Rob looked up to the big display screen. Despite Regulo’s earlier words, Lutetia still loomed larger and larger.
“And what do you think appeals to Darius Regulo?” The quiet words interrupted Rob’s inspection of the display.
“You gave me a hint, last time I was here.” Rob’s tone was bitter. “I was just too stupid to see it. You gave me a lot of talk about matter transmitters, and the problem of transit times around the System. You had your method working even then. I should have realized what you were up to when you paid to use extra Spiders, and asked me to build the beanstalk instead of using Sala Keino. He was on your payroll, and he was your expert on space construction. But you had a better use for him.”
“No, Rob, don’t get that wrong.” Regulo’s voice showed an odd mixture of pride and reproof. “You are a better construction man than Keino will ever be. I picked you for the hard job, not the easy one. How far have you thought it through?”
That was a touch of the old Regulo. Rob wondered if his exhausted brain had jumped to a wrong conclusion about the old man. Well, a few more minutes and he could collapse.
“Just the general idea. It starts with the Spider again. Now it’s spinning a different kind of web. Rockets are wrong. That’s sitting there in your desk as we talk, but I didn’t follow it far enough. I should have known you wouldn’t stop with the beanstalk, that just gets us up and down from Earth. You wanted a way of moving materials around the whole System without using drives. And the Spider could give you that.”
Rob paused for a few seconds, to examine again his left forearm. The pain was mounting, from acute to intolerable. He checked once more that the power input was disconnected. No doubt about that. He massaged the arm again with his right hand, unable to imagine any possible explanation. He motioned to Corrie to use the injector a second time. What was the maximum permitted dose?
“Spin another cable,” he went on. “Make it like the beanstalk, with superconducting cables and drive train attached to the load cable. This time, put the powersat at the center of the cable, with an equal length on each side of it. Fabricate it in space, but don’t ever plan to fly it in and tether it. Leave it out near the orbit of Mars, or in the Belt, or in near Earth — key places in the System. Then start it rotating about its center, like a couple of spokes on a wheel. I assume that you began with just a couple of them, one in the Belt and one near Earth?”
Regulo nodded calmly. He had finished fiddling with the control panel and now seemed oddly relaxed. “We started with two. That’s just the beginning. The more you have, the better the efficiency of the whole operation. I’ve been thinking we’d build about five thousand of them through the Earth-Belt region.”
“You could handle that many?”
“With Sycorax? Easily. We can track that number, and more — there are millions of orbits in the data banks already. This is just a few extra ones.” Regulo’s tone was that of a patient teacher. “I’ve told you before, Rob,” he went on. “Think big. The System’s a big place. You have to scale your thinking to match it.”
Rob would normally have found the conversation totally fascinating. Now it felt increasingly surrealistic. Was Regulo on his own kind of tranquilizers? The image of Morel’s body had gone from the screen, and with it any interest by Regulo in Rob’s accusation. He seemed happy to talk engineering.
Apparently Corrie was having the same reaction. “Don’t you two have any feelings?” she broke in. “Joseph Morel is dead, Caliban seems to have gone mad, and you sit there talking about spinning beanstalks. What about the Goblins, Rob? First you tell us there are children in Morel’s lab. Then you start talking about something completely different.”
As she spoke she realized that she was not getting through to them. They both ignored her. Some invisible cord of tension bound them to each other, some other level of communication was taking place deep below the surface.
“So how would you work it, Rob?” said Regulo. His bright eyes were fixed on the other man’s pale face.
Rob hesitated, but the urge to explain was too strong.
“Just as you did. You have a rotating cable out in a free orbit — thousands of kilometers of it.” He leaned forward, at the same time as Regulo moved his chair farther away from the desk.
“Now suppose you want to move a space pod from the Belt to the Moon,” Rob went on. “You make it rendezvous with the center of the cable, where the powersat sits. The center of mass of the cable would be moving in a free-fall orbit, travelling about the sane speed as the pod, so you use hardly any reaction mass to make the rendezvous. You don’t need much acceleration from the pod’s drives, either, just a fraction of a gee will be enough. Once you have the pod at the middle of the cable, you let it move out along the drive train. As the pod moves from the center it feels a centripetal acceleration. You need to use the drive train on the cable to restrain it. When it reaches the end of the cable, you release it to move in free fall. You’ve given it a big velocity boost. But the trouble from the point of view of a human on the pod is the acceleration. Out at the end of the cable, it’s huge. I looked at a couple of examples. A cable four thousand kilometers long, with end velocity of twenty-four kilometers a second, would give thirty gees at each end. That’s what killed the Goblins.”
“They were unlucky.” Regulo had moved his chair farther and farther from the desk, until it was almost back to the wall. “If you like, you could even say that it was Caliban’s fault. He received no inputs on space operations for passenger transfer, and intelligence can’t replace experience. He put the space pod to a cable rendezvous with a cargo Slingshot — one with high accelerations, never intended for people.”
“Do you have Slingshots for passengers?” Rob moved forward right up to the desk.
“We built the first two, just a month ago. I could find out which cable your Goblins used easily enough, by checking the angular momentum of all of them. Each time we use a Slingshot we naturally increase or decrease its angular momentum.” Regulo stood up, his back to the wall. “We lose angular momentum when we throw a cargo in toward the Sun, and pick it up when we catch something thrown in from Mars or the Belt. Provided we move the same mass of materials in and out, the whole system balances — just like the beanstalk back on Earth. I would have given you details of the Slingshot as soon as we had Lutetia under control. You’ve got the idea, but you’ll be surprised when you see how much we can cut off transit times.
“Well, enough of that.” Regulo’s voice changed in timbre, becoming gruffer and more intense. “The Slingshot was used in a way I never expected. It killed two of the `Goblins,’ if you’re correct. But what about the rest of it? Joseph was secretly performing some kind of social experiment here, that’s what you’re telling us. If he had a self-sustaining colony they would have been through many generations in thirty years. It makes me wonder what type of social structure they could have evolved. Did Joseph tell you what he was trying to achieve in his colony, before Caliban got him?”
“Not a thing.” Rob stood up. “Morel didn’t intend to tell me anything. He was supremely logical, and logical people don’t bother to explain things to a dead man. I had one other factor to consider while I was locked in that lab. Morel wasn’t an anthropologist. He didn’t have the slightest interest in social structures. He never told me what he was doing. But you see, Regulo, I know it anyway.”
“Aye.” Regulo’s voice was as calm as ever. “I was afraid of that. The second that you came in here, I thought that the game might be over.”
He waved a thin hand at the control panel. “While you were talking, I gave the signal for the maintenance crews to make emergency departure from Atlantis. They’re clear now, wondering what the devil is going on. See the ship?”
On the display, a large freighter hovered beside Atlantis. Near it, filling the screen, the swollen balloon of Lutetia hung, its surface white-hot and smoking with escaping volatiles.
“I have to ask you one more thing,” Regulo w
ent on, “though I think I know the answer. I suppose that it would be a waste of time to offer you part of Regulo Enterprises?”
Rob shook his head. The movement sent a flare of pain down his left arm.
“I thought not.” Regulo’s hands were behind him against the wall. A panel slid open to reveal a dimly lit corridor. “We respect money, you and I, but it has never been the main drive for either of us.” He sighed. “It’s a pity. We could have done great things as a team.”
“I know. Great things.” Rob’s voice was scarcely loud enough to hear. “To work with you, Regulo, for that I’d have given everything I own. But this is different. There are some rules that I can’t break.” He cleared his throat and spoke more loudly. “It’s over.”
“Not everything.” Regulo stepped back through the opening. Rob and Corrie did not move. “When you came in, I suspected that Atlantis was finished one way or another. So while were were talking I set the controls for collision with Lutetia. We have a few more minutes before impact.” He pointed again to the screen, to Lutetia’s swelling bulk. “After that, it’s no more Atlantis. No more Morel, no Goblins, no Caliban, no Sycorax. No evidence to support anything that you said. Follow me, both of you, or there will be no Rob Merlin and no Cornelia.”
The panel began to close.
“I’ll hold the ship for you.” There was a plea in Regulo’s bright eyes. “Hurry. I have to destroy Atlantis, but I can’t stand the thought of losing either of you.”
While the wall panel was still closing, Corrie ran rapidly around the desk and began to examine the settings on the controls. Rob dragged himself wearily across to join her.
“What’s the maximum drive setting for Atlantis?” He could feel pulses of pain running up his arm and through his whole body.
“About a thirtieth of a gee.” Without waiting to consult Rob, Corrie was throwing in new settings. “That’s not the point. The outer surface will fail at much less than that. I don’t think we dare try for more than a hundredth of a gee.”
“What happens if the outer membrane bursts?”
“The aquasphere would flood the drives. We’ll burn up in Lutetia.”
Rob moved to the display console and switched in a camera to show the exterior of Atlantis.
“Don’t use that drive unit, Corrie. It’s the best one for the direction of thrust that we need, but we’d fry Regulo. He’ll be coming out of that shaft. Take the next two drives and balance their thrusts. It will be close enough to tangential, we won’t lose more than a few percent effectiveness.”
He leaned across the desk, wincing as his left hand touched it. “Give us a fiftieth of a gee.”
“That’s too high. We’re only rated for half that.”
“Do it — and pray that Regulo over-engineered his products.”
There was a small but perceptible jolt as the two drives cut in. The image of Lutetia did not move on the screen.
“It’s not working, Rob.”
“Give it time. Accelerations take a while before you see the effects.” He was watching a second display, but it blurred as he stared at it. His eyes were refusing to focus. “Good thing we didn’t use that first drive, Corrie. Here comes Regulo, out of the shaft.”
A small, white-suited figure emerged from the exit tunnel closest to the waiting ship.
“He’ll go across to the ship, Rob.”
“Let him. We can’t stop him.”
“What happens if we can’t save Atlantis?”
Rob shrugged. “Tough on us, good for Regulo. He was right, without the Goblins or Caliban there will be no evidence. Even if we escaped, he still has all the money and influence. No one would ever believe me.”
Strain gauge readings from the skin of the aquasphere were well past the safety limits. Under the steady acceleration, a billion tons of water wanted to stay behind.
“It’s going to be close.” Corrie was looking at the fiery ball of Lutetia, now beginning to drift slightly sideways on the screen. “Awful close. The surface of Atlantis seems to be holding, but we have to get by Lutetia without boiling the aquasphere.”
“Look at the other screen.” The tone in Rob’s voice brought Corrie’s instant attention.
“What’s he doing, Rob?”
“I don’t know. Can you bring in his audio channel?”
“I’ll try.”
Regulo’s suit was visible as a tiny white speck on the screen in front of them. Instead of heading for the waiting ship he was moving in erratic bursts, backwards and forwards. Under the random thrusts of the suit jets he was still approaching the molten surface of Lutetia. The asteroid blazed before him with an intense white heat, filling the sky.
“I’ve got him on audio.”
Corrie’s words were lost in a hoarse, painful grunting. It was Regulo, muttering something to himself.
“Lutetia is blinding him,” Rob said suddenly. “It’s so bright, and so close. The photo-shield on that suit was never intended to handle that much intensity. Corrie, he’s lost his bearings.”
The erratic to-and-fro motion had ceased. Regulo was spinning aimlessly, jets firing at random. The white suit was moving closer to the surface of Lutetia.
“What’s he saying, Rob? Listen to him. He doesn’t seem to know what’s happening.”
“You got Alexis and you got Nita.” The hoarse voice from the suit was suddenly loud and intense. “Not me, though. You won’t get me. I beat you once, I’ll beat you again. I’ll master you.”
Rob looked back to the other screen. The swollen sphere of Lutetia was sweeping past Atlantis. It seemed close enough to touch, but they would clear it. His arm shot bolts of agony through his whole body. How could that happen, with the power off? Would he ever find out?
He slumped back in his seat, holding his forearm with his right hand. Atlantis was groaning and straining about them, the complaining creak of twisting braces and stressed partitions as loud as the angry words of defiance from Regulo’s suit. Rob felt a white tide rising in his head, sweeping up to engulf him as Lutetia would engulf Darius Regulo.
They were clearing the asteroid. In the moment before the tide swallowed him completely, Rob saw the tiny figure of the King of Heaven move on to its final rendezvous.
CHAPTER 17: A Bridge to Midgard
Eleven hours. Contact minus 40,000.
After weeks of waiting, the beanstalk had begun to uncoil its slow length. Under the combined influence of gravity and precise control thrusts it had left its position at L-4 and embarked on the long fall to Earth. The main load-bearing cable was hidden, covered along most of its length by superconducting power cables and the regularly spaced ladder of the drive train. One hundred and five thousand kilometers long, the assembly stretched now like a fine silver thread across the Earth-Moon system, spanning an arc one-fourth the way from Terra to Luna. Far from that arc, accelerating on a trajectory that would take it to a perigee distance ninety thousand kilometers from the surface, a billion tons of rock and metal had begun its own approach. Unchecked, it would swing in to Earth and away again, out past the Moon before it slowed to a distant apogee.
One year ago, the rock had been a natural feature of the Solar System. Its orbit had dipped in an eccentric path from Saturn to Venus. From all the millions of candidate rocks whose composition, mass and orbits were stored in the data banks, Sycorax had made the selection of this single asteroid as the rock best suited to the beanstalk’s needs. After careful shaping of the exterior, and delicate adjustments to the mass distribution, Sycorax had pronounced it ready. The asteroid could now fulfill its new purpose in the System. It would be the ballast, the bob at the end of the pendulum.
The rest of the components waited in synchronous orbit, stationary above Quito. The powersat was already functioning, its array of photovoltaic receptors turned away from the sun until they were needed. Close by hung the ore-carriers, passenger modules and maintenance robots, a thousand separate units loosely linked by a restraining net of thin cables. Until Con
tact there would be nothing but patient waiting. Then the robots would race along the beanstalk’s length.
Down on Earth there was also little sign of activity. It was night at Tether Control in Quito, with the time of landing set for nine the following morning. Luis Merindo, alone, prowled the perimeter of the great pit and looked on his work with a critical eye. His permanent smile had vanished at last. He peered down into the depths, then lifted his head and looked up, trying to imagine how it would be, here, when the beanstalk came lancing in through the atmosphere. His in-filling system was all ready, had been ready for weeks. What else could be done in preparation? Nothing. Wait and pray. Merindo shrugged and finally headed back to the array of remote handlers that made up the heart of Tether Control, twenty kilometers from the pit.
“Too damn much imagination,” he grumbled to himself, as he finally settled into his bunk. “Either I trust the man, or I shouldn’t be working for him. Good thing he can’t see me now, I’m as bad as the bride the night before the wedding.”
Luis Merindo might have been less comfortable if he could have seen Rob Merlin at that moment. The central control room in Santiago had one main screen and was flanked by twelve subsidiary ones. Any one of the twelve could be switched with the biggest one. Rob lolled before that screen. His face was pale and gaunt. His left arm ended at the wrist, in a stump wrapped in cloth. On his return from Atlantis a dozen doctors had told him that he needed treatment at once, that the beanstalk could wait.
He had ignored them. They concerned themselves only with Rob’s body; they could not see the white-haired ghost, the man who perched at Rob’s shoulder and told him that the beanstalk must be landed, tethered, and operating according to schedule, before Rob could feel a moment of peace and relaxation.
The Web Between the Worlds Page 25
