The Golden Globe

One of the many unlikely propositions I have sold in a lifetime of selling was based on that idea. We set up a Big Store, selling shares in a company that was "right on the edge of a breakthrough!" in the field of light-speed travel. The dodge was to put your money in the bank, get on the ship, and return a few hundred years later to reap the compound interest. The trip would only be a few months subjective time. Brilliant! Of course, we were the bank. And I already mentioned what happened to W. C. Fields's bank account. But you'd be surprised how easy a proposition it was to put over.

So now we come to the fourth method, or 3A, depending on how you apply the rules. This is the wheel, or the bucket on a rope.

Put some water in the bucket and whirl it around your head. The water doesn't spill out. Magic! Actually, centripetal force, which is a constant acceleration toward the center of a circle.

If you build a wheel in zero gee and set it spi

Make the wheel very large....

We've been building structures like this since humans went permanently into exile in deep space. The asteroid belt, the lunar Trojan points L4 and L5, the Jupiter and Saturn Trojans, J4 and J5 and S4 and S5, all are thick with wheels like this, or more often, cylinders. Up until the inception of the Oberon Gravity Project the largest of these artificial worlds was about sixteen miles in diameter.

The Gravity Project proposed a wheel one thousand miles in diameter.

To make a leap like that you need a significant new technology, or a major breakthrough in an old one. The Oberoni had a little of both.

When I had last come through about twenty years before, Oberon II had looked like this:

(—o—)

The O was the hub of the wheel-to-be, hollow in the center. If you were building an interplanetary Conestoga wagon that was where you'd put the axle. The long lines were the first pair of a proposed twelve spokes of the wheel. The two little arcs at the end were all that had been built so far of the outer rim of the wheel, the place where people would live and work.

Today it looked like this:

Four more spokes finished, and two separate portions of wheel arc. Each spoke was five hundred miles long. Each arc had reached a length of about six hundred miles. It looked like the project was half through but it was actually further along than that. You learn as you go, and getting started was much tougher than getting finished. They expected to wrap the whole thing in ten more years. That is about half a mile of rim every day. Don't ask me how they do it. I've stood at Edge City and watched the work, and I still don't know.

Oddly, a thousand-mile wheel turning once an hour produced just about the 0.4 gravity the engineers had in mind. From Luna, with a decent telescope, you could tell time by Oberon II. And since the diameter was one thousand miles the circumference was π thousand miles: 3,141.592654 miles. That led to the first of a long line of disparaging nicknames during the early construction: Pi in the Sky. But nobody was laughing now.

"Yeah, whaddaya want?"

"Is this the computerized answering service of Oberon National?"

"You got a problem with that?"

"I got a problem with your tone of voice."

"Fuck you. You dialed the aggressive-response number. Hold on, asshole, I'll co

I took a deep breath. Folks, is modern science wonderful, or what?

"Checking for an account in the name of Elmer Prettywillie."

"I am so sorry. We carry no such account."

"Then surely you've heard of S. Quentin Quale."

"I am devastated to inform you that I've made no such acquaintance."

"Well, you must know Linus Spaulding. Captain Linus Spaulding."

"Well... There is an account for the Linus Pauling Foundation."

"I'll bet it's right next to Jake's Clams. No, Spaulding. Captain Spaulding. The African explorer."

"Quel dommage. I am devastated."

Christ. When programmers have nothing better to do, they dick around with stuff like that. And what's worse, people use them. I'm told it got started with cutesy answering machine messages, back at the dawn of the Electronic Age. I wish it had stayed there.

If I were an extraterrestrial tour guide bringing a shipload of Betelgeusan caterpillar people for five days and four nights in the quaint little Sol System, I'd put Oberon II and its environs in the top-three places of Things to See.

Actually, maybe it would look like a primitive log cabin to the caterpillar people. Maybe they'd want to swap beads and trinkets and planet-busting bombs for our native handicrafts or buy a few million slaves. But for my money, you can't beat the Uranian system.

Uranus has rings. Nothing like the gaudy gold bands around Saturn, but impressive in their own, more subdued glory. And because the axis of Uranus is so far askew from the plane of the other planets, you get a great bull's-eye view of them as you approach.

Uranus has moons. Five major ones, all different colors, all showing a disk as you move closer. Then dozens and dozens of smaller ones, looking like very bright stars.

Uranus has Oberon II, which I've already described, but which ca

Uranus has Oberon I, the original moon. If you are lucky, your ship can come very close to it on the way in, and it looks wrong. Red-orange streaked with black and light brown and cream, it looks like a family-size pepperoni, black olive, and anchovy pizza, the sort that might be delivered to a family living at the top of a beanstalk. But they've already been eating it. A hundred years ago Oberon was reasonably round. Not anymore. Great gouges have been torn from it, a hundred miles wide and deep. Oberon is being ca

For the first century after the Invasion, there was little of organized government beyond the orbit of Mars. There were plenty of people. Just no government. Very few rules other than the ones you enforced yourself, and such rules tend to be only things that matter to you as an individual. And only those things that matter to you now. The environs of Uranus and Neptune were settled and developed by the rough-and-ready breed that always gravitates to the frontier. On Earth there were gold miners, buffalo hunters, trappers, and eventually farmers when the frontier was the American West. Later, in the Brazilian rain forests, it was lumbermen, miners, then slash-and-burn farmers. All of them despoiled the environment. There was nobody to tell them not to, and besides, there were zillions of square miles of wilderness. What's all the fuss about, amigo?

At Uranus, it was miners. I'm sure they'd heard of the environmental disasters of Old Earth, but why should they worry about that? There were no buffalo to be driven to extinction, no native peoples to evict and practice genocide on, no tropical forests to turn into arid Saharas. There's nothing out here but rock, Lord love you! How can even the most rapacious businessman fuck up a rock?