Shui Wa and her four co-workers cautiously descended from the top floor of the Aerospace Building, and it took forty minutes to reach its eighty-third floor, where they had reached yesterday. Spider-Man's biggest headache is rubbing chamfered walls, i.e. walls that are less than 90 degrees from the ground. In order to express his perverted creativity, the designer of the Aerospace Tower designed the entire building to be sloping, supported by a slender column and the ground at the top, which, according to the famous architect, is more inclined to express a sense of rise. This seems to make sense, and this skyscraper has also become famous all over the world, becoming another landmark of Beijing. But eight generations of the architect's ancestors have been scolded by Beijing's spider-men, and the work of cleaning the Aerospace Mansion is almost a nightmare for them, because the entire side of this sloping edifice is full of chamfered walls, up to 400 meters high, and the angle to the ground is as small as 65 degrees.

After arriving at the work position, the water baby looked up and saw that the huge glass cliff above her head seemed to be falling down. He opened the lid of the detergent container with one hand and gripped the handle of the suction cup tightly with the other. This suction cup is specially made for cleaning chamfered walls, but it is not easy to use, and often desuction, at which point the spider-man will swing off the wall and be suspended by the harness to play the swing in the air. This happened many times during the cleaning of the Space Building, and each time it made people fly out of the sky. Just yesterday, one of Shuiwa's co-workers sucked out and swung back, slammed into the wall under the push of the strong wind, smashed a large piece of glass, and made a big cut on his forehead and arm, and the expensive coated high-grade architectural glass made his year's work in vain.

Up to now, Shui Wa has been doing Spider-Man work for more than two years, and this job is really not easy. When there is a second-level wind force on the ground, the wind force in the air is five levels per 100 meters, and now on the super high-rise buildings of four or five hundred meters, the wind is even greater. Needless to say, since the beginning of this century, Spider-Man has been falling from time to time. In winter, the strong wind is as sharp as a knife; The most commonly used lotion when cleaning glass is very corrosive, making the fingernails turn black first and then fall off; And in summer, in order to prevent the corrosion of the washing potion, you have to wear an impermeable raincoat, rain pants and rain boots, if you wipe the coated glass, the sun on your back, the sunlight reflected by the glass in front of you also makes people unable to open their eyes, at this time the water baby feels like being placed on the sun stove of the land and sea.

But Shuiwa loves this job, and this year is the happiest time in his life. This is of course because Spider-Man has a relatively high income among the low-educated migrant workers who come to Beijing from other places, but more importantly, he gets a wonderful sense of satisfaction from his work. He prefers to do the work that other workers don't want to do: cleaning the newly completed supertall buildings, which are all over 200 meters tall and up to 500 meters high. Hanging from the top walls of these skyscrapers, the city of Beijing stretches out unobstructed, and the so-called high-rise buildings built in the last century look so small from here, and farther away, they look like clusters of thin wooden strips stuck in the ground, while the Forbidden City in the center of the city seems to be made of golden building blocks; At this height, the noise of the city cannot be heard, and the whole of Beijing has become a whole that can be seen at a glance, a huge life with a cobweb-like highway as its blood, breathing quietly below. Sometimes, the skyscraper towers above the clouds, shrouded in a gloomy rainstorm below the waist, but the sun is shining above, and when he is a child, there is an endless sea of rolling clouds under his feet......

Shui Wa learned a philosophy from this experience: things have to be seen clearly from a high place. If you are submerged in this metropolis, everything around you is so complicated, the city seems to be an endless labyrinth, but from this height, the whole city is just a giant ant nest of more than 10 million people, and the world around it is so vast.

After receiving his salary for the first time, Shuiwa went around a large shopping mall, and when he took the elevator up to the third floor, he found that this was a place that confused him. Unlike the bustling lower two floors, the hall on this floor is relatively empty, with only a few low tables of surprisingly large size, and on the wide table top of each table there is a small cluster of buildings, each as tall as a book. There is a verdant meadow with a white pavilion and cloister on the grass...... These small buildings seem to be made of ivory and cheese, they look so cute, and together with the green meadows, they form a delicate little world, and in the eyes of the water baby, it really looks like a model of a small paradise. At first he guessed that it was some kind of toy, but there were no children in sight, and the people at the table looked serious and serious. He stood on the edge of a little heaven and stared at it for a long time, when a beautiful young lady came to greet him, and he knew that this was the place where commercial houses were sold. He casually pointed to a small building and asked how much the top suite was, and the young lady told him that it was a three-bedroom apartment, 3,500 yuan per square meter, and a total value of 380,000 yuan. Hearing this number, the water baby gasped, but the young lady's next words made the cold number much softer:

"Pay in installments, 1,500 to 2,000 yuan per month."

He asked cautiously, "I...... I'm not from Beijing, can I buy it? ”

The young lady gave him a touching smile: "You are really funny, the hukou has been cancelled for two years, what else is Beijinger who is not Beijinger?" Aren't you from Beijing? ”

After the water baby walked out of the mall, he walked aimlessly on the street for a long time, Beijing in the night was shining around him, and he held a few colorful advertising pages given to him by the sales lady in his hand, and stopped to look at it from time to time. Only a little more than a month ago, in that simple house in that distant western city, owning a house in the provincial capital was still a myth for him, and now, he is still quite far from buying that house in Beijing, but this is no longer a myth, it has turned from a myth into a dream, and this dream, like those exquisite small models, is really placed in front of his eyes and can be touched.

At this time, someone knocked on the glass that the water baby was wiping inside, which is often a troublesome matter. The appearance of high-rise cleaners in office windows always makes the white-collar workers in the super building have an inexplicable annoyance, as if these people are really alien spiders as their common name, and the gap between them is far more than the glass. When Spider-Man was working, the people inside either complained that the sunlight was blocked and that they couldn't get along with them. The glass of the Aerospace Building is semi-reflective, and the water baby looked inside with great difficulty, and finally saw the people inside, it was actually Lu Hai!

After the breakup, Shuiwa has been thinking about Lu Hai, in his memory, Lu Hai has always been a homeless man in a suit and leather shoes, living a difficult life in this big city. On a late autumn night, when Shui Wa was silently worrying about Lu Hai's winter clothes in the dormitory, he really saw him on TV! At this time, China Solar Engineering is choosing the material for building the mirror, which is the most critical technical core of the project. He went from being a tech tramp to one of the chief scientists of China's solar project, and became famous all over the world overnight. Since then, although Lu Hai has frequently appeared in various media, Shui Wa has forgotten him, and he feels that there is no relationship between them.

In that spacious office, Shui Wa saw that Lu Hai had not changed from the inside to the outside compared to two years ago, and even wore that suit, and now Shui Wa knew that this high-end and luxurious clothes in his eyes at that time were actually secondary. Shuiwa told him about his life in Beijing, and finally he smiled and said:

"It seems that we are both doing well in Beijing."

"Yes, yes, it's all good!" Lu Hai nodded excitedly, "Actually, when I said those words to you about the times and opportunities that morning, I almost lost confidence in everything, I meant it to myself, but this era is really full of opportunities." ”

The water baby nodded: "There are golden birds everywhere." ”

Then, the water baby looked at this large office full of modern feeling, and the most striking thing here was the unusual set of decorations: the ceiling of the office is a holographic image of the starry sky, so the people in the office are like being in a courtyard under a brilliant starry sky. In front of the background of this starry sky is a silver circular curved surface, which is a mirror, much like the sun stove in Lu Hai, but Shui Wa knows that this sun stove may be as large as dozens of Beijing. In one corner of the ceiling, there is a spherical lamp, which, like this mirror, is suspended in the air without any support, emitting a dazzling yellow light. The mirror casts a beam of light onto a large globe next to his desk, creating a round bright spot on its surface. The ball of light drifted slowly under the ceiling, the mirror turning to track it, always keeping the beam of light towards the globe. The starry sky, the mirrors, the light balls, the beams, the globe and the highlights of its surface form an abstract and mysterious composition.

"Is this the Chinese Sun?" The water baby pointed to the mirror and asked in awe.

Lu Hai nodded: "This is a mirror with an area of 30,000 square kilometers, which reflects sunlight to the earth in a synchronous orbit at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, and looks like an extra sun in the sky on the ground." ”

"I've never been able to figure out how there is more rain on the ground when there are so many suns in the sky?"

"This artificial sun can affect the weather in many ways, such as affecting atmospheric circulation by changing the thermal balance of the atmosphere, increasing ocean evaporation, moving fronts, etc., these two sentences are not clear. In fact, the orbital mirror is only one part of China's solar project, and the other part is a complex atmospheric motion model, which runs on many supercomputers, accurately simulates the movement of the atmosphere in a certain area, and then finds a key point, and uses the heat of the artificial sun to exert an influence, which will produce a huge effect, enough to completely change the climate of the target area for a period of time...... The process is extremely complicated, not my specialty, and I don't quite understand it. ”

Shui Wa asked another question that Lu Hai must understand, he knew that his question was too stupid, but he still mustered up the courage to ask: "Such a big thing hangs in the sky, won't it fall?" ”

Lu Hai looked at the water baby silently for a few seconds, then looked at his watch, patted the water baby's shoulder and said, "Let's go, I will invite you to dinner, and at the same time let you understand why the Chinese sun will not fall." ”

But things were far from being as simple as Lu Hai thought, and he had to move the line of knowledge to be taught to the bottom. Shui Wa knew that he lived on a round earth, but the world in the depths of his consciousness was still a structure with a round sky, and it took a lot of effort for Lu Hai to make him truly understand that our world was just a small stone ball floating in the endless void. This night Shui Wa did not understand why the Chinese sun did not fall, but the universe had completely changed in his mind, and he entered his own Ptolemaic era. On the second night, Lu Hai went to the food stall with Shuiwa to eat, and successfully made Shuiwa enter the Copernican era. After two more nights, the water baby struggled into Newton's age and learned (only about gravitation, of course). The next night, with the help of the big globe in the office, Lu Hai made the water baby enter the space age. On the next public holiday, also in front of that big globe, Shui Wa finally understood what synchronous orbit meant, and at the same time understood why the Chinese sun would not fall.

On this day, Lu Hai took the water baby to visit the command center of the China Sun Project, and a tall screen reflected a panoramic view of the construction site of the Chinese Sun in synchronous orbit: a few silver flakes floated in the dark space, and the space shuttle looked like a few small mosquitoes in front of those flakes. What shocked Shui Wa the most was the earth taken from a height of 36,000 kilometers on another big screen, and he saw that the continents were like large kraft paper floating on the ocean, the mountains were like the wrinkles of kraft paper, and the clouds were like pieces of white sugar left on the kraft paper...... Lu Hai pointed to the water baby to show where his hometown was and where Beijing was, and the water baby looked at it for a long time, and then came up with a sentence:

"Standing on such a high place, people must think differently......

Three months later, the main project of the Chinese Sun was completed, and on the night of the National Day, the mirrors cast sunlight for the first time on the dark part of the earth and fixed a huge spot of light in the Beijing-Tianjin area. That night, Shui Wa witnessed this magnificent sunrise in Tiananmen Square with hundreds of thousands of people: in the night sky in the west, the brightness of a star increased sharply, and there was a circle of blue sky spreading around this star, when the brightness of the Chinese sun reached its maximum, this circle of blue sky had occupied half of the sky, and at its edge, the color gradually transitioned from pure blue to yellow, orange and deep purple, and this circle of gradient colors was like a circle of rainbows surrounding the blue sky in the center, forming what people call "circular morning glow".

Shui Wa returned to the dormitory at four o'clock in the morning, he was lying on the narrow top bunk, the light of the Chinese sun shining in through the window, shining on the pillow wall of the commercial housing advertising pages, Shui Wa tore the colored paper off the wall.

Under the heavenly light of the Chinese sun, the ideals he had been so excited about were so prosaic and insignificant.

Two months later, the manager of the cleaning company approached Shuiwa and said that Mr. Lu from the China Sun Engineering Command Center asked him to go. Since the work of cleaning the Aerospace Building was completed, Shui Wa has never seen Lu Hai again.

"Your sun is great!" After seeing Lu Hai in the office of the Aerospace Building, Shui Wa praised sincerely.

"It's our sun, especially you, too: now you can't see the Chinese sun here, it's making snow for your hometown!"

"My parents wrote to say that there is really more snow there this winter!"

"But the Chinese sun is also having a big problem," Lu Hai pointed to a large screen behind him with two circular light spots, "This is an image of the Chinese sun taken in the same location, after two months, can you see any difference between them?" ”

"The one on the left is brighter."

"Look, in just two months, the decrease in reflectivity can be seen with the naked eye."

"What, is there dust falling on the big mirror?"

"There is no ash in space, but there is the solar wind, that is, the flow of particles ejected by the sun, over time, it makes the mirror surface of the Chinese sun have undergone a qualitative change, the mirror surface is covered with a very thin fog film, the reflectivity is reduced, a year later, the mirror will become like a layer of mist, then the Chinese sun will become the Chinese moon, but nothing can be done."

"Didn't you think of any of that at first?"

"Of course I thought of it...... Let's talk about you: do you want to change jobs? ”

"Changing jobs? What else can I do? ”

"I'm still a high-altitude cleaner, but I'm here with us."

Shui Wa looked around in confusion: "Didn't your building just be cleaned?" Or hire a high-altitude cleaner? ”

"No, it's not for you to wipe the building, it's to wipe the Chinese sun."

It was a meeting attended by senior leaders of the China Solar Engineering Operations Department to discuss the establishment of a mirror cleaning agency. Lu Hai introduced Shui Wa to everyone and introduced his work. When asked about his academic qualifications, Shuiwa honestly said that he had only been in elementary school for three years.

"But I can read, and it's no problem reading books." Shui Wa said to the attendees.

A burst of laughter rang out, "Mr. Lu, are you kidding?" Someone shouted angrily.

Lu Hai said calmly: "I'm not kidding. If a mirror cleaning team of 30 people is formed, it will take half a year to clean all the Chinese sun, and the cleaning team needs to work non-stop according to the cleaning cycle, which will require at least 60 to 90 people to rotate, and if the space labor protection law is being formulated, this rotation may require more people, that is, 120 or even 150 people. Are we going to have 150 astronauts with PhDs who have flown 3,000 hours on high-performance fighter planes to do the job? ”

"That's going to have to be about the same, right? In today's urban higher education, let an illiterate fly into space? ”

"I'm not illiterate!" Shui Wa said to the man, the other party ignored him, and then said to Lu Hai:

"This is a blasphemy against this great project!"

The attendees nodded in agreement.

Lu Hai also nodded: "I have long expected that you will have this kind of reaction. All of you here, except for this cleaner, have PhDs, so good, let's see what you do in cleaning work! Please follow me. ”

More than a dozen participants followed Lu Hai out of the conference room and into the elevator in confusion. There are three types of elevators in this kind of skyscraper: fast, medium and slow, and they take the fastest elevator and accelerate quickly to the top floor of the building.

Someone said, "It's the first time I've taken this elevator, and I really feel like I'm taking off on a rocket!" ”

"After we enter the synchronous orbit, everyone will also experience the feeling of cleaning the Chinese sun." Lu Hai said that the people around him all cast strange glances at him.

After getting out of the elevator, everyone followed Lu Hai up a narrow escalator, and finally walked out through a small iron door and came to the open-air roof of the building. They were immediately surrounded by sunlight and strong winds, and the blue sky above seemed to be much clearer than usual, and they looked around to see the city of Beijing. They find that there is already a small group of people waiting on the rooftop, and Shui Wa is surprised to find that it is the manager of the cleaning company and his spider friends!

Lu Hai said loudly: "Now, let's invite everyone to experience the work of the water baby." ”

So the spider-men came over and fastened the seat belts of each of the participants, and then led them to the edge of the roof, where they carefully stood on the small hanging boards that the dozen spider-men used as working platforms, and then the hanging boards began to slowly descend, hanging five or six meters from the edge of the roof, and the participants who were hanging on the glass wall of the building let out a burst of unadulterated exclamations.

"Guys, let's get ahead of the meeting!" Lu Hai squatted and leaned out from the edge of the roof and shouted to the people below.

"You bastard! Pull us up! ”

"Each of you must finish wiping a piece of glass before you can come up!"

It is impossible to wipe the glass, all the person below can do is to hold on to the rope of the harness or hanger and not dare to move, it is impossible to let go of a hand to pick up the brush placed on the hanger or open the lid of the cleaner bucket. In their day-to-day work, these astronauts deal with tens of thousands of kilometers of altitude on drawings or documents every day, but in this personal experience, the altitude of 400 meters has already made them fly away.

Lu Hai stood up and walked to the top of an Air Force colonel, he was the only one who was calm among the dozen or so people who were hanged down, he began to wipe the glass, his movements were calm, and the most surprising thing for the water baby was that his two hands were working, and he didn't grasp anything to stabilize himself, and his hanging board was motionless against the wall in the strong wind, which only a veteran can do for the spider man. When Shui Wa recognized him as an astronaut on the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft more than ten years ago, it was not surprising to see what she saw.

Lu Hai asked: "Colonel Zhang, are you frankly speaking, is the work in front of you really easier than your spacewalk in orbit?" ”

"If you only look at physical strength and skill, the difference is not too much." The former astronaut replied.

"Well said! A study by the Aerospace Training Center has shown that ergonomically, the work of a high-rise building cleaner bears many similarities with the job of cleaning mirrors in space: both perform repetitive, monotonous and physically demanding tasks in a position where the danger requires constant balance; We must always be vigilant, the slightest negligence will lead to accidents, which for astronauts may be mis-drifting, loss of tools or materials, or failure of life support systems, etc.; In the case of Spider-Man, it could be broken glass, a fall from a tool or detergent, or a broken and slippery seat belt. In terms of physical skills, especially in terms of mental fitness, Spider-Man is more than capable of doing mirror cleaning jobs. ”

The former astronaut looked up at Lu Hai and nodded: "This reminds me of the old fable: the oil seller pours oil into the oil pot through a square hole of a copper coin, and the skill required is as high as that of a general to shoot an arrow into the bull's-eye, the only difference is their identity." ”

Lu Hai continued: "Columbus discovered America, Cook discovered Australia, but these new worlds were developed by ordinary people, and these pioneers were at the bottom of society in Europe at that time. The same is true for space development, the country will make near-earth space the second west in the next five-year plan, which means that the era of exploration in the aerospace industry has ended, it is no longer just a job carried out by a few elites, and allowing ordinary people to enter space is the first step in the industrialization of space development! ”

"Okay, okay, you're right! Get us on it! The others below shouted hoarsely.

On the elevator back, the manager of the cleaning company leaned into Lu Hai's ear and whispered: "Mr. Lu, you have been impassioned for a long time, and the reason is a bit too big, right?" Of course, in front of Shuiwa and my little brothers, it is difficult for you to find out the key points. ”

"Huh?" Lu Hai looked at him inquiringly.

"Everyone knows that the China Solar Project is run in a quasi-commercial way, and it was almost stopped due to a lack of funds, and now, there is not much left for you to run the project. In commercial astronautics, regular astronauts earn more than one million dollars a year, and I guys can save you tens of millions a year. ”

Lu Hai smiled mysteriously and said, "Do you think it's worth taking this risk for tens of millions of me?" I deliberately pressed the education level of mirror cleaners to the lowest level this time, and as soon as this precedent was opened, I could use ordinary college graduates to do other jobs in space orbit in China's solar operation, and this time, the savings were more than tens of millions, as you said, this is also a helpless way, we really don't have much money left. ”

"In my childhood and teenage years, going into space was such a romantic venture, and I distinctly remember calling an American astronaut a god during a visit to the Kennedy Space Center," the manager said. Now," he patted Lu Hai on the back and shook his head with a wry smile, "we're each other. ”

Lu Hai turned his head to look at the spider-man boys, and said in a loud voice: "But, sir, the salary I give them is also eight to ten times that of yours!" ”

The next day, 60 spider-men, including Shui Wa, entered the China Aerospace Training Center in Shijingshan, all of them rural descendants who had come to Beijing from other places to work, and came from various remote corners of China's vast fields.

Mirror Farmer

At the Xichang base, the "Horizon" space shuttle poked its head out of the large white fog ejected from its engine and roared into the blue sky. In the cabin sat Shuiwa and fourteen other mirror cleaners, and after three months of ground training, they were selected from sixty people to be the first to go into space for practical operation.

In the feeling of the water baby at this time, being overweight is far less terrible than the legend, and he even has a familiar sense of comfort, which is the feeling of the child being held tightly in the arms of the mother. Outside the porthole on his upper right, the blue of the sky was getting darker. There was a faint crackling sound of blasting bolts outside the cabin, the boosters separated, and the engine sound changed from a deafening roar to a mosquito-like buzz. The sky turned deep purple, and finally it turned completely black, and the stars appeared, unblinking, very bright. The humming stopped, the cabin became quiet, the vibrations of the seats disappeared, and then the pressure of the back on the seat surface also disappeared, and weightlessness appeared. Water babies are weightless training in a huge pool, and it really feels like they are floating in the water.

But the seat belts could not be unfastened, the engine buzzed again, gravity pushed everyone back into their chairs, and the long orbit change flight began. In the small porthole, the starry sky and the ocean alternate, and the cabin is filled with the blue light reflected by the earth and the white light of the sun from time to time. The curvature of the horizon that can be seen from the window is getting bigger and bigger, and the range of scenery that can be seen from the sea and land is getting bigger and bigger. The orbit change flight to the synchronous orbit lasted for six hours, and the alternation of the starry sky and the earth's scenery in the porthole gradually had a hypnotic effect, and the water baby actually fell asleep. But he was soon awakened by the voice of the commander over the loudspeaker, which said that the flight was over.

The cabin mates floated away from their seats and leaned against the portholes to peek out. The water baby also unbuckled his seat belt and floated awkwardly to the nearest porthole with a swimming motion, and he saw the whole earth with his own eyes for the first time. But most of them were huddled by the porthole on the other side, and he also kicked the bulkhead and ran over it, hitting his head on the bulkhead on the opposite bulkhead because he was too fast. Looking out of the porthole, he found that the "Horizon" had come directly below the Chinese sun, the mirrors had taken up most of the starry sky, and the space shuttle was like a small mosquito flying under a huge silver dome. As the Horizon approached, the water babies began to appreciate the enormity of the mirror: it had taken up all the space outside the window, and they could not feel its arc at all, as if they were flying on an endless silver plain. The distance continued to shorten, and the reflection of the "Horizon" appeared on the mirror. Long seams can be seen in the silver earth, which are woven into squares like the warp and weft lines on a map, and become the only reference for giving a sense of relative speed. Gradually, the meridians on the silver earth no longer parallel, but converge towards one point, and this trend accelerates dramatically, as if the Horizon is heading towards a pole on this huge map. The pole soon appeared, all the meridional seams would gather on a small black dot, the space shuttle descended towards this small black dot, Shui Wa was shocked to find that this black dot was actually a building on this silver earth, this building is a fully sealed cylinder, Shui Wa knew that this was the control station of the Chinese sun, and it was their only home in this cold and silent space for the next three months.

This is how the life of the Space Spider-Man began. Every day (the Chinese sun also circles the earth 24 hours a day), the mirror cleaners drive a series of walk-behind tractor-sized machines to polish the mirrors, and they drive these machines back and forth on the vast mirrored surface, much like farming on the silver earth, so the Western news media gave them a more poetic name: "mirror farmers". The world of these "farmers" is peculiar, and beneath their feet is a silvery plain, which rises slowly in all directions in the distance due to the curvature of the mirror, but because of its size, it looks as flat as the surface of the water. Above, the Earth and the Sun always appear at the same time, the latter being much smaller than the Earth and resembling a radiant moon. On Earth, which occupies most of the sky, you can always see a slowly moving circular spot of light, which is especially striking on the dark side of the earth, which is the area where the Chinese sun illuminates the earth. The mirror can be reshaped to change the size of the spot, which is small and bright when the silvery earth rises steeply in the distance, and large and dark when the ascent slope is slower.

But the job of mirror cleaners is very hard, and they soon find that cleaning mirrors is as boring and tiring as rubbing tall buildings on earth. After returning to the control station every day, I am often so tired that I can't even take off my spacesuit. With the arrival of the follow-ups, the control station became crowded, and people lived as if they were living in a submarine. But I was lucky to be able to return to the station, which was nearly a hundred kilometers away from the farthest part of the station on the mirror, and when I cleaned to the outer edge, I often couldn't come back after work, so I could only spend the "night" in the "field", suck some liquid food from the spacesuit, and then hang in the air to sleep. Not to mention the dangers of the work, the mirror cleaner is the person who has carried out the most spacewalks in the history of human spaceflight, and in the "field", a small glitch in a spacesuit can kill a person, as well as micrometeorites, space junk and solar magnetic storms, and so on. Such living and working conditions made the engineers in the control station angry, but the "mirror farmers", who were born to endure hardship, silently adapted to all this.

On the fifth day after entering space, Shui Wa spoke to his family, and at this time, Shui Wa was working more than 50 kilometers from the control station, and his hometown was in the light spot of the Chinese sun.

Daddy Shuiwa: "Baby, are you on that day, it shines on our heads, this night is the same as the day!" ”

Water Baby: "Yes, Dad, I'm on it!" ”

Shui Baby Niang: "Baby, is it hot on it?" ”

Water baby: "It's hot when it's hot, it's cold when it's cold, I cast a shadow on the ground, the outside of the shadow has ten summers hot from us, and the inside of the shadow has ten winters cold from us." ”

The water baby mother said to the water baby father: "I saw our baby, there was a little black dot on the head that day!" ”

Shui Wa knew that it was impossible, and his tears welled up and said, "Father, mother, I also look at you, there are also two little black dots in that place on the Asian continent!" Wear more clothes tomorrow, I see a large cold snap moving towards you from the north of the continent! ”

……

Three months later, the second detachment arrived, and the water babies returned to Earth to take a three-month vacation. The first thing they did after landing was to buy a monocular high-powered telescope each. Three months later, they returned to the Chinese sun, and in between work, everyone used telescopes to look at the earth from afar, and of course the most they looked at their hometown, but it was impossible to see their village at a distance of 40,000 kilometers. One of them wrote a childish poem on the mirror with a thick pen:

In the silver on the earth, I look at my hometown

The mother at the edge of the village looks up at the Chinese sun

This sun is the son's eyes

The yellow earth will be dressed in green in this gaze.

The "mirror farmers" did an excellent job, and they gradually took on more tasks that went beyond their cleaning work. The first was the restoration of mirrors damaged by meteorites, and later a higher-level work was undertaken: monitoring and reinforcing stress overruns.

The Chinese sun is in motion, and its attitude is constantly changing, and these changes are done by three thousand engines distributed on its back. The mirror surface of the mirror is very thin, it is connected by a large number of thin beams on the back of the mirror into a whole, when the attitude or shape is changed, some positions may occur stress overrun, if the output of each engine is not corrected in time, or reinforced in that position, let it develop, the overrun stress may tear the mirror. The technical requirements of this work are high, and the discovery and reinforcement of stress overrun points requires skilled skills and extensive experience.

In addition to attitude and shape adjustments, the most likely time for stress overruns is during orbital haircuts, which is officially called orbital error correction due to light pressure and solar wind. The solar wind and light pressure exert a force on the huge area of the mirror, this force reaches about two kilograms per square kilometer of the mirror, so that the mirror orbit is flattened and moved upward, and on the large screen of the ground control center, the deformed orbit is displayed at the same time as the normal orbit, much like the hair grows on the normal orbit, from which the bizarre operation name comes from. The "Mirror Farmers" flew over the Silver Ground, carefully observing every anomaly on the ground, making emergency reinforcements at any time, and completing their tasks brilliantly each time. As a result, their incomes have increased a lot, but the one who has benefited the most is Lu Hai, who has become the first person in charge of China's solar project, and he doesn't even have to hire ordinary university graduates.

But the "mirror farmers" all understand that they are the first and last batch of space workers with only primary school education, and the minimum number of future space workers is also a college graduate. But they have fulfilled the mission envisioned by Lu Hai: proving that the underlying work in space development requires skill and experience, adaptability to harsh environments, rather than knowledge and creativity, which ordinary people can do.

But space is also changing the way of thinking of the "mirror farmers", no one can look at the earth from 36,000 kilometers every day like them, the world is just a small sand table in front of them that can be seen at a glance, and the global village is not a metaphor for them, but a real reality in front of them.

As one of the first space workers, the "Mirror Farmer" caused a sensation around the world. However, with the rapid development of the industrialization of near-Earth space development, many super projects have appeared in space, including super-large solar power stations that use microwaves to transmit electricity to the ground, microgravity product processing plants, and space cities that can accommodate 100,000 people have also begun to be built. A large number of industrial workers flocked to space, they were ordinary people, and the world gradually forgot about the "mirror farmers".

A few years later, Shuiwa bought a house in Beijing, established a family, and had children. Every year he spends half of his time at home and half of his time in space. He loved this work, and the long journey on the silver land at an altitude of more than 30,000 kilometers gave him a kind of transcendent tranquility, and he felt that he had found his ideal life, and that the future stretched forward as smoothly as the silver plains under his feet. But then one thing broke this tranquility and completely changed the journey of Shui Wa's mind, and that was his relationship with Stephen Hawking.

No one expected Hawking to live past a hundred years old, both as a miracle of medicine and as a manifestation of his personal spiritual strength. He became the first convalescent when the first low-gravity sanatorium in space was established in low-Earth orbit. But the overweight in space almost killed him, and he had to endure overweight when he returned to the ground, so he may not be able to return to Earth until the invention of a space elevator or an anti-gravity capsule. In fact, doctors advised him to stay in space for a long time, because the weightless environment was the most suitable for his body.

Hawking became less interested in the Chinese sun, and he came from low orbit to the Chinese sun, which was again enduring accelerated gravity (much smaller than when entering space from the ground) to the geosynchronous orbit, to see a cosmological observation of the slight anisotropy of background radiation intensity, which was located on the far side of the Chinese sun because of the huge mirrors that block interference from the sun and the earth. But after the observation was completed and the observatory and the working group were withdrawn, Hawking still did not want to leave, saying that he liked it and wanted to stay longer. What attracted him to the Chinese sun, the press made all kinds of speculations, but only the water baby knew the truth.

During the days of Sun Life in China, Hawking's favorite thing to do was to walk on the mirror, and it is incomprehensible that he only walked on the back of the mirror, and walked for several hours a day. The water baby with the most experience in space walking was designated by the station to accompany the doctor for a walk. At this time, Hawking was already on a par with Einstein, and of course Shui Wa had heard of him, but was still surprised when he first saw him in the control station, and Shui Wa could not imagine how a person who was paralyzed to such an extent could do such a great thing, even though he still knew nothing about what the great scientist had done. But while walking, Hawking's paralysis was not visible at all, perhaps because of his experience in manipulating an electric wheelchair, and he operated the miniature engine on the spacesuit with the same dexterity as a normal person.

Hawking's communication with Shuiwa is difficult, although he is implanted with an electronic voice system controlled by brain waves, and speaking is not as difficult as in the last century, but his words can only be understood by translating them into Chinese through a real-time translator. According to the leader's explanation, in order not to affect the doctor's thinking, Shui Wa never took the initiative to talk, but the doctor was very willing to talk to him.

The doctor first asks about the life of the water baby, and then recalls his early years, he tells the water baby about the big cold house he lived in Albans in his childhood, and the music of Wigner plays in the tall living room that freezes in winter; and the circus carriage that was placed in the Osmington Mill Ranch, which he used to ride with his sister Mary to the beach; and the Lighthouse of Avan in the territory of Zilton, which he often went to with his father...... Shui Wa marveled at the centenarian's memory, and what surprised him even more was that there was a common language between them, Shui Wa told everything about his hometown, and the doctor loved to listen very much, and when he walked to the edge of the mirror, he asked Shui Wa to show him the location of his hometown.

After a long time, the conversation inevitably turned to the scientific side, and the water baby thought that this would end the rare exchange between them, but it was not, and it seemed like a break for the doctor to tell ordinary people about the difficult physics and cosmology in the most popular language. He told Shui Wa about the Big Bang, black holes, and quantum gravity, and after Shui Wa went back, he gnawed on the thin little book written by Dr. in the last century, and then asked the engineers and scientists in the station for advice, and actually understood a lot.

"Do you know why I like it here?" During a walk to the edge of the mirror, the doctor said to the water baby to the corner of the earth peeking out from the edge, "This large mirror separates the earth below, so that I can forget the existence of the earth and face the universe with all my heart." ”

Shui Wa said: "The world below is so complicated, you can see from a distance here, the universe is so simple, just there are some stars scattered in the space. ”

"Yes, kid, that's true." The doctor nodded.

The back of the mirror is the same as the front, it is also a mirror, but there are more postures and shapes to adjust the engine like a small black tower. During their daily walks, the Doctor and the Water Baby float slowly against the mirror, often from the center to the edge of the mirror. When there is no moon, the back of the mirror is dark, and the surface is a reflection of the starry sky. The horizon is close and arc-shaped compared to the front, and the black latitude and longitude lines of supporting beams move beneath their feet in the starlight, as if they are floating on the surface of a small peaceful planet. When the attitude or shape is adjusted, the engine on the back of the mirror is activated, and the surface of the small planet is illuminated by columns of small flames, which makes the place even more mysterious. Above this small world, the Milky Way is shining brilliantly. It was in this realm that Shui Wa came into contact with the deepest mysteries of the universe for the first time, and he understood that all the starry sky he saw was just a speck of dust in an unimaginably large universe, and this entire universe was just the embers of a magnificent fireworks tens of billions of years ago.

Many years ago, when she stepped on the roof of the first high-rise building as a spider man, the water baby saw the whole of Beijing; When he came to the Chinese Sun, he saw the whole earth; Now, facing the third magnificent moment of his life, the water baby stood on the roof of the universe and saw something he had never dreamed of before, and although the knowledge was still rudimentary, it was enough to make the more distant world have an irresistible attraction to him.

Once, Shui Wa told an engineer in the station one of her puzzles: "Human beings landed on the moon in the sixties of the last century, why did they shrink back later, and still haven't landed on Mars, not even the moon?" ”

"Humans are real animals, and the things that were driven by idealism and belief in the middle of the last century have no longevity," the engineer said. ”

"Are ideals and beliefs bad?"

"It's not that it's bad, but the economic interests are better, if from then on, human beings will do whatever it takes to fly to outer space at a loss, the earth may still be impoverished, and ordinary people like you and me will not be able to enter space, although only in near-Earth space. Friend, don't fall for Hawking's poison, his trick can't be played by ordinary people! ”

The water baby has changed since then, he still works as hard as before, living a peaceful life on the surface, but obviously thinking about more things.

Time flies, twenty years have passed. In the past 20 years, Shuiwa and his partners have clearly seen the changes in the motherland and the world from an altitude of more than 36,000 kilometers, and they have seen that the Sanbei shelterbelt has formed a green belt across the east and west of China, the yellow desert is gradually covered with green, the hometown is no longer short of rain and snow, and the dry riverbed in front of the village is full of clear streams...... All of this is also due to the Chinese sun, which has played a large role in the grand project to change the climate of the great northwest. On top of that, the Chinese Sun has done many unusual things in recent years, such as melting the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro to alleviate the drought in Africa, making the city where the Olympics are held a true city that never sleeps......

But for the latest technology, influencing the weather in this way seems too clumsy and has too many negative effects, and the Chinese sun has fulfilled its mission.

The Ministry of Space Industry of the People's Republic of China held a grand ceremony to award the first batch of space industry workers of mankind. This is not only to recognize their hard and outstanding work in the past two decades, but more importantly, these 60 young people with only elementary and junior high school Chinese have entered the space work, marking that space development has opened the door to everyone, and economists agree that this is the real beginning of the industrialization of space development.

This ceremony attracted a lot of attention from the news media, in addition to the above reasons, in the minds of the general public, the experience of the "mirror farmers" is legendary, and at the same time, it is also good to have a chance to be nostalgic in this age of chase and forgetting.

Those simple and simple young men are now middle-aged, but they don't seem to have changed much, and people can still recognize them from the holographic TV. Most of them have received higher education through various means, and some of them have obtained the title of space engineer, but in the eyes of themselves and the public, they are still the same group of migrant workers from the countryside.

Speaking on behalf of the partners, Shui Wa said: "With the completion of the electromagnetic delivery system, the cost of entering near-Earth space is now only half of the cost of flying over the Pacific Ocean, and space travel has become a normal and mundane thing. But it's hard for a new generation to imagine what it would mean for an ordinary person to go into space twenty years ago, and it's hard to imagine how excited and exciting it would have been, and we are one of those lucky people. ”

"We people are very ordinary, there is nothing to say, we can have such an unusual experience because of the Chinese sun. Over the past twenty years, it has become our second home, and in our minds it resembles a miniature Earth. Originally, we regarded the seams on the mirror surface as the latitude and longitude of the northern hemisphere, and when we explained our position, we always said how many degrees north latitude and east longitude and west longitude were; Later, as we became familiar with the mirror, we gradually divided the continent and the ocean on it, and we would say that we were in Beijing or Moscow, and each of our hometowns also had a corresponding position on the mirror, and we were the most diligent in that piece...... On this little silver earth, we worked hard and did our part. Five mirror cleaners have given their lives for the Chinese sun, some of them did not have time to hide during the solar magnetic storm, and some were hit by meteorites or space junk. ”

"Now, this silver piece of land where we have lived and worked for twenty years is about to disappear, and it is difficult for us to put into words how we feel."

Shui Wa was silent, and Lu Hai, who was already the Minister of Space Industry, took over and said: "I completely understand your feelings, but I can comfortably tell you here: the Chinese sun will not disappear!" As I think you all know, for such a huge object, it is impossible to let it fall into the atmosphere and burn up in the same way as the last century, it will find its home in another way: it is very simple, as long as you stop the orbital haircut, and make the appropriate attitude adjustments, the solar wind and light pressure will eventually make it exceed the second cosmic velocity, leaving the earth to become a satellite of the sun. Many years from now, the interplanetary spacecraft will find it in a distant place, and then we may turn it into a museum, and we will return to the silvery plains to reminisce about our unforgettable years. ”

Shui Wa suddenly became excited, and he asked Lu Hai loudly: "Mr. Minister, do you really think that there will be this day, do you really think that there will be an interplanetary spacecraft?" ”

Lu Hai looked at the water baby blankly, speechless for a while.

"In the middle of the last century, when Armstrong made his first footprints on the moon, almost everyone believed that humans would be on Mars in ten to twenty years. Now, eighty-six years later, let alone Mars, no one has ever been to the moon again, for a simple reason: it was a loss-making deal. ”

"Since the end of the Cold War in the last century, the economic norms have ruled the world day by day, and humanity has made great achievements under this principle: now, we have eliminated war and poverty, restored the ecology, and the earth is becoming a paradise. This makes us more convinced of the correctness of the economic norm, which has become supreme and permeates every cell of our lives, and human society has become 100% economic society, and what input is greater than output will never be done again. The development of the moon makes no economic sense, the large-scale manned exploration of the planets is an economic crime, and as for the interstellar voyage, it is a true psychopath, and now, humanity only knows the input, the output, and enjoys these outputs! ”

Lu Hai nodded and said: "It is a fact that human space development in this century is still limited to near-Earth space, and it has many more profound reasons that are beyond our topic today. ”

"No more, and now, we have an opportunity to fly out of near-Earth space for a long-range space voyage for very little money. Sunlight pressure can push the Chinese sun out of Earth's orbit, and it can also push it farther away. ”

Lu Hai smiled and shook his head: "Heh, you mean to use the Chinese sun as a solar sailboat?" Theoretically, it is no problem, the body of the mirror is thin and light, the area is huge, and after a long period of light pressure acceleration, it will theoretically become the fastest spacecraft ever launched by mankind. But this is only from a theoretical point of view, the reality is that a ship with sails cannot sail far, it has to have people, an unmanned sailboat can go back and forth at sea, and even the port cannot sail, I remember Stevenson's "Treasure Island" has a vivid description of this. In order to sail and return with the help of light pressure, the mirror requires precise and complex attitude control, and the Chinese sun is designed to orbit the earth, and without human operation, it can only float blindly along an irregular course, and it cannot drift too far. ”

"Yes, but there's going to be someone on it, I'll drive it." Shui Wa said calmly.

At this time, the ratings statistics system showed that the ratings for this channel had risen sharply, and the eyes of the world were being drawn to it.

"But you alone can't control the Chinese sun, its attitude control needs at least ......"

"At least twelve people are needed, and given the other elements of interstellar travel, at least fifteen to twenty people, and I'm sure there will be so many volunteers."

Lu Hai smiled at a loss: "I really didn't expect that our conversation today would shift in this direction." ”

"Minister Lu, twenty years ago, you changed the direction of my life more than once."

"But I never thought that you had gone so far in that direction, far ahead of me." Lu Hai said with emotion, "Okay, it's very interesting, let's continue the discussion!" Well...... Unfortunately, this idea is not feasible: the most reasonable target for the Chinese Sun is Mars, but have you ever thought about it, the Chinese Sun will not be able to land on Mars, and if it does, it will be a huge expense, which will make the plan economically viable; If you don't land, it's no different from an unmanned detector, what's the point? ”

"The Chinese sun doesn't go to Mars."

Lu Hai looked at the water baby in confusion, "Where are you going?" Jupiter? ”

"It's not Jupiter, go farther."

"Further? To Neptune? Go to Hades......" Lu Hai suddenly paused and stared blankly at the water baby for a long time, "God, you won't mean ......"

Shui Wa nodded firmly: "Yes, the Chinese sun will fly out of the solar system and become an interstellar spaceship!" ”

Like Lu Hai, the whole world was stunned.

Lu Hai looked straight ahead with his eyes level, and nodded mechanically: "Okay, let's not think you're joking, you let me roughly estimate ......" As he said this, he half-closed his eyes and began to do mental arithmetic.

"I've already calculated: with the light pressure of the sun, the Chinese sun will eventually accelerate to one-tenth of the speed of light, and it will take about forty-five years to reach Proxima Centauri, taking into account the time it takes to accelerate."

Then, with the help of Proxima Centauri's light pressure deceleration, after completing the detection of the Centauri three-star system, it will accelerate in the opposite direction and return to the solar system in a few decades. It sounds like a wonderful plan, but it's actually just an impossible dream. ”

"You're wrong again, after reaching Proxima Centauri, the Chinese sun does not slow down, passes it at a speed of more than 30,000 kilometers per second, and accelerates again with the help of its light pressure, flying towards Sirius. If possible, we will continue to leapfrog and fly to the third star, and the fourth ......"

"What the hell are you going to do?" Lu Hai screamed in a gaffe.

"All we want from the planet is a set of high-reliability but small-scale ecological circulation systems and ......"

"Use this system to sustain the lives of twenty people for hundreds of years?"

"Listen to me, and a low-temperature hibernation system for life, we hibernate for most of the voyage, and only activate the ecological cycle when we are close to the star, which, with current technology, is enough to sustain us in space for thousands of years. Of course, the price of these two systems is not low, but it requires only one-thousandth of the capital compared to a human interstellar manned exploration from scratch. ”

"Even if you don't want a penny, the world will not allow twenty people to commit suicide."

"It's not suicide, it's just an expedition, maybe we won't even be able to cross the asteroid belt that is close in front of us, maybe we'll get as far as Sirius and beyond, how can we know if we don't try?"

"But there's one thing that's different from expeditions: you're definitely not going to come back."

Shui Wa nodded: "Yes, I can't come back." Some people are satisfied with the hot kang head of their wives and children, and never glance outside the world that has nothing to do with it; Others spend their entire lives just to see things that humans have never seen before. I've done both, and we have the right to choose a variety of lives, including life on a mirror drifting through space a dozen light-years away. ”

"One last question: Is it significant to fly over one star after another for thousands of years at tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers per second, sending back the faint radio waves that humans would have taken decades or even centuries to receive?"

Shui Wa smiled and said to the world: "The Chinese sun flying out of the solar system will make the pleasured human beings look up to the stars again, recall their dreams of cosmic voyages, and rekindle their desire to go on interstellar exploration." ”