Bracknell grinned weakly to cover his surprise and a pang of embarrassment. As he left the building and started back up toward his quarters, he saw Molina coming down the street, heading toward him. Victor’s going to be leaving, Bracknell knew. Going to Australia to start a new career in astrobiology. And he’s sore at me for not letting him publish the work he’s done here.
“Hello, Victor,” he called as the biologist neared. He knew that Molina despised being called Vic.
“Hi, Mance,” Molina replied, without slowing his pace.
Bracknell grasped his arm, stopping him. “Lara and I are riding up to the LEO deck. Want to come with us?”
Molina’s eyes widened. “You’re taking her up?”
“Just to the lowest level.”
“But the safety certification…”
“Came through a week ago. For the LEO platform.”
“Oh.”
“Come with us,” Bracknell urged. “You’re not doing anything vital this morning, are you?”
Molina stiffened. “I’m finishing up my final report.”
“You can do that later. You don’t want to head off to Australia without riding in the tower you helped to build, do you? Come on with us.”
With a shake of his head, Molina said, “No, I’ve got so much to do before I leave…”
Bracknell teased, “You’re not scared, are you?”
“Scared? Hell no!”
“Then come on along. The three of us. Like old times.”
“Like old times,” Molina echoed, his face grim.
Bracknell knew that he himself was frightened, a little. If we bring Victor along I’ll have him to talk to, to keep me from worrying about Lara’s safety. But he knew that was an excuse. Superstition again: nothing bad will happen if it isn’t just Lara and me riding the tube.
Molina, who hadn’t been alone with Lara since he’d confessed that he was in love with her, allowed Bracknell to turn him around and lead him back to their apartment building. What the fuck, he said to himself. This may be the last time I see her.
“It’s like we’re standing still,” Lara said as the elevator rose smoothly past the hundred-kilometer mark.
“Like Einstein’s old thought experiment about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration,” Bracknell said.
The elevator cab was big enough to handle freight and new enough to still look sparkling and shiny. An upholstered bench ran along its rear wall, but Lara and the two men remained standing. The walls and floor of the cab were buckyball sheets, hard as diamond but not as brittle, coated with scuff-resistant epoxy. The ceiling was a grill-work through which Lara could see the shining inner walls of the tube speeding smoothly by.
No cables, she knew. No pulleys or reels like an ordinary elevator. The entire tube was a vertical electric rail gun; the elevator cab was being lifted by electromagnetic forces, like a particle in a physics lab’s accelerator or a payload launched off the Moon by an electric mass driver. Pretty slow for a bullet, Lara thought, but they were accelerating all the way up to the halfway point, where they would start decelerating until the cab braked to a stop at the LEO level.
Molina stayed tensely silent. He hadn’t said more than two words to either of them since Lara had joined them for this brief trip into space.
LEO PLATFORM
“You should have windows,” Lara said as she walked to the bench along the cab’s rear wall and sat down. “It’s boring without a view.”
Bracknell sat beside her and glanced at his wristwatch. “Another twenty minutes.”
Molina had not spoken a word since they’d boarded the elevator, more than a half hour earlier. He remained standing, pecking away at his palmcomp.
“You need a window,” Lara repeated. “The view would be spectacular.”
“If you didn’t get nauseous watching the Earth fall away from you. Some people are afraid of glass elevators in hotels, you know.”
“They wouldn’t have to look,” Lara replied primly. “I think the view would be a marvelous attraction, especially for tourists.”
Conceding her point with a nod, Bracknell said, “We’ll be adding several more elevator tubes. I’ll look into the possibilities of glassing in at least one of them.”
“Are we slowing down?” Lara asked.
“Should be.”
“I get no sensation of movement at all.”
“That’s because we’ve kept the cab’s acceleration down to a minimum. We could go a lot faster if we need to.”
“No,” she said, with a slight shake of her head. “This is fine. I’m not complaining.”
As he sat next to Lara, Bracknell got a sudden urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But there was Molina standing a few meters away, like a dour-faced duenna, his nose almost touching his handheld’s screen.
“Victor,” he called, “come and sit down. You don’t have to work all the time.”
“Yes, I do,” Molina snapped.
Turning back to Lara, “Tell him to put away that digital taskmaster of his and come over here and join us.”
To his surprise, Lara responded, “Leave Victor alone. He’s doing what he feels he has to do.”
Feeling a little puzzled, Bracknell clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cab’s rear wall. It felt cool and very hard. We ought to put some cushioning along here, he thought, making a mental note to suggest it to the people who were handling interior design. And look into glassing in one of the outer tubes, he added silently.
When the cab finally stopped, a chime sounded and a synthesized female voice announced, “Level one: Low Earth Orbit.”
And all three of them floated slowly upward toward the ceiling.
“We’re in orbit now,” Bracknell said, pushing lightly against the wall to force himself down. “Zero-g. Weightless.”
Lara looked fine, but Molina was pale. Bracknell fished a pillbox out of his trousers pocket. “Here, Victor. Take one of these. It’ll help get your stomach out of your throat.”
The elevator doors slid open and the din of work teams immediately assailed their ears as they floated out of the elevator cab. Bracknell hooked a floor loop with the toe of his boot and pulled Lara down to the floor, then Molina. Standing there anchored to the floor and weaving slightly like a sea anemone, Lara saw a wide expanse of bare decking topped by a dome that looked hazy in the dust-filled air. A drill was screeching annoyingly in the distance and the high-pitched whine of an electrical power generator made her teeth ache: Sparks from welding torches hissed off to her right. The dust-laden air smelled of burnt insulation and stranger odors she could not place. Men and women in coveralls were putting up partitions, most of them working in small groups and tethered to the deck, although she spotted several floating weightlessly along the scaffolding, high above. An electrically powered cart scurried past on a rail fastened to the deck plates, its cargo bed piled high with bouncing sheets of what looked like honeycomb metal. Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else:
“Hold it there! That’s it!”
“I need more light up here; it’s darker than a five-star restaurant, fer chrissakes!”
“When the hell were you ever in a five-star restaurant, bozo?”
“I’ve got it. Ease up on your line.”
Bracknell made a sweeping gesture and hollered over the din, “Welcome to level one.”
Molina scowled out at the noisy activity, his face still slightly green. Lara clapped her hands over her ears; the motion made her bob sideways in her floor loops.
Pointing off to their left, Bracknell led them carefully, one set of loops to the next, past a gaggle of workers gathered around a small table that held a large stainless steel urn of coffee. At least, Lara assumed it was coffee. Several of the workers raised their covered plastic squeeze bulbs to Bracknell as he led them past. Mance nodded and grinned at them in return.