“Electrical discharge.” The pilot’s voice sounded edgy for the first time. “An enormous electrical discharge.”
“Even though we expected it,” said the copilot, “it was a helluva jolt.”
“Are we okay?” Zach demanded.
“Checking…”
“Get us out of here!” Zach screamed.
“All systems are down,” the copilot said. “Complete power failure.”
“Do something!”
“There is nothing to be done.”
“But we’ll die!”
“Of course.”
Zach began blubbering, babbling incoherently at these two lunatics.
Removing his glasses and rubbing at his burning eyes, the pilot turned to his copilot and said in Japanese, “The American genius doesn’t want to be a martyr.”
The copilot’s lean face was sheened with perspiration. “No one told him he would be.”
“Will that affect his next life, I wonder? Will he be reborn as another human being or something less? A cockroach, perhaps.”
“He doesn’t believe in reincarnation. He doesn’t believe in anything except destruction and his own ego.”
The pilot said, “In that case, he has succeeded admirably. He has destroyed his own ego.”
Neither man laughed. They sat strapped into their seats awaiting their fate with tense resignation while Zach screamed at them to no avail.
The massive electrical discharge released when some of the skytower’s insulating panels were eaten away completed the destruction of the connectors that held the tower’s two segments together at the geostationary level.
Although buckyball fibers are lighter in weight than any material that is even half their tensile strength, a structure of more than thirty-five thousand kilometers’ length weighs millions of metric tons.
The skytower wavered as it tore loose from the geostationary platform, disconnected from the centrifugal force that had pulled it taut. One end suddenly free of its mooring, its other end still tethered to the ground, the lower half of the tower staggered like a prizefighter suddenly struck by a knockout blow, then began its long, slow-motion catastrophic collapse.
The upper end of the tower, equally as long as the lower, was also suddenly released from the force that held it taut. It reacted to the inertia that made it spin around the Earth each twenty-four hours. It continued to spin, but now free of its anchor it swung slowly, inexorably, unstoppably, away from Earth and into the black silent depths of space.
In the geostationary ops center Emerson saw every damned screen suddenly go dark; his control panel went dead. He felt himself sliding out of his foot restraints and sailing in slow motion across the operations center while the technicians who had been working on installing the new equipment were yanked to the ends of their tethers, hanging in midair, more shocked and surprised than frightened.
“What the shit is going on, Waldo?” one of them hollered.
He banged his shoulder painfully against the wall and slid to the floor. Soon enough, he knew, the immense structure would swing around and we’ll all be slung in the opposite direction.
“Waldo, what the fuck’s happening?” He heard panic creeping into their voices now.
We’re dead, he knew. There’s not a thing that anybody can do. Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
“Waldo! What’s goin’ on?”
They were screaming now, horror-struck, aware now that something had gone terribly wrong. Emerson tried to blank out their yammering, demanding, terrified screams.
“Fear death?” he quoted Browning:
And the upper half of the skytower spun out and away from the Earth forever.
The lower half of the skytower slowly, slowly tumbled like a majestic tree suddenly turned to putty. Its base, attached to the rotating Earth, was moving more than a thousand kilometers per hour from west to east. Its enormous length, unsupported now, collapsed westward in a long, long,
The operations crew on duty at Sky City saw their screens glare with baleful red lights. Some of them rushed out into the open, unwilling to believe what their sensors were telling them unless they saw it with their own fear- widened eyes. The skytower was collapsing. They could see it! It was wavering and toppling over like a reed blown by the wind.
People on the streets in Quito looked up and screamed. Villagers in the mountains stared and crossed themselves.
At the Quito airport, Mance Bracknell dragged Lara by the arm as he ran down the terminal’s central corridor, screaming, “Keep away from the windows!
He pulled Lara into the first restroom he saw, a men’s room. Two men, an elderly maintenance worker in wrinkled coveralls and a businessman in a linen suit, stood side by side at urinals. They both looked shocked at the sight of a wild-eyed gringo dragging a woman into this place. They began to object but Mance yelled at them, “Down on the floor! Get down on the floor! There’s going to an explosion! An eruption!”
The businessman rushed for the exit while the older man stood there, petrified with sudden fear.
Mance pushed Lara onto the cold tiles and dropped down beside her, his arm wrapped protectively around her.
“Mance, how can—”
“There’s no place to run to,” he hissed in her ear. “If it hits here we’re pulverized.”
Slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed, the skytower’s lower half collapsed to the Earth. Its immense bulk smashed into Ciudad de Cielo, the tethers at its base snapping like strings, the shock wave from its impact blowing down those buildings it did not hit directly. The thunder of its fall shattered the air like the blast of every volcano on Earth exploding at once. Seconds later the falling tower smashed down on the northern suburbs of Quito like a gigantic tree crushing an ant hill. The city’s modern high-rise glass and steel towers, built to withstand earthquakes, wavered and shuddered. Their safety-glass facades blew out in showers of pellets. Ordinary windows shattered into razor-sharp shards that slashed to bloody ribbons the people who crowded the streets, screaming in terror. Older buildings were torn from their foundations as if a nuclear explosion had ripped through the city. The old cathedral’s thick masonry walls cracked and its stained glass windows shattered, each and every one of them. Water pipes ruptured and gas mains broke. Fire and flood took up their deadly work where the sheer explosive impact of the collapse left off.
And still the tower fell.
Down the slope that led to the sea, villages and roads and farms and open fields and trees were smashed flat, pulverized, while the shock wave from the impact blew down woodlands and buildings for a hundred kilometers and more in either direction, as if a giant meteor had struck out of the sky. A fishing village fell under the shadow of
