The funny thing, Sork thought, was that in the turmoil around the loading area he was almost sure he had seen the Turtle, Litlun, scurrying into an earlier car. Why would the Turtle be heading up to the orbiter? But, Sork told himself perhaps he was wrong; it had been only a fleeting glimpse, and when he thought of mentioning it to the others he decided against. It would only worry Moon Bunderan, to no purpose.
And he had so much on his mind already! He was actually tingling with excitement—literally, tingling—it was almost as though an electric shock were teasing his body, raising the short hairs on his arms. It was the same feeling he had felt just before he took that first, needed drink—back in the days when he needed drinks to survive, before Sue-ling Quong showed up and gave a new purpose to his life. He didn't want a drink now. What he wanted most he was actually about to have\
Sork could hardly sit still in the space ladder lift car as it slid up the cables toward the orbit station. They had been lucky to get space in a car, with so many Turtles going up to orbit with all sorts of strange possessions. The car reeked of the little knot of Turtles that shared it with them, clustered in their own corner. It was an odor that tickled the nostrils, almost stinging, like menthol but tinctured with something repellent, like an opened grave.
Sork craned his neck to see out the window of the elevator car. Disappointingly, there was little but clouds to see. The orbit station itself hung high above, tethered by its three lift cables to Kuala Lumpur, the west coast of Africa and Kansas City. Its central location put it sixty thousand kilometers over equatorial Brazil. Of course there was no hope of seeing it from the lift car yet, and there was nothing to see below but the curve of the Brazilian bulge into the broad Atlantic Ocean. Even that was almost obscured by the clouds.
Sork Quintero sank back into his uncomfortable perch. The lift cars had been designed for Turtles, not human beings; Turtles who were half again as tall as humans, and whose leathery carapaces did not bend in the same way as human bodies. And the thrusting of the car as it pulled itself up its long hundred-thousand-kilometer lift didn't help. At first it had been like being perched on the edge of a tall, uncomfortable desk, with someone twice as heavy as himself riding his shoulders, for the acceleration of the car, too, was set to Turtle standards, not human. But then it had slowed somewhat— or the thrust of acceleration had been eased, Sork did not know which—and now they could at least move about.
He patted the pouch at his side. There had been no time to pack. There also had been little in the way of possessions for any of them worth the trouble of packing. He had insisted on taking all Sue-ling's old university lecture chips—as much out of spite, to keep them from Lidun, as for any use he could see for them.
Next to him the young woman from New Mexico was scribbling on a notepad. Peering over her shoulder, Sork could see that it was a long letter to her parents, to be mailed, no doubt, from the orbiter. The girl was weeping silently as she wrote, and her Taur had rested a hard, warm hand on her shoulders protectively.
Sork looked the creature over with distaste. It was impossible to read expression on that broad, branded face, but the Taur was moaning softly, musically, to himself, his eyes fixed on vacancy. Sork hoped it wasn't going to be airsick. It was a mistake to bring that animal along, Sork was sure; but the girl had been so insistent—
On a compassionate impulse he reached down and touched her arm.
The Taur's eyes came into quick focus, and the great horned head turned warningly toward Sork. Sork hurried his words, as Moon Bunderan looked up inquiringly, "I thought you'd like to see where we're going. We'll be coming in sight of the orbiting station soon, and you've never seen it, have you?" Nor had he himself, of course, except in pictures.
"Thank you, Mr. Quintero," the girl said with polite interest. She put down her pen, dabbed at her eyes and said brightly, "It's a wonderful thing, isn't it? The space ladder, I mean. The Turtles certainly gave us some wonderful inventions."
"But it isn't!" Sork cried. "I mean the skyhook isn't a Turtle invention—or not just theirs, anyway. Human beings had thought of the space ladder long ago, way before the Turtles came."
"Oh, really?" She pondered that. "Well, then, if it's so useful, why didn't we build one ourselves?"
Sork flushed. "It was just too big an engineering project for our resources—then. Oh, we certainly would have done it, sooner or later. But the Turtles had a big advantage."
"They're more advanced scientifically, yes," the girl nodded.
"No, that's not what I mean. It's true enough, but it's not the most important reason. I admit the space ladder has to use some very high-tech materials, cables with a tensile strength that's pretty remarkable, but our scientists would have developed something that would do. No, what made it hard for us to build a ladder like this was the cost."
The girl looked disbelieving. "You mean there wasn't enough money?"
"Not just the money cost, though that would have been spectacular. The important thing was the cost to the environment. Every gram of material in the ladder—cables, cars, orbital station, machinery, everything—and that comes to billions of tons!—every last gram would have had to be mined and manufactured on the surface of the Earth. Then it would have had to be launched from the surface to orbit. It wasn't the building of the ladder that was too hard. It was getting all that stuff into orbit—in the cargo bays of rocket ships! With ten times the mass of fuel having to be lifted for every gram of cargo, and all those terrible rocket exhausts messing up the stratosphere. But the Turtles, you see, had the big advantage that they started in space. They didn't have to fight the gravity well to assemble the orbiter. They built it out of asteroid iron and cometary-nucleus materials, and all those things were already in orbit. The Turtles manufactured the whole skyhook, cables, cars and all, right in space!"
"Oh," the girl said, nodding. "I see." Then, that subject finished, good manners directed that she find another. She gestured around at the three Turtles who were sharing their car. All of them were busily strapping themselves in. "What's happening?"
"We're getting close," Sork told her. "We'd better buckle in, too."
And then, as they fumbled with the straps, "There it is!" his brother shouted, his face pressed against the crystal.
All of them leaned as far forward as they could. The station itself was now in sight, seen from below and rapidly approaching. It was well worth looking at. The orbital station was not a single object. It was several score capsules linked together with cables and passages—like beads on a string, but jumbled together as though the necklace had been squeezed into a tightly interlocking ball.
Sork took it upon himself to be tour guide for the young girl from New Mexico, loosening his safety straps to see better. "Some of those things are the living quarters for the station Turtles and the working parts of the station," he informed her. "They don't have wave-drives. They don't have propulsive capacity at all, not even reaction drives. They don't go anywhere, just stay there as a base. But the other things you see—the things that, some of them, look kind of like peanuts? Those are real ships. The little round ones are the orbital shuttles and workships; they're rocket driven and they don't go very far. But the big ones shaped like peanuts—do you see the ones I'm pointing at? Those are interstellar wave-drive ships."