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about is Sargent's ideas for getting into one of the transporters..." He
realized suddenly that Haber's remark had had nothing to do with escape bids,
but had gone off on a different tangent that meant something to the two
scientists but not to him. "What's wrong?" McCain asked.
"Have I missed something?"
"We were going to mention it anyway," Haber said to Rashazzi.
"You're talking in riddles," McCain said to both of them. "Mention what?"
"We've found something else that's odd," Rashazzi said. "Come and look at
this." They led McCain to the rear of the work area. Suspended from a support
quite high up in the girders overhead was a line with a metal ball at the end.
A pointer attached to the ball extended downward, almost scraping a large
sheet of card marked with a circular scale graduated in degrees, which was
lying flat on the floor. Rashazzi reached out and set the line swinging.
"From the length and period of a pendulum, a simple formula gives the local
acceleration due to gravity," he said. "That in turn determines the
force with which an object presses down on the floor -- in other words, what
you weigh." He looked up at McCain. "Do you remember feeling a little heavy
when you first came here? But after a couple of days it had gone away? Most of
us did. You thought it was due to fatigue, maybe? Well, it wasn't so. The
rotationally induced 'gravity' in Valentina Tereshkova is approximately ten
percent greater than Earth-normal."
"Seems strange," McCain commented.
"It's very strange," Rashazzi agreed. "If anything, you'd expect a space
colony to be designed for a level somewhat lower than Earth's -- to reduce the
stresses upon the structure, and hence permit lighter and cheaper
construction. But why would any designer go the other way?"
"I don't know. Do you?"
"No. But that's not all." Rashazzi motioned toward the pendulum as it passed
over the centerpoint of the circle, slowed to a halt a couple of inches
outside the scale, and began its swing back again. "This is what's called a
Foucault pendulum. That means it's free to swing in any direction."
"Unlike the kind in a grandfather clock, which is constrained to move in a
plane parallel to the back wall of the cabinet," Haber interjected.
McCain nodded. Rashazzi went on, "Like a gyroscope, a pendulum tries to
conserve momentum by continuing to swing in the same direction in space.
Imagine one set up at the north pole on Earth. Pick an arbitrary direction --
that of the constellation Aries, for example. Pull the pendulum back in that
direction, and release it. Now imagine it continuing to swing in the same
plane, away from Aries and then back toward it again for a whole day. The
Earth will have turned a full three hundred sixty degrees beneath it. Or, if
you were standing on the ground next to the pendulum, you would have observed
the Earth as staying still and the plane of the pendulum's swing rotating
through a circle -- in fact, as Aries moves in its circle around the pole" --
Rashazzi pointed at the card on the floor -- "you could measure its rotation
rate on a scale."
McCain remembered seeing this in science museums when he was younger.
"Okay," he agreed. "Now what?"
"Now let's repeat the procedure at the equator," Rashazzi said. "Aries no
longer moves in a circle around the center of the sky overhead, but rises and
sets. We start the pendulum moving just as Aries peeps over the eastern
horizon, and it continues to swing east-west. But six hours later, Aries will
be overhead. Now, is the pendulum still moving toward and away from Aries as
it was before? Hardly. It would have to be yo-yoing up and down, which would
be a miracle. No, instead it's still moving east-west with respect to Earth.
In other words, an observer there would see no rotation of the plane it swings
in. Between the pole and the equator both effects combine, and the plane will
rotate not through a full circle, but through a certain angle and back again,
which depends on latitude."
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McCain had been on Tereshkova long enough to know of the rim's equivalence to
Earth's equator. "So a pendulum here should keep going in the same direction,"
he concluded.
Rashazzi nodded. "Quite. But it doesn't. The plane of the swing rotates.
We've measured and timed it. Its oscillation period is eighty-eight seconds."
"As the colony spins," McCain said.
"Except that with the official dimensions as given by the Russians, and
allowing for ten percent above Earth-normal weight, it ought to be about a
minute," Haber said.
Rashazzi looked at McCain quizzically for a second, as if challenging him for
an explanation. "One answer that would give a slower rotation rate would be if
the diameter of Tereshkova were considerably larger than it's supposed to be."
He showed his palms briefly. "But that's impossible, of course. Ever since the
Russians started building it, Valentina Tereshkova has been studied by enough
groundbased and spacebased telescopes and other instruments for us to be under
no doubt that it is the size they say it is."
McCain could only look at them in bafflement. "So what do you make of
it?" he asked them. "Anything?"
Haber shook his head.
"There's something very strange about the geometry of this whole place,"
Rashazzi said. "Never mind Eban's escape projects. Even without them, we need
to get out and conduct more tests all over Tereshkova. One look at it from the
outside would tell us a lot. That's one attraction of the idea you had. But
right now, I can't tell you what this business means."
"Should we tell the escape committee about this?" Haber asked.
McCain shook his head. "Not until we know what's behind it. Right now they
don't have any inkling of this. So it's not something that could reach the
wrong ears if any of them were careless. Let's keep things that way for the
time being."
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The amenities for privileged-category inmates at Zamork included a library
that was larger and more diverse than the one available in the subsurface
Core. In particular it possessed a more comprehensive reference section. Now,
reference books tend to weigh a lot, and payloads hauled up out of Earth's
gravity well at considerable expense could be better devoted to other things.
So the bulk of the reference material in the Zamork library resided in
electronic form, and was updated by periodic transmissions from
Earth. In fact, it was a subset of the main public library maintained in
Turgenev.
Since Communists are supposed to exhibit a passionate zeal for setting
constantly new records of production, this material included vast tables of
industrial-output statistics, construction figures, agricultural yields, and
five-year forecasts of everything from zip-fasteners on Aeroflot flight
attendants' uniforms to millions of barrels of oil from the drilling platforms
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