‘It won’t hold!’ the technician screamed over the noises of
the turbines.
‘It will’ Dyson called back over the whir and crashing of
the electro-magnetic charge. He looked at the machine and gritted his teeth. It
will hold, he willed it to hold. This was the first shot, this was the only
shot. Billions of dollars had been pumped into years of research and
development, a team of a thousand had dug a pit into hell to house the reactor.
Now in the control room Dyson could see through the window the nine story device
he had created. The engine that would catapult the first interstellar craft out
of our solar system.
Fossil fuels, liquid oxygen, both were useful and combustible,
but there was no way in the long run the human race would be able to get itself
into space regularly with this kind of extravaganza. The engine had the answer.
That was what he called it, a spinning series of coils that balanced and counterbalanced
to such precision. Tesla almost had it right, almost caught the equation, but
where he had fallen at the last Dyson had grasped it. He had cried when he
completed the mathematics, it was beautiful.
Now the prototype was in full motion. There had been an
error in the calculus, or a mechanical issue. The coils had heated up faster
than expected, but they would not exceed the mechanical thresholds, they would
produce the amount of energy required.
Above Arthur C Clarke’s vision swayed. It had been built at
last. A single anchored elevator. Sixty thousand and thirty miles into the
upper atmosphere docked with the international space platform. He would have to
see about adjusting that as well. The load weights if the pieces that needed to
go up whole were too much for the engines on the ‘ribbon’. He would have to do
this all himself.
He turned to the panicking technician who had stopped
fretting, although he was sweating uncontrollably. Dyson took off his Jacket in
the warmth of the electromagnetic hum from the banks of machines. He never
dressed properly anyway. White coats and jackets and ties. He looked down at
his faded guns and roses t-shirt. He had sworn never to wear another jacket and
tie again after all those failed interviews, all those failed pitches to
companies who couldn’t see a profit. Now he was on the verge of creating a
power output that would put a manmade object around another star within six
years, dropping a crew off on Mars as it went.
This was his gift to the human race. This was his fuck you
to everyone who had doubted him: to that small weasel man who had turned up his
nose, who had sneered at the idea.
‘I’m sorry Mr Dyson’ his voice had been thin with an eye on
the clock, ‘your idea just won’t work, not on this planet anyway.’
The counter hit the mark perfectly. The power output reached
the threshold for shut down and the technicians behind him all started high
fiving. The whooping and hollering
began.
Dyson had stood, thanked the men and women for listening to
him before rounding on the weasel, the man with no vision.
‘I accept your challenge’ he had said.
Dyson looked back up at the displays. His maths had been perfect and he allowed himself a small smile.
It was the beginnings of an engine to take us to the stars, and all because
someone didn’t want to buy his idea for a vacuum cleaner.
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