“Not all the way?” she asked. “Not to the geostationary level?”
Bracknell shook his head. “That’s up on the edge of the Van Allen Belt radiation. The crew hasn’t installed the shielding yet. They work up there in armored suits.”
“But if they—”
“No,” he said firmly, grasping her bare shoulders. “Some day we’re going to have children. I’m not exposing you to a high-radiation environment, even in a shielded spacesuit.”
He sensed her smiling at him. “The ultimate argument,” she said. “It’s for the good of our unborn children.”
“Well, it is.”
“Yes dear,” she teased. Then she kissed him.
They made love slowly, languorously. Afterward, as they lay spent and sticky in their sweaty sheets, Bracknell thought: This is the real test. Do you trust your work enough to risk her life on it?
And Lara understood: He worries about me so. He lets others ride the elevator but he’s worried about me.
The next day was a Sunday, and although a full team of technicians was at work, as usual, Bracknell walked over to the operations office and told the woman on duty there that he and Lara would be riding up to the LEO platform.
The operations chief that Sunday morning was a portly woman who wore her ash-blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a square gold ring on her left middle finger.
“I’ll tell Jakosky,” she said, grinning. “He’s won the lottery.”
“What lottery?” Bracknell asked, surprised.
“We’ve been making book about when you’d let your lady take a ride up,” said the operations chief. “Jackpot’s up to damn near a thousand Yankee dollars.”
Bracknell grinned weakly to cover his surprise and a pang of embarrassment. As he left the building and started back up toward his quarters, he saw Molina coming down the street, heading toward him. Victor’s going to be leaving, Bracknell knew. Going to Australia to start a new career in astrobiology. And he’s sore at me for not letting him publish the work he’s done here.
“Hello, Victor,” he called as the biologist neared. He knew that Molina despised being called Vic.
“Hi, Mance,” Molina replied, without slowing his pace.
Bracknell grasped his arm, stopping him. “Lara and I are riding up to the LEO deck. Want to come with us?”
Molina’s eyes widened. “You’re taking her up?”
“Just to the lowest level.”
“But the safety certification…”
“Came through a week ago. For the LEO platform.”
“Oh.”
“Come with us,” Bracknell urged. “You’re not doing anything vital this morning, are you?”
Molina stiffened. “I’m finishing up my final report.”
“You can do that later. You don’t want to head off to Australia without riding in the tower you helped to build, do you? Come on with us.”
With a shake of his head, Molina said, “No, I’ve got so much to do before I leave…”
Bracknell teased, “You’re not scared, are you?”
“Scared? Hell no!”
“Then come on along. The three of us. Like old times.”
“Like old times,” Molina echoed, his face grim.
Bracknell knew that he himself was frightened, a little. If we bring Victor along I’ll have him to talk to, to keep me from worrying about Lara’s safety. But he knew that was an excuse. Superstition again: nothing bad will happen if it isn’t just Lara and me riding the tube.
Molina, who hadn’t been alone with Lara since he’d confessed that he was in love with her, allowed Bracknell to turn him around and lead him back to their apartment building. What the fuck, he said to himself. This may be the last time I see her.
“It’s like we’re standing still,” Lara said as the elevator rose smoothly past the hundred-kilometer mark.
“Like Einstein’s old thought experiment about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration,” Bracknell said.
The elevator cab was big enough to handle freight and new enough to still look sparkling and shiny. An upholstered bench ran along its rear wall, but Lara and the two men remained standing. The walls and floor of the cab were buckyball sheets, hard as diamond but not as brittle, coated with scuff-resistant epoxy. The ceiling was a grill-work through which Lara could see the shining inner walls of the tube speeding smoothly by.
No cables, she knew. No pulleys or reels like an ordinary elevator. The entire tube was a vertical electric rail gun; the elevator cab was being lifted by electromagnetic forces, like a particle in a physics lab’s accelerator or a payload launched off the Moon by an electric mass driver. Pretty slow for a bullet, Lara thought, but they were accelerating all the way up to the halfway point, where they would start decelerating until the cab braked to a stop at the LEO level.
Molina stayed tensely silent. He hadn’t said more than two words to either of them since Lara had joined them for this brief trip into space.
LEO PLATFORM
“You should have windows,” Lara said as she walked to the bench along the cab’s rear wall and sat down. “It’s boring without a view.”
Bracknell sat beside her and glanced at his wristwatch. “Another twenty minutes.”
Molina had not spoken a word since they’d boarded the elevator, more than a half hour earlier. He remained standing, pecking away at his palmcomp.
“You need a window,” Lara repeated. “The view would be spectacular.”
“If you didn’t get nauseous watching the Earth fall away from you. Some people are afraid of glass elevators in hotels, you know.”
“They wouldn’t have to look,” Lara replied primly. “I think the view would be a marvelous attraction, especially for tourists.”
Conceding her point with a nod, Bracknell said, “We’ll be adding several more elevator tubes. I’ll look into the possibilities of glassing in at least one of them.”
“Are we slowing down?” Lara asked.
“Should be.”
“I get no sensation of movement at all.”
“That’s because we’ve kept the cab’s acceleration down to a minimum. We could go a lot faster if we need to.”
“No,” she said, with a slight shake of her head. “This is fine. I’m not complaining.”
As he sat next to Lara, Bracknell got a sudden urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But there was Molina standing a few meters away, like a dour-faced duenna, his nose almost touching his handheld’s screen.
“Victor,” he called, “come and sit down. You don’t have to work
“Yes, I do,” Molina snapped.
Turning back to Lara, “Tell him to put away that digital taskmaster of his and come over here and join us.”
To his surprise, Lara responded, “Leave Victor alone. He’s doing what he feels he has to do.”
Feeling a little puzzled, Bracknell clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cab’s rear wall. It felt cool and very hard. We ought to put some cushioning along here, he thought, making a mental note to suggest it to the people who were handling interior design. And look into glassing in one of the outer tubes, he added silently.
