He fell. It must have been a sickening few seconds, but it ended quickly when the line took hold and he rolled out in a long arc beneath the lander. Kellie pulled quickly away while he swung back and forth, clutching the line, saying O God over and over.
Mac began to haul him in. Hutch watched Nightingale kick frantically, and she feared he might have a heart attack. "Relax, Randy," she told him. "You're okay. The hard part is over." And she continued talking to him in the most soothing tone she could muster until Mac's hand reached down finally, seized his vest, and dragged him into the aircraft.
The lander tilted slightly and started around again. Mac reappeared in the hatch with his line. "Okay, me proud beauty," he said. "You're next."
The elevator shook. Another quake, maybe. And it started down again. She backed away from the opening and got off her feet. Rain drummed on the roof. The elevator kept dropping, and it seemed for a few seconds to be almost in free fall. Her heart came into her throat. Then metal squealed, and the elevator banged to a stop.
Kellie was calling frantically. "I'm okay," Hutch said.
"Maybe not."
Hutch's heart, which was still fluttering, missed a beat. "What's wrong?"
"I'm sinking."
Spike depletion.
She watched the lander dropping lower. Kellie slowed the descent, hit the jets, and regained some altitude. She came around again. "We're going to have to get it right the first time," she said.
Mac stood in the airlock with his line. Kellie glided in overhead, killed the jets, reversed thrust, and brought the lander to a dead stop. It began to fall.
"No," Hutch said. "It won't work."
It was dropping too fast. Mac looked desperately in her direction.
"I'm going to have to land and recharge," Kellie said. "Hutch, I'm sorry. I don't know any other way to do this."
Hutch nodded and waved good-bye. "Take it down. I'll be here when you come back."
It was getting dark. Winds were high, and she had no sensors. A night rescue would be out of the question.
Kellie was fighting back rage and tears. "You can't stay in the elevator, Hutch."
Hutch watched the lander kick in its jets and bank away to the east. "Is it that bad?"
"It isn't good."
She looked out at the storm. And at the gridwork, the crossbars and diagonals and guide rails off to either side. If she could get to them.
A bolt of lightning exploded overhead, throwing everything into momentary relief.
The outside of the elevator was smooth, without handholds. Despite the low ceiling, the roof was out of reach. She saw no way to climb onto it, not without something to stand on.
It slipped again. Something banged hard against one of the walls.
She backed away and tried to think. It was hard, knowing what might happen at any moment, to keep her head clear.
She gathered up her vine, went back to the opening, and looked again at the roof. Then she got down on her belly, leaned out, and peered underneath. A pair of cables hung from the underside. And she saw the break, only a few meters down. A missing guide rail.
The way things were going, she had only a couple of minutes.
Hutch produced her laser, moved to one side of the doorway, and cut a hole belt high in the wall. Then a second one farther to the left at the level of her shoulders and a third one above her head directly over the first. The e-suit was supposed to protect her from extremes of heat and cold, but she wasn't sure what would happen if she put her foot on hot metal. On the other hand, she didn't have time to stand there and wait for everything to cool.
"Hutch-" Kellie's voice, broken up by the storm. "-on the ground and charging."
"Okay."
"Can you get out of the car?"
"I'll let you know."
She went back to the doorway, measured distances, tried to convince herself there was no difference between what she was trying and climbing onto a garage roof, which she had done many times in her girlhood.
She leaned out and grabbed the highest of the handholds. The rain took her breath away. Even though she was protected from it by the suit, the psychological result was the same as if the field were not there. The McMurtrie Effect again.
She gathered her courage, swung out onto the face of the elevator, inserted her foot into the bottom hole, climbed quickly up, and crawled onto the roof. The cable housing was centered, and the roof angled slightly down away from it. Her first impulse was to make for the housing, to get as far from the edge as she could. But that would accomplish nothing.
She watched the network of diagonal and horizontal bars move slowly past. Move up. They were round and desperately narrow. No thicker than her wrist. What kind of building materials did these people use, anyhow?
She edged toward the gridwork, tied one end of her vine around her waist, and stepped off the roof onto a passing crossbar. The elevator kept going, and she leaned away until it was clear. Then she looped her vine around the bar, pulled it tight, and realized she'd stopped breathing. She lowered herself into a sitting position, both legs off one side of the rail although she'd have preferred to straddle because it would feel safer, but it just wasn't comfortable.
"Hutch?" Kellie's voice.
"I'm off the elevator."
"You okay?"
"Yes. I think so."
"Where are you?"
"Sitting on a crossbar."
More lightning. They lost communication for a moment. When it came back, Kellie said, "How safe are you?"
"I'm okay."
"We'll have enough of a charge in an hour or so."
"Don't try it. You'll get us all killed. Wait till morning."
"Hutch-"
"Do what I'm asking you to. It's the b.est chance for everybody."
The elevator was still moving steadily down. Then it stopped, and for several minutes it seemed locked in place. Finally it dropped out of the framework, out of the guide rails, and began to fall. A long time later she heard it hit the forest below.
BREAKING NEWS
"One of the two persons stranded in an elevator early this morning remains in danger…."
Nicholson would have preferred to be in his cabin in the Adiron-dacks. He wanted nothing so much as for this entire business to be over and his part in it to be forgotten. He believed he was safe. But he'd been shaken, and he hated being put into a position that required him to continue to make decisions that might backfire. He was, in fact, determined to see that nothing went wrong, that he emerged blameless from the mission. If he could accomplish that, he would consider himself very fortunate.
Secondarily, he would like to see a successful rescue. Not only because it would help his case, but because when his own immediate fears had passed, he'd begun to feel some sympathy for the four people trapped on the ground.
He was aware that his priorities, had they been known, would have reflected poorly on him. And that judgment embarrassed him, putting an even heavier load on his shoulders. But he couldn't help how he felt. He resented Marcel, not for anything Weady's captain had actually done, but because he hadn't been able to come up with a rescue plan that didn't involve additional risk for Nicholson.
There was a mild jar as the ship began the course correction. He sensed the mass of the object that the Star was hauling. Saw it in the sluggishness of the ship's responses. And that was the way of it at the moment: the Star was tied to this impossible alien shaft, much as Nicholson was tied to his decision to allow two passengers and a lander to drop out of orbit.
Power flowed through the bulkheads as the four superluminals struggled to move their burden onto the designated course. They had no serious capability for lateral maneuvering. While the ships could change their own heading through the use of strategically placed highly flexible thrusters, only the main engines had the sheer capacity to affect the Alpha shaft. That meant they could, in practical terms, only move it forward, relying on gravity fields and inertia to do the rest.