"Hi, Mom!"
"Bobby! Where are you calling from?" At first her expression was surprised—as if she hadn't expected to see any of us for a while, but then her eyes flicked down as she read the information at the bottom of her display. Her expression darkened immediately. "Put your father on!"
Dad stepped into view then. "Hello, Maggie," he said grimly.
"You're doing it, aren't you!"
"I told you I would. It's the only way to be fair."
"You son of a bitch! The court said no."
"The court said not without your agreement."
"And I said no! So that means the court says no too!"
"Maggie—" Dad was keeping his voice deliberately calm. "I will not let you abuse the children as a way of getting even with me. They're old enough now, they're entitled to make up their own minds." Douglas shot me an I-told-you-so look.
"I'm going to stop you, Max—I'll see you in jail, you lying pig!" Abruptly, she remembered that Weird and Stinky and I were there too. She said, "You kids—Bobby, Charles, Douglas—why did you let him do this? You stay where you are! Don't you go anywhere with him. I'm calling the police." Behind her, a woman's voice was asking, "Maggie? What's going on—?" And then the screen went blank.
There was silence in the phone booth for a moment. Finally, I said, "So this wasn't such a good idea, was it, Dad?"
"Shut up, Chigger!" said Weird.
"I wanna talk to Mommy!" Stinky wailed.
I realized then that after her hello, she hadn't said a thing to any of us kids, except to order us to stay put. For some reason, that made me feel really angry at her. If she really cared about us as much as she said she did, why was she yelling at us? At least, Dad didn't yell. He just went silent.
He was silent now. He looked uncertain. Actually, he looked old. Beaten up.
"Dad?" asked Weird. "Are you all right?"
"No," he said. "Look. I need you to understand something. All three of you. Your Mom didn't want me to bring you on this trip. So I did it without her permission. Maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do. But I needed to do this. I really did." Dad dropped to his knees in front of Bobby and me and put his hands on our shoulders. "I've made a lot of promises to you kids, and I haven't been able to keep all of them. Maybe none of them. And I know you resent me for it. You're probably right to do so. I guess I haven't been the best dad in the world. I'm sorry about that. It hurts me something awful to know that I've let you boys down. You mean more to me than anything else in the world. That's why I did it. Just once in my life, I wanted to do something extraordinary for you. And this is it. And I wasn't going to let anybody say no."
He looked so sad and vulnerable—and for a moment, he even looked old—that I couldn't help myself. I flung myself into his arms. And so did Bobby. And Douglas. Not because he was right, but because he was Daddy. And he needed us. And suddenly it was very scary, the whole thing, and I guess we needed him too, and then Stinky started crying. And I have to admit, even I—
Dad pulled back and looked me in the eyes. "Are you all right?" I guess he'd felt me trembling.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm fine. I just don't like her yelling at us all the time. That's all."
"Me neither," said Stinky petulantly.
Dad looked at Weird. "Douglas?"
Weird shrugged noncommittally. "It's just Mom. That's just the way she is."
"Do you want to go back?"
"She's going to call the cops on you."
Dad sighed and nodded. "I hope she doesn't. For your sakes—" he added sadly. "Because then we could both lose custody. And you guys would end up in foster homes. And that wouldn't be good for anyone. That's why." He looked sorry he'd said it, but it was too late to take the words back.
Abruptly, he looked at his watch as if he had an appointment to keep. He straightened up. "So? Are we going to Geostationary? Gotta make up your minds now."
I looked to Weird. He gave me a half-and-half expression, and finally said, "Well, it'd be silly to come all this far and not go all the way."
"Yeah!" I said. Because I really did want to go, no matter what Mom said. And so did Stinky.
We were going up again.
CHANGE OF PLANS
No, we weren't.
At least, not right away.
"What's the matter, Doug?"
"Mom said she was going to call the police." Weird looked genuinely worried.
Dad nodded. "We're seventy-two hundred kilometers away ... and sixteen klicks up."
"She could phone someone," I suggested.
"She could," Dad agreed. "But it's a question of jurisdiction. She'd have to get the local authorities to agree to detain us. And that would require a judge's order and an international warrant. And that would require—" He looked at his watch and thought for a second. "It won't happen this late on a Saturday. Tell you what, though. Before we start looking around the station, let's check our reservations"—Dad led us over to a customer service desk; the woman who was working there had almost no hair at all—"just in case that storm screws things up."
Dad shouldn't have said that. Stinky looked worried. "Are we going to feel the storm up here, Daddy?"
Before Dad or Weird could answer, the hairless woman said, "Nothing to worry about, young man. The orbital elevator was originally designed to withstand wind forces of more than four hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Since then, its strength has been upgraded to five hundred and fifty."
"Yes, but what are we going to feel?" I asked.
The woman was annoyingly cheerful. She pointed. "Over there by the information center, there's an educational display that will show you exactly what will happen the entire length of the cable. You'll see these big leisurely waves that rise gently up the Line. They're hundreds of kilometers long. We'll get some rocking up here, but the waves will come in such long slow cycles that you won't be able to feel them. If you feel anything at all, it'll be like being on a very large boat on a very gentle ocean. We had a storm four years ago as big as this and it wasn't any problem."
"So there's no danger—?" Dad asked.
"None at all. Only a little inconvenience. But just for safety's sake, everybody is locking down all up and down the Line. It's a standard procedure. Most of the platform towns are already secured. Terminus might take a beating, they did last time, but nothing that couldn't be set right in a few weeks of regular repair duty."
"Will they still be sending up elevators?"
"Only cargo and supply pods. No passengers. It's too uncomfortable. Not the ride, the view. And it takes too long to get above the worst of it. They'll probably be sending up some scientific teams in one of the maintenance pods to look at the inside of the storm, they usually do, and of course the cable engineers like to look at the situation first-hand, but no—we won't be sending up any passengers."
"We were supposed to catch the 2:15 up to Geostationary—" I started to ask.
"Mm," she said, and touched her ear to listen to her communication channel. "Let me check on that for you." She made a face as she listened. "It's likely to be cancelled. Or they might send it up empty. But they're getting some pretty high winds already, so they're more likely to send up a water-pod in that time-slot. Let's see if we can get you onto another car instead." She turned to the workstation at her desk. There was a big vertical display behind her, showing the progress of all of the cars between Terminus and One-Hour. Already the cars lined up at Terminus were colored blue for water-pods instead of pink for passengers.