Jumping off the Planet d-1

by David Gerrold

  Part of the show talked about some of the proposals to add self-destruct mechanisms to the beanstalk. One guy wanted to mine the entire length of each cable with binary explosives, so if the cable snapped, the whole thing would be blown to bits and all the bits would vaporize on the way down through the atmosphere, so nobody on the ground would get hurt. But the analysis of that plan showed that it was not only too expensive, but even if you could do it, and even if all the cables snapped, it still wouldn't work. The resultant meteor showers would do almost as much damage as a falling cable, and the radius of destruction would be far wider. And besides, there was more chance of one of those self-destruct units failing and blasting the Line apart than there was of a terrorist snapping all three cables at once. So much for that idea.

  But if the Line was in serious danger, you could snap it at One-Hour, the low-Earth orbital boundary about 200 klicks up, and let everything above that fly into space, and then you'd only have to worry about less than 200 kilometers of Line hitting the ground.

  Most of that stuff burns up on the way down, of course, the stuff that has to fall the farthest—so we only have to worry about the bottom-most lengths of Line, the stuff that doesn't have time to burn up. And remember, it's all Line-cable, the strongest material ever manufactured, so you can't depend on it all vaporizing. You're much more likely to get a rain of hot, flaming chunks. Which is why you want to keep the area west of the Line clear. At least a hundred klicks. Then once you've reduced the global scale of the disaster to a domain of a couple hundred klicks, you can start to argue that Line failure is a tolerable risk, especially if the Line is on a western coastline, so that a failure drops most of the debris into the ocean. But even so, you're still dealing with a lot of mass hitting the planet, with significant consequences. And of course, regardless of what happens to the planet, the financial cost of a Line failure would remain the same: global economic meltdown.

  But then the program showed how the Line is regularly maintained, how new filaments are being added to the existing cables at the rate of twelve per year. Every month, each cable gets a new filament started. Although filaments aren't supposed to wear out, their projected life is about eighty years per wire, so the idea is that each filament will be replaced every forty years. The show didn't say how they were going to remove the old filaments, but I assumed there was some way to do it. But even if they stopped the regular maintenance, they figured that the beanstalk could stand untended for thousands of years. Maybe more. By then, who knew what advances in technology we might have?

  It was all supposed to be very reassuring—but it wasn't. Not really. It was as comforting as a flight attendant saying, "In the unlikely event of a water-landing ... "

  After we got tired of watching programs about the construction of the beanstalk, Weird started scanning through the entertainment and news channels. There were hundreds. Eventually, he found a station from home. That's when things suddenly got very interesting.

  "Hey, Dad, look—" Douglas said. It was hard not to look. One whole wall was a screen. And it had Stinky's picture on it. And mine. And Weird. And Dad. Uh-oh ...

  The announcer was saying, " ... believed to be somewhere on the orbital elevator. With the exception of the phone call received earlier today, the Dingillian children have not been heard from since their father took them last week for a regularly scheduled vacation. Line officials refused to comment, saying that to do so would violate their passengers' privacy, but TNN's own travel desk has determined that Max Dingillian had made reservations for four on the 2:15 elevator to Geostationary. That car was never launched due to the high wind conditions of Hurricane Charles, and Ecuador Security is now investigating the possibility that Dingillian and his sons are still somewhere at Terminus. Margaret Dingillian is seeking an International Court Order requiring the Line Authority to consider this a security situation and detain Max Dingillian. More on this developing story as it breaks ... In other news, the hotly contested Baby Cooper lawsuit took another legal blow this week when it was revealed that one of the company's lawyers had failed to—" Weird switched the television off and looked at Dad. We all did.

  FAMILY MEETING

  Dad sat down, looking kind of weak. He began to do that thing he does when he's winding himself up to make one of his speeches. He flustered.

  And the more he flustered, the more I knew this wasn't going to be good. And I was already feeling all squooshy inside. I didn't know which was more mixed up, my stomach or my head. And Dad's performance wasn't helping. Finally, I turned to Weird and said, "You better ask him."

  Dad said, "Ask me what?"

  Weird cleared his throat and managed to stumble over a whole paragraph. "Well—it's about you and us and Mom. Chigger and I were talking—and well, I mean—you are kidnapping us, aren't you, Dad?"

  Dad nodded his head as if he had been expecting this conversation for a while. He sighed. "You know that your Mom and I aren't on very good terms. I'm sorry about that. I wish it were different."

  "Mom always maintained that the divorce was your fault."

  "I asked for the divorce, yes, but I think you should know why. I found your mother in bed with someone else—"

  "That woman we saw on the phone?" Weird asked.

  Dad shrugged. "I don't know if she's the same one or not. It doesn't matter. Your mom asked me to forgive her. And I—I just couldn't. I felt betrayed. Yes, your mother and I had problems. I thought we were working them out. I was honestly trying, but things weren't happening. I wasn't getting the work or the money—"

  "Dad," I said, exasperated. "You and mom have explained this to death. I don't know about Douglas and Bobby, but I don't care whose fault it is."

  "Well, I do," he said. "Because I've had a lot of time to think about this. I'm paying a terrible price, because I don't get to be with the three people I love most in the world—you kids."

  "Yeah, Dad, and what about the price we're paying?" I said. "Every year when we go on vacation, you always spend the first three days trying to make up for everything. Except it can't be made up."

  He nodded his agreement. "Charles, I think you're the one who's been hurt the most by all this, and I wish I knew what to do for you to make it all right. It isn't easy being the middle kid. You're always getting overlooked and taken for granted, and I don't blame you for feeling the way you do."

  "Yeah, Dad, yeah," said Weird. "And we've all heard that speech too. Tell us what's going on now." I was mad at Weird for interrupting. I had thought for a moment that Dad was finally going to say something that would make a difference. But maybe not, because he just let Weird change the subject without even noticing how unfinished I still felt.

  "I've been thinking about this for years," Dad said. "Leaving Earth. It's something I've always dreamt of—going out into space and never coming back. But I was never sure where I should go. There were too many possibilities, and I could only have one of them. And then one day, I realized that not choosing meant I wasn't having any. So I made a choice. And then I started thinking—if I leave, I'll never see you boys again. And if you hated me for not being there when you were growing up, you'd hate me all the more for abandoning you. And I just couldn't stand that thought. So—" He stopped to take a breath and figure out how to say the next part.

  Weird filled the silence. "So you decided to just grab us and take us with you?"

  "No." Dad shook his head. "No. that's not it at all. I do have tickets for you, but they're refundable. I'm taking you only as far as you want to go. I'm trying to give you two things here, Douglas: the trip I've always promised you, and the choice you never had before on how you want your life to turn out."

  Dad turned back to me. "You said something once, Charles, that has stayed in my head like a ball bearing bouncing around the inside of an empty steel drum. You said that it was your family too, and nobody ever asked you what you wanted. Well, this is me asking you. All of you."

  "Do we have to decide now?"

  Dad sh
ook his head. "No. There's time enough when we get to Geostationary. You can go back down if you want. Or you can come on out to the launch point with me. From here on in, whether you come with or not is all your own decision. But at the very least, you're going to have an out-of-this-world vacation."

  "But everybody will be looking for us—"

  Dad pointed to the now-blank wall. "They're looking for the people in that picture. They won't be looking for us the way we look now, will they?"

  Weird went thoughtful at that. Then he started frowning. Then he looked at Dad with that faraway squint he gets when he sees something that no one else has seen yet. "How much of this did you plan in advance, Dad?"

  Dad looked embarrassed. "What do you mean, Douglas?"

  "We drove across the border and we didn't buy our train tickets until Mazatlan, and you paid cash. You only bought tickets as far as Acapulco. It was only after we were on the train that you upgraded them to Beanstalk City. You didn't want Mom to be able to find us by your credit card purchases, did you?"

  Dad scratched his ear while he tried to figure out some polite way to say it. He couldn't. "Yes, you're right, Douglas. I didn't want your mother to know where we were going."

  "And the reservations at Terminus? You knew we could catch an earlier car up to One-Hour too?"

  "I didn't plan the hurricane—" he started to say.

  "No, you didn't. That one was lucky. But wasn't it convenient that there was an empty first-class cabin on the 11:00 car? Wasn't it also convenient that we checked in at the reservation desk just in time to catch it? And wasn't it also convenient that you kept looking at your watch all over One-Hour? Did you make this reservation in another name so it would be waiting for us? You did it first class too, didn't you? So they'd be less likely to give it away."

  "You're very observant, Douglas. You'd make a good detective." Dad sighed and admitted it. "I wanted you to have the chance. That's all. The chance your Mom didn't want you to have. I asked her—I said I wanted you to come with me up the Line, and then I'd send you all back home again. She said no. She was sure that I was going to try to steal you. But all I wanted was to give you one great memory of your Dad, and the trip I always promised you. And then she threatened to go to court and I realized just how angry she was and that she was going to try to hurt me any way she could. Even if it meant hurting you too. That's when I started thinking that if jumping off the planet was a chance for me to have a better life than is possible on Earth, well, then maybe it might be a chance for you kids too. But I promise you, Douglas, I won't take you anywhere against your will. I just want to spend some time with you before I go. Is that too much to ask?"

  "Why didn't you tell us this before?" I asked.

  "If I had, would you have believed me? Would you have come?"

  I thought about that. He was right. I wouldn't have believed him. Would I have come? That was a harder question. Not believing him, I don't know what I would have done. In reply, I shrugged.

  Stinky had been silent the whole time. I wasn't sure how much of this he understood, but he'd been listening carefully and suddenly he piped up, "Aren't we going home? I wanna go home!"

  Dad and Douglas and I exchanged looks. Dad scooped up Stinky and held him on his lap. "Hey, kiddo. You're going to go home real soon, if that's what you want. But Daddy's going away for a long

  time, and I wanted us to have some time together before I say goodbye, that's all."

  "Where are you going?"

  "Very far away. So far away that you can't even imagine it."

  "Why?" demanded Stinky. "Don't you love us anymore?"

  "I love you more than anything, sweetheart."

  "Can't you take us with?"

  "Well, that's what we're talking about now. Whether or not you want to go."

  "But I don't want to go. I want to go home."

  "Okay. You can do that, if that's what you want."

  "But I want you to come too."

  "I can't do that."

  "But why are you going away?"

  "Because it's something I have to do."

  The frustration on Bobby's face was evident. He began to cry. "But why ... ? It isn't fair!"

  "I'm not sure I understand it all either, kiddo. This is just the way it is." Dad hugged Bobby close, probably because he didn't have anything else to say.

  Douglas gave Dad a weird look then—one of those looks that got him his nickname. He shook his head over some personal annoyance that maybe only the two of them understood and headed for the door.

  "Where are you going, Doug?"

  "Nowhere. Out."

  Yeah. Like where could he go? And then he was gone anyway.

  I wanted to follow him, but I felt I should stay with Dad for a bit. There was something else going on that I still didn't understand. Whatever it was, Douglas hadn't said, so I felt just like Bobby: it wasn't fair and I didn't know why.

  MORE UP

  At first, dad was a little worried about Doug leaving the cabin. He was afraid that someone might recognize him from the pictures—or any of us—but we'd cut off all our hair and Dad and Douglas were wearing their space hats and Stinky and I were both buzz-cut, so we didn't look very much like the pictures on TV anymore. And then we also realized that it was unlikely that anyone else on this elevator car had even seen that same broadcast. Doug had been watching an El Paso news feed. All the other news was talking about Hurricane Charles and the damage it was doing all across Ecuador. Nobody was going to be looking for us; they were all too busy with much more serious problems.

  And even if somebody did recognize us, what could they do? We hadn't broken any laws. And even if we had, who was going to arrest us? The elevator attendants? We couldn't run away anyway.

  Of course, once we got to Geostationary, they could have the police waiting for us, but Dad didn't think that was likely. Geostationary wasn't signatory to the SuperNational Treaty and there wasn't any extradition from space. This was because the Loonies weren't willing to agree to it and Geostationary usually sided with Luna more than Earth. According to Weird, anyway.

  But there were private security agents available for hire at Geostationary, and if Mom really wanted to make trouble for us, she could hire a couple of those guys to meet us. But what could they do? Could they force us to go back to Earth? Dad wasn't sure what might happen in that case.

  Just to be safe, Dad said I should probably stay in the cabin anyway. So I glowered and sulked and tried on different angry faces. And then I got bored. And when I get bored, I get nasty. And when I get nasty, I get disgusting. Just to see how disgusting I can be.

  It didn't take long. Dad got so disgusted watching me fart and belch and flick my boogers at the TV screen that he finally said, "Okay, Charles. You win. I can't stand it anymore." He muttered something about teaching hygiene to chimpanzees. Then he said I could go out and walk around again, but only if I promised to keep out of trouble.

  It was probably the boogers that did it. Boogers always work. Adults can't stand boogers. They can't even stand the word "booger." Booger booger booger. I didn't even like it when Stinky flicked his boogers, so it was probably a lot worse for Dad when I did it. But it worked.

  I went down to the bottom of the car and up to the top, with stops everywhere in-between, looking for a place where something interesting—anything—was happening.

  Nothing was happening. Nothing. And more nothing on top of that. The only thing to do was wander around—which I was already pretty good at. Mom called it my "restless lion" prowl. She said all I needed was a dead antelope leg to drag around. Ha ha. That's a grownup joke, only funny to grownups, annoying to those carrying the burden of genetic progress. But at least there was more room to drag my antelope haunch in the whole elevator car than there was in the cabin. Up and down and all around. The only thing weird was that I didn't see Weird anywhere, but I wasn't really looking for him anyway, so I didn't think about it. He'd probably found a terminal somewhere and was redesigning
someone's government or something.

  So this was what I'd flicked all those boogers for. The big discovery: there isn't anything to do on an elevator. All elevators are the same. You watch the numbers. That's it.

  It doesn't matter how pretty the numbers are presented, they're still numbers. You go down to the bottom level and look at the lights on the wire to see if the red one has gotten any farther out and it looks exactly the same. It's impossible to tell. So then, you go up to the top and get something to eat. And after that, you go down to the lounge and watch TV. But you can do that in your cabin, and at least in your cabin, you can choose what you want to watch. So you get up and walk around some more. You go upstairs, you go downstairs.

  If you want, the attendants will take you on a tour of how everything works, only it's all the stuff you've already seen, and there isn't that much of it anyway, so out of total boredom, you go back and look out the windows again.

  If you go up to the top level, you can see ... the Line and the stars. The cable zips past at a thousand miles per hour, 1600 klicks. It's going so fast, you can't see any details on it at all, it's just a long shining bar of light that stretches up and away into nothing, like a big pointer into the night.