Anson went to the window and stared out at the eastern sky. The first stars were showing but he did not see them. He was searching for Atlantis, thirty million miles away and slowly moving in from its position in the Belt. It would be months before it reached Earth orbit.

“You told me that Corrie hated Morel,” he said at last. “Now you’re suggesting that she might have been working with him, trying to find a cure. At the very least, she might have been taking treatment from him.”

“Do you think that’s too improbable a combination?”

“Not at all — but I thought maybe you would.” Anson laughed, and it was an abrupt, humorless sound. “I learned long ago that people are complicated. There’s almost no limit to the levels of inconsistency you can find in a person. I’m glad you’re learning it, too. What are you going to do next?”

“Next?” Rob opened his eyes. He shrugged. “Build more beanstalks. Develop the Slingshot further, shrink the Solar System. Regulo left enough unfinished work to keep me busy for a lifetime.”

“You’re playing dumb. You know what I mean. What are you going to do about Corrie? What about Caliban? Worst of all, what about the Goblins? Forget the engineering. Sala Keino could handle that for you.”

Rob shook his head. There was a lengthening silence, broken at last by the sound of the door to the outer room sliding open.

“That’s Senta and Corrie,” said Rob. “Howard, I have no answers. According to the Antigeria Labs, we should be able to treat the Goblins for progeria to the point where they recover most of a normal life span. What we can do for them socially, God knows. They’ve been treated worse than slaves. Thirty of them have induced cases of cancer pertinax — as many as in the whole rest of the System. We’ll have to keep a systematic program going, a legal program, to look for a cure. As for Caliban, you tell me. What do you do with a new intelligence once you’ve created it?”

“You study it. You interact with it. That’s what I’d like to do, for my own selfish reasons.” Anson spoke quickly. “Why do you think I’m letting Senta talk me into going up to space? Caliban and Sycorax seem to have developed methods of information storage and retrieval different from anything on Earth — non-sequential, non-random, I’m tempted to say non-logical. I’d like to work with them, and that means Atlantis. Caliban ought to have regenerated his arms—”

He stopped as the door behind him opened. Corrie and Senta stood together on the threshold. Senta was in one of her withdrawal spells, bewildered and terrified. She was clinging to Corrie’s arm, eyes nervous and wild. The younger woman was trembling, her face oddly pale. The resemblance between the two was striking. Howard Anson went forward to help Corrie.

“ `Thou art thy mother’s glass,’ “ he said softly. “ `And she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime.’ Here, let me take Senta. I know what to do.”

It was probably imagination, but in the younger woman’s face he could see the first shadow, the hint of coming disease. He took Senta’s arm.

“We checked it out,” Corrie said. “There’s no truth to it. The group in Chryse have a new treatment for drug addiction, but it won’t do anything for taliza. It was just bad reporting.”

Anson nodded. “I was afraid of that. It sounded too good to be true. Give me ten minutes while I do something for Senta. Until there’s a breakthrough, we’ll just have to struggle along with what we have.”

He grasped Senta tenderly and began to lead her through to the bedroom where a supply of the drug was stored.

“Howard.” Anson paused as Corrie called to him. He turned in the doorway.

“Howard, do you think there will — do you think somebody will find a cure? In time? A real cure?” Corrie’s voice faded to a whisper on the final words.

As she spoke, Rob rose from his couch and moved to her side. He placed his hand on her shoulder, as much for his support as for hers. Anson examined the two of them. Rob was exhausted but full of determination, with a look in his eyes that told Anson how he must answer.

“I’m quite sure of it, Corrie,” he said. “It won’t come tomorrow, and maybe it won’t come next year. But we’ll keep working, and we’ll find it. We’ll find you both a cure.”

APPENDIX 1: Notes on Quotes

When this book first appeared, I received lots of questions about beanstalks. I expected those. What I did not expect was the number of people who came up to me and said, “Were those all quotes at the beginning of chapters? I’ve tried to look them up, and I can’t find half of them.”

They were not all quotes, but many were. Here, for the curious, are their origins.

Chapter 1. “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven, to His feet thy tribute bring.” — from the hymn beginning with these words, by Reginald Heber.

Chapter 3. “Go and catch a falling star…” — from the poem beginning with these words, by John Donne.

Chapter 4. “Busy old fool, unruly Sun…” — from the poem beginning with these words, by John Donne.

Chapter 5. “The light of other days…” — from the poem beginning, “Oft, in the still night, ere slumber’s chain has bound me…” by Thomas Moore.

Chapter 8. “To meet with Caliban…” — from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Chapter 9. “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain…” — from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Chapter 11. “What seest thou else, in the dark backward and abysm of time?” — from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Chapter 12. “…at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream…” — from Tennyson’s “Tithonus.”

Chapter 15. “I do begin to have bloody thoughts…” — from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Chapter 16. “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the gates of Heaven…” — from John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress.

Chapter 18. “Cor contritum quasi cinis, gere curam mei finis.” — from the Dies Irae in the Latin Mass for the Dead; these lines are often translated as, “See like ashes my contrition, help me in my last condition.”

APPENDIX 2: Beanstalks in Fact and Fiction

Beanstalk basics

The scientific literature about beanstalks, in all its different versions (we’ll get to those later), has grown steadily over the past twenty years. Now there exist many varieties of proposed forms, for use in a variety of places, ranging from Earth to Mars to the Lagrange points of the Earth-Moon system. This book uses what I will term the “standard beanstalk,” a structure which extends from the surface of the Earth up into space, and stands in static equilibrium.

To understand how any beanstalk is possible, even in principle, we begin with a few facts of orbital mechanics. A spacecraft that circles the Earth around the equator, just high enough to avoid the main effects of atmospheric drag, makes a complete revolution in about an hour and a half. A spacecraft in a higher orbit takes longer, so for example if the spacecraft is 1,000 kilometers above the surface, it will take about 106 minutes for a complete revolution about the Earth.

If a spacecraft circles at a height of 35,770 kilometers above the Earth’s equator, its period of revolution will be 24 hours. Since the Earth takes 24 hours to rotate on its axis (I am ignoring the difference between sidereal and solar days), the spacecraft will seem always to hover over the same point on the equator. Such an orbit is said to be geostationary. A satellite in such an orbit does not seem to move relative to the Earth. It is clearly a splendid place for a communications satellite, since a ground antenna can point always to the same place in the sky; most of our communications satellites in fact inhabit such geostationary orbits.