1 January 2018

Herewith ,part 3 of the ICE NEEDLE, the last unpublished Hawke /McLane story. The Hope crew have made  contact with  the  expedition leader in the Ice needle   but Fortuna can sense that he is being monitored by the alien presence on the Uranian moon. Her telepathic powers also allow her to learn something of the Aliens. Duncan Lunan, the writer of ICE NEEDLE takes up the story:    ”

Fortuna learns the full story of the artefact and its occupants.   The mission of the wheel was to establish the ET’s form of life in the Solar System, but if they found a life-bearing planet, their ethic was to colonise only the outer planets and leave the inner system alone.   If intelligence did in due course arise in the inner system, and develop space travel, no doubt by the vast timescales of the Universe the visitors would be then have dispersed or died out, so there would be no undue influence. However, they had one renegade among their leaders, who wanted a return to the sort of wars of conquest which they used to pursue in the past.and were now ashamed of.

He and his followers had put a lot of effort into modifying the electrostatic defence of the habitat so that it could be used as a weapon. To keep out cosmic rays, you can cut the mass of a torus habitat by a factor of four to ten, depending on the hull material, if you don’t then have to surround it with a five-metre thick layer of rock or build the habitat out of five-metre thick prestressed concrete in the first place. The system was designed as an option for the ‘Stanford Torus’ space habitat project in the mid-1970s.   For it to shield the whole structure electrostatically against cosmic rays, the charge required would be huge – 15 billion electron volts.   For a habitat as big as this, designed to move across interstellar space, the mass saving would be colossal. The system requires the hub of the habitat to be hollowed out as a ‘well’ for high-energy electrons (Fig. 9) and have an emergency discharge system to make the whole structure electrically neutral. (Richard D. Johnson & Charles Holbrow, eds, “Space Settlements, A Design Study”, NASA SP-413, US Government printing Office, 1977.)   If discharged along a beam of gas or plasma, however, it would be.a devastating weapon. (Ben’s comment at this point: “It makes the Annedoti trick look trivia1!”)

At the point when this issue came to a head, a colony had already been established on Miranda, leaving the population on the habitat relatively low – i.e. still several million!   But the warlike faction staged a coup, and turned the weapon on Miranda, to destroy the colony. Unfortunately, unknown to them, Miranda was near breakup due to tidal stresses. (This is what the astronomers
think really happened to it, perhaps several times in its history, because of interactions between the right-angled pulls of the planet and the Sun – though there aren‘t any mathematical models yet.) With this colossal bolt of energy from the habitat sinking deep into Miranda, it was enough.to trigger the break-up.   The effect was to create big broken lumps of Miranda in orbit plus an expanding ring of debris – like the situation in the Earth-Moon system after C-Day, but even worse.
The habitat tried to take shelter on the far side of Umbriel, that being as far as they could get in the time.   But because Umbriel is so small  (750 miles diameter) the trick didn’t  work: chunks of debris came round the curve of Umbriel and broke the rim and the spokes, and
the rim fell. In the process, although its spin rate was very low, it suffered terrible damage because of the momentum it had due to its mass: another big factor was that as it crashed on to the surface, Umbriel’s gravity was at right-angles to the spin-generated artificial gravity, so everything loose plunged to what is now the bottom of the rim.

Factions of survivors ( from Miranda) tried to attack and reclaim the hub, but it was still upright and intact, and even at low power the electrostatic weapon was devastating against individuals in spacesuits. At the end of the conflict the leader of the renegades had himself placed in suspended animation until his surviving followers got organised: but they didn’t, they died out, and he’s been in cold sleep for a million years or more – not completely suspended, but growing in the low gravity so that he now fills a substantial part of the hub. Not to be a repeat of Cthulhu, he’s roughly humanoid in shape, but with one central eye, and two tentacles instead of arms. I see him as grey, but at any rate he shouldn’t be green, not to repeat Cthulhu.”          Part 4 to follow shortly  .  Skipper Prossitt