Wisdom Does Not Become You

If at first we don't succeed, we never seem to learn

Wisdom Does Not Become You
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Living Beyond Our Own Reach

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Gods and men: each hurled into space, giving names and reasons to the blackness between the stars and fears, dreams and gears that drive the hearts of worlds, wars, and peoples. The men painted faces on the frightening stars and named them: Cassiopeia, Draco, Gemini. Fear fermented into longing, and the men lusted to join their gods, and they sacrificed their sons and peacemakers in that cause: "space!"

We harvested the most infinitesimal matter in the world to create the most terrible fire; and then we rode the flames into the sky—to learn, we said, to understand and become the wise men. And men cried as the rockets tumbled from the sky, as the peacemakers evolved into men-o-war, as the gods ate more of our sons for trespassing against the precious stars.

At such a cost as that, at least some made it through...

Prisoners of Ourselves

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2188 witnessed the devastation of the Daytonatti megalopolis when Deltech's Extraplanetary Grandliner Lebowitz fell from orbit, killing all 3,224 souls aboard and 16,766 on the ground. With the indescribably tragic loss of life and history in that significant city multiplex, the Overnational Committee on Aerospace Activity announced a global ban on space travel.

It was a wise choice; everybody said so. Industry and technology had grown so large that they outstripped the safety industry. Just as the seagoing behemoth Titanic had sunk despite being "unsinkable," the Grandliners manufactured by Lockheed-Stimson and flown by Deltech Air and Space Travel Corporation had little in the way of safety mechanisms—mechanisms that were easily available and cost-efficient at the time, like lifepods and exoboost escape trajectory rockets. The ban was not just so much rhetoric, either. Per sanctions from the disastrous failure of their flagship, Lockheed and Deltech developed a system of off-def (offensive/defensive) satellites that had the capability to restrict exit from the surface by way of force. Dubbed "the Groundskeepers," these satellites were sent into orbit to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic. The garbage scows were permitted to drone through on their one-way voyages to the sun, as was the annual resupply vessel for the base on Luna. A few other automated missions were also granted passage. But any other traffic was neutralized—which is to say disintegrated—by the Groundskeeper satellite system, leaving no trace of debris to fall back to the sheltered Earth below.

Nothing would cause the heavens to fall again. Feet on the ground should stay on the ground. It was the wisest choice; everybody agreed it was the safest, as well. No one was alive to remember how safely sheltered East Germany had been once upon a time.

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26 years to the day after the its implementation, the ban was lifted. The radiograms and communicomms were jammed with messages of plans and parties and hopeful expeditions. All circuits were busy, and the ionosphere was absolutely crackling with the obtuse contouring wave interference the industrial communicomms created. Everyone and everything was talking at once...and so the Groundkeepers never heard the most important part of the message.

Wonderfully exuberant vessels of gold and silver, black and green, world class Swedish Blue streaked into the skies leaving trails of firework exhaust behind. Grandparents stood on porches with their grandchildren waving as their parents took off for belated honeymoons. Little brothers watched with admiration as their elder siblings piloted real ships, now, not the scow-tugs they had trained on. Husbands blew kisses to wives who were joining the Lunar Landrights Committee or to help settle the Uritra vs Danddillion case or to just enjoy a long-awaited girls' night up.

The Groundkeepers never received the order lifting the ban. Grandparents and wives, husbands and children, strangers and loved ones—everyone found someone else in whose arms to seek comfort, sanity, as the skies lit up with the most gruesome firework display mankind had ever witnessed. General Motlee, in the Luna Base Solar Wind Echostation, listened in horror as ship after ship, rocket after rocket disappeared into blistered silence, increasingly panicked transmissions truncated in an instant.

Something In the Wind

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The close of the 22nd century found man an earthbound creature once again. After the disastrously aborted exodus of 2188, the Overnational Defense Committee unanimously approved a resolution to bring down the Groundkeepers.

"Doug, it's simple. It will just take too damn long!"

"Mr. Brevet, there's simply no way around it. There's a process for recalling satellites from the network, and each satellite needs up to 66 days to complete that process."

"66 days?! That's—"

"Mr. Brevet—Jim, come on. You know all this, don't look shocked, not to me. You know much prep we have to do on the ground and how many millions of calculations and tiny adjustments each satellite needs to make."

Jim looked resigned. Having given Doug Harriman, now the lead spokesman and litigator for the Groundkeeper system, an opportunity to lecture on his beloved network of killer flying robots, Jim Brevet, Chairman of the Overnational Revised Committee on Extraplanetary Travel and Commerce, had no choice but to let his old friend wear himself out on the topic.

"Each satellite," Harriman reminded his old law partner, "has to position itself to decline the orbital plane at exactly the perfect angle and attitude to slide into the atmosphere. All this with the most minimum of positioning thrust and all while navigating that blasted 'space wind'!" Solar and plasma energy had begun boiling across the solar system 9 years before from a nervous-looking Jupiter. This was one of the reasons so many on the planet were chafing to get up into space, to explore this disturbing phenomenon. "Once positioned, the satellite will gently slide down the sky and splash down in one of 5 approved landing areas in the Southern Ocean."

Brevet seized his opportunity while Harriman took a breath. "Doug, There are 144 satellites in the Groundkeeper network. It would take 26 years to recall the entire fleet! Damn it, the world is just not that patient. They're hungry to get back to the stars, Doug. Especially with Jupiter developing a sudden case of indigestion, getting back out there isn't just attractive; it's necessary!" He paused looking out the big plate glass window of his austere office. His voice became businesslike, almost brusque. "It's too dangerous to wait that long, Mr. Harriman. The resolution was unanimously passed today to shoot them down with the Superspike missiles."

Harriman's mouth dropped open.

"Within 1 year, estimates indicate the skies would be clear."

"Jim... You don't understand," a deflated Doug Harriman stated, adding softly, "None of you do..."

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The Superspikes were hurled at their targets beginning on Christmas Eve, 2196. The Overnational Atmospheric and Space Defense Office (ONASDO) staff watched with grim satisfaction as 6 of the slim appropriately-named missiles streaked upward.

But the Groundkeeper network parried each missile as a cow's tail swats flies. ONASDO sent the next volley toward a second set of satellites; they were treated as the first, lasered from the air like skeets. The rockets were disintegrated lower and lower with every volley until, on March 18th, 2197, the Groundkeepers went on the offense, directing the targeted energy weapons at sites that had been launching the missiles.

The holocaust that was feared never emerged. Jim Brevet's Committee wisely halted the rockets and missiles and bombs; the Groundkeepers' offensive halted. Humankind pondered and the satellites circled the planet, both in tense, watchful silence.

The Skyhook

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In a small, hot room in Killion Grove, Pennsylvania, Dr. Newman Bertolovsky made his great discovery. He had no idea it would become infamous, only that it meant the days of the Groundkeepers were over.

He called his invention the Skyhook. Oftentimes, the most evolutionary of discoveries is also the simplest. The Skyhook was a balloon-mounted device. The space-security network of defensive/offensive satellites known as the Groundkeepers ignored the weather balloons. Garbage scows and unmanned drones used to be permitted through, as well, but since the "Sky Fire" eleven years before, no ships with their own propulsion were permitted through the now-semi-autonomous containment network. But the balloons were ignored, as they had no external propulsion.

Newman's first idea had been very simple: just hook a bomb to a balloon and send it up until it found one of the lower-tier satellites, and blow it up. But he quickly realized that the nascent orbital hivemind would catch onto that and begin strategic preemptive actions.

The Skyhook was very similar...and very different. The Skyhook took a payload much more dangerous than a bomb; the Skyhook was designed to sneak man back into the skies, up above them, almost into space. In the ultimate wisdom of the preemptive strike, men would rise like phantoms and slide like ghosts into the machines they had built to cage themselves.

The platform of the Skyhook had a tiny cockpit; 60 seconds worth of compressed nitrogen for suit propulsion, if needed; logic schematics of the satellites' "little brains" and "big brains;" and a small, pocket-sized, green-covered copy of the New Testament. The truly revolutionary aspect of the Skyhook was that it was a steerable balloon. A small drone housed in a small sack inside the main canopy of the balloon used tiny pulses of compressed nitrogen to nudge the balloon laterally in very slow increments. The Groundkeepers disregarded small bursts of not-flammable gasses; and the balloons lumbered so slowly that they posed no overt threat.

But just part of the prize was no prize at all. The satellites at the outer edges of the network needed to be infiltrated, too. And so the third and final coup deliverable by the Skyhook was the hook itself. Essentially, it was nothing more than a long, strong lasso. A microfine filament of tungsten asterate was "fired" from the balloon when it reached it's maximum altitude miles above the earth. The filament magnetically attached to the satellite it targeted, and the tiny winch in the cockpit began slowly reeling the balloon up into space. The winch pulled the balloon up to 305 kilometers per hour, making the longest "hook" a 26-hour trip: 5 hours from ground to apogee, 21 hours from apogee to satellite via the 'Hook.

At 0933 on December 8, 2213, Captain Gerald G. Ford, tenth-generation descendant of American President Gerald R. Ford, opened his mic for the appointed command. All personnel would be in place by now; it was time. He prefaced the command with a wisecrack: "Let's light these candles, ladies!"

The program that was executed in all 144 Groundkeeper satellites at the same time should have turned them and shot them outward into space, clearing the Terran skies. It was hoped the men would remain tethered to the 'Hooks, but all of them knew they were not actually likely to survive. They would be global heroes for generations to come, though, and that's immortality in itself.

They were right; they didn't survive. But the skies didn't clear, either. They exploded an aerial conflagration that made the infamous "Sky Fire" seem as trifling as real fireworks!

At the instant one of the satellites detected ignition in another satellite, it turned and gunned the owner of the propulsion down, ignoring the fact that the vessel was its brother. But in order to turn, it had to use its own thruster, and was thus targeted and gunned down itself. And so on across 144 satellites— which all then fell flaming through the atmosphere and into the earth at virtually the same exact time. How many were killed in the impact? How many in the panic? How many from starvation, homelessness, grief?

Newman Bertolovsky died 18 months later from botulism, of all things. He died knowing his invention worked. He had, indeed, hooked the sky. His last prayer was one of forgiveness, for though he had grasped the heavens, he had never meant to pull them down on top of everyone.

Little Wheels Never Stop Turning

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"On this day, let the challenge be set! One year from now, we will rejoin our brothers and sisters on the Moon. We will see our sons and daughters again!

"Humankind will reclaim these skies!

"It is unwise for friends, families, worlds to be held asunder. So let us challenge ourselves to follow the example of those long-ago three wise men and follow our own light in the sky. Luna—we are coming back for you!..."

Excerpt of Inaugural Speech, Milton Gilbert Gladstone, 15th Chair of the Overnational Master Board
October 1, 2245

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