Page 17 - Unlikely Stories 5

On His Own Petard

daring innovator and disruptor of old technologies demanded a
certain degree of boy-genius unkemptness about his office-workshop,
a popular culture trope he had mastered. Then he sat and mentally
reviewed the crisis finally coming to a head: the payload war.
It was, he knew, the final battle for energy efficiency. Even the
most fuel-inefficient machines powered by combustion easily pushed
human and animal labor aside centuries before. Then fossil fuels hit
the twin hazards of depletion and pollution, just as other means of
electrical generation attempted to take over. And they would, Minsk
was well aware, but it was too late: mankind had dealt a death blow to
the terrestrial environment. Retrogression of civilization itself was
imminent, another in the mass of extinctions mankind was inflicting
on the planet. Minsk was driven both by opportunity and necessity:
life had to be established elsewhere, a new beginning on another
planet for the survivors of the brief Anthropocene. Mars would have
to do.
Ironically, the only way currently to get there was by vast
expenditures of fuel in rocket engines. And that had justified Minsk’s
entry into and domination of the space delivery industry. He would
be both savior and supreme plutocrat. He had the vision. It led him
to one daredevil gamble after another in parlaying a small stake in
computer games into the highly-leveraged Minsk Unlimited, the
alternately bane and darling of Wall Street, the one-man band leading
the charge to mass colonization of another world. But he could not
prevent more breakthroughs in chemistry and physics from taking
down his supremacy in moving men and materials away from earth’s
powerful gravity. He was in a race with a competitor he thought
could not succeed: the space elevator.
Like the quest for cheaper energy and stronger, lighter materials
historically pushing engineering innovation in earthbound machinery,
the price and social costs of the fuel requirement for accelerating
massive rockets and their payloads to escape velocity had stimulated
the development of an alternative. A century-old idea was on the
verge of actualization by a Japanese competitor, Tetsubashi
Shinzaibatsu, had secured financing to extend a ribbon of composite
carbon nanotube down from geostationary orbit at the equator to a
marine base station on the equator. It would also have a

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