The Gentle Likpas

The fantastic Odyssey of the Mother, page 4

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The Mothers were not launched with rockets, but with a space lift to geostationary orbit. This page 4 describes its building, which was not a simple feat.

 

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The mother tells the story of the Slingshot, and what is its use:

 

Auweara

 

The small island of Auweara, with its unique flora and wildlife, was the home of the Likpas of Paradise, a world of flowers, perfumes and kindness. They were the first victims of the nuclear war which almost ruined Haralik. When the emissaries of Arnolika came back in the aftermath of the explosion, they found only a desert of quicklime and charred trunks. A wonderful world had been irreparably erased, without anyone ever knew who did that and why.

 

Then came the radioactive Great Winter, forcing the rare surviving likpas to hide in the tunnels of Antakaralik. They emerged only a thousand years later, during the following Great Summer. Freed from the phallotism, the radioactivity eased up, they at last could explore and freely inhabit their planet.

 

When they found again the island of Auweara, grass and forest had grown again. But of the wonderful flowers, of the likbubuterfly and of the cabbage trees, absolutely nothing remained. Only the strange basalt Spyramid testified that a moving and mysterious civilization had lived here. Its meaning will therefore remain forever unknown, as of so many other ruins of the ancient Haralik

 

The Slingshot

 

However, Auweara was ideally located for basing the Slingshot: right at the equator, in the middle of an uninhabited ocean. Therefore, it was decided to build here the Alpha station, with the Anchor, the Pulley, and the Factory for the Cable.

 

The Slingshot is primarily a space elevator, a monomolecular Cable 200 000kms long, stretched between the Auweara island and a Counterweight in space, rotating with Haralik. Beyond the geostationary orbit, the centrifugal force prevails over gravity. Thus, the Counterweight keeps the cable tensioned, allowing to carry loads and astrolikonauts from the ground to the geostationary orbit.

 

However, the Cable continues beyond the counterweight: it is the Slingshot, which freely rotates in space like a giant whip. The MOTHERS are then assembled on a Cursor, which will slide along the Slingshot, in a vertiginous slide. Then the centrifugal force ejects the MOTHERS with enough speed to leave the solar system!

 

 

Things like that, it could happen only to the Likpas, hey?