The beginning of a new science fiction story, “Resonance.” I think I’m going to try to finish this one before the deadline for All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories.
Grant Sullivan watched his dream slipping away on CNN-Scientific. The screen showed an anchoring mechanism connected to the bottom of a fifty-thousand-kilometer black strip of nanofiber only two centimeters wide. It was less than ten centimeters from the steel and concrete base to which it was supposed to attach. Now five. Four. Three. Two. One.
With an audible click, the anchor locked on, and a cheer went up from the crowd on-site near Quito, Ecuador. The quarter-billion dollar Otis Prize for creating the first space elevator would be going to Nanoplications, not Sullivan Space Technologies.
Grant muted the television as the CEO of Nanoplications attached a small wheeled climber to the strip. It would now travel up the strip, streaming a second strand behind it. Others would follow, and soon there would be a think cable capable of carrying any payload into space. It was exactly what he had planned to do, but the Sullivan cable was not even halfway down from geosynchronous orbit yet.
It would get finished, of course, because it was the only way to recoup even part of the money spent on development. But Grant had been counting on winning the Otis Prize, and without that money he would lose control of the company he had founded.
He sighed, and switched off the television.
You didn’t notice any Zeppelins in the story? Well, by the time it’s over, there will be dirigibles aplenty.