Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea (9 page)

“How far out is the belt?” Cathy asked.

Nelson pointed to the thickest, darkest area of the crescent. “The area of greatest intensity is about ten thousand miles out. From there it just tapers away to nothing, in every direction.” At her nod, he continued. “Now the inner belt—and this is the one that’s giving us the trouble.” Close to the surface of the “earth” he drew a smudge, a sort of curved oval, the inner curve of which was parallel to the curve of the earth. This too he shaded to be darkest at its middle, which lay on an imaginary line extending the equatorial center-line of the earth. “This is the inner belt. The center of intensity is about 2,000 miles from the surface. It too tapers away to nothing, down at about the 450- or 500-mile level. Which happens to be the accepted average of the topmost layers of our atmosphere—that is, anything above that is too rarefied to be called an atmosphere.

“Now a funny thing happened a few years ago, and all credit to B.J. here, who without moving anything but his brains, managed to remember it. On the ninth day of November in 1960—he even remembered the date—the entire outer belt disappeared. In just about an hour it was gone, for no reason anybody could figure at the time. In a few days it was back again. Right? Right. Now in the same month, maybe coincidence, maybe not, something slowed up one of the first—”

“The first,” said B.J. from the depths of the settee.

“The first passive communications satellite, a balloon type called Echo. Here it was sailing along at over 900 miles, and suddenly there was enough atmosphere to slow it down. Why? Well, the best theory anyone could come with was that due to an increase of solar activity—and that November is still famous for that kind of sun stuff—the atmosphere under the edges of the outer Van Allen belt became heated. The heated air then rose so high that it was able to interfere with Echo in its orbit nearly a thousand miles up. Am I beginning to make some sense here?”

“The Van Allen belt can heat the atmosphere, then!” said Cathy.

“It can. It did. All right. One more point, and then I think we’ve covered Phase one: what happened. Phase two is, of course, what can we do about it.

“What happened is that a meteor shower—a cloud of dust, mostly, with some rocks in it, but they don’t matter: a dense cloud of interstellar dust, fine enough to be able to be pushed around by the likes of our magnetic field and the Van Allen belt, suffused the outer belt. Now you can see by the crescent shape of the cross-section that it’s something like a parabolic lens. If we grant that it has become lens-like enough to focus the sun’s rays at a point three hundred or so miles off the surface, it’s a fair assumption that you could get a pretty awesome concentration of energy. That level happens to be the so-called ozone layer as well—a lot of free oxygen atoms running around wanting to combine with something. You heat the whole mess, and enough air rises into the ozone layer to give it plenty to combine with. It does—it burns. The more it burns, the more it heats, the hotter it gets, the more fuel comes up to feed it.”

“Good God,” murmured the Congressman.

“So much for Phase One. Now, Phase-what-do-we-do-about-it. Let’s recall again what happened on the ninth of November ‘way back in 1960. All of a sudden, without warning, the entire outer belt disappeared. Within a matter of minutes it just—wasn’t. Now, what could do that to a hollow doughnut in space 24,000 miles in diameter, 10,000 miles thick and with a hole 6,000 miles across? Even granting that the huge thing is made of nothing but electrons trapped in a magnetic field—a good way of saying it’s made of nothing at all, practically—you’d think it would take a lot to make a thing that size just disappear. And you’d think wrong!

“That’s the trouble, the sheer size of the thing. It overawes your thinking processes. Now you must remember that on the day that thing broke up, there were no magnetic disturbances in the earth’s field. It was Dr. James van Allen himself who reported this breakdown, mind, and he made a special point of this. So whatever broke it down wasn’t some gigantic force canceling out some gigantic force. It was some little thing, no larger in itself than a plague germ is to a man, or that one extra neutron that brings about an atomic explosion. Well, you might say, what little thing was it?

“A patch of dust, I might answer. But a patch of dust bearing the right electric cargo. As long ago as the eighteenth century, it was known that there are two kinds of static electricity—it was Benjamin Franklin who wrote it up. Rub silk with a glass rod and you get one kind. Rub flannel with a carbon rod and you get another. Substances charged with the same kind repel one another; charged one with one, one with the other, they attract each other. They were called, for convenience, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’—meaningless terms, actually, but . . . well . . . convenient.

“Now the Van Allen belts are made up of charged particles, and the important thing is that these particles all carry the same charge. At the same time you have a force, the earth’s magnetic field, confining these particles within a certain area. All the particles want to repel one another, yet they’re all held together. The result is that each takes up a station at a distance from the others—a distance which is a compromise between confining and repelling forces. A homely example is the process called ‘flocking’, which you’ve all seen, oftenest on record turntables—a way of coating a metal surface with a velvety, fibrous coating. The way that’s done is to lay on an adhesive, and when it’s tacky, spray the fibres on with a high-pressure air-gun. And just as they leave the gun, they’re charged with static electricity. They plunge into the adhesive, which sticks them head-first, but in their electrical effort to get away from the fibre next door, which has the same charge, they stand straight up. Millions of them, forced to be close together, standing straight up to present as little contact with one another as possible.

“So with the electrons, and with the charged dust particles which have been forced into the same position by the Van Allen forces. Now if we can collapse the field, we will have dispersed the dust—or rather, it will disperse itself, become random, and in a matter of minutes will scatter enough so that the field, restoring itself in a day or two, can’t possibly collect enough of them to resume the damage.

“And that, my friends, you will be glad to learn, is all the background I need to state, and you to understand. Now we can be specific and say what can be done.

“We need only to seed the outer Van Allen field with electrons of opposite charge to those already there. And it is not as big a job as one might at first suppose. It is not necessary to reverse the charge of every particle out there—that would result in exactly the same situation as we already have. No: we need only to approach the theoretical situation of reversing the charge of half of them. The stability of the whole field would then be upset; particles would collide, merge, fuse, and generally achieve the random effect that we need so that they can free themselves from the Van Allen area.

“Further, we need not even achieve that theoretical half; for if we could get this effect on a very small number of them, the disturbed particles would cause change in other particles by induction. The only critical thing is to make these changes in the right place. And it really would take very few charged particles to turn the trick—the effect then would be very like seeding rainclouds with silver iodide, a fraction of an ounce of which is sufficient, in the right circumstances, to release thousands of tons of water.

“But the seeding must be done in the right place, or like rainmaking, it just won’t work. The right place for our problem is, according to my calculations, along a parabolic curve which will enter the outer Van Allen field at its closest to the earth, pass through the dense center 10,000 miles out, and return to the other hemisphere, coming out where again the field thins out near the surface. In other words, recalling that the cross-section of our hollow doughnut is a crescent, the line will enter one tip 2,000 miles from the earth, pass through the center, or thickest part of the crescent, and come out through the other tip.

“The description of such a parabola is the description of the instrument which can travel it—a missile. According to my calculations it will be sufficient to charge two hundred pounds or less of fine dust—I suggest lampblack, as it is easy to come by and the particles are small—and trail it out along that line, and it will disperse the Van Allen field and the cosmic dust with it. No more lens, no more heat, no more fire. You have a question, Congressman?”

“Actually, I have,” said Parker. “What would such a missile cost, Admiral?”

Nelson burst out with a roar of laughter so sudden and so loud that Cathy actually squeaked with fright (though was of course unheard) and even B.J. Crawford twitched. Nelson exhausted the mighty bellows of his lungs and sank down on the chair behind his desk to get air. Once his lungs were full, he released another thundering peal of merriment.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Parker, honest I am,” he gasped at last, “I’m not laughing at you, Congressman. I admire you—I can’t tell you how much I admire you. I like a man who decides what he’s going to be and then
be’s
it, come hell high water or the sky on fire.” Seriously he then assured the Congressman, “Not one dime will it cost that hasn’t already been paid. Right here aboard we carry six Polaris XII’s. Lampblack is, as I said, easy to come by, just by burning stale bread or old stockings, though we’ll surely find some more scientifically respectable way to manage it. As to charging it, we’ll have the engine-room run us up a little van de Graaf generator which will do the trick nicely. No charge, Mr. Parker: it’s all bought and paid for.

“The one critical thing, though,” he resumed, more than seriously—gravely—”Is where we launch this thing from, and when.” He picked up a sheaf of scribbed sheets, riffled rapidly through them, and let go the ones he did not want as if they had ceased to exist, which they did not, but instead settled about his ankles and added themselves to the drifts already there. He struck the paper in his hand. “I’ve calculated that and cross-checked it in every possible way. Reception is getting worse by the minute, but on our last exchange with the Naval Observatory I was able to give them figures on this problem and have them run through the Big Brain computer at Princeton. You may be sure they’re right. Without dragging you through the details, please accept my word that the only place to launch the seeding missile from is here.” He pointed to a spot on the world map north northwest of Guam, near the Marianas. “Launched about east by north, at an elevation of about 45°, the missile will drag an optimum section of the condensed heart of the outer Van Allen field, with the rotation of the earth giving it just enough extra push. So much for where.

“As to
when
, I’ll guarantee these figures too, and I wish I couldn’t. I’ve gone through them till I’ve worn a trail, but there’s no arguing it. It has to be done at 4
P.M.
on August 29, or not at all.”

“But that’s barely a month away!” cried Cathy.

“Tell that to the Van Allen field,” said the admiral gruffly. “Listen: if the average temperature of the earth continues to rise at its present rate, it’ll be at 175° by the end of August, and you can write off life as we know it. But that isn’t all. Once it reaches that temperature, the whole process will accelerate, warm currents rising into the burning zone, bringing more fuel and more oxygen with them. On the 2nd of September you can expect the band to become a globe. By the 10th, the oxygen will be depleted and I suppose the fire will go out. Not that it will matter a hoot to anyone. So to sum it up: we have to get to the Marianas by the 29th, we have to fire just that missile just that way, and if we don’t, we’ve had it.”

“But that’s thousands of miles—thousands!” said the Congressman.

“We can do it, even with this stop-off at the UN. I’d like to avoid that but I can’t. The last I heard, someone or other has advanced a hands-off policy, on the theory that the fire-band will burn itself out. This is a tempting thing to believe, because it sounds as if all anyone has to do is to muddle through, stay alive until the worst comes and then passes, and after that everything will be okay again. I’m tempted myself. Only thing wrong with the theory is that it isn’t so.” He slapped his sheet of figures.

“I know it isn’t so. I think we have a duty to go to New York and present this material. It could be unpopular, but I know there are enough sound heads around to calm people down while we’re on our way. And once it’s understood, it at least gives the world a sure out, and not a wait-and-hope situation. That might be good enough for some folks, but it’s enough to drive a lot of others out of their minds. The one thing the world can do without right now is panic. The one thing we can do about that is to give the world a concrete hope.” The Admiral held them with his eyes for a moment, then with an oddly dramatic, very slight gesture, he tossed the paper to the cluttered desk. “Well,” he said, “d’you like it?”

“I’ll buy it,” said the Congressman.

“Who could question it?” asked Cathy Connors.

“Right,” said the Admiral, and began issuing orders. “B.J., get out of here and get some sleep. On second thought,” he said, gazing at the recumbent and exhausted officer, “Stay where you are and get some sleep. You’re doing it already.” And indeed, B.J. Crawford’s other eye had snapped shut the instant the Congressman had approved Nelson’s plan. “Cathy, shove aside some of that mess and type me up a statement of everything I just said, the whole project. If you get stuck, ask me. Write it more or less as if it was a speech, because that is just what it is going to be. I want to walk in there, speak my piece, clear out and get going. And Cathy—Congressman—do me a favor. Keep this to yourself until I go on TV with it. Before we leave New York I’ll give any of the boys shore furlough if they want it, but I don’t want them buzzing and worrying about it beforehand. All right?”

“All right, Admiral,” said the Congressman. “My congratulations, by the way, and thanks for your confidence. You can count on me for anything you may need.”