Then I said something to Weird about what a waste it was spending all that hard cash for a toy that has to be taught. Weird grunted something about Dad not wanting to use his credit cards. "So what?" I asked. Then he asked if I'd noticed that Dad had paid for the train tickets with cash too. And I said, "Yeah? So what?" And Weird said that if he'd paid by credit card and someone wanted to find us—like Mom—it'd be real easy to look up the account transactions to see where we were going. Dad heard that, and said that it was also cheaper to pay cash because you didn't have international transaction fees and you didn't have to worry about flexi-dollars going up suddenly either, and that way we could save money and do more. So there I was, with two more conflicting stories and one more reason to be as paranoid as Mom.
Vacations are supposed to be fun—except vacations with Dad were never fun; they were just this thing we had to do every year, and this one wasn't turning out any different—so whoever made up that crap about vacations being fun didn't know what he was talking about, or maybe he'd never been on a vacation with Dad. And besides, I kept thinking about what Dad had said back in the crater: "Don't go anywhere unless you know how you're going to get back."
See, that was the point.
I didn't know if I wanted to go back.
What if Weird was right?
If he was, I wasn't sure I wanted to stop Dad—because part of me was starting to think that maybe Dad was right, that going to the stars was the only way to get out.
It sure couldn't be worse than here.
TERMINUS
After a while, dad gave up trying to get us kids to talk to him. Even Stinky had figured out something was going on and stopped talking. So Dad scrunched down in his seat and watched the news while we continued to grind southward. It was more of the same old same old. People were dying. Food riots in China. Botuloid Virus in Africa. Comatosis in Asia. Wars in India, Somalia, and Manchuria.
"You hear that, Charles?" Dad asked.
"Yeah," I grunted. "Don't live in places ending with the letter 'a'—especially 'ia.' "
"Never mind," said Dad. He shut up again. Whatever it was he'd wanted to say about all that stuff, it wasn't going to get said while I was in one of my moods. On the lighter side, some girl in Oregon said her horse had been eaten by a giant pink caterpillar. Dad was right. The world was going crazy. But I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of agreeing with him.
Things got a little better as we got closer to the beanstalk.
Close up—like the last hundred klicks—the Line was almost too bright to look at. Up in the observation domes, you could plug into the telescope channel and see views of it from broadcast stations all over Ecuador.
Dad punched up the coordinates of one of the Andes installations and we all stared at the shimmering view of One-Hour Station. We'd seen it before—but this was live and that made it more real. Seen from this angle, through miles of atmosphere, One-Hour was just a gray indistinct blob, but we could see all three of the cables clearly delineated, and once we saw a tiny blip slide up into the station and another one drop away.
Most people think the Line is just one cable, but it isn't. It's three independent cables, all linked together for triple strength, so it's really three beanstalks in one. Originally there was only one, but they'd added the other two to triple the capacity of the stalk and provide additional "vertical services."
Eventually, they wanted to add three more cables. All six would touch down as an even bigger triangle than the present one; it would cover four times as much land. The newer triangle would point north, the original triangle would be inside it, pointing south; its vertices at the center points of the sides of the larger triangle.
They didn't know yet if they'd need to expand beyond that, but they were prepared to. Dad told us all this on the train. He drew a diagram and showed that six cables was probably the most you could put down without hitting the point of diminishing returns. Part of it was land area, part of it was economics; it all had to do with something called Elevator Theory.
By the time we got to Beanstalk City—that's what everybody calls it, but that's not its real name; it's really named after Sheffield Clarke, the English engineer who designed and built the whole thing—all of us were excited in spite of ourselves. Even Weird had stopped being a jerk long enough to ask Dad questions. And Dad answered honestly.
I was excited, but I was also getting a little scared too. This wasn't going to be like an airplane. An airplane, you knew what was holding you up. This was different. Nothing was holding you up. What if it broke? I knew it couldn't, but what if it did anyway—?
We arrived at the beanstalk at ten in the morning. First we rolled across a big plateau with dark mountains all around. There were a lot of warehouses and industrial buildings—and tube-towns too. Everything looked big and new and shiny—except for the parts that were small and cheap and dirty. The last twenty miles we passed a whole bunch of parking areas and hospitality structures and hotels and tacky little side businesses—and then abruptly, that all stopped and we were riding through what looked like a big park. Weird said this was the safeguard zone around the beanstalk.
For security reasons, they don't let anyone drive right up to the elevator. The closest you can approach by car is one of the official arrival areas. These are all at least fifteen kilometers away from Terminus. All traffic from there is by shuttle-train. I suppose a terrorist with a rocket-launcher might be able to do some damage from that distance, but if somebody really wanted to assault the beanstalk, they wouldn't do it with a rocket-launcher anyway. Dad said that almost the entire Ecuadorian economy is based on the beanstalk now, and they're a world power too, and a sponsoring nation of the Colonization Authority, so they don't take any chances with Line security.
The sky had gone all hazy gray and overcast—there was a tropical storm heading in from the Pacific—so we couldn't see if the Line went all the way up to zenith or not. But all of the beanstalk's lights were on and that made it very bright against the grungy clouds. We could even see the flashing lights of vehicles sliding up and down the Line. I started wondering how often lightning struck the cables and what kind of trouble it could cause to the people in the elevator cars. Despite the high gloom, the weather was still sweltering. Dad said they never have cold days anywhere on the equator, but it was definitely windy outside; we could see the trees whipping back and forth, and occasionally big palm fronds would go tumbling by. Weird said there was nothing to worry about; the Line was secure for wind velocities of up to 625 kph.
Dad opened the tour book he'd bought that showed how the base of the Line was surrounded by cargo facilities, terminals, parks, tourist sites, stadiums, theaters, and a whole webwork of highways, tracks, and canals. The widest canal circled the beanstalk—Weird said that all of the bridges over it were retractable, in case terrorists or someone tried a ground assault. Airplanes weren't even allowed to fly within fifty klicks of the Line without special permission. He said the Ecuadorians were very serious about this; they once shot down somebody's Lear Jet and there was a big lawsuit about it.
When you get close enough, the bottom of the Line starts rising up over the horizon like a big white mountain. It spreads down and out and out and just keeps getting bigger and bigger the closer you get. And it takes a long time to get. A half hour at least. The top of the cone part is over two kilometers high. At the apex there's a ring around the Line, an observation tower where you can view the surrounding countryside or just watch the Line-cars go sliding up into the sky.