A ship entered the Starwhale’s tail at meteoric speed, slowed near the mouth, sped back down the long, long torso, left the tail, and began to fall toward Earth. “- ships carrying cargo from Mars or the asteroids, we can put the kinetic energy back!”
Most of those in Gaming A were listening to the presentation. Alex Griffin wasn’t, and he didn’t believe Harmony was. He had come in late and he felt a little lost, but the presentation wasn’t his prime motive here.
Alex had avoided Thadeus Harmony for the past half-hour. It was no mean trick. The big man had stalked him purposefully. Alex had declined to answer three phone messages, and ducked out of the back of his office once. It was easy to guess what Thadeus wanted, and Alex wasn’t prepared to give it.
“ The Beanstalk was the earliest skyhook conceived,” the narrator’s voice said. “ It would be the most useful, and the most expensive.
“ A satellite orbiting 22,300 miles above the Earth’s equator will circle the Earth in the same time it takes the Earth to turn, in twenty-four hours. It remains in orbit above one point on the Earth’s equator.” A glowing, dotted line painted itself wide around a huge blue and white Earth. “ Suppose we were to put a space station at geosynch… ” A classic wheel-shaped space station appeared, with a green-skinned giant atop it. “… and let down a line to the Earth’s surface.” The giant flung coils of heavy rope downward. Maybe it was vine; the giant was garbed in leaves. “ It would fall, of course.” The weight of thousands of miles of vine dragged the startled giant off the station and down. He became a streak of meteor flame.
Two more giants popped up on opposite sides of the space station. They hurled lines inward and outward. “ We must extend another line outward for ballast, to keep the center of mass at geosynch… ”
Alex spotted Kareem Fekesh without difficulty. The dark, slender, elegant sheik was the still center of a flow pattern of supplicants from a score of factions seeking a word with him. His man was letting few of them through… that was Razul, recovered nicely from his Battling Robots duel. Fekesh was watching the artificial sky. Neither Razul nor Fekesh appeared to have noticed Alex Griffin.
The green giants’ line had mutated, had become one smooth, continuous tether. Capsules ran up and down its length in faintly visible nets of magnetic force, elevator cars running with no cables. “ Of all of these proposed skyhooks, the Beanstalk is the most difficult to build. It must stand the greatest stresses. But the Beanstalk can lift cargo from ground to orbit, and fling them out to the stars, for the cost of the electricity, a few dollars a pound.
“ But that cost is deceptive. The Beanstalk is also the most dangerous of the skyhooks. For if the cable ever snapped-”
Flame flashed where the cable broke, somewhere above the midpoint. Meteor strike, or only the sudden release of terrible energies? Part of the cable fell toward interplanetary space. The rest… thirty thousand miles of single-crystal iron fiber composite wrapped itself around the Earth’s equator, carrying meteoric energy levels. The Earth strangled in a noose of fire.
A hundred voices murmured uneasily. Alex was watching Kareem Fekesh.
Was that a smile? What kind of smile? Alex had seen smiles like that, a faint curl of the lips, before Dream Park personnel plunged into the details of a major problem. A very bright businessman might be envisioning an answer to a potential difficulty…
Or a terror-monger might be watching a new and exotic means to trigger Megadeath. Fekesh turned and whispered to Razul. Razul frowned, considered, nodded-
A large hand fell on Alex’s shoulder. “Alex,” Harmony said urgently. “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Shhh. This will be over in a few minutes.”
“And you’ll arrange to be paged away. Now, Alex.” Thadeus’s eyes were blazing.
Alex nodded and backed up until they were under the shadow of a model mining derrick.
On the dome above them, the Barsoom Project was building a tower. They built it from the ground up, and it was already too high. No material known to man would support it. The tower stood because it was another linear accelerator. Ferrous rings shot upward through the interior at scores of miles per second. The tower’s magnetic field pushed down on them as they rose, lifting itself against gravity, slowing the rings to a stop near the tower’s crown; pushed down on them as they fell, still lifting itself, accelerating the rings until they reached bottom. There, at scores of miles per second, they looped around in a bitch kitty of a magnetic field and started back up the tower. It was a staggering feat of engineering. Alex ignored it.
“What are you doing?” Harmony asked furtively. “It wasn’t until this morning that I realized what I’ve done. Name of God, man-!”
“Don’t worry,” Alex said soothingly. “I’m just keeping an eye on things.”
“And talking to Izumi and Khresla? And activating Tony McWhirter?”
“What busy little ears we have.”
It was all that Harmony could do to keep his voice from cracking. “Alex, I was drunk! I should never have said anything at all!”
“ So there you have it.” Through the skeletal derrick Alex could see four “skyhooks” on the dome at once: tower, Star-whale, Beanstalk, and a tremendous spinning cable whose endpoints dipped into the Earth’s atmosphere. “ Even the cheapest of these projects would be expensive; the others are much worse. Each of these fantasy devices could lift cargo to space at a few dollars a pound. Each would cause awesome destruction if it failed. And each would be far cheaper, easier to build, less massive, and less dangerous if built to serve Mars!”
Mars replaced Earth. “ Mars rotates in just over twenty-four hours, but is far less massive than Earth. Stressed by only two-fifths of a gravity-” Sudden close-ups of the Beanstalk and Pinwheel showed each to be considerably shorter and much more slender. The rings being fired up and down the tower moved more slowly; the Starwhale was scores of miles long instead of hundreds of miles.
“ Each of these devices can serve Mars for around fifteen percent of their cost at Earth. Their lower energies make each far safer. More to the point, they may loft their goods from the surface of Mars and land supplies for the colonists and materials for the terraforming project; but if they fail-”
They failed all at once. The Beanstalk wrapped Mars in fire. The endpoints of the Pinwheel, which had been dipping low above the surface six times per orbit, now pounded the desert itself until shock waves shattered it. Misdirected rings shredded the tower. A rising spacecraft entered the orbiting rail gun off-center and tore it into a chaff of shredded superconducting wire.
Disasterlight painted Harmony’s broad, battered face with crimson highlights. His eyes blazed.
Alex could see the panic there. He asked, “What do you think I’m going to do? Publish a letter in the Times? Activate the Dream Park hit squad?” Alex’s mind’s eye built him an army of three-dimensional cartoon figures dressed as Ninjas. A black-robed Minnie Mouse, a sword-wielding Baby Huey, and Popeye the Sailor covered with Yakuza tattoos, closed in on a whimpering Fekesh…
“Alex!” Harmony’s voice was rigid with alarm. “Stop smiling like that.”
“Sorry. I’m easily distracted.”
“Dammit, this is serious. You’re likely to stir up more problems than you’ve ever dreamed of!”
Behind them, with staggering sound and visual effects, Martian colonists were battening hatches and shoveling Marsdust to cover glass walls. Mars was ringed in fire and meteoroids.
Alex pulled back from his friend, deeper into the shadow of the derrick, away from the illumination of the fireclouds. “Thadeus, you hired me because you trust me. Not just to do the day-to-day work, but on the big things. And just maybe you hired me specifically for this.”
Harmony wagged his head regretfully. “I was crazy. We’re talking about a hundred billion dollars. At least. Alex-”
Something on Alex’s face must have given Harmony pause, because suddenly he was speechless.