Back and forth, back and forth, he worked the filament as he crouched over the grille and the four-hundred-kilometer-distant Earth. He could feel considerable resistance, so he must be making some progress through that stubborn steel. But just how much, there was no way of telling.
“Dr. Morgan,” said CORA, “you must really lie down for half an hour.”
Morgan swore softly to himself.
“You’re making a mistake, young lady,” he retorted. “I’m feeling fine.” But he was lying; CORA knew about the ache in his chest. . . .
“Who the hell are you talking to, Van?” asked Kingsley.
“Just a passing angel,” answered Morgan. “Sorry I forgot to switch off the mike. I’m going to take another rest.”
“What progress are you making?”
“Can’t say. But I’m sure the cut’s pretty deep by this time. It must be. . . .”
He wished that he could switch CORA off, but that, of course, was impossible, even if she had not been out of reach between his breastbone and the fabric of his spacesuit. A heart monitor that could be silenced was worse than useless—it was dangerous.
“Dr. Morgan,” said CORA, now distinctly annoyed, “I really must insist. At least half an hour’s complete rest.”
This time, Morgan did not feel like answering. He knew that CORA was right; but she could not be expected to understand that his was not the only life involved. And he was also sure that she had, like one of his bridges, a built-in safety factor. Her diagnosis would be pessimistic; his condition would not be as serious as she was pretending. Or so he devoutly hoped. . . .
The pain in his chest certainly seemed to be getting no worse. He decided to ignore both it and CORA, and started to saw away, slowly but steadily, with the loop of fiber. He would keep going, he told himself grimly, just as long as was necessary.
The warning he had relied upon never came. Spider lurched violently as a quarter ton of dead weight ripped away, and Morgan was almost pitched out into the abyss. He dropped the spinerette and grabbed for the safety belt.
Everything seemed to happen in dreamlike slow motion. He had no sense of fear, only an utter determination not to surrender to gravity without a fight. But he could not find the safety belt. It must have swung back into the cabin. . . .
He was not conscious of using his left hand, but suddenly he realized that it was clamped around the hinges of the open door. Yet still he did not pull himself back into the cabin. He was hypnotized by the sight of the falling battery, slowly rotating like some strange celestial body as it dwindled from sight. It took a long time to vanish completely; and not until then did Morgan drag himself to safety, and collapse into his seat.
For a long time he sat there, his heart hammering, awaiting CORA’s next indignant protest. To his surprise, she was silent, almost as if she, too, had been startled. Well, he would give her no further cause for complaint. From now on, he would sit quietly at the controls, trying to relax his jangled nerves.
When he was himself again, he called the mountain.
“I’ve got rid of the battery,” he said, and heard the cheers float up from Earth. “As soon as I’ve closed the hatch, I’ll be on my way again. Tell Sessui and Company to expect me in just over an hour. And thank Kinte for the light—I don’t need it now.”
He repressurized the cabin, opened the helmet of his suit, and treated himself to a long, cold sip of fortified orange juice. Then he engaged the drive, released the brakes, and lay back with a sense of overwhelming relief as Spider came up to full speed.
He had been climbing for several minutes before he realized what was missing. In anxious hope, he peered out at the metal grille of the porch. No, it was not there.
Well, he could always get another spinnerette, to replace the one now following the discarded battery back to Earth. It was a small sacrifice for such an achievement. Strange, therefore, that he was so upset, and unable fully to enjoy his triumph.
He felt that he had lost an old and faithful friend.
53
Fade-Out
The fact that he was only thirty minutes behind schedule seemed too good to be true; Morgan would have been prepared to swear that the capsule had halted for at least an hour. Up there in the Tower, now much less than two hundred kilometers away, the reception committee would be preparing to welcome him. He refused even to consider the possibility of any further problems.
When he passed the five-hundred kilometer mark, going strong, there was a message of congratulation from the ground. “By the way,” added Kingsley, “the Game Warden in the Ruhana Sanctuary’s reported an aircraft crashing. We were able to reassure him. If we can find the hole, we may have a souvenir for you.”
Morgan had no difficulty in restraining his enthusiasm; he was glad to see the last of that battery. Now, if they could find the spinnerette—but that would be a hopeless task. . . .
The first sign of trouble came at five hundred fifty kilometers. By now, the rate of ascent should have been over two hundred klicks; it was only one nine eight. Slight though the discrepancy was—and it would make no appreciable difference to his arrival time—it worried Morgan.
By the time he was thirty kilometers from the Tower, he had diagnosed the problem, and he knew that this time there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. Although there should have been ample reserve, the battery was beginning to fade.
Perhaps those sudden jolts and restarts had brought on the malaise; possibly there was even some physical damage to the delicate components. Whatever the explanation, the current was slowly dropping, and with it the capsule’s speed.
There was consternation when Morgan reported the indicator readings back to the ground.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Kingsley lamented, sounding almost in tears. “We suggest you cut speed back to one hundred klicks. We’ll try to calculate battery life—though it can be only an educated guess.”
Twenty-five kilometers to go—a mere fifteen minutes, even at this reduced speed! If Morgan had been able to pray, he would have done so.
“We estimate you have between ten and twenty minutes, judging by the rate the current is dropping. It will be a close thing, I’m afraid.”
“Shall I reduce speed again?”
“Not for the moment. We’re trying to optimize your discharge rate, and this seems about right.”
“Well, you can switch on your beam now. If I can’t get to the Tower, at least I want to see it.”
Neither Kinte nor the other orbiting stations could help him, now that he wished to look up at the underside of the Tower. This was a task for the searchlight on Sri Kanda itself, pointing vertically toward the zenith.
A moment later, the capsule was impaled by a dazzling beam from the heart of Taprobane. Only a few meters away—so close that he felt he could touch them—the other three guiding tapes were ribbons of light, converging toward the Tower. He followed their dwindling perspective—and there it was. . . .
Just twenty kilometers away! He should be there in a dozen minutes, coming up through the floor of that tiny square building he could see glittering in the sky, bearing presents like some troglodytic Father Christmas. Despite his determination to relax, and obey CORA’s orders, it was quite impossible to do so. He found himself tensing his muscles, as if by his own physical exertions he could help Spider along the last fraction of its journey.
At ten kilometers, there was a distinct change of pitch from the drive motor. Morgan had been expecting this, and reacted to it at once. Without waiting for advice from the ground, he cut speed back to fifty klicks. At this rate, he still had twelve minutes to go, and he began to wonder despairingly if he was involved in an asymptotic approach. This was a variant of the race between Achilles and the tortoise. If he halved his speed every time he halved the distance, would he reach the Tower in a finite time? Once, he would have known the answer instantly; now, he felt too tired to work it out.
At five kilometers, he could see the constructi
onal details of the Tower—the catwalk and protective rails, the futile safety net provided as a sop to public opinion. Although he strained his eyes, he could not yet make out the air lock toward which he was now crawling with such agonizing slowness.
And then it no longer mattered. Two kilometers short of the goal, Spider’s motors stalled completely. The capsule even slid downward a few meters before Morgan was able to apply the brakes.
Yet this time, to Morgan’s surprise, Kingsley did not seem utterly downcast.
“You can still make it,” he said. “Give the battery ten minutes to recuperate. There’s enough energy there for that last couple of kilometers.”
It was one of the longest ten minutes that Morgan had ever known. Though he could have made it pass more swiftly by responding to Duval’s increasingly desperate pleas, he was too emotionally exhausted to talk. He was genuinely sorry about this, and hoped that Maxine would understand and forgive him.
He did have one brief exchange with Driver-Pilot Chang, who reported that the refugees in the Basement were in fairly good shape and much encouraged by his nearness. They were taking turns to peer at him through the one small porthole of the air lock’s outer door, and simply could not believe that he might never be able to bridge the trifling space between them.
Morgan gave the battery an extra minute for luck. To his relief, the motors responded strongly, with an encouraging surge of power. Spider got within half a kilometer of the Tower before stalling again.
“Next time does it,” said Kingsley, though it seemed to Morgan that his friend’s confidence sounded somewhat forced. “Sorry for all these delays . . .”
“Another ten minutes?” Morgan asked with resignation.
“I’m afraid so. And this time, use thirty-second bursts, with a minute between them. That way, you’ll get the last erg out of the battery.”
And out of me, thought Morgan. Strange that CORA had been quiet for so long. But this time he had not exerted himself physically; it only felt that way.
In this preoccupation with Spider, he had been neglecting himself. For the last hour he had quite forgotten his zero-residue glucose-based energy tablet and the little plastic bulb of fruit juice. After he had sampled both, he felt much better, and only wished that he could transfer some of the surplus calories to the dying battery.
Now for the moment of truth—the final exertion. Failure was unthinkable, when he was so close to the goal. The fates could not possibly be so malevolent now that he had only a few hundred meters to go.
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed when there were only millimeters to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.
The capsule heaved itself upward in fits and starts, like a dying animal seeking its last haven. When the battery finally expired, the base of the Tower seemed to fill half the sky.
But it was still twenty meters above him.
54
Theory
of Relativity
It was to Morgan’s credit that he felt his own fate was sealed, in the desolating moment when the last dregs of power were exhausted and the lights on Spider’s display panel finally faded out. Not for several seconds did he remember that he had only to release the brakes and he would slide back to Earth. In three hours, he could be safely back to Earth. In three hours, he could be safely back in bed. No one would blame him for the failure of his mission; he had done all that was humanly possible.
For a brief while, he stared in a kind of dull fury at that inaccessible square, with the shadow of Spider projected upon it. His mind revolved a host of crazy schemes, and rejected them all. If he still had his faithful little spinnerette—but there would have been no way of getting it to the Tower. If the refugees had possessed a spacesuit, someone could lower a rope to him—but there had been no time to collect a suit from the burning transporter.
Of course, if this was a video drama, and not a real-life problem some heroic volunteer could sacrifice himself—better still, herself—by going into the lock and tossing down a rope using the fifteen seconds of vacuum consciousness to save the others. It was some measure of Morgan’s desperation that, for a fleeting moment, he even considered this idea before common sense reasserted itself.
From the time that Spider had given up the battle with gravity until Morgan finally accepted that there was nothing more that he could do, probably less than a minute elapsed. Then Kingsley asked a question which, at such a time, seemed an annoying irrelevance.
“Give us your distance again, Van. Exactly how far are you from the Tower?”
“What the hell does it matter? It could be a light-year.”
There was a brief silence before Kingsley spoke again, in the sort of tone one used to address a small child or a difficult invalid.
“It makes all the difference in the world. Did you say twenty meters?”
“Yes—that’s about it.”
Incredibly, unmistakably, Kingsley gave a clearly audible sigh of relief. There was even joy in his voice when he answered:
“And all these years, Van, I thought that you were the Chief Engineer on this project. Suppose it is twenty meters exactly—”
Morgan’s explosive shout prevented him from finishing the sentence.
“What an idiot! Tell Sessui I’ll dock in—oh—fifteen minutes.”
“Fourteen point five, if you’ve guessed the distance right. And nothing on Earth can stop you now.”
That was a risky statement, and Morgan wished that Kingsley hadn’t made it. Docking adapters sometimes failed to latch together properly, because of minute errors in manufacturing tolerances. And, of course, there had never been a chance of testing this particular system.
He felt only a slight embarrassment at his mental blackout. After all, under extreme stress a man could forget his own telephone number, even his own date of birth. And until this very moment, the now dominant factor in the situation had been so unimportant that it could be completely ignored.
It was all a matter of relativity. He could not reach the Tower; but the Tower would reach him—at its inexorable two kilometers a day.
55
Hard Dock
The record for one day’s construction had been thirty kilometers, when the slimmest and lightest section of the Tower was being assembled. Now that the most massive portion—the very root of the structure—was nearing completion in orbit, the rate was down to two kilometers. That was quite fast enough. It would give Morgan time to check the adapter line-up, and to rehearse mentally the rather tricky few seconds between confirming hard dock and releasing Spider’s brakes. If he left them on for too long, there would be a very unequal trial of strength between the capsule and the moving megatons of the Tower.
It was a long but relaxed fifteen minutes—time enough, Morgan hoped, to pacify CORA. Toward the end, everything seemed to happen quickly, and at the last moment he felt like an ant about to be crushed in a stamping press, as the solid roof of the sky descended upon him. One second, the base of the Tower was meters away; an instant later, he felt and heard the impact of the docking mechanism.
Many lives depended now upon the skill and care with which the engineers and mechanics, years ago, had done their work. If the couplings did not line up within the allowed tolerances; if the latching mechanism did not operate correctly; if the seal was not airtight . . . Morgan tried to interpret the medley of sounds reaching his ears, but he was not skilled enough to read the messages.
Then, like a signal of victory, the DOCKING COMPLETED sign flashed on the indicator board. There would be ten seconds while the telescopic elements absorbed the movement of the advancing Tower. Morgan waited half of them before he cautiously released the brakes.
He was prepared to jam them on again instantly if Spider started to drop, but the sensors we
re telling the truth. Tower and capsule were now firmly mated together. Morgan had only to climb a few rungs of ladder, and he would have reached his goal.
After he had reported to the jubilant listeners on Earth and Midway, he sat for a moment recovering his breath. Strange to think that this was his second visit, but he could remember little of that first one, years ago and thirty-six thousand kilometers higher. During what had, for want of a better term, been called the foundation-laying, there had been a small party in the Basement, and numerous zero-gee toasts had been squirted. This was not only the first section of the Tower to be built; it would also be the first to make contact with Earth, at the end of its long descent from orbit. Some kind of ceremony had therefore seemed in order, and Morgan now recalled that even his old enemy Senator Collins had been gracious enough to attend and to wish him luck with a barbed but good-humored speech. There was even better cause for celebration now. . . .
Already, Morgan could hear a faint tattoo of welcoming raps from the far side of the air lock. He undid his safety belt, climbed awkwardly onto the seat, and started to ascend the ladder. The overhead hatch gave a token resistance, as if the powers marshaled against him were making one last feeble gesture, and air hissed briefly while pressure was equalized. Then the circular plate swung open and downward, and eager hands helped him up into the Tower. As Morgan took his first breath of the fetid air, he wondered how anyone could have survived here. If his mission had been aborted, he felt quite certain that a second attempt would have been too late.
The bare, bleak cell was lit only by solar-fluorescent panels, which had been patiently trapping and releasing sunlight for more than a decade, against the emergency that had arrived at last. Their illumination revealed a scene that might have come from some old war. Here were homeless and disheveled refugees from a devastated city, huddling in a bomb shelter with the few possessions they had been able to save.