The short man shrugged. “Stability? You calculated all that months ago. Now, you sit and watch and tell me you’ll be worrying. What will you be doing, tell me that.”
Rob sniffed. The two men had played this game many times before. “I’ll be sitting there trying to control a hundred thousand kilometers of live snake, that’s all. Not to mention the ballast, out at the far end. How’d you like it if we miss on that? You’ll get the whole thing in your lap, here at Quito.”
“Wouldn’t happen like that, would it?” Luis turned and cocked his dark head, a note of inquiry replacing the verbal sparring. His feet were inches from the lip of the excavation.
“Come away from there, Luis, and I’ll answer the question. You don’t seem to care if you fall over, but it makes me nervous.”
“You know I’m irreplaceable.”
“Bull. I’ll have no trouble getting a replacement who’s more competent — I just don’t want the bother of breaking in somebody new to run Tether Control.” Rob watched as the other man moved a couple of inches away from the edge. “You’re right, though,” he went on. “If we don’t get the ballast tied on at the other end, you won’t get the cable in here — the first time round. It will start to curl around the Earth, speeding up all the way. You’ll get it on the second sweep, and then I guarantee you’d notice it. It ought to be moving about Mach Three when it comes into the atmosphere, a couple of billion tons of it. Quito would be a lively place.”
“Siccatta! You paint nice pictures for me.” Luis spat again over the edge, turned, and walked back to join Rob by the aircar. “I suppose you told all that to the General Coordinators’ Office? What did they think of it?”
“Not my department.” Rob mimicked the other’s flat, calm delivery. “I left all that to Darius Regulo. He’s the one who handled the permits.”
“Hm. And how did he manage that?”
Rob shrugged. “I’ll have to guess. Some people he persuaded, some he bought, some owed him for past favors, some he scared more with other worries if we don’t go ahead and build the `stalk. You know how it’s done. A little carrot, a little stick. Me, I just build the cable — and she’s a big mother, too, biggest I’ve done. I’m happy to leave the manipulation of the authorities to Regulo’s fine Italian hand.”
He sat down on the stubby wing of the aircar. “We’ve got enough worries without taking on Regulo’s. Any real problems at this end? If not, we’ll keep the fabrication going and make final plans for the fly-in.”
The dark man shook his head. “I worked for you on the New Zealand Bridge, and on the Madagascar Bridge, and I’m lined up for the Tasman Bridge. All that, and you have the nerve to ask me such a question. Rob Merlin, my perfectionist friend, don’t you know me at all? Don’t you think I would have been banging your door down, long ago, if something were not going according to plan and according to schedule? Do you think I am one of those incompetent lastajas who would rather see things screwed up than admit they have troubles?”
“All right.” Rob held up his hand to cut off the flow of words. “I’m with you. I know you’ve got everything under control here, I know your work. Damn it, Luis, if I didn’t know you’d have everything running smoothly, I’d never have asked you to work on this in the first place. But you know me, too. I have to see it all for myself, and I have to ask those dumb questions. It’s part of me, the way that digging holes is part of you.”
“It is.” Luis was smiling as the two men climbed into the aircar. “I agree, it’s part of your nature.” He looked at the huge earthworks surrounding them, man-made hills of rock and rubble. “And just you stay that way,” he said softly. “Keep insisting on seeing everything for yourself. That’s the reason why Luis Merindo has worked for you four separate times. Remember, I value my life, too — even if you think that I stand a little too close to the edge. Let’s go over and look at Tether Control. We’ll be ready here when you are.”
The view from L-4 was always a surprise to visitors. It was Earth that drew the attention first, looming four times the size of the Moon. The lunar sphere appeared exactly the same size as seen from Earth, but it was the body that finally received the closer look. The markings seemed all wrong. An Earth dweller had that same invariable face planted deep in his memory, back before he could recall any coherent sights. When the familiar face was changed suddenly to an alien profile it became a new and interesting world, no longer Earth’s age-old companion. And that feeling persisted. Rob had made the trip to L-4 many times now, and was becoming accustomed to the new face in the sky. Even so, he found that he was taking an occasional look at the bright hemisphere as he rode slowly along the length of the beanstalk, heading back towards the Spider.
The load-bearing and superconducting cables, along with the elements of the drive ladder, were being extruded as a single complex unit. That was the assembly to be flown in to a landing at Tether Control. The rest — ore and passenger carriers, maintenance robots and condition sensors — would all be added later, once the beanstalk was settled in position.
There had been a slight argument with Regulo on the question of the ore carriers. He had wanted to do it in the same extrusion process, eager to see how much could be done with the Spider. He seemed to regard it as his own new toy. Rob had persuaded him that it would make the fly-in to Earth tether more complicated, even though the extrusion itself was feasible. Addition of the ore carriers would be a separate installation job, by a team ready to work up and down the length of the beanstalk itself, and it could be done in less than a month with maintenance robot assistance.
The doped silicon strands of the load-bearing cable gleamed brightly in the sunlight, a gossamer loop extending out from L-4 and far off towards the distant Earth. Rob could follow it by eye for only the first few kilometers. Beyond that, thousands of tiny sensors planted all the way along its twisting length sent frequent radio inputs to Sycorax’s orbit adjustment programs. The results of those computations were channeled through to Rob and, failing his override, initiated any necessary corrective action on the beanstalk. Small reaction motors, mobile along the length, maintained the delicate overall stability of the vast loop. Regulo had readily accepted Rob’s suggestion that they should use two Spiders, fuse the first few kilometers of cable that each extruded, and generate a long, looped strand that would halve the total time for manufacture. The maneuvers prior to fly-in would be more complicated because of that, but Rob was convinced that they were well under control.
He looked ahead. Far in front of him he could now see the bulk of the asteroid that Regulo had moved in from the Belt. Close to its surface, still invisible to him, floated the two Spiders, endless streams of bright cable squirting from their spinnerets. He was watching for them as he moved steadily closer to the asteroid, until a second small inspection craft, similar to the one that he was riding in, moved away from the shadow of the asteroid and headed in his direction.
“Corrie?”
“Right.” Her voice was clear over the head-set. “I thought I’d come out, meet you, and take a look for myself. How is the beanstalk behaving?”
“So far, as smooth as you could ask.” As Rob moved level with the second ship it turned and began to follow him along the cable. “I rode around the whole loop without seeing anything we need to worry about. There was a little oscillation and twisting at the far end, but it was being damped by the reaction motors by the time I got there. Somebody back there on Atlantis is doing a good job on the control calculations.”