Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

Must have an interesting room layout, she thought as they negotiated two rightangle turns in less than four meters. I'd hate to be on a landing party assigned to take this ship. The thought reminded her of the question Meredith had wanted her to ask while she was here, and she spent the rest of the swim trying to come up with a polite way to phrase it.

They emerged from the maze into a control room whose impressiveness lay less in lights and gadgetry than in the quiet competence she could sense in the Poms on duty there. Off to one side, floating next to a porthole, was the alien she recognized as Waywisher. As she turned in his direction he flipped his tail, timing his movement to meet her exactly halfway.

"Good day, Miss Olivero," the translator said as Waywisher swam around her in a brief pattern she took for a Pom welcome dance. Possibly a sign of responsibility as well, she decided, noting that her escort withdrew to the other side of the room as it ended. "I trust the ship has been set up to your satisfaction?"

"It seems to be, so far," she said. "We'll know in a few days or weeks, after the whole system reaches equilibrium. You wished to talk privately with me?"

"Yes." There was a brief hum on the circuit, and when the translator voice began again it had changed subtly in tone. "We are now cut off from communication with either of our species. I would like to offer you a barter: information for credit against Spinneret cable."

"Indeed?" Carmen asked, trying to dislodge the tight knot that had abruptly formed in her stomach. "What sort of information?"

"We have formulated self-consistent hypotheses concerning both the cable material itself and the 'glue,' as you call it, with which it is coated. We will trade this information for a credit of one trillion dollars."

"That's a lot of money," Carmen said. "What makes you think the information is that valuable?"

"It is unlikely your science will be able to provide you with these insights in the foreseeable future. However, once you have been put on the right track, your progress toward understanding and control of the Spinneret will undoubtedly be greatly enhanced."

"What makes you think we don't have control and understanding now?"

"Two of your fellows died during or shortly after the first Rooshrike cable operation. The conclusion is obvious."

Carmen pursed her lips tightly. "All right. Then as long as we're on the subject anyway, some of us would like to know why you want so much cable. It seems to us that, living under water, the possible uses for something this strong would be extremely limited."

If Way wisher was annoyed by the question, neither his manner nor his words showed it. "It's precisely because of our habitat that we need the cable so desperately. Tell me, how do you think we launch our ships into space?"

"Why—" She fumbled at the sudden change of subject. "I assume you do like everyone else: build the ships in orbit with material brought up in shuttles."

"No. For us it turns out to be more economical to build them on the planet surface"—under water, Carmen's mind edited in—"and then launch them essentially empty, with only the control areas flooded and most of the crew packed into small boxes under artificial hibernation. A skeleton crew then guides the ship to the nearest ringed gas giant planet—or asteroid belt, if the system is fortunate enough to have one—and spends up to a year mining enough ice to fill the ship. Only then can the crew be revived and the ship made fully functional."

"Complicated," Carmen murmured.

"And very costly," the Pom said. "One of every twenty-eight who undergo hibernation does not survive the revival procedure."

Carmen swallowed. "You must want very badly to go into space."

"The oceans of our home are wide and unbounded; we have always been a people who swam freely wherever we chose. Should we now be bound to the surface of a single world?" The Pom's fins rippled restlessly for a moment, and Carmen had the sudden feeling she'd been granted a brief glimpse into the innermost workings of the Pom psyche. Odd, she thought, how the translators tend to mask how really alien we are to each other. I wonder whether that's a strength or a weakness of the whole technique? An interesting thought; but before she had time to follow it any further, Way wisher had composed himself. "It's for this reason we desire your cable," he said. "With it we will build a device with which we may bring our ships directly to space."

And suddenly Carmen understood. "You're going to build a skyhook, aren't you?

Run a Spinneret cable from orbit to the surface and use it like an elevator."

The Pom's tentacles rippled. "You're familiar with such devices? Astonishing!"

"Only the theory," Carmen admitted, dredging her memory for any details she may have squirreled away. "We worked that out—oh, at least half a century ago, I think. I don't know if we never came up with anything strong enough to build it or if someone found a flaw in the theory or what."

"There are no theoretical flaws, but we've found no material strong enough for our needs. Until now."

"Yes, the cable would be ideal, wouldn't it?" Was that what the Spinners had used it for? "A trillion dollars is still a lot of money, though. For good, hard data we might be willing. But I want an overview first, some idea of what exactly we'd be paying for."

"I suppose that's not unreasonable," Waywisher said after a short pause. "Very well. Our first clues came from the Rooshrike heat tests on their first cable. As you know, it becomes superconducting at relatively low temperatures, distributing the applied heat evenly through its mass. What you may not know is that at higher temperatures it begins to show an almost black-body radiation spectrum, but with gaps that resemble absorption lines for various metals. At higher temperatures still the lines disappear."

"Yes, the Rooshrike report mentioned all that. There were some lines like those of simple molecules, too—titanium oxide, I think, and one or two others. I didn't know they'd given the data to anyone but us."

"They didn't. But they did their tests in space, and we had a probe nearby."

"Ah." It was becoming increasingly hard for Carmen to maintain her old image of the Poms as gentle, guileless creatures. "They seemed to think it indicated the presence of nontransmuted metals in the cable skin."

"Not true. The strength of the cable indicates it to be a perfectly homogeneous material."

"Why? A lot of alloys are stronger than their constituent metals."

"True. But alloys cannot be internally bonded by enhanced nuclear force."

Carmen's skin prickled. The Poms' mastery of nuclear forces was supposed to be what had allowed them to develop an underwater technology in the first place, and it was a secret they'd guarded jealously from other races. If that was what they were offering … "You've done that kind of bonding yourselves?" she asked, as casually as possible.

"Yes." Waywisher's fins and tentacles ripped restlessly, a mute indication of how much this revelation was costing him. "The theory is quite straightforward, though application can be difficult, and under it the 'glue' can also be partially explained as a stepwise-enhanced edge effect. The absorptionlike spectrum lines would then be due to weak force-electromagnetic coupling between nuclear fluctuations and the electron shell response. Is all of this translating properly?"

"I think so," Carmen said, the taste of irony in her mouth. All the talk on Astra of protecting the Spinneret's secrets—and here the Poms had been using those same secrets for centuries. "I'm not a scientist, but all the words sound familiar. So why are you bothering to buy our cable when you can make your own?"

Waywisher barked, an almost seal-like sound the translator didn't touch. "We've mastered the technique only for the lightest metals; the difficulty, as well as the material's final strength, increases rapidly with atomic weight. If our theory is correct, the Spinneret cable is composed of an entirely new element with weight approximately three hundred seventy times that of hydrogen … and its actual tensile strength around ten to the twelfth pounds per square inch."