Free Pillar to the Sky by William R. Forstchen Page B

field, but for whatever reasons few rarely did. It was a brain drain of those who could potentially be the best in the field, and it saddened him.
    Granted, he did have several female friends—“fellow nerds,” they called each other—but there was never a sense of attraction like the one Eva triggered.
    He got up, followed Eva out the door, stopped in the snack room to get a diet soda, then stepped outside into the boiling humid heat of a D.C. summer. To the northwest, dark clouds were gathering and there was a distant rumble, perhaps offering the momentary relief of a cooling rain, which an hour later would turn back into humid heat again.
    She had sat down against a tree and just stared at nothing. He approached and held out the soda as a peace gesture.
    “Thank you,” she sighed in Ukrainian, popping the lid and taking a sip.
    “Why are you so damn obstinate?” she asked, looking at him, but at least without the anger of five minutes ago.
    “It’s our job to ask for the hard facts,” he replied. “Your whole premise for building this tower of yours is based on a what-if.”
    “It will come far sooner than nearly anyone realizes.”
    “Eva, you just assume that this talk about Japanese research on nanotube carbon fibers is going to surge forward and in another decade we will have something with the strength to build the tower. A snap of the fingers and the magic material that can withstand all the forces that can rip a tower apart will appear. But they are not even halfway to the tensile and compression strength you dream of, and our job here this summer is hard science.”
    “Give it ten years,” she said coldly. “We will move ahead with all the other problems to be solved, then have them cleared and be ready to go the day the material is at last available to build with.”
    “All right. Let’s say for the sake of argument your dream happens and ten years from now this miracle of C-60 carbon nanotubes appears. Then what?”
    She was about to snap at him again, but somehow the peace gesture of the soda stilled her frustration. She took a big gulp and offered the can back to him and he took a sip.
    “Go on. I’ll listen,” she offered.
    He was about to add, You mean, listen until you disagree, then tear my head off. But he held back on that.
    “You postulate your theory on building a tower on a what-if: the expectation that someone will figure out a way to manipulate carbon atoms and build molecules—what some are calling ‘buckyball’ molecules—into nanotubes hundreds of times stronger than tungsten steel. And then, not just strands a few millimeters in length in a laboratory, but hundreds of thousands of miles of the stuff, turned out by factories that are then capable of spinning them into cables thousands of kilometers long the way they used to make cables for suspension bridges.”
    “Your American history,” she retorted. “When the first suspension bridges were built a hundred and fifty years ago, they didn’t trust steel and used iron, even though it was brittle. So they overbuilt the cables to handle the stress. Fifty years later it was all steel and no one would even think of using something as ancient as iron. But they built the bridges with what they had, and that is my point.
    “Can’t you dream just a little?” she continued. “Back when the people in that building we work in, Dr. Rothenberg included, were dreaming up something called Apollo, they came up against a brick wall. The lunar lander needed an onboard computer. In the final minutes of landing, they could not rely on just an onboard radar system to send the data back to earth and then send the flight corrections back. That would take several seconds at a time when the astronauts needed split-second decisions. They needed a computer on board that could do it instantly. Only problem was, the computers of 1962 were bigger than the entire landing module. Six years later they had one the size of a suitcase that could