He peered down between his shoes, swinging them idly.
"Pretty fair edge, if you ask me." I could tell by the way he looked off into the distance that he was pissed. He doesn't like me to point out the lapses in logic his appearances usually imply.
"If you don't like having me around, I can always go away," he drawled.
I learned long ago not to put my arm around his shoulder or anything foolish like that. People stare. Rude, but there it is. Usually I don't even look directly at him, but now I did.
"After better than ninety years, Elwood, I have trouble imagining what I'd do without you."
That seemed to satisfy him. He squinted up at the hang gliders for a time.
"Maybe I came here in a faster ship than you did," he said.
"Using up your frequent-traveler miles on the Flying Dutchman?"
"The old Spirit of St. Louis was a lot faster. No, but maybe I hitched a ride with somebody who did get here faster. Now, if I was you, I'd be asking myself, 'Who do I know that got here faster than me? And how'd he do it?' "
Two hours in the library looking at back postings of newspads and I had the information I needed. And yes, I actually went to the library. They exist, you know, and some of them even have a few books in them. Even on a spanking-new world like Oberon they have not entirely converted to over-the-phone service. And by law they have to maintain old-fashioned desk-bound terminals, for those folks who eschew direct interface and implanted modems: Amish, Christian Scientists, naturalists, washed-up ex-child telly stars, people who get Radio Free Betelgeuse on the fillings in their teeth. Weirdos.
When I found what I was looking for, the beginnings of a wild idea took root like crabgrass and refused to go away. I walked for an hour, turning it over and over in my mind. Just too wild, I kept telling myself. And then I'd think of another angle and be right back, worrying at it.
I found a restaurant that allowed dogs—that's right, some of them on Oberon don't; can you imagine? And they call themselves civilized—and spent a contemplative two hours eating pasta and drinking strong tea. Toby, after eating his portion and vainly trying to interest me in playing fetch with the last meatball, snoozed in his chair.
What the heck? I thought. Toby opened one eye and I realized I'd said it aloud. I dropped money on the table and scooped him up, suddenly in a big hurry.
"How'd you like to ride on the fast train?" I asked him. He allowed as how that was all right with him, and went back to sleep.
Toby is a trusting soul. Well traveled as he is, he might have had second thoughts if he'd known more about the Rim Express.
The Express hadn't been operating the last time I was on Oberon, for what I thought of as an excellent reason: there wasn't much rim to speak of. There was a lot more rim now, but there was still the little matter of a five- or six-hundred mile gap between the arcs. How could a train get from one arc to the other if no rail connected them? Well, sometimes the simplest thing really is to let the mountain come to Muhammad.
The train car was everything the spoke elevators were not: narrow, cramped, linear. Seats were four across, with an aisle between pairs. The top half of the car was transparent, though you couldn't see anything when you boarded since the car was in a tube, suspended an eighth of an inch above a magnetic induction rail. I settled into an aisle seat. It was deeply padded, and could recline almost forty-five degrees. When the car was about half-filled, the front and rear doors sealed and there was a loud hiss as the air in the tube was bled away. Then I was pressed back in my seat by rapid acceleration.
In only a few minutes we burst silently into space. Toby floated up out of my lap, weightless. He's not bothered by this, simply looking around curiously until I snagged a hind leg and brought him back down. I twisted in my seat and saw the massive trailing edge of Noon Arc dwindling behind us. I could see the pressurehead, several tunnels including the one we had emerged from, the mysterious inner structure of the floor. We were traveling at three thousand miles per hour—
—and standing dead still. It's all relative, you see. Or so I'm told. From a viewpoint on the rotating wheel, we were really skedaddling. But stand away from the wheel, motionless, and you'd see that the train car was just hanging there as the Noon Arc rotated away from it, and the Six Arc approached.
All very neat. Hang suspended there for twenty minutes, then decelerate when the other arc sweeps you up. Travel time: thirty minutes. And, I hear you protest, why the hell would anyone take the fifteen-hour ordeal of a trip through the hub, as Poly did twice a week, when this magical chariot was available?
Answer: money.
There was no real physical reason why the Rim Express should be so expensive to ride. It was cheap to operate, it was safe, it was quick. And the government of Oberon hated the damn thing, wished it would just go away. Since it didn't, they taxed the hell out of it. They added surcharges for every screwball thing a government is likely to get up to, and then they added some more. On top of that, they subsidized the spoke elevators to the point that they were practically free. It was like bus fare as compared to rental of a limousine. The elevators didn't really need a fare box at all. Money from concessions and gambling enabled the service to turn a tidy profit, sort of like a theater that makes nothing at the box office but cleans up selling outrageously priced popcorn and drinks.
But what was the problem with speed and efficiency? Why the hostility to the Express? The answer didn't make sense to me, until I considered the economics of a rotating world under construction.
Since its inception not that many years before, and for some years to come, well over ninety percent of the freight traffic went down. Cargoes arrived at the hub—finished steel, composite, glass, web, imported food, merry-go-round horses, starving actors—and was lowered to the rim. Of that, only the starving actor was likely to return to the hub. And on Oberon, down meant slow. Each kilogram moved from the hub to the rim slowed the spin of the wheel by a few millionths of a second. Consider that millions of kilograms were lowered that way each day. Pretty soon, left to itself, the wheel would run out of juice like a music box winding down its spring. Everybody would get lighter, and lighter, and lighter... and rise up and blow away. (People did get lighter, though not by a lot. When the rotation speed had slowed to a certain point the engineers applied thrust and brought the wheel back up to speed, and slightly over. Included in Oberoni "weather forecasts," actually schedules, was the day's "gravity index." There were light days, and heavy days. Would you believe that suicide rates increased on heavy days? It's true. Also more fistfights, absenteeism from work, and complaints of constipation.) (This quirk of rotation also made spring scales illegal on Oberon. Only beam balances would give true weight.)
Thrust means energy, and energy costs money. You'd think they'd have a kilogram-lowering tax to pay for it, and they did, but not a big one. It was a complex equation, but one that eventually worked out to an outrageous tariff on the Rim Express, since these citizens weren't helping out by keeping the elevators in operation.
There was another way of delivering cargo to the rim. It also involved slowing the wheel. This was a fact of physics that no amount of taxation would correct: more mass at the rim equals less speed, no matter how it got there. But it was quicker, like the Express itself. The wheel is turning, see, and it has these two huge gaps in it. Why not wait for an arc to pass, then move your cargo into position where it could be intercepted and magnetically slowed, much as we were sitting out here in space right now, waiting for the arc to arrive?