done. Maybe some of the other people laughed, but I thought: ‘He used to be great. Now he’s just good.”
He drained his beer and tossed it. “Hell. Anybody can be good. It only takes practice. But looking at that old man, for the first time in my life I thought that maybe I could be great…” He rubbed his eyes, then looked at Vail with sudden suspicion. “Are you working on my Psych evaluation?”
“Tut-tut,” Vail said innocently. “Just curious. Just curious.”
Max looked down through the water, and he saw Her.
Sedna. Eskimo, or Inuit, and beautiful. The encrustations around her face were cracking and chipping away, revealing smooth brown flesh beneath.
She was still burdened by her load of sins, but many of them were breaking free, unable to maintain their hold.
Sedna had a chance. The universe was coming back into balance. The Paija beaten, the angakoks could cleanse Sedna if the road remained clear…
Above them, far above them, light sparkled and shimmered on the surface of the water.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A rocket rose up the sky… up the dome of Gaming A, off to Alex Griffin’s left. At first the launch looked normal enough. But stratospheric winds twisted the vapor trail into a bizarre knot of subliminal skywriting, and the oversized Phoenix craft still hadn’t tipped over to make orbit. It was roaring straight up. The flame died, but the tiny silver dot kept rising. if something else didn’t happen it would presently come roaring straight down.
Alex had come in in the middle of something. Seeking enlightenment, he plucked earphones from a rack.
“ Rockets are inefficient. Even fusion rockets, even antimatter rockets are wasteful compared to most of the machines in common use.. to a zapcar, for instance. A zapcar uses only stored electricity. Its reaction mass is the road beneath the wheels and the planet Earth beneath the road.
“ There are ways to send spacecraft into the solar system without burning tremendous masses of onboard fuel. Collectively these devices are called ‘skyhooks.’ None have been built. Some of them won’t work. But we only need one that does…”
Ten-person carts were available, but not many were in use. The majority of guests were spaced around the rim of the dome in little clumps, watching, but also pressing the flesh, meeting contacts, making deals.
High on the dome, the rocket was still rising.
Peripheral vision caught something coming from Alex’s right. It drifted across the sky toward the rising spacecraft, like a widemouthed predator of the deep, long and narrow like an eel, with luminous markings… no. He could see stars through it. The crisscrossed lines he had thought were markings were it. It was just a net, a net of superconducting wire, shaped by magnetic fields into a bizarre large-mouthed eel drifting on great square fins that must be solar power collectors.
“ The Starwhale is no more than an orbiting rail gun, but it will serve our purpose. To put a spacecraft into orbit costs fuel. We’d find it much cheaper merely to fire a craft two hundred miles straight up. At that point-”
The Starwhale ate the spacecraft.
The ship was tiny. It entered the mouth of the net at tremendous speed… at five miles per second or better, if the Starwhale was in orbit. The Starwhale was much bigger than Alex had thought, and moving much faster.
The ship slowed and came to a halt before it reached the tail. “ We can catch it, accelerate it to orbit, and leave it there. Or we can continue accelerating the ship-” It sped back toward the mouth of the beast. “- up to another five miles per second, to send it to the moon, or Mars, or the asteroids.
“ Of course we must steal kinetic energy from the Starwhale. But if we can catch incoming ships to decelerate them-”
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.
