have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.
She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.
Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself; was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love… The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet… that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?
Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.
In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superceded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks; and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts; Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.
Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station. The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the northeast. This scoop formed a great gap across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways explosion. But that was the only flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flat. And sixty kilometers across and a full five thousand meters deep. Like the start of the mohole to end all moholes. The few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant’s scale, almost invisible from the rim.
The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevator. The attachment point was obvious: a massive tan and white concrete blockhouse, located a few kilometers west of the big tent town around the train station. Running west along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum black. There were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.
The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base; apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that afternoon. This turned out to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheless. The end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, and this rocket’s eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurts. The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple of thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor observing a fishing line dropped down among them from the plum sea surface – a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottom wreck. His blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathe deep. Very peculiar.
They toured the base complex. The gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring of a rim. The walls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a shock-cushioning collar. The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, thirty-seven thousand kilometers in all. And only ten meters across.
With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily; but not rapidly, as it had to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic approach. “It’s going to be like Zeno’s paradox,” Slusinski said.
So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.
Frank spent this time setting up the head Department of Mars offices in the town, which one day was christened Sheffield. The Burroughs staff protested the move, but he ignored them. He spent his time meeting with American executives and project managers, all at work on various aspects of the elevator or Sheffield, or the outlying Pavonis towns. Americans represented only a fraction of the workforce on hand, but Chalmers was kept busy nevertheless, because the overall project was so huge. And Americans appeared to be dominating the superconducting, and the software involved with the actual elevator cars, a coup that was worth billions and which many people gave Frank credit for, though it was in fact his AI and Slusinski who were responsible, along with Phyllis.
Many of the Americans lived out in a tent town east of Sheffield called Texas, sharing the space with internationals who liked the idea of Texas, or had just ended up there randomly. Frank met with as many of them as he could, so that by the time the cable touched down they would be organized and working with a coherent policy – or under his thumb, as some of them put it. But happy to be there, as long as it gave them any clout. They knew they were less powerful than the East Asian commonwealth, which was building the elevator car shells, and less powerful than the EEC, which had constructed the cable itself. And less powerful than Praxis, and Amex, and Armscor, and Subarashii.
Eventually the day came when the cable was going to touch down. A giant crowd gathered in Sheffield to see it; the train station concourse was jammed to well over capacity, as it had a good view along the rim to the base complex, popularly referred to as the Socket.
As the hours passed, the end of the black column drifted downward, moving more and more slowly as it approached its target. There it hung, not that much bigger than the leader line guiding it down; smaller in fact than the business end of an Energia rocket. It stood up into the sky perfectly vertically, but it was so thin and the foreshortening was so severe that it looked not much longer than a tall skyscraper. A very skinny tall skyscraper, walking on air. A black tree trunk, taller than the sky. “We ought to be right under it, down on the floor of the socket,” one of his staff said. “There’d be headroom when it stops, right?”
“Magnetic field might scramble you a bit,” Slusinski replied, never taking his gaze from the sky.
As
