well that his hundred eagerly motivated space-cadets would look all that material up long before the next session started. (The few who hadn’t started out all that motivated—the ones who had entertained the false hope of a snap course and an easy A—either soon dropped or were reformed by the enthusiasm of their fellows.) Thus, each time, Dr. Vorhulst had that next session to play.
This time, however, Ranjit couldn’t hit the search engines right away. He had other obligations. First there was the terminally tedious hour and fifty minutes of philosophy to get through. Then came the quick gulping of a detestable sandwich and a lukewarm bag of some anonymous variety of juice, which was lunch, all swallowed in a hurry so he could get to the two o’clock bus that would take him to the library.
But just outside the lunchroom his seatmate in Astronomy 101 was standing with a few of his fellows, and he had news for Ranjit. “You didn’t hear what Dr. Vorhulst had promised for our next session? I was just telling my friends the news about it. The Artsutanov project, you know. Vorhulst says we might get the project built right here! In Sri Lanka! Because the World Bank’s just announced that it has received a request for financing a study of a Sri Lankan terminal!”
Ranjit was just opening his mouth to ask what all that meant when one of the others said, “But you said it might not pass, Jude.”
Jude looked suddenly brought down. “Well, yes,” he admitted. “It’s the damn Americans and the damn Russians and the damn Chinese that have all the power—and all the money, too. They’re just as likely as not to hold it up, because once you’ve got an Artsutanov lifter going, any damn little pipsqueak country in the world can have a space program of its own. Even us! And there goes their monopoly! Don’t you think?”
Ranjit was saved the embarrassment of not having an answer for that—indeed, of not having any really good idea of what Jude was talking about in the first place—by the Sinhalese group’s growing hunger. And then in the library—search engines working—Ranjit was soaking up information at a high rate of knots. The more he learned, the more he shared Jude’s excitement. That tough first step of getting from Earth’s surface to LEO? With an Artsutanov skyhook it was no problem at all!
True, feasibility studies were a long way from an actual car that you could hop into and have drawn at high speed up to low earth orbit, no million-liter oceans of explosive liquid propellant required. But it might happen. Probably would happen, sooner or later, and then even Ranjit Subramanian might be one of those lucky ones who would circle the moon and cruise among Jupiter’s satellites and perhaps even walk across the hopelessly dry deserts of Mars.
According to what the search engines turned up for Ranjit, as far back as