AGUINALDO—Day 11
The orbits displayed on the holoscreen made no sense to Luis Sandovaal, but he wasn’t going to admit that to anybody. He cracked his knuckles and leaned back in his seat. He understood little about celestial mechanics, but enough not to believe it when something was supposedly “impossible.” Besides, once he knew even a little about a subject, it was easy to convince others that he was an expert.
Plodding along and optimizing its own parameters, Sandovaal’s computer model had found a way to send his wall-kelp to the other colonies, using only the magic of gravity. His kelp would save the lives of thousands. President Magsaysay would like that. But Sandovaal had to understand the orbital principles enough so that he’d seem knowledgeable when he made the proposal to the Council. The next meeting would be within the hour.
Orbits, ellipses, perturbations, a slow-moving tug-of-war with gravity … he had difficulty conceptualizing the rules. He wondered if this was how other people felt about biology and genetics. But then, everybody had genetics inside them. Sandovaal’s distinctive pale hair and blue eyes set in a round Filipino face had caused his own fascination with the subject.
The son of a Danish diplomat and a Filipino woman, Luis Sandovaal had grown up in the expansive diplomatic household of his grandfather. They had found a special exemption to get Luis into the embassy schools, where he studied voraciously—especially the natural sciences. Later, the old Danish ambassador had arranged for his grandson to study at Cambridge.
Luis’s mother had pulled him aside the day before he had boarded the Philippine Airways flight from Manila to London, begging him not to desert the Islands forever, to come back with what he had learned.
Sandovaal logged off the computer and made his way out of the lab complex, onto the Aguinaldo’s main floor level. Sandovaal pressed a taxicall by the stairs and waited for one of the electric carts to find him. His thumbprint would trigger a priority call and ensure a speedy dispatch.
Above him, children played in the zero-G core, squirting compressed air out of cans to maneuver themselves. A sail-creature nymph and an older boy played a game of crack-the-whip. Sandovaal squinted, then snorted to himself. The Barrera boy—Ramis, he thought. Always up to something dangerous. Ramis flew past the nymph until the rope grew taut, then snapped them both about. With the colony’s crisis, President Magsaysay had been far too busy to keep a close watch on his foster son.
The taxi’s arrival startled Sandovaal from his thoughts. He climbed in, directed it to the main Council chambers, then craned his neck to look out the taxi’s wire-mesh window. Ramis and the sail-creature nymph still frolicked in the core. An old woman slowly made her way along the axis on a pedal-kite. Other nymphs guarded the children playing in the core, as they had been conditioned to do.
Like sheepdogs.…
Years ago the colony animals had accepted the wall-kelp as a substitute feed, once it had been dried and processed. Sandovaal and Dobo Daeng, along with the technicians who had replaced Agpalo and Panay Barrera, worked on the next step in their experiments. Sandovaal had been stifled on Earth, unable to get permission to do some of his research because it was too unorthodox, and therefore considered “risky.” Here on the Aguinaldo, the Filipinos trusted his judgment.
Sandovaal expanded on the technique of gene grafting he had developed for the wall-kelp. At times he felt like a Filipino Frankenstein; at other times he conceived of himself as a chromosomal gourmet chef.
Most of the time the recipe failed. The failures usually died immediately, but some survived into the embryonic stage. Only rarely did a hideously distorted patchwork “thing” manage to grow to maturity.
Then they succeeded in creating the first proto-creature—robust and strong, featureless. The creature had both mitochondria and chloroplasts within its cell walls—it was plant and animal. Somehow, everything had worked exactly right—everything fit together, everything functioned as it should.
Sandovaal would never admit that it had been an accident.
Dobo kept staring at the proto-creature with wide eyes, astonished. The other assistants crowded around.
“It is still a plant, so it functions as a plant. It needs nutrients, sunlight, water.” Sandovaal felt smug. “We grew its lungs and digestive system, but they were superfluous. Like our appendix: everyone has one, but it serves no purpose. A baby can be perfectly happy in the womb, unaware of its lungs, until we take it away from the mother and force it to breathe the open air.”
“Mother Marie, it is a miracle, I think,” Dobo whispered.
Sandovaal made a rude sound. “Since when does a thousand trials, breaking your back for months and months, qualify as a miracle? We did not create life, Dobo, we just rearranged it.”
Sandovaal thought of what Magsaysay had said a year before, and smiled to himself.
Sheepdogs!
The twenty senators were settling into their seats in the Council chamber when Sandovaal strode in. He knew they did not expect him, which would heighten the effect. The senator from Leyte—a thin woman who needed the simplest things explained to her several times—scowled at his intrusion.
Magsaysay sat up straight and blinked his large eyes, then smiled. “Welcome, Luis. Feel free to join us.”
“I have learned something important. As your chief scientist I am required to point it out—” He stopped. Sitting cross-legged in a chair against the back wall was the Barrera boy.
Sandovaal blinked in surprise. Only minutes before, Ramis had been playing with the sail-creature nymph up in the core. Sandovaal’s taxi had encountered only the typical delays—how could the boy have gotten here so fast? Had he somehow directed the nymph where he wanted to go?
“Yes, Luis?” Magsaysay said, raising his eyebrows.
Sandovaal turned back to the Council members, trying to mesmerize them with his bright blue eyes. They would survive, thanks to him. And he was about to pull another rabbit out of his hat.
“You asked me to see if we could somehow help the other colonies—get wall-kelp to the lunar base and to the American Orbitechnology colony. You must decide if we should assist the Soviet Kibalchich as well. If they had a nexus of the wall-kelp, the other colonies would be able to grow their own supply. They would survive. But we have no rockets, no shuttles. How will we launch these packages to them?”
Sandovaal went to the display holotank in the center of the chamber, activated it, then logged on. He accessed the files he had just been viewing in his laboratory, and displayed the results. The Moon, the Earth, and the Lagrange points appeared on the screen.
“The concept is simple, and the celestial mechanics models say it will work. You will have to discuss details with one of our orbital specialists, but I am confident we have the ability among our distinguished engineers and physicists to implement my idea.” He scanned the senators’ faces again. Ramis stared at the tank, fascinated.
Sandovaal tapped his fingernail on the glass in front of the display. “Reaching the Moon is relatively simple. We can, in effect, just toss the wall-kelp there. We can sling a package there by attaching it to the end of a tether. According to the diagram, if we make the tether long enough and reel the package away from the Aguinaldo, then the package and our colony will be in different orbits.”
He worked with the keyboard on the podium and animated the display. “If you think about it, the concept is clear.” He flashed a glance at the thin senator from Leyte. “The length of the tether determines the package’s orbit. We can calculate an orbit that will intersect the Moon’s and adjust the tether’s length to match it. Once we release the tether, the package will travel in the new orbit until it impacts the Moon. Think of children slinging themselves across the core, playing crack-the-whip. It is the same principle.