There was no shortage of vertical space, and there probably wouldn't ever be, at least not for a long, long time. Dad said that the industrial development of the cable would eventually prove more important than the transportation aspects, because the beanstalk had effectively tripled or quadrupled Ecuador's usable land area. In fact, they'd be dropping new cables to handle the increased traffic long before they used up all the available vertical space on the existing lines.
Dad said that the Orbital Elevator Corporation was planning to start dropping the first of the next three cables in a few months. Each new cable dropped would create another triangle and another area of interior space. When I asked how that would affect Terminus, Dad had said that Terminus would get even bigger. The area covered by the tent would be expanded—quadrupled, at least—so obviously the ground-level expansion was already planned for too.
But by then, the Kenya cable would be up and running and that would be serious competition, so there wouldn't be as much pressure to grow as fast, although Dad said that the Ecuadorian cable could probably lower their fares and shipping costs by then, because so much of their initial investment would already have been amortized, so they could probably give the Kenyan group a pretty hard time.
Dad said there was also a Singapore-Malaysia investment group preparing a cable of their own, and British Canada was dropping a cable down into the Pacific Ocean, just south of Christmas Island. That didn't make sense to me, but Dad said there were a lot of military and scientific reasons for having a cable of your own.
There was something about the way he said that last part. "Do you think there's going to be a war?" I asked.
He looked at me with a sad look in his eyes. "I hope not," he said, "but sometimes I think it's already started and we just don't know it yet."
ALL ABOARD
It wasn't too hard to find a ticket lobby. There was this big circular balcony all around the cables. It was as wide as an avenue, it had two levels, and there were check-in counters on both levels. It was high enough above the floor of Terminus that you could look down over the railing and see the big well where the cables disappeared into the Earth. You could see everything, even how the cars were loaded and moved into position for launch. We all wanted to look, but Dad insisted we get our tickets first.
The ticket counters on the lower balcony were only for day-trips up to One-Hour. That was real popular with tourists who wanted to visit the beanstalk and who wanted to go into space but who weren't planning to go all the way up to orbit, which was a much longer trip. There were elevators leaving for One-Hour every five minutes.
One-Hour was open twenty-four hours a day, but we had to go to a different line. Tickets for Geostationary and even farther out, like to the launch stations beyond, were sold on the top level. Those cars launched every fifteen minutes.
Dad had made reservations for a 2:15 elevator, but we were early. The woman behind the counter had a shiny brown face, and she kept smiling at Stinky like he was her own little boy. She suggested that we go straight on up to One-Hour now and see all the sights up there, and then we could catch our reserved cabin on the 2:15 car when it stopped at One-Hour to pick up passengers. That way we could leave almost immediately without any waiting and we'd get to see everything up at One-Hour too. Because of the storm coming in, traffic up the elevator was heavier than usual, she said, so it was probably a good idea to leave now. Dad agreed and so did the rest of us, so the woman rewrote our reservations. She scanned our IDs and then gave each of us our own boarding cards.
She asked if we wanted to check our luggage, but Dad said no. We didn't have that much and we'd prefer to keep it with us. She had a pretty smile and she made us all feel a lot friendlier—like we were actually going to have fun for a change. She gave each of us an elevator badge to wear. I started to shove mine in my pocket, until Weird pointed out that it was also a life-monitor and a locator chip and a beeper-communicator. We had to wear our badges at all times, Weird said.
After that, Dad took us back over to the edge of the balcony to look at how the cables worked. The three cables of the Line plunged straight down from the very top of the tent each into its own separate hole in the floor of the station. They were as big around as buildings. Bigger. Dad said each one was as thick as a baseball stadium. The bottom of the Line looked like three huge pillars from God with a big open space between them—enough for another dozen stadiums. Probably more.
This wasn't the real bottom of the Line, of course. That was anchored four or five kilometers underground. Above us, below us, all around us, all the separate filaments of the cable were peeled off into underground tunnels and threaded down into the bowels of the earth, where each one was knotted around a couple zillion tons of basalt or whatever. They couldn't pull loose. Every filament was separately anchored, some as far as fifty klicks away so there would be a firm anchor for the Line even if there were a massive earthquake here.
From our vantage point on the balcony, we could see everything. Dad pointed out the details of this and that as happily as if he'd built the Line himself. He explained the purposes of each of the different tracks, talked about what the lights meant, and made sure we noticed all the smaller cables running down the sides of the big ones.
As we watched, an elevator car slid down one of the cables into a reception bay; at the same time another one popped up on the other side of the same cable. On the next cable over, a pair of linked cargo pods came sliding down, direct from orbit; they had a Lunar insignia painted on them. As they slid out of sight, a loaded cargo container rose up to balance them. "Look! That one's going straight to the moon," I said to Stinky. We watched as it rose up and up and up until it finally disappeared through the roof.
That's when it hit me. That we were going up too. This wasn't another one of Dad's didn't-happen promises. This was for real. And that's when I started to feel very nervous. Especially about the stuff Weird had said. I was beginning to think he might be right. This whole trip—it wasn't normal. Not for Dad.
I wished I knew how to ask Dad to reconsider, but I knew whatever I said, he wouldn't change his mind. Certainly not after traveling all this way. And Weird and Stinky were so hyped up about the elevator, they probably wouldn't let him reconsider anyway. I would have waited down here at Terminus for them, but I knew Dad would never agree to that either—and I didn't dare ask.
It wasn't that I didn't want to go. I sort of did. I just didn't want to go right now.
"Is that where we're going?" Stinky asked, pointing up the elevator.
"Yep," I said, my voice kind of strangled. I took his hand so he wouldn't get lost. Weird looked at me funny, but I turned away before he could say anything, pushing Stinky after Dad and wishing I were big enough to be taken seriously.
Dad herded us down to a platform next to a long queue of elevator capsules, all moving slowly in line toward the launch bay. Each car was as big around as a house and at least five or six stories tall. There were at least a dozen of them, with a new one popping into the queue every few minutes; every time a car at the front slid into the launch rack, a new one thunked up at the other end.