I doubt if you would, thought Rob, as he closed the door. Gigolos don’t chew away at problems until four o’clock in the morning. Gigolos don’t run their own, highly profitable, businesses. Gigolos don’t stay and care for lovers who need endless care and attention. Howard Anson was something else, a wasp in a drone’s disguise. There were few like that in the world, and the ones you found had to be savored and cultivated. Senta Plessey was a fortunate woman.
Rob tried to picture her as she must have been thirty years earlier, but the image would not come into focus. When he at last fell asleep, it was Corrie whose face smiled upon his inner eye.
CHAPTER 6: A Voyage to Atlantis
It was three weeks, not two, before Rob had done enough analysis and design work on the beanstalk to feel ready for another meeting. The reference material had been more voluminous than he expected, and his first simple ideas on construction had proved unworkable. On the other hand, he had found time to look at design changes to the Spider. With a little ingenuity, there was no reason that doped silicon cable could not be extruded at the rate that Regulo wanted. All things considered, Rob was satisfied with his progress when Corrie came by to tell him that Regulo had called to find out the status.
“He’s very keen to get moving, and wants to know when you’ll be ready to talk,” she said. She was sitting in the window seat of his apartment, looking out over the breathtaking view of Rio Bay. Assigned by Regulo to remain close to Rob and hurry him along as her top priority, she had watched over his shoulder as he tried different tentative plans for skyhook construction. Rob had been at the point of telling her to get lost for a week when he realized that her comments were both constructive and useful.
She left him alone each afternoon, when she insisted on an intensive spell of physical conditioning. Seeing her now, draped along the window seat in a brief yellow leotard, Rob realized again how easy it would be to misjudge her frailty. She had the slimness of build that often went with long spells of low-gravity environment, but there was no doubt about the tone of the long, smooth muscles in her arms and legs — and he knew from personal experience how strong and supple she was.
“Do you think you could give Regulo what he wants with a video-phone session?” Corrie said, watching the clouds sail in off the ocean.
“Not really. I could do a fair amount like that, but I’d rather handle it in person.” He was still busy at the terminal. “What’s the round-trip signal delay to Atlantis?”
“Long-ish.” Corrie stretched and stood up.
“That’s a woman’s answer.”
“You go to hell, too. Let’s see. Regulo’s been moving a bit farther out over the past few weeks. Last time I checked he was nearly two million kilometers from Earth. That’s thirteen seconds, not counting relay station delays and assuming we can use straight line-of-sight transmission.”
“That’s too long. Too long for me, and you can bet that Regulo won’t want to sit with quarter-minute gaps in the conversation. He values his time much too much for that. I can be ready to leave in the morning. Can you arrange to get us out there tomorrow?”
“I can arrange for take-off then. But travel time to Atlantis will be nearly two days with the craft that we have available.”
“That’s all right. I can start sending design data to Regulo, even before we leave. He’ll have plenty to look at, getting up to speed with my assumptions and notation. I might as well send him my list of what I think are the key problems, too.”
One of the things that Rob appreciated about Corrie was her lack of fuss. She simply nodded and said: “Better start packing. I’ll schedule us to leave here first thing in the morning. We’ll be at the port by midday.”
Riding out to Atlantis in one of Regulo’s private fleet of ships, Rob marvelled again at the wealth and influence of the man.
At every stage of the operation, the usual travel hitches simply disappeared. All connections with aircraft, shuttle and deep space vessel, all formalities of exit clearance, all questions of ticketing and finances — they were simply not there. If the shipping of raw materials to Earth and Moon, and that of finished products around the whole System, went as smoothly as this, Regulo earned every fraction of his two percent. No wonder that the Earth authorities and the United Space Federation, tangled in regulations and bureaucratic inefficiencies, could not keep up with the man. Corrie had described some of their efforts to control him, but he always kept a couple of moves ahead of them; and, apart from anything else, they really needed the efficient service that only Regulo Enterprises seemed able to provide. Rob’s respect for the old man’s talents grew and grew.
“It’s no good fidgeting,” Corrie said in answer to Rob’s impatient question. “Sit there and contemplate your navel. It will be another hour before we get there.”
They had moved out well past the Moon, heading away from the Sun. Atlantis was somewhere ahead of them, just off the plane of the ecliptic.
“We’ll soon be near enough for visible contact,” she went on. “We ought to get a lot of back-scattered light from this angle, so it will be easy to see.”
Rob was sitting by the forward screen, the electronic magnification turned up to the maximum. Nothing showed there but liberal quantities of random noise, producing a snow-storm effect on the display. “We’re less than twenty thousand kilometers out, according to the radar data,” he complained. “If that figure of a two-kilometer diameter is accurate, it should be showing better than twenty seconds of arc. We ought to be seeing it easily with this magnification — so where is it?”
Corrie frowned at the blank display screen. “We can pick up anything down to a second of arc with that set of cameras. And I just checked the pointing, it’s straight at Atlantis. I’ll bet that Regulo and Morel are playing games with the albedo again. There’s a variable reflectance material on the outside of Atlantis, so they can absorb solar radiation selectively, with just the ranges of wavelengths that are best for the interior. You might try taking a look in the thermal infra-red.”
Rob raised his eyebrows. “I’ll try. But I thought those variable albedo materials were still text-book. It’s a fancy technology. Let me see what we get with the ten to fourteen micrometer scanner. The resolution won’t be as good, but maybe we’ll pick up some sort of blob.”
He switched the channel selector, while Corrie leaned over his shoulder. “Regulo doesn’t let things stay in the text-books,” she said. “If there’s any way it can be transformed into a piece of hardware, he’ll do it. He was asking me the other day if you could make the Spider extrude materials at high temperature. I don’t know what he was after, but I suspect that you’ll find out when we get to Atlantis.”
“He asked me that, too.” Rob was tinkering with the fine tuning of the screen display. “It’s just a question of using the right materials for the extrusion nozzles — easy enough. Ah, there we are.” They stared at the screen, where a small, fuzzy ellipse had appeared.
“That can’t be it,” objected Corrie. “The picture we get ought to show a sphere.”
“It would, in the visible part of the spectrum. We’re looking at it in the thermal infra-red, remember, so we’re seeing differential heat emission from different sides. Atlantis must be rotating, with the side facing away from the Sun always a bit cooler. That’s why it looks lop-sided.” Rob was peering with interest at the display of the asteroid. “Two kilometers across, eh? What do you think Regulo would charge to make one like that for somebody else?”
“Price isn’t the issue. He couldn’t do it.” Corrie saw his skeptical look. “Honestly. It’s not that he wants the only one — though I suspect that he does. This one was a fluke. There will never be another like it.”