unless the elevator were built to climb its gravity well; they would have been bypassed by miners going to the metal-rich asteroids, which had no gravity wells to contend with. And then there were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets…
But there was no danger of that now.
On the fifth day they approached Clarke and slowed down. It had been an asteroid about two kilometers across, a carbonaceous hunk now shaped to a cube, with every centimeter of its Mars-facing surface graded and covered with concrete, steel, or glass. The cable plunged right into the center of this assemblage; there were holes on both sides of the joint where cable met moon, just big enough to allow passage to the elevator cars.
They slid up into one of these holes and came to a smooth stop. The interior space they slid into was like a vertical subway station. The passengers got out and went their ways into the tunnels of Clarke. One of Phyllis’s assistants met him and drove him in a little car through a warren of rock-walled tunnels. They came to Phyllis’s offices, which were rooms on the planet side of the moon, walled with mirrors and green bamboo. Though they were in microgravity and pulling themselves around, they stood on a consensus floor as established by the furniture, rip-ripping around in velcro shoes. A rather conservative practice, but to be expected in such an Earth-regarding place. Frank exchanged his shoes for some velcro slippers by the door and followed suit.
Phyllis was just finishing talking to a couple of men: “Not only a cheap and clean lift out of the gravity well, but a propulsion system for slinging loads all over the solar system! It’s an extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering, don’t you think?”
“Yes!” the men replied.
She looked about fifty years old. After fulsome introductions – the men were from Amex – the others left. When Phyllis and Frank were the only ones left in the room, Frank said to her, “You’d better stop using this extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering to flood Mars with emigrants, or it’ll blow up in your face and you’ll lose your anchoring point.”
“Oh Frank.” She laughed. She really had aged well: hair silver, face handsomely lined and taut, figure trim. Neat as a pin in a rust jumpsuit and lots of gold jewelry, which together with her silver hair gave her an overall metallic sheen. She even looked at Frank through gold wire-rimmed glasses, an affectation that distanced her from the room, as if she were focusing on flat video images on the insides of her spectacles.
“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”
She stared at a spot about three feet in front of him. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listeners. “This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It’s here for us and we’re going to use it. Earth is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropping. Science and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they always have. These first pioneers may suffer some hardships, but those won’t last long. We lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived.”
Startled at this lie, Frank glared at her. But she did not back down. Scornfully he said, “You’re not paying attention!” But the thought frightened him, and he paused.
He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear floor at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked down on Tharsis, of course, and from this high it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemisphere: the great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemished. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked her.
“LS 60. I go down regularly.” She smiled.
“Where do you stay when you descend?”
“In UNOMA dorms.” Where she worked busily to break the UN treaty.
But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned her to do. Elevator manager, and also the primary liaison with the mining concerns. When she quit the UN, she could take all the jobs she could handle from them. Queen of the elevator. Which was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She’d have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.
And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarks. Well, she always had been a little stupid. Frank gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.
“Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States,” he said. “If the American government decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some.”
“You could never do that,” Phyllis said. “It would bankrupt the government.”
“That’s like threatening a dead man with hanging. A couple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymore. The only ones who even think they can are exactly your transnational executives. They hold the debt, but no one else cares about their money. I could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in your face. Whichever way it does, it wrecks your game. “ He waved a hand angrily. “At which point someone else will occupy these rooms, and,” a sudden intuition, “you’ll be back in Underhill.”
That got her attention, no doubt about it. Her easy contempt took on a sudden edge. “No single person can convince Washington of anything. It’s quicksand down there. You’ll have your say and I’ll have mine, and we’ll see who has more influence.” And she rip-ripped across the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of UN officials.
So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough; he would prove her wrong. On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new president would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.
Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd: it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him: running along a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.
Once resettled in Sheffield he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn,
