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CHAPTER 10: The Birth of Ourobouros

The city of Quito lay less than thirty miles to the south-west. From the excavation site it could no longer be seen. Immense mounds of earth and broken rock completely circled the pit, hiding all the surrounding countryside from anyone inside the lip of the crater.

The landscape had become lifeless. Nothing grew on the steep sides of the rock piles, nor in the cavernous interior of the pit with its sheer, metal-braced walls. Rob was standing about thirty meters from the edge, looking about him at the bleak, dead scene.

“I hope all this is worth it,” he said to the man standing beside him. “You’ve certainly carved the earth up here. You know we have to hit the point exactly, then hold it down when it starts to pull? Otherwise, we lose the whole thing.”

The other man was small, dark-skinned, and short of stature. He was much at home in the thin mountain air. His smile at Rob was brilliant and gap-toothed. “Not my department,” he said, with the ease of long familiarity. “Landing it in the right place is your job. Me, I just dig the holes. Come on over and take a look at the bottom of this one. She’s a big mother, biggest I’ve ever done.”

Rob allowed himself to be led to the edge of the pit. It was a little more than four hundred yards across, with an even, circular boundary. The sides were smoothly vertical. Rob took a quick look over, then stepped back.

“That’s enough for me, Luis. I’m not all that fond of heights.”

“You say?” The other man stared at Rob challengingly. “You try and tell me that, when Perrazo told me you went off climbing the Himalayas — alone? What is that, if it is not heights?”

“That’s different. I had my mind on getting up the mountain, and down again. Here, it’s all the way down in one swoop. I’ve always wondered how you could feel so comfortable, working the heights like this.” He took another quick step to look over the edge, then promptly backed up again. “It manages to look a lot deeper than five kilometers from up here. I can’t even see the excavation equipment, and they’re big machines.”

“Biggest I could find. We’ll be all ready here in a couple more months.” Luis advanced to the very edge of the pit and leaned casually over it. He nodded in satisfaction at what he saw and spat into the depths. “This is still the easy part, eh? When she comes in, and we have to get the rock back in there — that’s when we begin to sweat. She’ll be a bitch to tether. You sure you don’t have more time for me to fill her in? Couple billion tons, less than five minutes. That’s a tall order.” The confident tone of his voice belied his words as he leaned far over the edge and peered downwards.

“You’ll do it, Luis.” Rob was staring up, straight above them, as though seeing something descending in his mind’s eye. “We’ve built in a mushroom at the end of the beanstalk. It broadens out to about three hundred and fifty meters at the bottom, so you won’t have any trouble watching it arrive. It will be coming in at less than a hundred kilometers an hour on the final entry, and its arrival position will be accurate to better than one meter. You can start shovelling rock in there as soon as the leading edge goes below ground level. You’ll have loads of time. Way I look at it, I wonder why we’re paying you as much as we are — it’s like giving the money away.”

“All right.” Luis was laughing and still looking down into the pit. “Maybe you’d like to take over this job for yourself, eh? Then I can have the easy part, sit over there in Central Control and watch while other people do all the work.”

“Easy? Where do you think all the worry will be? You can sit here and be full of blind faith — I’m the one who has to worry about the stability, all the way in.”

The short man shrugged. “Stability? You calculated all that months ago. Now, you sit and watch and tell me you’ll be worrying. What will you be doing, tell me that.”

Rob sniffed. The two men had played this game many times before. “I’ll be sitting there trying to control a hundred thousand kilometers of live snake, that’s all. Not to mention the ballast, out at the far end. How’d you like it if we miss on that? You’ll get the whole thing in your lap, here at Quito.”

“Wouldn’t happen like that, would it?” Luis turned and cocked his dark head, a note of inquiry replacing the verbal sparring. His feet were inches from the lip of the excavation.

“Come away from there, Luis, and I’ll answer the question. You don’t seem to care if you fall over, but it makes me nervous.”

“You know I’m irreplaceable.”

“Bull. I’ll have no trouble getting a replacement who’s more competent — I just don’t want the bother of breaking in somebody new to run Tether Control.” Rob watched as the other man moved a couple of inches away from the edge. “You’re right, though,” he went on. “If we don’t get the ballast tied on at the other end, you won’t get the cable in here — the first time round. It will start to curl around the Earth, speeding up all the way. You’ll get it on the second sweep, and then I guarantee you’d notice it. It ought to be moving about Mach Three when it comes into the atmosphere, a couple of billion tons of it. Quito would be a lively place.”

Siccatta! You paint nice pictures for me.” Luis spat again over the edge, turned, and walked back to join Rob by the aircar. “I suppose you told all that to the General Coordinators’ Office? What did they think of it?”

“Not my department.” Rob mimicked the other’s flat, calm delivery. “I left all that to Darius Regulo. He’s the one who handled the permits.”

“Hm. And how did he manage that?”

Rob shrugged. “I’ll have to guess. Some people he persuaded, some he bought, some owed him for past favors, some he scared more with other worries if we don’t go ahead and build the `stalk. You know how it’s done. A little carrot, a little stick. Me, I just build the cable — and she’s a big mother, too, biggest I’ve done. I’m happy to leave the manipulation of the authorities to Regulo’s fine Italian hand.”

He sat down on the stubby wing of the aircar. “We’ve got enough worries without taking on Regulo’s. Any real problems at this end? If not, we’ll keep the fabrication going and make final plans for the fly-in.”

The dark man shook his head. “I worked for you on the New Zealand Bridge, and on the Madagascar Bridge, and I’m lined up for the Tasman Bridge. All that, and you have the nerve to ask me such a question. Rob Merlin, my perfectionist friend, don’t you know me at all? Don’t you think I would have been banging your door down, long ago, if something were not going according to plan and according to schedule? Do you think I am one of those incompetent lastajas who would rather see things screwed up than admit they have troubles?”

“All right.” Rob held up his hand to cut off the flow of words. “I’m with you. I know you’ve got everything under control here, I know your work. Damn it, Luis, if I didn’t know you’d have everything running smoothly, I’d never have asked you to work on this in the first place. But you know me, too. I have to see it all for myself, and I have to ask those dumb questions. It’s part of me, the way that digging holes is part of you.”

“It is.” Luis was smiling as the two men climbed into the aircar. “I agree, it’s part of your nature.” He looked at the huge earthworks surrounding them, man-made hills of rock and rubble. “And just you stay that way,” he said softly. “Keep insisting on seeing everything for yourself. That’s the reason why Luis Merindo has worked for you four separate times. Remember, I value my life, too — even if you think that I stand a little too close to the edge. Let’s go over and look at Tether Control. We’ll be ready here when you are.”