“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 Contact 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.
He sat in the padded control chair, nervously fingering with his right hand the panel of switches before him. He was calling up displays on each of the screens in turn, a reflex action carried on by his fingers independently of his brain.
One more day. Then he could permit the first operation.
He decided that he would run over everything just one more time. After that, he would go to bed. Luis had called earlier, and Rob had emphasized the need for a good night’s sleep before they began the final tether. They would need their brains clear and rested when the time came. Luis was probably back in Quito sleeping like a baby; Rob doubted he would be able to sleep at all.
He flicked in a display of the silent control room in Quito, then went one by one around the geosynch reporting stations. He inspected the caboose last of all, the unmanned mass of equipment that hung at the very end of the beanstalk. Everything was quiet, physical variables well within their tolerances. Even the Sun was behaving itself, with no new flares and prominences to change the density profile of the upper atmosphere.
Rob’s obsessive checks and counter-checks did not go unobserved. Corrie drifted quietly in during the long countdown. She stood behind him without speaking, watching the parade of images as they moved across the big screen. She too had tried, in vain, to persuade Rob to postpone the landing until his condition improved.
Finally Corrie turned and left. She could share only so far in the excitement and the tension that consumed Rob.
One more day, and then the operations could begin to replace his hand. He had given his promise. But would he keep it — or would some new goal emerge to fill his life?