When she signed off, Chiang leaned toward her. "I was at the University of Tokyo for a few years," he said. "Lamps used to swing all the time. It really doesn't have to amount to something." He wore a cheerful short-sleeved blue team jersey stenciled Miami Hurricanes. "We'll be okay," he said.

They talked the problem over. How important was the tower and its contents? Hutch knew that a professional archeologist would have told them it was priceless. But she confessed there was really no way to know.

In the end they compromised. They'd spend one more day there. Then find someplace safer to work.

A wind kicked up. The sky was full of stars and the snowscape sparkled.

Chiang found it difficult to sleep, knowing Kellie was so close. Just the seat in front of him. But he hadn't realized she was awake until he heard her moving. He leaned forward and touched her elbow. "You okay?" he asked.

She angled her seat so she could see him. Her eyes were dark and lovely. Her hair fell down around her collar, and he ached to take it, take her, in his arms. "The quake's not good," she said, looking toward the tower. "That thing could come down on our heads."

"Sorry you came?"

"Wouldn't have missed it." Her eyes came back to him. "On the other hand…" She took a deep breath and he tried not to stare at her breasts. And whatever she was going to say was left unfinished.

VII

Women were intended by their Maker to be cheerleaders. One has only to examine their anatomy and their disposition to recognize that melancholy fact. So long as they, and we, keep this rockbound truth firmly in mind, the sexes will perform their joint functions with admirable proficiency.

— Gregory MacAllister, "Night Thoughts," Notes from Babylon

Wendy was still two hours away from the object, but they were close enough to have good visuals, which were displayed in various aspects across a bank of screens in project control. The area was crowded with Beekman's people, clustered in front of the monitors and hunched over consoles.

The object had turned out to be an assembly of fifteen individual shafts, connected by bands set at regular intervals of about eighty kilometers. Eight shafts were on the perimeter, six in an inner ring, and one in the center. They were of identical dimensions, each with a diameter of about three-quarters of a meter, each long enough to stretch from New York to Seattle. There was considerable space between them, so Marcel could see through the assembly, could detect stars on the far side.

A rocky asteroid was attached to one end, webbed in by a net. The overall effect, Marcel thought, was of a lollipop with a stick that projected into the next county.

The end opposite the asteroid just stopped. A few lines trailed out of it, like dangling cables. Marcel noticed that the fifteen cylinders were cut off cleanly, suggesting the object had not broken away from some larger structure, but rather had been released.

"Impossible thing," said Beekman, who was delighted with the find. "Far too much mass for so narrow a body."

"Is it really that big a deal?" asked Marcel. "I mean, it's in space. It doesn't weigh anything."

"Doesn't matter. It still has mass. A lot of it along the length of the assembly."

Marcel was studying the configuration: The asteroid was up, the lower end of the assembly was pointed directly at Deepsix.

Beekman followed his eyes. "At least its position is about what we'd expect."

"Stable orbit?"

"Oh, yes. It could have been there for thousands of years. Except-"

"What?"

He delivered a puzzled grunt. "It just shouldn't hold together. I'll be interested in seeing what the thing's made of."

John Drummond, a young mathematician from Oxford, looked up from a screen."Impossibilium," he said.

Marcel, fascinated, watched the image. It was so long they couldn't put the entire thing on a single screen without shrinking the assembly to invisibility. One of the technicians put it up across a bank of five monitors, the lollipop head on the far left, and the long thin line of the supporting pole stretching all the way over to the far right-hand screen. "So it's not a ship of any kind, right?" he asked.

"Oh, no," said Beekman. "It's certainly not a ship." He shook his head emphatically. "No way it could be a ship."

"So what is it? A dock?" asked Marcel. "Maybe a refueling station?" They homed in on one of the braces. It appeared to be a simple block of metal, two meters thick, supporting all fifteen shafts in their positions. "Where do you think it came from?"

Beekman shook his head. "Deepsix. Where else could it have come from?"

"But there's no indication they ever had technology remotely like this."

"We really haven't seen anything yet, Marcel. The technology may be under the ice. Kellie's tower might be very old. Thousands of years. We didn't look very advanced a few centuries ago either."

Marcel couldn't bring himself to believe that all evidence of a high-tech civilization could just disappear.

Beekman sighed. "The evidence is right outside, Marcel." He tried to rub away a headache. "We don't have any answers yet. Let's just be patient." He looked at the screens and then glanced at Drummond. An exchange of some sort took place between them.

"It's probably a counterweight," Drummond said. He was about average size and generally uncoordinated, a thin young man with prematurely receding hair. He seemed to have had trouble adjusting to low gravity. But he'd come to Wendy with a reputation for genius.

"Counterweight?" said Marcel. "Counterweight for what?"

"A skyhook." Beekman glanced at Drummond, who nodded agreement. "There's not much else it could have been."

"You mean an elevator from the ground to L.E.O.?"

"Not Earth orbit, obviously. But yes, I'd say that's exactly what it was."

Marcel saw several smiles. "I was under the impression there was no point putting up a skyhook. I mean, we've got spike technology. We can float vehicles into orbit. Why go to all the trouble-" He stopped. "Oh."

"Sure," said Beekman. "Whoever built this thing doesn't have the spike. They've got some other stuff, though, that we don't. We could never make one of these. Not one that would hold together."

"Okay," said Marcel. "What you're telling me, if I understand this correctly, is that this is the part of the skyhook that sticks out into space and balances the section that reaches to the ground, right?"

"Yes."

"That brings up a question."

"Yes, it does," said Beekman. "Where's the rest of the skyhook?" He shrugged. "Remove the counterweight, and everything else falls down."

"Wouldn't we have seen it if that had happened?"

"I'd think so."

"Maybe they cut it loose near the bottom of the elevator. If that happened-"

"Most of it would get yanked out into space and drift off."

"So there could be another piece of this thing out here somewhere."

"Could be. Yes."

"But what we're saying is that it was put up and then taken down?"

"Or fell down."

They retired into the project director's office, and Beekman waved him to a chair. A large globe of Deepsix stood in one corner.

"It's crazy," said Marcel. "You can't hide a skyhook. Up or down."

"Maybe the pieces that collapsed are under the glaciers," Beekman said. "We really can't see much of the surface." He zeroed in on the equator and began to turn the globe. "Although it would have to be along here somewhere. Along the equator where we can see the ground."

They called up pictures of Maleiva HI and began looking. For the most part, the equator crossed open ocean. It touched a few islands in the Coraggio east of Transitoria, rounded the globe without any land in sight, passed through Northern Tempus, leaped the Misty Sea, and returned to Transitoria a couple hundred kilometers south of Burbage Point. The tower.