‘It’s not a bad ride, Factor,“ the steward told him. ”You just have to relax and stay loose. It’s over before you know it, sir.“
Regan grinned and strapped himself in. The warning gong sounded, and the ground personnel left the ship. The budget provided for a crew of just two, pilot and co-pilot. Stewards did not remain on board after blast-off. Too expensive to ferry hired hands back and forth.
The seconds ticked away. Regan waited, swaying gently in the hammock-like acceleration cradle.
Blast-off came. The ship groaned and lurched.
It reminded Regan of his very first space flight, a business trip to the Moon, aboard an old clinker of a rocket that went back almost to the ‘70’s. He had felt every jolt of the blast-off then, and he was feeling it now. Well, it was no luxury liner, he thought. Not at fifty bucks a ride! “
Gravity dragged at him. Five, six, seven G’s. His face distorted under the strain. But it was only momentary. It was too expensive, and too rough on the passengers, to push the acceleration any higher. The people aboard wouldn’t be trained astronauts. They’d be ordinary joes - though of course they’d all need medical certificates testifying that they could stand the gaff. The weak-hearted as well as the faint-hearted would get only secondhand impressions of this World’s Fair.
The engines cut out as the ship reached orbital velocity. Regan was used to the phenomenon of no-grav by this time, but he smiled at the thought of the thousands upon thousands of visitors to the Fair who would be experiencing it as something brand new and startling.
They drifted through the darkness. Somewhere nearby was the Satellite. Regan had no porthole to view by-economy!- and so all he could do was slump back in the cradle, relax, wait.
Hardly any time at all had elapsed. It was quicker to reach a satellite fifty thousand miles up than it was to drive from New York to Boston. That was the point that had to be hammered on in the promotional campaign: that it was just a short, easy hop, skip, and jump from your nearest spaceport to the World’s Fair.
There was still no sensation of motion. And then, briefly, there was: the blast of lateral jets as the ship matched orbits with the Fair Satellite. Regan waited. There was a second jolt as the starboard jets were fired. This rendezvous maneuver was the most time-consuming part of all; two objects moving at thousands of miles an hour had to be brought together in such a way that the airlock of one and the airlock of the other could be joined.
A tricky maneuver, but not really a difficult one. And, under the circumstances, the only possible way of getting Fair visitors inside the Fair. Just as for practical reasons it was impossible to equip passengers aboard jet airliners with their own parachutes, so, too, it was unthinkable to provide a spacesuit and the training to use it for everyone who came to the Fair. Professional spacemen could suit up and cross a rope ladder through space to get inside the Fair Satellite; Earth-lubbers would have to move from airlock to airlock without once leaving an atmosphere.
The ship and the Satellite were joined. The locks opened. For the first time, Claude Regan set foot in the home of the 1992 Columbian Exposition.
He was impressed.
He found himself in a high vaulted chamber, brightly lit, walled on three sides. In the middle distance he saw workmen welding something, sparks showering gaily in casual disregard for the environment. Further off, a giant crane was being inched into position.
The welcoming committee came rushing up to greet him.
A Brazilian named Castelanho pumped his hand. “So glad to see you, Senhor Factor. So very glad!” Castelanho was in charge of construction and maintenance; he was the top-ranking Aero do Brasil man on the job. “We have everything ready for you to see,” Castelanho exclaimed. “I hardly know what to show you first, Senhor Factor!”
Regan grinned amiably. “It doesn’t matter. I want to see it all.”
It was quite a sight.
Even with everything half-completed or worse, it was possible to discern the outlines of the Fair that would be. The globular Satellite was divided into many levels for greater floor space, and the pavilions of the nations and the great companies were rising in every part of the huge orbiter. Workmen shouted across echoing voids; cables trailed everywhere; booms and cranes, assembled out here in space, swung in awesome majesty from one level to another.
There was little or no sensation of actually being in space. The normal gravity, the atmosphere, the solidity of everything around, gave one the feeling of still being on Earth, and yet not really in any familiar place, for one was definitely inside something, some vast enclosed space, and there were no five-hundred-acre enclosed spaces of this sort to be found on Earth. The Satellite was unique.
There were few portholes opening onto the blackness of space without. This was deliberate. Cutting down on the number of portholes reduced the structural weakness in the shell of the Satellite itself, and cut construction costs. All to the good, of course. Still more to the point was the fact that revenue could be promoted from the almost total absence of windows.
There were some windows-half a dozen of them, large plate-glass panels. They were to be operated as concessions. Anyone who wanted a squint of the starry void-and Regan imagined that would have to be just about everyone who came to the Fair-would have to hand over fifty cents or so to enter a window area. Penny by penny, the Fair would somehow pay its way.
Regan roamed on. His busy imagination transformed what he saw into completed pavilions, and he liked the effect. It would not, of course, resemble any of the World’s Fairs of the past except in general purpose. Regan could remember being taken, as a boy of nine, to the New York World’s Fair of 1964. He remembered the green meadows, the reflecting pools, the gay Lunar Fountain, the colossal Unisphere towering fifty yards high, the tree-bordered malls. It had seemed like a dazzling wonder-world, and he had never forgotten its glittering gaiety, its spectacular abundance.
Here there were no malls, no trees, no meadows. A single fountain fed water endlessly into a pool, but there was none of the elaborate machinery that had marked the fountains of that other fair. Nor were the pavilions the palaces of delight that Regan remembered from his childhood.
Everything was simpler, here. Of course. This was a tiny world in space, and what was built there was built at mind-staggering expense. Duplicating a terrestrial World’s Fair was beyond question. They had created something new here, something the world had never seen before.
Regan spent half an hour at the Global Factors pavilion, bordering on the main plaza. It was more nearly complete than any of the others, of course, since Regan had bulled the appropriation through the Board of Directors very early in the game. A Global engineer-one of the men who usually helped build dams in underdeveloped parts of Earth- spotted Regan out front, recognized him, and came out to meet the Factor.
‘Looks pretty good, doesn’t it, Factor Regan?“
‘It looks grand,“ Regan said. ”The whole thing. It’s just terrific.“
Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic as Regan reached Washington, bone-tired. The vision of the World’s Fair Satellite still tingled in his brain. He had been unable to sleep on the trip back, down to the Denver Spaceport and then across the continent by jet to Washington. Images raced through his mind-of the Fair completed, of people patiently queuing up to board the little ships, of wide-eyed visitors strolling the aisles of the Satellite in wonder.
He managed to get a little sleep at the Georgetown home he had rented as his residence while in the Capital. At noon, he was at the Fair office, and he was not there more than minutes when Lyle Henderson came stalking into Regan’s room, tight-lipped, gaunt-faced, practically quivering with suppressed rage.