In the geostationary ops center Emerson saw every damned screen suddenly go dark; his control panel went dead. He felt himself sliding out of his foot restraints and sailing in slow motion across the operations center while the technicians who had been working on installing the new equipment were yanked to the ends of their tethers, hanging in midair, more shocked and surprised than frightened.
“What the shit is going on, Waldo?” one of them hollered.
He banged his shoulder painfully against the wall and slid to the floor. Soon enough, he knew, the immense structure would swing around and we’ll all be slung in the opposite direction.
“Waldo, what the fuck’s happening?” He heard panic creeping into their voices now.
We’re dead, he knew. There’s not a thing that anybody can do. Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
“Waldo! What’s goin’ on?”
They were screaming now, horror-struck, aware now that something had gone terribly wrong. Emerson tried to blank out their yammering, demanding, terrified screams.
“Fear death?” he quoted Browning:
And the upper half of the skytower spun out and away from the Earth forever.
The lower half of the skytower slowly, slowly tumbled like a majestic tree suddenly turned to putty. Its base, attached to the rotating Earth, was moving more than a thousand kilometers per hour from west to east. Its enormous length, unsupported now, collapsed westward in a long, long, long plunge to Earth.
The operations crew on duty at Sky City saw their screens glare with baleful red lights. Some of them rushed out into the open, unwilling to believe what their sensors were telling them unless they saw it with their own fear-widened eyes. The skytower was collapsing. They could see it! It was wavering and toppling over like a reed blown by the wind.
People on the streets in Quito looked up and screamed. Villagers in the mountains stared and crossed themselves.
At the Quito airport, Mance Bracknell dragged Lara by the arm as he ran down the terminal’s central corridor, screaming, “Keep away from the windows! Quitarse las ventanas!”
He pulled Lara into the first restroom he saw, a men’s room. Two men, an elderly maintenance worker in wrinkled coveralls and a businessman in a linen suit, stood side by side at urinals. They both looked shocked at the sight of a wild-eyed gringo dragging a woman into this place. They began to object but Mance yelled at them, “Down on the floor! Get down on the floor! There’s going to an explosion! An eruption!”
“Eruption?” asked the old man, hastily zipping his fly.
“Erupción grande!” Mance said. “Temblor de tierra! Earthquake!”
The businessman rushed for the exit while the older man stood there, petrified with sudden fear.
Mance pushed Lara onto the cold tiles and dropped down beside her, his arm wrapped protectively around her.
“Mance, how can—”
“There’s no place to run to,” he hissed in her ear. “If it hits here we’re pulverized.”
Slowly at first, but then with ever-increasing speed, the skytower’s lower half collapsed to the Earth. Its immense bulk smashed into Ciudad de Cielo, the tethers at its base snapping like strings, the shock wave from its impact blowing down those buildings it did not hit directly. The thunder of its fall shattered the air like the blast of every volcano on Earth exploding at once. Seconds later the falling tower smashed down on the northern suburbs of Quito like a gigantic tree crushing an ant hill. The city’s modern high-rise glass and steel towers, built to withstand earthquakes, wavered and shuddered. Their safety-glass facades blew out in showers of pellets. Ordinary windows shattered into razor-sharp shards that slashed to bloody ribbons the people who crowded the streets, screaming in terror. Older buildings were torn from their foundations as if a nuclear explosion had ripped through the city. The old cathedral’s thick masonry walls cracked and its stained glass windows shattered, each and every one of them. Water pipes ruptured and gas mains broke. Fire and flood took up their deadly work where the sheer explosive impact of the collapse left off.
And still the tower fell.
Down the slope that led to the sea, villages and roads and farms and open fields and trees were smashed flat, pulverized, while the shock wave from the impact blew down woodlands and buildings for a hundred kilometers and more in either direction, as if a giant meteor had struck out of the sky. A fishing village fell under the shadow of sudden doom, its inhabitants looking up to see this immense arm of God swinging down on them like the mighty bludgeon of the angel of death.
And still the tower fell.
Its length splashed into the Pacific Ocean with a roar that broke eardrums and ruptured the innards of men, beasts, birds, and fish. Across the coastal shelf it plunged and out beyond into the abyssal depths. Whales migrating hundreds of kilometers out to sea were pulped to jelly by the shock wave that raced through the water. The tsunami it raised washed away shoreline settlements up and down the coast and rushed across the Pacific, flooding the Galapagos Islands, already half-drowned by the greenhouse warming. The Pacific coast of Central America was devastated. Hawaii and Japan were struck before their warning systems could get people to move inland. Samoa and Tahiti were hit by a wall of water nearly fifteen meters high that tore away villages and whole cities. People in Los Angeles and Sydney heard the mighty thunderclap and wondered if it was a sonic boom.
And still the tower fell, splashing all the way across the Pacific, groaning as part of its globe-girdling length sank slowly into the dark abyssal depths. When it hit the spiny tree-covered mountain backbone of Borneo it snapped in two, one part sliding down the rugged slopes, tearing away forests and villages and plantations as it slithered snake-like across the island.
The other part plunged across Sumatra and into the Indian Ocean, narrowly missing the long green finger of Malaysia but sending a tsunami washing across the drowned ruins of Singapore. Along the breadth of equatorial Africa it fell, smashing across Kenya, ploughed into the northern reaches of Lake Victoria, drowning the city of Kampala with a tidal wave, and continued westward, crushing cities and forests alike, igniting mammoth forest fires, driving vast herds of animals into panicked, screaming stampedes. Its upper end, still smoking from the titanic electrical discharge that had severed it, plunged hissing into the Atlantic, sinking deep down into the jagged rift where hot magma from the Earth’s core embraced the man-made structure that had, mere minutes earlier, stood among the stars.
Across the world the once-proud skytower lay amidst a swath of death and desolation and smoking ruin, crushing the life from people, animals, plants, crushing human ambition, human dreams, crushing hope itself.
Lying flat on the tiles of the airport men’s room, Bracknell felt the floor jump as a roll of thunder boomed over them, so loud that his ears rang. Even so, he heard screams and terrified cries.
“Are you all right?” he asked Lara, his voice sounding strange, muffled, inside his head.
She nodded weakly. He saw that her nose was bleeding slightly. Bracknell climbed slowly to his feet. The old man was still lying on the floor, facedown. Bracknell called to him, then nudged his shoulder. The man did not move. Rolling him over, Bracknell saw his soft brown eyes staring out sightlessly.