Battle Station (13 page)

Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Battle Station

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But while the electronics technology may be ready to face the remaining years of this century, the politics of communications satellitesâand especially DBS âlags behind.

Many national governments do not want their citizens to receive television broadcasts from other nations. Dr. Jerry Grey, author of
Beachheads in
Space
(Macmillan, 1983) and a veteran of many international meetings and conferences on astronautics, says, “Television is too powerful a medium; they're afraid of it. Most of the governments of the world don't want TV broadcasts going directly from a satellite to their citizens.”

Most of the world's governments are authoritarian, if not outright dictatorships. Freedom of speech, taken for granted by Americans, is a rarity elsewhere. But signals beamed from a satellite to the ground are very difficult to jam. To stop DBS, governments have turned to legalistic formulations.

Dr. Grey, in
Beachheads
in Space
, traces the political turmoil succinctly:

International opposition [to DBS] arises from â¦ national sovereignty concerns â¦ . Unlike radio [which can be jammed], direct-to-citizen
television was seen by many governments as too powerful a medium to be allowed to develop along the same relatively open lines as international radio. [Ordinary] television could be received only by relatively large, expensive ground stations, from which any retransmissions could be controlled â¦ . But direct citizen access to geostationary satellites whose coverage could conceivably range over a third of the globe was worrisome to many governments.

Those governments, mostly Third World and Eastern Bloc nations, pushed through a ruling in the United Nations that the U.N.'s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space should set up controls to regulate DBSs.

“The vote,” Dr. Grey reports, “was 102 to 1, the United States alone defending vigorously its established policy of unrestricted free flow of information.”

As a result, regulations were approved in which every nation, no matter how small, was awarded a geostationary orbital slot and five DBS channels. Thus the small nations have gained control of most of the future slots along the geostationary orbit. They are apparently willing to sell or lease those slots to nations that can actually place DBSs in orbit, providing that they have some measure of control over the programming being beamed to the ground.

This ruling applied, essentially, to the eastern hemisphereâthe nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa âalthough the precedent can and probably will affect the availability of future orbital slots for North and South America.

As far as communications technology is concerned, this ruling makes certain that nations cannot place DBSs in orbit on a haphazard, first-come, first-served
basis, which could result in a chaos of satellites beaming signals that overlap and interfere with each other, producing bedlam on the ground.

On the political side it ensures that virtually any nation on Earth can exert a controlling power over the transmissions beamed from DBSs to its citizens. These nations have the right to refuse to allow another nation or consortium to place a DBS in an orbital position assigned to them, unless and until they are satisfied that the satellite will not broadcast anything which that government does not want its citizens to receive.

For example, suppose France wants to place a DBS in an orbital slot above the Pacific, where it would beam transmissions to the islands of French Polynesia. The French would have to borrow, rent, or buy a slot from one of the nations that has been assigned an orbital position above the Pacific Ocean. That nation's government, presumably, could extract a promise from France not to broadcast any material to which the “host” government might object.

Another way that governments may restrict their citizens' access to foreign DBS signals is to control the frequencies that each satellite uses
and
the frequencies receivable by the TV sets owned by their citizens. Thus a government might prohibit the sale, within its borders, of TV sets that can receive broadcasts from neighboring nations.

The Group of 77's “New International Order” includes a “New World Information Order” in which, among other things, news correspondents would have to be licensed by the nations they are reporting about, and data from Earth-resources satellites could not be disseminated without the permission of the nation whose territory was surveyed. Jeffersonian freedom of information is antithetical to such attitudes, and the
Group of 77 will continue to use its voting power at the United Nations to place as many restrictions on DBSs as possible.

The struggle, then, is between those nations that insist on an unrestricted flow of information and those that insist that every nation has the right of prior approval of the information transmitted to its citizens. Of the former, only the United States has voted consistently in favor of Jefferson. Our allies have often deserted us, either abstaining from critical votes or voting with the other side.

Nandasiri Jasentuliyana, of Sri Lanka, the executive secretary of the U.N. Conference on Outer Space, points out that many of the nations of the world believe that their national sovereignty is just as important as Western ideas of freedom of speech. Even leaving aside the political aspect, he says that a nation's internal social and cultural values must also be carefully considered.

“Who am I to say, for example,” he asks, “that one religion's ideas on family planning and birth control should or should not be broadcast to people of a different religion?”

To Americans raised on Jeffersonian ideas of free speech and tolerance for ideas different from our own, such regulation of DBSs smacks of censorship. Certainly a relatively closed society such as the Soviet Union would not want its citizens to see American situation comedies or game shows. Would Americans tolerate the six o'clock news as Tass would transmit it?

But Antenna Technology's chairman Nelson appears unworried by the Third World or even the Soviet-dominated Second World:

“Once people realize that they can put up a cheap antenna and get television programs from all over the
world, no government on Earth will be able to hold them back.”

Perhaps he is right. Certainly many engineers and industrialists see a brilliant future for commsats in general and DBSs in particular. After all, the biggest auction ever held by Sotheby Park Bernet was in 1981, when the famed auction house sold off seven-year leases for seven channels in an RCA satellite for a grand total of $90.1 million.

The ever-optimistic Clarke even foresees the advent of a global communications network that transcends national boundaries and, more important, national politics.

“During the coming decade,” he believes, “more and more businessmen, well-heeled tourists, and virtually
all
newspersons will be carrying attachÃ© case-sized units that will permit direct two-way communications with their homes or offices, via the most convenient satellite. These will provide voice, telex, and video facilities â¦ . As these units become cheaper, they will make travelers
totally independent of national communications systems.
” (Clarke's italics.)

Commsats, according to Clarke, can help to unify the world. “It means the end of closed societies.” Nations that refuse to allow visitors to bring “such subversive machines across their borders” will face economic suicide, “because very soon they would get no tourists, and no businessmen offering foreign currency. They'd get only spies, who would have no trouble at all concealing the powerful new tools of their ancient trade.”

Even if the politicians are dragging their feet, satellite communications is already a big business âand it is growing.

But like it or not, the fact is that DBS broadcasts are now, and will continue to be, under the control of
national governments that have scant tolerance for freedom of information.

Despite the technology of DBS, we have a long way to go before that “global village” opens its gates. And the Jeffersonian struggle of knowledge over ignorance, of freedom over despotism, has found a new battleground in space.

Isolation Area

Like the Earth, space is not for the military alone, thank goodness!

If you have read
Prometheans,
a collection of fact and fiction published in 1986 by Tor Books, you have already met Sam Gunn. He's the feisty little astronaut who â¦ Well, if you've read the story, you already know, and if you haven't, I shouldn't spoil it for you.

“Isolation Area” deals with a later period of Sam's life, when he takes that first scary step toward becoming the solar system's premier big-time space entrepreneur. In a subtler way it is also the story of the friendship between two men, and of the new freedoms that we will find as we begin to live and workâand loveâin space.

Incidentally, the best way to see that the military role in space is minimal is to maximize the peaceful, civilian, commercial aspects of space development. In his own cash-and-carry way, Sam Gunn strikes a blow against militarism with every sale he makes.

They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.

The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue,
frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said
Administration.
A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his narrow waist and made him look even taller and leaner.

He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in orbit before. Her pale blond hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, although she had more of a figure than he cared for.

Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. The reporter could see the resentment smoldering in the black man's eyes. Malone's face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair cropped close to the skull. She guessed Malone's age at somewhere in the early forties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.

She tried to restart their stalled conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”

“Why're you doing a story on Sam?” Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.

The two of them were in Malone's “office”: actually an observation blister in the central hub of space station
Alpha
. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting stations,
Alpha
was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where
most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity. Two thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon's one-sixth gee. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero gee, weightless.

Malone's aerie consisted of one wall, on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of viewing screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent plastic bubble, from which Malone could watch the station's loading dockâand the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and whiteflecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.

To the reporter, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world of their birth. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station's rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.

She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.

She said to Malone, “I've been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar Network â¦”

Despite himself, Malone suddenly grinned. “First time I ever heard him called
Mr.
Gunn.”

“Oh?” The reporter's microchip recorder, clipped to her belt, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”

That lean, angular face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh â¦ Sam, mostly. âThat tricky bastard,' a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty
times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”

“What did you call him?”

The suspicion came back into Malone's eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”

Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. The reporter turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex â¦

Malone's long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.

“You were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“Was I â¦ ?”

“It's all right,” he said. “Gets everybody at first. Don't be scared. You're perfectly safe.”

His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.

“If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”

He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment, he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won't need them, she insisted to herself. I'm not going to let this get me.

“Feel better?” he asked.

There was real concern in his eyes. “I think I'll be all right. Thanks.”

“
De nada,”
he said. “I appreciate your coming out here to the hub for the interview.”

His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station's zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that the shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.

It took several moments before she could say, “I'm not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”

Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn't make much difference, one way or t'other. He's dead; nothing you say can hurt him now.”

“But we know so little about him. I suppose he's the most famous enigma in the solar system.”

The black man made no response.

“The key question, I guess â¦ the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”

Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn't! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's a long story,” Malone said.

“That's all right. I've got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it, the reporter wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the outer wheel, where gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.

“Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”

“A cold?”

“Sam came down with a cold in the head. That's
how the whole thing began.”

“Tell me about it.”

Sam was a feisty little bastardâMalone reminisced âfull of piss and vinegar. If there were ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he'd find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn't abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you'd call him.

He'd had his troubles with the brass in Houston
and
Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he'd be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space.
How
he made it through training and into flight operations is something I'll never figure out. I just don't feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.

Anyway, when I first met him, he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head, and they couldn't let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.

“Six billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses, and postnasal drips, and the assholes in Houston won't let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”

Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years.
Alpha
was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn't spin, it just hung there; everything inside was weightless.

My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee bunks jammed into it, together
with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning, Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.

“Just don't sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.

That stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of hisâhis face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue, not really green. Sort of in between.

“Malone, huh?” He read the name tag clipped over my bunk.

“Frederick Mohammed Malone.”

“Jesus Christ, they put me next to an Arab!”

But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost like a baby's. After a moment's hesitation I swallowed it in mine.

“Sam,” he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the name tag pinned to his coveralls.

“I'm not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”

“Good for him.” Sam disengaged his cleated shoes from the grillwork floor and floated up onto the cot. His travel bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed at the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody's dying. What're you in for? Hangnail or something?”

“Something,” I said. “Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.”

His eyes went round. “AIDS?”

“It's not contagious. Not unless we make love.”

“I'm straight.”

“I'm not.”

“Terrific. Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.

I had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out of their wits that they would catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those days.

Sam's grin faded into a frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if you've got AIDS? Won't you catch my cold? Isn't that dangerous for you?”

“I'm a guinea pig â¦”

“You don't look Italian.”

“Look,” I said, “if you're gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay?”

He shrugged.

“The medics think they've got my case arrested. New treatment that the genetic researchers have come up with.”

“I get it. If you don't catch my cold, you're cured.”

“They never use words like âcured.' But that's the general idea.”

“So I'm a guinea pig, too.”