“But—” Myra began again. This time he stopped his wife’s lips with his own.
“Get Natasha and Robert, will you?” he coaxed. “And our baggage? And let’s see how this hydrogen burner works.”
Which turned out to be very well. They did have to stop twice to add water to the fuel tank, under the scandalized stares of the people running the filling stations they stopped at, but the little car performed as well as any fossil-fuel burner.
They were still ten kilometers from the terminal when Robert emitted one of his heart-stopping shrieks. Myra jammed on the brakes, but it wasn’t a sudden danger. It was simply an exciting sight. What Robert was waving at (as he said “Spider!” and “Climb fast!” and “Many, many, many!”) was the cable of the Skyhook itself, barely visible as something that glinted from the sun. But what it carried, once you knew what to look for, was visible enough. There were the cargo-carrying pods, one after another, marching up into the sky and disappearing into the first layer of clouds.
“Huh,” Ranjit said. “Looks like they’ve really got it going, doesn’t it?”
So they had.
The road to the terminal was paired up with a railroad track, and as they were approaching, a train—forty-two freight cars, Natasha counted excitedly—overtook them and disappeared into one of the terminal’s giant sheds. There were guards at the car entrance, but they passed the Subramanian family with a friendly salute, and a wave in the direction of the VIP parking lot.
Where they were met by a handsome Asian woman who introduced herself as Joris Vorhulst’s assistant. “Engineer Vorhulst was looking forward to seeing you very much,” she informed them, “but he didn’t expect you until tomorrow. He’s on his way, though. Would you like something to eat?”
Ranjit opened his mouth to say what a good idea that was, but was overruled by his wife’s faster response. “Not just yet. If we could just look around for a bit—”
They could. They were warned to stay out of the loading sheds and, of course, to beware of the trucks and tractors that were lugging around unidentifiable bits and pieces of no doubt excitingly interesting objects.
Ranjit contemplated all the activity with benign incomprehension. “I’d give a lot to know what some of these things are,” he informed his family in general.
Young Natasha pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “that lumpy package there is the thruster for an ion rocket. I think the bale next to it is carbon nanotubes in sheet form—I’d say probably part of a solar sail—”
Ranjit gazed at his daughter, openmouthed. “What makes you so sure?” he demanded.
She grinned at him. “While you were talking to that lady, Robert and I poked around, and I read the bills of lading. I think they’re building spaceships up there!”
“And,” called a familiar voice from the unloading shed, “you’re exactly right, Tashy! We’ve got a couple of them working already.”
Joris Vorhulst wouldn’t listen to any objections; he wanted food, decent Sri Lankan food, and if they didn’t want to eat, they could just watch him doing so. Because, it turned out, he had been five weeks on the Skyhook himself, and was just now coming back from supervising the work of those very spacecraft whose existence Natasha had deduced.
“Skyhook is really beginning to pull its weight,” he informed them happily. The two robot rocket ships that were already commissioned were working as scavengers, dedicated to combing LEO for abandoned spacecraft or even abandoned fuel tanks of ancient Russian and American ones. Once found, computer-controlled solar sails were mounted on them and they were programmed to sail themselves to Grand Central. There they were transformed. They were no longer dangerous free-flying spaceship killers. Now they were simply the raw materials for anything that needed to be built. “It’s all very well to ship stuff up from the surface,” Vorhulst declared, mouth full of what even Myra had to admit was a really good curry, “but why should we waste what’s up there already?”
“And that’s what you were doing up in LEO? Collecting scrap to build new things?”
Vorhulst looked embarrassed. “Actually,” he said, “I was making sure the third ship was ready to go. That’s the one that’s headed for the moon. You know that the robot explorers have been busy there for a few years now? And they’ve found plenty of those lava tubes I used to talk about in my astronomy class?”
“Actually,” Ranjit complained, “I didn’t. The progress reports they sent the advisory council were pretty sketchy.”
“Yes,” Vorhulst conceded, “I know they were. We’re hoping the big three will loosen up a little now, because those tubes are going to change everything. One of them is right under the Sinus Iridium—the ‘Bay of Rainbows.’ It’s a beaut. It’s eighteen hundred meters long, and ship three will be carrying the machinery to seal it up because Lunar Development has a plan for it. The big three want tourists, you see.”
Myra looked skeptical. “Tourists? Last I heard there were about eleven people living in the lunar colony and it was costing a fortune just to keep them fed and supplied with air to breathe.”
Vorhulst grinned. “In the old days, yes. That was when they had to be supported from Earth’s surface, by rockets. But now we’ve got the Skyhook! Oh, there’ll be tourists, all right. And to give them a good reason to go there, the big three pulled a few strings, and now the Olympics association has made a deal.”
Natasha, previously uncharacteristically silent, perked up. “What kind of a deal?”
“To hold the kind of events they can’t do on Earth, Tashy. You see, lunar gravity’s only 1.622 meters per second squared, so—”
Natasha held up her hands. “Please, Dr. Vorhulst!”
“Well, it’s just about one sixth as much as Earth’s at the surface. That means that the minute anybody does competitive sports on the moon, all the old records that involve running or jumping are just out the window. I’m not sure that even the Sinus Iridium tube is tall enough to let the high jumpers strut their stuff.”
Ranjit was looking skeptical. “You think people are going to travel a couple of hundred thousand kilometers just to watch some athletes jump high?”
“I do,” Vorhulst insisted. “So does Lunar Development. But that’s not the star turn. What would you say to a contest that hasn’t been possible on Earth? Like a race between humans in muscle-powered flight?”
If he expected Ranjit to answer, he was disappointed. There was a crash of dishes as Natasha jumped to her feet. “I would say I’m ready!” she cried. “I want to go! And, you’ll see, I’ll win!”
32
NATASHA’S GOLD
She did go there, too.
Not immediately, of course. A lot had to be done before that first-ever lunar Olympics could be held—a lot done to the moon to make it possible, for example, and a quite large lot that had to be done to the Skyhook to at least make it possible to carry passengers with a reasonable hope that they would get there alive. Now that the briefing texts had become more informative, Ranjit devoured them as soon as they arrived, all the space-cadet fever that Joris Vorhulst had awakened in him flashing back.
Fortunately for Ranjit’s peace of mind the world seemed to have taken a turn for the better. The second dose of Silent Thunder had restrained some of the unruliest of the world’s leaders. His seminars kept going well enough to keep Dr. Davoodbhoy pleased, and his little family continued to be an unfailing delight.
Especially Natasha. The prospect of college looming just a few years before her was no problem, but there was also the lunar Olympics Dr. Vorhulst had promised. Training for that was not easy. It made the athletes’ training for every other Olympics look like ten minutes of morning jumping jacks to keep the love handles away.