Alexis Gilliland: The Third Wave

Dr. Kerry shook her head. “You know what it took to keep our beehives going? We had to install electromagnets to approximate Earth’s magnetic field for them And they ’re still on the verge of dying out, though the bumblebees seem to doing OK. Without the umbilical from Earth, we’d have failed long since.”

“And a starship would cut the cord for sure,” said Levsky. “How sad; I want to believe, I really do.”

“The real problem with that starship isn’t going to be the physics, Pavel Ivanovitch, it’s going to be creating a sustainable biosphere that can be expanded when we arrive.”

“Your turn, chief” said Winslow, writing the weights in his log book. “Are you one of the people looking to find a nice, delicious planet at the other end?”

The colonel rolled his basket up to the scale. “No, no, no, we will surely have to build in space, just as here on Luna.”

“Building is one thing,” Winslow replied Thriving is something else.”

“More water would help,” said Levsky, unloading the peppers on the scale. “Aquaculture is doing fine in principal, at least in those dinky little tanks, but we need to expand. If we only had a few hundred tons of water available, we could have all sorts of seafood.”

“We could do a lot with water,” agreed Dr. Kerry. “If we were serious about a starship—”

“You listen to the news, Earth sure sounds serious.”

“Hah! Ten years ago Earth was serious about building power stations, Winslow. No, for a starship, you need a working biosphere that can be expanded when you arrive. Maybe a hundred species of bonsai trees huddled together, all cramped and root-bound, waiting for The Day to become a vast forest.”

Colonel Levsky wrote the weights into his log book. “Look,” he said. “One of the problems with the Lunar biosphere is that we are critically short of water. Earth isn’t stupid, they know that, so where are they talking about going with the prototype? Out where there’s water, or at least ice, Diomedes, out in the Trojans.”

Dr. Kerry looked up. “Ah, Pavel Ivanovitch. Water would help, it surely would, but how are you going to fit a working biosphere into a 100,000 ton starship when half the weight is devoted to the physics of transportation?”

“Biospheres can be any size, Sioux,” he replied. “I have a working biosphere hanging above my computer, a sealed globe of water with an air bubble, tiny shrimp, and green plants, living in happy equilibrium together.”

“I’ve seen it,” she replied. “How big would it have to be to support 1,000 humans for a century or more?”

“Huh. Figure humans at 150 pounds each, times 1,000, 150,000 pounds, 75 tons. Figure they’d need 10 times their own mass in the next level of the food chain, that’s what, 750 tons? Be generous and call it 1,000 tons. That’s doable.”

“And you don’t like the food here on Luna, Pavel Ivanovitch? You’d need at least two steps, probably three. Two steps is 75 tons plus 750 plus 7,500, and that’s for the living protoplasm alone! Don’t forget the substrate; dirt to grow in, water to swim in, and air to breathe. Not to mention the energy to make the plants grow, and whatever it takes to keep the bees happy. Out of the 50,000 tons available for crew quarters, it looks like well over half is going to be biological.”

“The House-Senate conference rejected the proposal this afternoon,” said Madeline Tosca, leafing through the pages of the report. She was attending the informal staff meeting on the state of the starship, held in one of the lesser grandiose meeting rooms in the Rayburn House Office Building, by virtue of her undeniable talents. She was chairing it by virtue of her connections.

“Ah, here we are. Despite the Senate’s vigorous efforts, led by the rambunctious Senator Metcalfe, the House appears to be unwilling to fund a prototype starship that does nothing except test the hydrogen bomb drive on a short test flight to Diomedes. The Honorable Stanley Wysinski says: “The Starship-prototype has simply too many problems needing to be solved to tackle them one at a time. When they reach Diomedes, the crew will have to do something, not just pile into the ship’s boat and come on home. Does he have anything in mind?”

“Not really,” said a senior staffer, newly come to the foot of the long, polished conference table. “My sense of Stan’s position is that he’s opposed, but he’s looking for honorable arguments to use in this case, Doctor Tosca.”

“I do not hold a doctorate,” she replied gently. “If you wish to grant me an honorific, Professor will do; I profess to know a lot about practically everything.”

“What should the Honorable Stanley W. have had in mind?” asked Turi John Ramos, cutting back to the question.

“There have been a few arguments among ourselves,” Tosca reminded him, referring to the starship’s supporters. “A few well-ventilated differences of opinion on the talk show circuit which might confuse the uninitiated. I expect the man would like us to reach a consensus before we start spending the taxpayer’s money.”

“You Americans,” said Colonel PI. Levsky looking bored rather than annoyed. “As my government has said before, to design a Starship one must work on the three main problems concurrently.”

“What does your government think they are?”

“Well, Doctor Ramos, we all are working on the first two, of course, the drive, and the SRB,” he saw Ramos’s blank expression and explained the initials. “That would be the Stress Resistant Biosphere, for the generation ship. The third problem is: What do we do when we arrive? Once our prototype arrives at Diomedes, it must be prepared to build its own structures, its own habitats, which it must then infuse with the life from the ship’s AHB, or Ad Hoc Biosphere.”

“I’m not sure that your third problem corresponds to what the several groups arguing over the mission description have in mind,” said Turi John, at last. “What task do you people want the prototype to perform, anyway?”

Levsky reached into his briefcase and produced a file folder. “These are the first results of that little robot flotilla that my government sent light-sailing off to Diomedes a few months back,” he said politely. “You surely knew that Diomedes was part of a planetesimal system when you picked it out as your destination?” Turi John shook his head.

“No? Well, you had good staffwork, then. Diomedes rotates around a common center of mass with the smaller Automeden…” he took out a glossy photograph. “And here, precisely at that center of mass is what appears to be a loosely consolidated lump of primeval matter, of, oh, about 2.8 cubic kilometers.”

“Does it have a name?” asked Madeline Tosca, examining the photograph and wondering if it had been discovered on this side of the ocean.

Levsky nodded. “One of your technicians, Charlie Cavanagh over at the NASA Image Processing Lab, said it looked like a cowflop, and for want of a more dignified alternative, Cowflop it appears to be, at least on the working papers.” He pulled out an analysis sheet. “The solids are unremarkable, mostly iron and silicates as one would expect, but Cowflop would appear to be about 12.6 percent volatiles, most of which is water. That’s by volume, of course.” He passed over the analysis sheet.

“Fascinating,” said Turi John. “Utterly fascinating. But what does this have to do with anything?”

“My thought, which is my government’s thought as well, is that this little crumb of a Cowflop—which is, you will note, over on page four, locked in rotation with Automeden and Diomedes—might be the prototype’s natural destination.”