“Oops,” Garfield said with a grin.
I gave him my best glare and materialized another ball. “I might build a bunch of Bobs and field a team or two…”
“Oh jeez no. Half of them will turn Canadian and want to play hockey instead, eh.”
I laughed and tossed the new ball.
Riker – September 2164 – Sol
The two colony ships were impressive, even in their half-built state. They would feature two drive rings and a massive reactor cooling section, all necessary to move the huge central cargo section. Since the cargo would be ten thousand human beings in stasis, a significant proportion of the mass of the vessel consisted of shielding. Overall, the colony ship would have looked like a military vessel to a science fiction fan of my day, but without the phaser banks or frag cannons, of course.
One of the ships was farther along than the other—the concession to the Spits resulted in some shifting of manufacturing capability. The third ship would be ready only four months after the first two. Now we were trying to even out the construction of One and Two so that they would be ready together.
I snorted with amusement, thinking of the last couple of UN sessions. Now that the yelling was over, this was more like a project from my former life. Technical challenges and engineering issues. With the manufacturing AMIs doing all the work, I didn’t even have to worry about labor issues.
Negotiations still continued, of course, back on Earth. No one was willing to quietly go along with being scheduled “somewhere down the road.” We still had the fifteen-hundred-trip issue to deal with. We didn’t know for sure that it would be a death sentence, but there was general agreement that the climate on Earth was getting worse. If it got bad enough, starvation was a real possibility, despite all our efforts.
Homer and his crew continued to scour the system. They’d also implemented some techniques for bringing metal up from planetside. That was slow and laborious, especially given the scale of our requirements. I’d allocated a half-dozen printers to Homer—Colonel Butterworth, predictably, had screamed like a stuck pig—with instructions to bootstrap themselves up to a viable operation. So far, Homer was doing better than expected. The amount of refined metal on Earth was considerable, even after the war and subsequent bombardment. He’d already returned the printers to regular ship production, after printing up new ones.
Homer had calculated the possibilities, and gone into his “good news, bad news” comedy routine. The good news was that we could eventually build a lot more colony ships from what he estimated we could haul up from Earth. The bad news was that everyone would be long since dead.
You would think that 3D printers would have solved the scarcity problem. In fact, the technology had just moved the bottleneck. We could build more drones to extract and haul the metal out of Earth’s gravity well, or we could build colony ships, or we could build more printers in order to produce more drones and colony ships during which time we would be producing neither. The calculations to determine the optimum path were finicky and had large error bars. Even thinking about them made me grit my teeth.
The drone had reached its destination. I ordered it to establish a sideways vector, then watched the video as the colony ship’s exterior drifted by. Unfinished sections allowed drones and construction roamers access to the interior. A steady stream of laden drones entering the hull was matched by a stream of empty-clawed drones exiting. The status window revealed no current issues. The printers were keeping up with parts demand, Homer’s supply crew was keeping up with raw materials demand, and the construction crew was kept busy twenty-four-seven.
I shook my head and closed the video windows. Inspection done.
***
Homer and Charles were in Earth orbit, taking a break from their outer-system patrols. We took advantage of the rare opportunity to have an all-Bobs meeting. Even without commentary from Arthur, the tone was a little gloomy. The climate of the planet continued to deteriorate, and was possibly accelerating.
“I think it’s a given that we won’t be getting fifteen million people out-system,” Homer said. “Which means we have to come up with some way to keep them alive here.”
“Triaging will help.” Charles poked a finger at his copy of the holographic globe. “Emigrate the most marginal groups first, move everyone else to the most equatorial locations.”
I shook my head. “Most of the equatorial locations aren’t habitable. Not because of climate—some of them are actually more temperate now—but because of a lack of infrastructure. Conventional bombings or falling rocks will make a city uninhabitable. Add in the problem of a lack of power and water, and you can’t just drop a bunch of people off in the jungle and expect them to survive.”
“A lot of the jungle isn’t jungle anymore,” Arthur retorted.
I grimaced in response. “I know, Arthur, but it doesn’t change the basic point. We can’t move that many people to anywhere that doesn’t have infrastructure, no matter how comfortable the climate. And I don’t see the point of building temporary infrastructure, when it’s going to delay ship-building.”
“And Butterworth will have a cow.” Charles smiled ruefully.
“Okay,” Homer interjected. “Spitballing, then. How about using space mirrors to warm up the Earth?”
I looked at him in surprise. “Not a bad idea in principle. A lot of unknowns, though, as it would be all new engineering. I think we’d need a minimum of a thousand kilometers’ radius for a mirror to have any appreciable effect. Plus, it wouldn’t do anything to clear the spreading radioactivity or repair the damaged and destroyed ecosystems, at least not within a human lifetime.”
“And Butterworth…” Charles said smiling.
“Will have a cow!” We all replied in chorus. Colonel Butterworth had become a bit of a cliché with his standard reaction to any change in plan.
Homer shrugged. He’d done the math, too. “Let’s pass it by the colonel, and see if he grabs his chest and falls over.”
“Space stations?” Charles ventured. “Same problem, though, I guess. Or moon colonies. Building all the structure and infrastructure to keep people alive in space would set the colony ships back decades. And you have to build for a population density sufficient to make a dent in the fifteen million or it’s pointless.”
I nodded, glum. I’d had all these thoughts. Not really surprising that the other Bobs had, too. But anything that we tried would detract from the ship-building. Any useful plan would need to either have negligible impact on the overall plan, or would have to produce significant enough results in a short enough time to be worthwhile.