Although much of Kronia's industry and related research was located on Titan because of its diversity of minerals, the forbidding gloom had traditionally induced most Kronians to prefer habitats elsewhere. Since Athena's occurrence, however, more people were forsaking the human liking for being able to see stars, and moving beneath the protective cover of Titan's atmosphere.
The pioneer group who founded Kronia had established their first base on Dione, naming it "Kropotkin," after the Russian social ideologist who had spent most of his life trying to impress upon people the revolutionary notion that they needed each other, and whose ideas had partly inspired the colony's guiding philosophy. The first exploratory expedition to Titan had been mounted later, after the foothold on Dione was secured, penetrating beneath Titan's cloud canopy to set up a pilot base beside a methane stream flowing from an upland waste of ice and broken crater rims, which for understandable reasons they called "Styx," after the river enclosing the mythical Greek Underworld. Styx was still the name of the spaceport at the site where the original base had stood, now serving the processing complex of Essen, which handled ores and other materials both mined locally on Titan and brought from elsewhere. The Tesla nuclear and electrical research center formed a part of Essen.
The transorbital lander Keene was on descended nose-up, pancake-braking against the atmosphere, and then came around to full-vertical for the final phase of its descent to slide tailfirst toward the opened docking silo. The metal constructions below rose up to take on shape and form with lines of windows and reflected highlights, and then were lost as the ship entered a different world of service gantries and tiers of brightly lit access levels. The half-shells of the covering lid rolled shut overhead, and while the bay was cycling to fill with heated, breathable air, the passengers exited through an access tube at the transorbital's forward door, moving with the peculiar loping gait that quickly became second nature as the most efficient way of moving in reduced gravity. Keene's single carryall was tagged for forwarding to his accommodation address, and he was carrying just a light overjacket slung over his arm, and a portasec briefcase. As he had half expected, Shayle was among the people waiting to meet the arrivals. Small, personal things like that were important among Kronians—even when his destination was only a ten-minute tube ride away. Keene acknowledged her with a grin, exchanged farewells with his traveling companions, and made his way over.
Shayle was characteristically tall but sturdily built for a Kronian, with the buxom fullness and pink-hued, freckly complexion that Keene was accustomed to associating with farmhouse diets and lots of fresh air. Her red hair was loosely braided to below her shoulders, and she was wearing a skirt with a green, hip-length jacket adorned by a tree pattern in brown and tan—reminiscences of an Earth she had never known.
"Hi," Keene greeted. He showed his hands. "The VIP treatment? Or has everyone missed me that much?"
"We just like a friendly face to be the first thing you come back to."
"So how have things been?"
"We've been managing. Pang's waiting for you." Shayle turned, and they began walking in the direction of the elevators that would take them down to the transit-tubes.
"How about Jan— What's his name again? Jan . . ."
"Jansinick."
"Right. Was he there yet, when you left?"
"No, but I called Pang a few minutes before you came off the ship, and he'd just arrived. I don't think Pang wants to go into things too much until you get there. He said he'd just told Jan that he was sure he'd find our work attractive."
"Attractive," Keened repeated, and groaned.
Shayle's tone became more serious. "How was it up there?" she asked.
"More of an education than I expected. It makes traffic control look like a rest home. The Security Arm's training base got hit pretty badly a couple of days ago. They lost a lot of people there."
"Yes, I know. They're talking about abandoning Rhea and setting up a new base here on Titan instead."
"There's no point in rebuilding it out there," Keene agreed.
The boarding area was awash with color from flowering plants in tubs and hanging planters—again, all part of the Kronian dedication to preserving everything they could of Earth. Keene had never learned much about plants and their names. Sometimes, talking with Kronians, he felt as if he should have known more. "It feels like walking out into a palace after a week of being cooped up in a LORIN station," he commented to lighten the mood. "Did you ever see pictures of the insides of old submarines?"
"I'd have thought all this would be almost as bad for someone who lived their whole life on Earth."
"I guess we're just an adaptive animal."
They joined a knot of people waiting at the elevator doors. "Oceans and mountains," Shayle went on. "Open sky from horizon to horizon. I can't imagine such things. You must miss it a lot."
Keene shrugged in a way he had learned to make nonchalant. "Life here is so busy that I don't get much time to think about it. When I do, I'm usually too tired to think." A downgoing car arrived. Keene and Shayle got in with the others.
"How's everything otherwise?" Keene asked as the doors closed.
"Pretty smooth. Nyica has upgraded the V-mode simulation. Gordon's installing the bleed diverters on the rig."
"The swivel bearings arrived, then?"
"Finally—yesterday morning."
"What about the rewiring job that Quane was doing?"
"He moved on. I think somebody in Hybrid is after him."
"Hm . . . We need to find a replacement, then," Keene said.
"Mariel's working on it," Shayle told him.
As with any society that had progressed beyond primitive, Kronia needed ways of coordinating effort and unifying its policies in order to function. Its complex technologies and public services could no more have been sustained by unorganized individuals following their own inclinations than an army could hope to succeed as an unled mass with no plan or strategy. But how could such organization come about without the monetary incentives that had built Earth's corporate hierarchies, or authority structures of the kind that had shaped its military commands and academic tradition? As with so much else of Kronian social dynamics, the solution hadn't been designed or imposed, but had emerged as a consequence of the unique value system.
Keene had begun his professional life in Kronia by heading a small research team working to combine spacecraft drive nucleonics with MHD power generation. He headed it because others had decided they had something worthwhile to learn from him and followed. Shayle was a fusion specialist who had become his second. But the main challenge for him had been not so much in the work itself, but in understanding how a functioning research environment could come together for such work to take place in to begin with.
Pang-Yarbat ran the larger project that Keene had later joined, bringing his group of people with him. But neither Pang-Yarbat nor Keene received monetary funding to hire the people and pay for the services they needed to get the work done. How any kind of cohesion or loyalty could be sustained in such a situation had been one of the first mysteries Keene had faced on joining the Kronian workplace.
The way to be valued in such a system was by doing work that was worthwhile and demanding. But that worked two ways. What mattered was not so much what you might imagine your own level of excellence to be, as the standing and reputation of the people who accepted you as a colleague to work with. Thus, a hierarchy of recognition took shape, reflecting the quality accorded to one's work. The most prestigious teams set the toughest standards, and in the self-reinforcing system that resulted, they attracted the most capable contenders. Making top grade was like being awarded a Fortune 500 directorship or entry to one of the old Ivy League universities—except that it couldn't be bought with money or connections. There was only one way to get accepted: by being damn good.
It had taken Keene awhile to realize fully what a tribute it had been when Pang-Yarbat invited him and his team to join the larger project. It meant that he and those who had attached themselves to him became a section within Pang-Yarbat's group, with a corresponding elevation of status that attracted more talent. The section now consisted of eight regulars in addition to Keene himself. Of these, five were committed to working there exclusively—on the equivalent of a contract. The remaining three worked for Keene part of the time but were also associated with other projects, sometimes competing ones, and not yet decided as to which way they wanted to go. Finally, there were recently qualified students or technicians who moved around until they found a niche that stimulated them sufficiently to want to attach to.
Secrecy was impossible in such circumstances, and clashes of interest inevitable, which would have made such a system unthinkable on Earth. But Kronians valued the flow of information more highly than ownership, on the grounds that it would be more likely to find its way to whoever would make the best use of it. As with material things, proprietary information counted for little on Kronia. Nobody cared about, or was too impressed by, how much a person had; what mattered was what they could do.
The tube access point that Keene and Shayle alighted at was in the subsurface part of Essen's central area. They emerged on one side of a concourse where a traffic gallery carrying open-seat electric cars, and pedestrian terraces at various levels came together in a complex geometry that confused newcomers. A children's group wearing an assortment of traditional costumes from Earth was putting on some kind of performance in front of a grotto of shrubs and ferns, where water cascaded down too slowly over rocky ledges to a pond. Around and above were offices and other workplaces, eateries and stores—or at least, the places that came closest to serving the same purpose. For with no money system, people just took what they needed. Terrans had known about Kronian "commerce," of course, but even after seeing it for himself, Keene had remained baffled for a long time as to how it could work. It went against everything he had grown up understanding as making sense. If there was no restriction on what somebody could take, what was to prevent everyone from wanting everything? And given that, how could any system of production keep up?—never mind one as limited in kind and capacity as Kronia's.
But on Kronia it worked. Since possessions in themselves didn't signify anything that was especially valued, acquisitiveness taken too far was not only pointless but the equivalent of passing counterfeit bills. For by the principles of appretiare, the act of choosing a particular offering in preference to available alternatives was to acknowledge the value of the provider, thereby constituting payment. People produced—or served, or taught, or advised, or entertained—for the satisfaction of doing worthwhile work. Few greater ignominies were feared than putting one's best into an effort and having no takers—equivalent to bankruptcy, and a sign that one's calling lay somewhere else. But taking what wasn't needed or valued for itself was to tender appreciation that was not sincere and, hence, tantamount to paying in worthless currency.
A short walk along one of the galleries brought them to the front entrance of the Tesla Center. After crossing a reception foyer, they followed a corridor past some offices and then passed through a double-door fire dam and bulkhead lock to emerge on a walkway overlooking a different world of power engineering. The air smelt of hot oil and ozone, and thrummed to the vibration of heavy machinery. Two rotary housings twenty feet or more high stood on concrete plinths in the space below, surrounded by pumps, switch banks, and transformers wreathed in color-coded pipework and cabling. High-voltage insulator stacks stood beyond the supporting columns at the rear, with bus bars ascending to unseen regions above. They followed the walkway for a short distance and then descended a railed stairway to the floor below, crossing beneath a bridge of ducting and lagged steam pipes topped by a catwalk to a passage leading to doors through another double-wall bulkhead.
The surroundings on the far side were different again: more like a lobby, with some concession to color and pattern in the decor, elevator doors to one side, and glass-walled stairs going up to corridors leading away left and right on two levels. Ahead, a concertina drop-screen shut off a work zone where construction was in progress. This was a new extension of the Center, eventually to have its own tube terminal and access shaft to the surface. Pang-Yarbat and his group were just some of many relatively recent arrivals. The administrators took pride in finding room for everyone as their way of contributing to the Center's work, and ultimately, of keeping alive the population that would exist in years to come. Even a laborer with a shovel could watch the spectacle of a fusion-driven interplanetary lifting out of orbit and say, "I helped build the place where the engines for that ship were designed." Appretiare.
Pang-Yarbat's office with its lab space behind was roughly halfway along one of the upper corridors. They found him draped in the chair pushed back from his L-shaped desk with its usual litter of hand-scrawled calculations and papers, facing a screen showing some of the group's earlier work. The man seated in a chair drawn up behind him had to be Jansinick Wernstecki. The shelves around them were cluttered with tools, workshop materials, and pieces of equipment in various stages of disassembly. In the area to the rear, Reyd Orne and Merlin Friet were working amid a tangle of instrumentation wiring sprouting from where the outer metal cladding had been removed from the original Valkyrie array—about the size of a regular door but thicker, mounted horizontally in a steel frame wreathed in tubes and power cabling.
"Ah, Lan!" Pang beamed, getting up. "So welcome back from your shot-in-the-arm vacation. We were starting to wonder if you were transferring up there permanently." It was one of Pang's puns. The Security "Arm," who among other things operated the LORIN stations, was the nearest Kronia had to a military force, while "shot" had doubtless been an allusion to X-ray laser bombs.
Pang was from somewhere in eastern Asia, brought to Kronia at an early age. He was short and chubby, with rich hair cropped short, and deep, alive eyes made more intense by ancient silver-framed spectacles which he refused to change for surgical correction. He had a broad, flat nose, fleshy chin to match, and a rubbery face that could take on an infinite variety of expressions and spoke its own language. His joviality and penchant for puns and expressing himself in riddles masked one of the most agile scientific minds that Keene had ever encountered—or maybe they were an irrepressible byproduct of it. Pang's father and an uncle had played key roles in the Kronian development of fusion energy after hostile politics quashed the chances of any concerted program on Earth, and Pang had followed in the same general field. In earlier years he had directed the design of the drives for the Osiris spacecraft that had brought Keene and others from Earth, so Keene's grasp of nuclear-propulsion physics had not been lost on him when it came to his attention. Inviting Keene into his group had been the result—not a bad salary offer at all for somebody relatively new in from Earth at the time.
Wernstecki, who had also stood at Keene and Shayle's arrival, was physically Pang's opposite in just about every respect. A tall, gaunt Caucasian, he had a halo of fair, frizzy hair, thin, pointy nose and chin, and thick lips that looked as if they belonged to another face. His eyes were pale, almost colorless, and took in Keene with a steady gaze, unlike Pang's, which shifted restlessly as if constantly reading in updates from the surroundings. His head was perched atop a long neck protruding from a shirt collar riding atop a sweater, with a light jacket hanging loosely over a gangly frame. Keene judged him to be in his mid thirties.
"Lan, meet Jansinick Wernstecki," Pang said, making an ushering motion. "Jan, this is Doctor Landen Keene, one of the survivors that Gallian's mission brought back, who looks after the power-engineering side of the project. . . . And this is Lan's colleague, Shayle Hartz. Fission and fusion. They make a good combination—or should I say hybrid? I hear Jan is one of the top theoreticians in celestial electrodynamics, Lan. A real live-wire in the field." The corners of the rubber mouth twitched upward. Keene refused to encourage him.
The three shook hands. Wernstecki's fingers were like turkey talons, but the grip was surprisingly firm. On meeting the unwavering eyes, Keene got the feeling of everything readable about himself being absorbed and logged, and immediately sensed an odd but strangely powerful personality. He knew that Wernstecki had been born on Enceladus and had studied under Pang's father for a while. He had gone on to specialize in celestial electrical phenomena, and in recent years had been involved in the frantic work of trying to quantify and recompute the changed dynamics of the Solar System following Athena's disruptive electrical effects. Pang, recognizing the potential value of this kind of experience in electro-gravitic interactions to his own project, had invited Wernstecki to visit Tesla and learn more of what they were doing there. He hadn't said anything specifically about recruiting him . . . but Wernstecki would know how things worked.
Pang went on, "I've told Jan that our work began as a generalization of Weber's force law. . . . But why don't I let Lan come into the act more and take it from here?"
Keene understood that the invitation was as much for Keene to establish his own credentials in Wernstecki's eyes as to help Pang assess Wernstecki's. "You're familiar with that, Jan?" he inquired.
Wernstecki nodded. "Yes, of course. Weber's original work was to derive the Ampère current law by generalizing Coulomb's force law to include second-order reciprocal terms in c." He paused, as if for a response. For some reason Keene had expected a reedy voice, but it was deep and firm, like the handshake.
"Unifying electrostatics with electrodynamics," Keene said. "It gave a correct expression for wave propagation before Maxwell."
"Jointly with Neumann," Wernstecki supplied. "They also succeeded in deriving Faraday's induction law from the force law, and formulated the first example in physics of a potential energy that depended on the velocity of the interacting particles."
It sounded like a perfect background for the Tesla project. No wonder Pang's eyes were twinkling. Pang seemed to decide suddenly to put Wernstecki out of the strain of suppressed curiosity that was written all over his face. "We extended the force law further to include still higher terms," he said, turning to face Wernstecki fully. "Then we used it to calculate the average force between groups of neutral dipoles consisting of paired oscillating charges. The results were interesting. It indicated a residual force as a fourth-order effect. Inverse-square. Attractive."
Wernstecki didn't need time to think. Keene saw that what it meant was clear to him immediately.
The velocity of light, conventionally denoted as c, is a very large number. The reciprocal, 1 divided by c, is therefore a very small number. The fourth-order term meant the term in Pang's extended force-law polynomial that contained the reciprocal multiplied by itself four times, which would give an inconceivably small number. That was how small the force that Pang was talking about—an attractive force between the dipoles—would be compared to the electrical force between the charges forming them.
"Forty orders of magnitude smaller," Wernstecki pronounced, after calculating a quick mental approximation.
An electrical dipole is an object carrying positive and negative charges concentrated in two distinct regions, such as at opposite ends. An "oscillating" dipole meant a system of two or more charges bound together in constrained motion. An atom would be an example. Although neutral as a whole, an atom's internal stresses cause the charge of its constituent protons and electrons to be distributed unevenly, making it a dipole. Pang was saying that a tiny attractive force, diminishing as the square of the separating distance, was produced as a statistical residue of the electrical forces between oscillating groups of net-neutral charges.
Such a group would be formed by an assemblage of atoms—in other words, mass. And gravity, the weakest force known to physics, was forty orders of magnitude less than the electrical force. Hence, Pang was saying that gravity appeared as a byproduct of the internal electrical nature of matter. And that much was interesting and exciting in itself, to be sure. But it wasn't exactly new. Speculations and theoretical studies of such a possibility went back a long way. Evidently there was more to it.
Wernstecki looked at the images on the screens again—metal frameworks filled with arrays of unusual electrical devices, typical thrown-together lab efforts. One showed a technician in clean-room garb floating in midair while making some adjustment—clearly a freefall setting. Then he turned to gaze back at the woman and the youth working on the construction in the area at the rear. The exposed section revealed banks of chip-like devices packed in a system of mounting frames strung with bundles of conductors. But the conductors were too heavy for them to be circuit chips; and woven among them was a forced-flow cooling matrix of capacity no electronic system would have needed. A light of understanding came over Wernstecki's face, and the pale eyes shone with genuine astonishment. "Artificial gravity? You've done it? Experimentally? You have verification?"
Pang waved the last of Wernstecki's suspense away with a toss of his hand. "That unit behind us at the back there was actually the first prototype that we built on Valkyrie, before we moved down here and Lan's team joined us. The view on the screen was the final phase of the dipole array wiring."
Valkyrie was an orbiting platform above Titan that housed an odd mixture of scientific and other facilities, including a spherical swimming pool, a 3-D sports arena, an arboretum featuring some strangely shaped plants, and a school of weightless architecture. However, many of the former occupants had evacuated to the surface since the bombardments caused by Athena began. During his spell on LORIN 5, Keene had learned that the rest of the space was to be vacated too, and the platform converted into a close-range defense station for Titan.
"You're talking about huge currents," Wernstecki commented distantly. He was visibly excited, his mind racing over the implications.
"One of the problems with the early experiments was to deliver enough without getting friction or reaction effects that would have swamped the measurements," Pang agreed. "Solid conductors were unworkable. In the end we resorted to pinch-stabilized mercury bridges. Doing it in zero-g eliminated a lot of spurious background, and the electromagnetic shielding had to be a hundred percent. That was why we stayed so long up in Valkyrie. But in the end, the effect we achieved exceeded the attraction of normal matter by a factor of over fifty. We were measuring tens of nanograms, but it was there. It was real. We could switch it on and off." He inclined his head to indicate the direction behind. "With power flowing, we can make that array act like a twelve-ton mass. And even with that array, we could improve the figure by a factor of a million . . . if the structure could stand it."
As Wernstecki leaned back in the chair, thinking, his eyes came unconsciously back to Keene. Keene could almost read him fitting the pieces together. Artificial gravity had been talked about for much longer than Kronia had existed. The immediate applications would be in spacecraft and satellites, eliminating the need for ungainly simulations by rotating structures or whirling modules at the ends of booms and tethers. Later, larger-scale booster systems could perhaps be implanted in low-gravity bodies like asteroids or the gas-giant moons to create Earth-normal conditions at the surface. And after that . . . who knew? Whole new technologies of matter manipulation, weight neutralization, freight handling, earthmoving . . .
But taking it beyond the research stage that Pang had described would require lots of electrical power. Hence, the Tesla Center was the obvious place to continue the work. That was why the project had relocated here and why Pang had brought Keene's group into it. He had needed power engineers, and nuclear-proficient ones at that—the watts to induce normal bodyweights on spacecraft flight decks or increase Titan's effective mass thirtyfold weren't going to come from any other source. The source would need to be efficient and compact, suitable for being built onto space vehicles. Keene's spaceborne MHD concept had fitted the need perfectly.
"So how far are you now toward a more advanced stage than that prototype?" Wernstecki asked finally. Pang let Keene answer.
"We have a one hundredfold scaled-up engineering proving model almost built here," Keene said. "Down in one of the heavy equipment bays." He looked inquiringly at Pang. "I assume we'll be taking Jan to see it?"
"Naturally, naturally." Pang kept his gaze directed at Wernstecki. "This will open up a totally new realm of physics. New industries will follow one day, revolutionizing engineering, leading to full colonization of the Solar System." In Kronian terms, he was saying that the payoff for being part of such an undertaking, if it succeeded, would be fabulous.
Watching Wernstecki's face, Keene had the feeling it would be only a matter of time before the project acquired a new talent. Wernstecki himself addressed the issue directly, avoiding any pretenses. "When would you want some kind of decision?" he asked Pang-Yarbat.
Pang waved a hand carelessly. "Take your time. I know that the work you're doing at present is important too. Be sure in your own mind what you want." He paused for a moment, tried but was unable to resist it, and grinned an insincere apology at Keene and Shayle. "It's a weighty matter, after all."