During the remainder of the descent, Menelaus had ample opportunity to think, and when thinking prevailed nothing, to worry, and then to fret, and then he opened the elevator liquor cabinet, and realized that between the awkwardness of his gauntlets and the heavy cheek-guards of his helmet, he could not get the whiskey bottle to his lips in an open and unbroken condition.
And when he unscrewed his gauntlets for the second time, he caught a glimpse of red metal. After a swig or nine of fine Kentucky whiskey burning in his throat and warming his insides to a toasty glow, he decided to go data-fishing, to see if there was any angle he had overlooked.
First, he called the top of the buried antennae leading to Pellucid, and checked on growth rates. The Van Neumann machine was doubling its mass every forty days, and the fail-safe built into its design had worked the one occasion that a volcanic eruption had carried some of the material to the surface: compared to the temperature and pressure beneath the mantle of the Earth, the surface world was an icy near-vacuum, and so when several pounds of modified diamond crystal had floated to the surface of a lava flow, it had broken down into black carboniferous dust.
The machine had a processing volume entirely out of proportion with the software he had been able to download: it was like a library of ten thousand acres, with only one shelf occupied by a few reference books. It was smart enough, however, to prioritize non-rhythmic changes in its environment, to which it was more sensitive than Montrose’s design specifications could account for.
He looked at the data first as graphs, then as hieroglyphs, then imagined as a polydimensional matrix in his mind’s eye. He laughed when he realized what these data were. The high energy of the passing vactrains, shooting like so many magnetically-accelerated bullets through the tangle of Brachistochrone curves below the mantle of the Earth, set up a resonance effect and echo, which the Pellucid crystals could pick up. The crystals were hearing the electromagnetic rumblings of passing trains. These echoes were of different nuances of pitch and consistency, and Pellucid had automatically filed them according to a system of phenotypes.
Pellucid also flagged the shipments that did not match a soothing system of patterns. Montrose realized he was looking at the military movements of the recent weeks, days, hours, and minutes. A simple set of calculations in his head, checked against calculations run through his amulet, and he found he had quite by accident stumbled across a fairly clear estimate of where the world’s soldiers were, were their gear was being collected, and so on.
But there were two groups of migration-patterns, and they had peaked at different times.
The older group consisted, not of one or two, but many unscheduled stops that had been made at the base of the tower over the last few weeks, and these did not fit the much more recent motion-pattern of Del Azarchel’s troopers. They were round trips to depots in Florida and Astrograd and various seaports, including many stops at Monaco.
Montrose turned the information over and over in his mind until, as if on its own, the pieces clicked into place. With his amulet, and Rania’s security overrides and her password lists, he was able to call up an image of the tower’s blueprints and wiring schematics, but also able to open loading invoices, personnel lists, duty rosters, and, in short, Montrose mapped out where any of those unscheduled trains from several weeks ago, passing through Quito, had deposited their cargoes.
He halted the spider car when it reached the cable stanchion. He was at the bottom of the tether proper, about a half-mile above the ground. Here, at the top of the superscraper that formed the tower’s massive base, there was a small platform, windows pressurized due to altitude, and a bank of elevators leading farther down. He rode a freight elevator down only a few score feet, and stepped out onto a catwalk, and the clash of his metal feet sent sharp echoes reflecting from distant bulkheads.
This highest floor was not an observation deck or restaurant (those things were reserved for even higher altitudes). This vast cylindrical space was a warehouse: balcony upon balcony reached down hundreds of feet, beyond the range of sight. Loading platforms were protruding like metal tongues into the air of this central well, for dangling cranes like freakish chandeliers to load freight into spider cars considerably bigger than the luxury-passenger car he had been using.
He checked the manifest whose image his amulet shined into the back of his eyeballs, rippling through the scores of imaginary pages at once. He deduced a framework based on a statistical distribution and superimposed in his mind’s eye the warehouse space before him. Immediately he saw which crates did not fit the pattern: the tall, dark, sealed canisters grouped (by no coincidence) about the main load-bearing members.
Explosives. He did not need to open the crates to see; he could tell by the cables connecting them to junction boxes. The crates had Princess Rania’s personal seal on them. If Exarchel had a system to monitor unscheduled and unregistered depthtrain movements, he knew of this. But perhaps he did not.
Montrose grimaced. No need to fight the duel after all. Rania had prepared all this in advance. Even the orbital mechanics of the Hermetic now made sense: it would require a relatively short burn for that great vessel to reach a higher orbit.
He went back to the combination of landing deck and loading dock and into the spider car. The status light showed an upward-accelerating strand was ready to provide the energy to pull him aloft.
The strand was one of the many that formed the cable bundle of the tether. All he had to do was engage the clutch, to tighten the spider legs adhering to that strand while loosening the magnetic grip from the stationary strands.
He put his un-gauntleted hand toward the electric clutch and hesitated. Again, he had that feeling of being haunted by a thought just out of reach.
It bothered him that his augmented intelligence had seemed to make him less and not more aware of his subconscious mind. He wondered if expanding his mind were like blowing up a balloon: doubling the radius of the balloon would quadruple the surface area but would increase the volume hidden beneath the surface eightfold. Hence his subconscious would be darker, not clearer, than before: a cavern opening into a hollow world where strange lights could be seen in the distance, illuming only glimpses.
In any case, do not run from him. It will go badly for you, if you attempt it.
He snatched his hand back from the clutch. Something was wrong. What had he overlooked?
At that moment, his amulet uttered a chime of music, and the voice of Rania, sharp and clear, entered the car. “Husband, you have trapped yourself. Do not re-ascend!”
“Rainy, you awake?”
“No, I’m talking in my sleep. Why did you go down? Couldn’t you see it was a trap?”
“I can take him.”
“Stupid, stupid man!” That came out as a sob. “I had it all planned! Now you are caught! Get out of the car!”
He stepped back out of the spider car, and stood on the glass-enclosed observation deck. “What is it? Did Vardanov wake you up? I suppose no one can drive a car down the tether without everyone noticing…”