Jumping Off the Planet

by David Gerrold

  Dad herded us down to a platform next to a long queue of elevator capsules, all moving slowly in line toward the launch bay. Each car was as big around as a house and at least five or six stories tall. There were at least a dozen of them, with a new one popping into the queue every few minutes; every time a car at the front slid into the launch rack, a new one thunked up at the other end.

  Weird pointed past the row of cars. On the other side, we could see down into the space where they went through their final service check before being thrust up into the boarding queue. Preloaded cargo pods were slid automatically into the bottom levels of each car—so the capsules were even taller than I thought.

  Weird said that balancing the load on the Line was so critical that they had to plan the cargo schedule months in advance. And yes, there was always a little room held out in each pod for last-minute things that needed to be shipped up the elevator. And there were always six empty slots a day for standby cars or for cargo that missed its normal launch slot, which sometimes happened if a car failed its pressure test.

  Dad came back and grabbed both our arms then, complaining that we didn't have time for gawking. He had that tone in his voice, so Weird and I just traded looks and followed after.

  Dad hurried us all the way to the front of the queue, to the front-most car being loaded. The cars were shiny blue metal with silvery trim. Lined up the whole length of the platform, all creeping forward together, they looked like a giant subway train. The edge of the platform was a moving slidewalk, rolling at the same slow speed, so boarding the elevator car was a lot like getting on a car in an amusement park ride, only you stepped in through a triple-layered hatch. The walls of the cars were thicker than I expected, but that's because the whole thing had to be pressurized for space.

  Dad entered the car first, then Weird and Stinky. I hesitated a bit—I don't like cramped places and the door to this one was just small enough that you almost had to duck to get through it—but inside it was all comfortable chairs and tables, so I followed. Reluctantly.

  An attendant told us to take any seats we wanted. They were spaced around the room in clusters, like a lounge. We sat down and we waited.

  As soon as the car was full, they slammed the door shut with a scary thunk—once that door was closed you couldn't get out again—and then we waited several forevers while they ran the final set of launch tests.

  Weird said they have only five minutes to check the pressure and weight. This is when they pump or drain extra water into the ballast tanks to equalize the weight of the car. Weird said the load engineers have to equalize the strain up and down the entire length of the cable—if you calculated the total weight of tonnage on the line at any given moment it was enormous, so balance was critical.

  So was the water. They always needed a lot of fresh water up topside, not just for the various stations on the Line, but for export too. In fact, Weird said, the folks at the top of the Line considered the water more important than the passengers.

  If the elevator car failed either the final pressure test or the weight check, Weird said, it would get shunted to a side track, and a standby car sent up in its place. I hoped that would happen to us. But Weird said that hardly ever happens. Most of the time the standby car gets sent up as the last car in a shift. The shifts were four hours long.

  There were several attendants aboard to help us stow our backpacks, and they even offered us drinks and snacks. There were video screens everywhere, each one showing the inevitable "for your own safety ... " instructions. But there's not really a lot to know about the elevator. Either it works or it doesn't. The cars up to One-Hour are equipped with breakaway bolts and parachutes for emergency return, but except for the occasional test launch, none have ever been fired in a real emergency. In case of a pressure drop, each level of the car could be sealed off from all the others, but that was unlikely too, because the cars were triple-hulled. You'd have to hit one with a meteor to put a hole in it. I looked for seat belts, but there weren't any. That surprised me at first, but Weird said we'd never be going fast enough to need them.

  One of the levels inside the elevator car had floor-to-ceiling windows, one had waist level-to-ceiling windows for people who need the feeling of a railing, and the third passenger level had only portholes, because some people need to have a wall between themselves and all that height. The rest of the car was reserved for cargo and life support and stuff like that. There was no pilot, but there was a senior attendant. In our car, he looked and acted more like a head waiter than anything else, but Weird told me he was also trained in all kinds of medical and safety procedures, even in law enforcement. Weird is full of stuff like that. He's a lot like Dad that way. It's like being online 24/7.

  He said that the cars used to be a lot smaller, but the beanstalk had been designed from the beginning for expansion and as soon as there were enough filaments to support the weight, they started switching over to the larger cars. About twenty years ago, Weird said. And then Dad added that we could probably see some of the older cars on display up at One-Hour.

  Our car was filled to capacity—not exactly crowded, but you had to watch where you were stepping. There weren't that many tourists aboard; it was mostly locals. That was because there was a big tropical storm moving inland and a lot of the locals were going up to One-Hour to wait it out. Apparently, it was the safest place to be. There were hotels and restaurants and theaters up at One-Hour, so they were probably going to make a party of it.

  At last, our car was in the number one position. Stinky and Weird and I watched as we moved suddenly away from the platform. There was a gentle bump or two, and then the car was locked into the launch tube. We were right next to the cable—it looked like a huge curved wall. I imagined I could hear it humming. That's when I started getting really scared. I wanted to ask if I could get off, but I didn't want Dad and Stinky and Weird to know how scared I was. So I just grabbed Stinky's hand tighter and said to him, "Any minute now. Don't be afraid."

  He looked at me with a funny expression as if he couldn't understand why I would say such a thing. "I'm not scared. It's only an elevator."

  Besides, the attendants couldn't let me off. Even if they wanted to. It was already too late. There were so many cars traveling each way on the Line at any given moment that everything had to be tightly scheduled and every launch had to be precisely timed. So once a car was sealed and had passed all of its integrity tests, it was effectively launched. A car had to slide up this track every five minutes, no matter what. I didn't know what would happen if a car missed its launch, but I got the feeling the elevator engineers wouldn't like it.

  Coming down, the whole process was reversed. A new car arrived every five minutes. They were strung the entire length of the Line, so each car had to be moved out of the way before the next one arrived. They'd never had a collision, but apparently in the early days of the Line there had been a couple of near misses. Only a few times had they ever had to halt downward traffic to clear the track. Weird said they didn't like to do it not just because it was bad publicity but because every minute of stoppage cost half a million dollars of lost income.

  There was a chime then, and everybody else who hadn't yet found a spot at a window came pushing in behind us. Then some music started playing, something dramatic; it took me only a moment to recognize it. Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. The first movement. O Fortune. Very theatrical. Very powerful. One of Dad's favorites. I could tell by his smile that he thought it was appropriate music for jumping off a planet.

  At first we didn't feel anything, but the cable-wall next to us started sliding down, and then we rose up out of the launch cradle. A moment more, and we were rising up through the core of Terminus Station and my heart did one of those sudden flip-flops like it does at the top of the roller coaster when you realize you're strapped in and it doesn't matter what you want to do anymore because this is what you're going to do, whether you want to or not.

  We were on our way.

 
; UP

  We were on the second level, where the windows started at waist level and angled outward toward the top, so we could lean out and look almost straight down. I swallowed hard and tried not to look, but I couldn't stop myself from seeing anyway.

  First we rose up through the service core, then all of the terraces and balconies began dropping away like toys. At least that part was fun to watch, because we could see how everything was laid out inside the tent. It was a whole different view of Beanstalk City and we could see how big the world under the dome really was.

  We rose all the way up to the top, and then the view closed in for just a few seconds as the car slid up through the top of the tent. The elevator starts out slow, so it takes almost two minutes to get to the top, but the timing is perfect because that's where the music gets sort of quiet for a bit, anticipating the next part, then it comes back with a big crescendo just as the car rises up out of the roof and into the open air. The music pounds toward a big dramatic punch and you get to see how the whole city around Terminus is spread out like a giant Monopoly board. And then ... the elevator starts going up even faster.

  Even though the day was overcast, Terminus City seemed to have a ghostly bright quality. As it spread out below us, everything shone in vivid colors.

  Mostly around the tent there were parks and lakes, but we could also see all of the industrial areas too—all the warehouses, and the shipping and receiving areas, and the highways and tracks and canals. And beyond, there was the rest of the city that grew up around the Line: the dorms where a lot of the construction workers and their families lived while it was being built—and still lived today, because most of them had been guaranteed jobs on the Line when it was finished—and farther out, all the office towers and hotels for tourists and visiting business people, and then the rest of the city beyond, where everybody else lives, the ones who provide ground-side services for the Line and its constant stream of traffic.

  We also saw a lot of Tube-Towns scattered below. The slums. Just like home. They ringed the whole area. The gray day made them look almost as depressing from above as they were close up.

  If I leaned out far enough, I could see how the shining cables of the Line speared straight down into the center of everything. Its shadow was like a triple knife cut, slicing west across the landscape. It arrowed out toward the horizon, eventually fading away in the distance.

  We kept rising and the effect was like one of those pull-back-into-infinity shots that you see on TV all the time. We rose up and up and everything else got smaller and smaller. Pretty soon we could see the dark blue line of the ocean to the west, and more banks of clouds piling up on the horizon, a thick wall of them.

  We passed through a small patch of clouds and then a bigger one, and somebody nearby said something about the big storm that was heading in from the Pacific, how we'd probably be able to see the whole thing from One-Hour. Somebody else said if you stood real still you could feel the wind rocking the elevator car, but I tried it and couldn't feel anything. Maybe it was just imagination. It was pretty hard to tell.

  Most everybody stood there at the window for at least fifteen minutes, pointing things out to each other while the ground kept dropping away below. It wasn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. At least, not yet. Maybe higher up.

  The view of the cable was sort of interesting too. The Line zips past the window like a vertical highway—so fast it's just a big blur. It looks like it's all one smooth surface, but it isn't. A lot of it is studded with solar cells, and every thousand meters there's an outer ring of those high-powered sulfur-incandescent lamps that are brighter than the sun; the ring is outside the elevator tracks so the lights don't accidentally shine in. The projectors are there so the Line will be visible from hundreds of miles away. From a distance, all those lights blend together to look like one solid line of brightness. That's why we could see the Line so clearly all the way to Mexico. The lights are partly to warn airplanes and partly to aid people who are aiming their communication dishes and partly as a navigational aid, and partly just for national pride. I mean, if you had a beanstalk in your country, wouldn't you want to show it off?

  The other thing about the beanstalk is that there's a lot of space between the three cables. A couple of square kilometers, at least. But it wasn't empty space. For one thing, most of the tracks on the parts of the cables facing each other—the insides—were for cargo pods. We saw them zipping up and down past us; the cargo pods weren't normally pressurized for passengers and they traveled a lot faster in both directions, because cargo didn't suffer from motion-sickness.

  But in addition to the cargo tracks, there were also these great billowy tubes of transparent mylar; they were inflated chimneys of all different lengths. Their bottoms and tops were at different heights and they looked kind of like a big ghostly organ. Some of them reached as high as the four-kilometer mark. Their purpose, Dad said, was to irrigate the atmosphere via the "chimney effect." Apparently when you have two chimneys of different heights and you get wind blowing across the top, you get air current down one and up the other. This is how prairie dogs cool their burrows. Here, at the beanstalk, the idea was to create a steady flow of air from the upper reaches of the atmosphere down into the lower and back up again. The air flow generated some electricity, but more important, it helped cool the land around the base of the Line. Weird said that the Line produced three degrees of local cooling, which could make a real difference on a hot day at the equator.

  But—Dad said, some of Ecuador's neighbors blamed the chimneys for the persistent El Nino condition in the Pacific that had been screwing up rain patterns for the past twenty years or so and generating some really nasty storms—like the one growing out in the Pacific right now. But who knew for sure? Weird always said that everything was connected to everything else, but if that was true, then the weather had to be caused by everything, didn't it? Nobody knew for sure, and that was part of what everybody was angry about. According to Dad anyway. That's what fat Señor Hidalgo had been talking about on the train—how the Line was destabilizing everything in the world. Even where people lived.

  That was the real surprise—there are people living on the Line. All the way up to the five-kilometer mark. And someday even higher. Every so often, we'd pass through a platform city, three or four or five levels suspended from all three of the cables—with holes of course for the elevator tracks and the chimneys. We zipped through them too fast to see much detail, but what we did see as they dropped away below us was pretty impressive. They were like vertical villages. The first three were open to the air, and we saw clusters of offices and homes and shopping areas—real homes with big windows and yards and even a few swimming pools. There were also public launch balconies for gliders of all kinds.

  I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place. You'd have to be very rich to live this high. The sky cities were where important corporation people lived as well as some of the people in Ecuador's government.

  One of the attendants said that eventually there would be at least a hundred of these platform towns on the Line; there was room for thousands of sky cities, of course; but every platform town required multiple new filaments on the Line, not to mention the installation of an equivalent weight at the other end of the cables to balance it—the attendant said there were already hundreds of water tanks at the far end of the cable, moving up and down all the time to keep the Line in equilibrium—so there was a practical limit to how much could be hung on the Line.

  And then the last of the towns disappeared beneath us, and there was nothing for a while except the humming of the cable. By the time we hit ten kilometers, the sky had turned a very deep blue. I'd never seen it that color before. Now the only settlements we were zipping through were scientific or industrial ones, and there weren't too many of those.

  The ground below had become mostly featureless; a blanket of clouds covered most everything below us. To the north we could see a few patches of brown and gree
n. To the east, we could see the wall of the Andes stretching north and south. It looked like a crumpled white sheet. I couldn't believe how steep and jagged the mountains were.

  Dad said that the original plan had been to drop the cable down onto one of those mountaintops, but when they looked at the problems of anchoring the Line to a mountaintop so high you needed an O2-mask to breathe, they had second thoughts. Even if you could build Terminus on the mountaintop, you'd still have to extend the elevators down to the foothills; you'd have to build a second Terminus. It was easier to just extend the bottom end of the cable a couple klicks farther. What you traded off in additional stress and tension on the anchor, you got back in construction savings and maintenance benefits.

  By now, the view had gotten to be pretty standard airplane stuff, except that the cables sparkling all the way down until they disappeared into the clouds below made it impossible for me to pretend I was in an airplane anymore. As long as I didn't think about the cables, I was fine, but this view was a little too scary for me.

  That's when Stinky said, "Is this all there is to do? Stare out the window?"

  So Dad said, "Well, let's see what else there is. Come on, let's go upstairs." So we all trooped up to the top level of the car, which wasn't really much of a level, just a little room with a glass dome over the top so you could look straight up the Line if you wanted to.

  There wasn't much to see up here either, just the cables of the elevator stretching endlessly up into the dark blue above. For some reason, that was even more disturbing. But it was also more boring, so I went back downstairs to the restaurant level, where I bought myself a Coke and tried to avoid looking at any windows.

  About the time I began to wonder how often people freaked out on one of these trips and what the attendants would do if I started screaming, Weird came down the stairs and seated himself next to me.