“Confidence in me.” Rob, unsteady on his feet, placed his right hand against the wall. “More confidence than I had. It wasn’t ever supposed to end like this.”
Corrie entered Control Center. She had missed the message from Regulo, and saw only Rob’s agonized look and rigid posture.
“I knew it.” She went to his side and placed an arm around him in support. “Just look at you, you’re a wreck. The beanstalk is a great success, but it could have waited until you had recovered. No more excuses. It’s operation time. You want to celebrate? You can do it in the hospital.”
She expected an argument. Instead, Rob meekly allowed himself to be led away. As he went, he muttered — to her, or to himself? — “It’s over. It’s all over.”
By nightfall, the last traces of oscillation had damped below the detection level of any of the monitors. Earth had adjusted to the presence of its newest bridge. As the stars appeared, Luis Merindo could see the bright thread of the beanstalk, still illuminated by the setting sun, disappearing into the night sky.
He walked to the perimeter of the guard fence and looked up. Far above his head, catching the sunlight until the final sweep into Earth’s shadow, the patient robots continued their work of installing the ore and passenger carriers. Their night would not come for another five hours, until the deep shadow had climbed the beanstalk all the way to synchronous altitude. Even then the ballast weight would still swing in full sunlight, until it too dipped at last behind the Earth for its brief half-hour of night.
Merindo stood alone, gazing upward. Broad, dark, heavily built, he had been a ground-hog all his life, moving the earth and planting the caissons. Rockets out to a cold and empty space had never offered any attraction, not to a man who felt his roots so deep in earth. But now the way to space was a part of Earth itself, and with a firm highway standing ready to be taken…
The thin filament of the illuminated cable moved higher in the sky, even as the lower parts drifted into shadow. The thread drew his vision outward. He did not realize it then, but when Luis Merindo finally lost sight of the beanstalk against the background of the tropical star field, and turned his weary way back to the air car and Tether Control, a decision had been made at some deep level within him.
He was the first of the billions who would feel the lure of that shining road, and follow it outward.
CHAPTER 18: “Cor contritum quasi cinis, gere curam mei finis”
“Senta and Corrie ought to be here in a few minutes.” Howard Anson, seated by the window, was watching the endless stream of traffic as it moved to the base of the beanstalk. There was a speculative look on his well-bred features. “What did the doctors decide, Rob? Are you on the road to recovery?”
“That’s what they tell me. I’m even beginning to believe it. Can you tell me, Howard, is it possible to die of pain?”
“Sure it is. You’ll never hear a doctor call it that, they say that your heart failed, or you lost the will to live, or some other nonsense. But dying of pain used to be very common.” Anson shuddered. “Thank Heaven for modern anesthetics. Why do you ask? Were the operations so painful?”
“Not them. The final hours on Atlantis, and afterwards. If Corrie hadn’t ignored everybody on the ship and cut off the rest of my hand with the surgical laser, I don’t think I’d be here now.”
“You owe her a lot. I finally had time to examine the records of your trip back. She broke every rule in the System. You averaged two gees — there were traffic alarms going off all the way in from the Belt. Didn’t you tell me that thing” — Anson gestured at Rob’s new left hand — “could be switched off any time you wanted to? You should ask for a refund.”
“The people who installed the new one said they didn’t expect me to shred my hand and use it as a screwdriver. And I didn’t know that Morel was going to melt part of the wall of Atlantis and shower me with drops of liquid metal.”
Rob was sitting up in the bed close to the broad window, supported on a pile of pillows. His face was emaciated but his color was good. Anson was pleased by the improvement.
“When will you get an explanation from them?” he said. “You once told me that those hands were foolproof.”
Rob smiled. “It depends how big a fool owns the hands. They never could tell me what happened, but this morning I finally figured it out for myself. I had stripped off the protective layer of skin, down to the metal skeleton. Then Morel splashed on a drop of liquid nickel, right next to the ulnar nerve terminal input and inside the hand. Then we added a few drops of sepia and water, from Caliban’s splashing about after Joseph Morel. The result was a nice little micro-battery. It couldn’t have been generating more than a millivolt — but it fed right into my sensory nerves.”
“I hope you got a design modification, so it won’t happen again.” Anson seemed unmoved by Rob’s grimaces at the memory.
“It won’t happen again. Not to me, at least. I’m headed for the quiet life — rigging the high steel, or painting the beanstalk to keep it from rusting.” Rob stared out of the window towards the distant base of the structure. “Are you really thinking of going up it? I thought you were dead set against space travel.”
“I was. But Senta keeps trying to talk me into it, and I finally have a good reason to go.” Anson had lost his smile, and seemed to be waiting for something. After a few moments he said, “Rob, we’re just making small talk, and there’s something we need to clear up before Senta and Corrie get here. It’s not really over with Atlantis, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t let’s play games with each other. We have one basic question that we’ve both been avoiding. It still needs an answer.”
Rob turned quickly from the window. “I think you’d be happier without the answer.”
“Never. You know my weakness. I need to know. And it’s not just curiosity. I have to make a decision of my own.”
Rob said nothing. For the next minute the two men watched the carriers with their loads of passengers and cargo, sweeping up the beanstalk. It was evening, and the cars disappeared from sight as they rose through the purple twilight, only coming into view again as they emerged from Earth’s shadow.
“It’s a simple question,” Anson went on last. “What was Joseph Morel really doing with the Goblins? He didn’t give a damn about their social structure. He had some other reason for his experiments. What was it?”
“All right.” Rob’s face was somber. “Senta found out, and it brought her a brain-wipe and taliza addiction. Let’s hope we do better than that. You’re quite right, Morel had no interest in the Goblins’ social structure. He only cared about biological and medical answers. So why the Goblins? Well, remember the first time that Senta talked to me about cancer crudelis and cancer pertinax?”
“Come on, Rob. I’m the original memory man. Senta told you that Morel had found a treatment for crudelis, but not for pertinax. His cures worked for animals, but on humans they had deadly side effects that made them useless.”
“Right. The differences between animals and humans are small, chemically, but they are crucial. Now think about Morel. Regulo provided the security that he needed for all his experiments. If Regulo died, that security was gone. They had to find a cure for cancer pertinax, one that could be used on humans before it was too late for Regulo.”
“But didn’t you say that Morel’s treatments helped Regulo?”
“They sure did. Without them he’d have died many years ago. But he was getting steadily worse — I could see the change in him, even in the short time I knew him. And Morel was getting closer, but he didn’t have a cure. He had discovered something else, though: a way to induce progeria in humans. He could produce a race of Goblins, small, short-lived and controlled completely by him, out on Atlantis.”