Mercury Read online

  “You’ve been up and down a dozen times,” she whispered to him as they lay together in the shadows of their darkened bedroom, her head on his naked chest. “It’s not fair for you to keep me from going with you. Just once, at least.”

  Despite his inner tension, he grinned in the darkness. “It’s not fair? You’re starting to sound like a kid arguing with his parents.”

  “Was I whining?” she asked.

  “No,” he had to admit. “I’ve never heard you whine.”

  She lay silent for several moments. He could feel her breathing slowly, rhythmically, as she lay against him.

  “Okay,” he heard himself say. “We’ll go up to the LEO deck,” he conceded.

  Lara knew the Low Earth Orbit station was five hundred kilometers up. Her elation was immediately tinged with disappointment.

  “Not all the way?” she asked. “Not to the geostationary level?”

  Bracknell shook his head. “That’s up on the edge of the Van Allen Belt radiation. The crew hasn’t installed the shielding yet. They work up there in armored suits.”

  “But if they—”

  “No,” he said firmly, grasping her bare shoulders. “Some day we’re going to have children. I’m not exposing you to a high-radiation environment, even in a shielded spacesuit.”

  He sensed her smiling at him. “The ultimate argument,” she said. “It’s for the good of our unborn children.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Yes dear,” she teased. Then she kissed him.

  They made love slowly, languorously. Afterward, as they lay spent and sticky in their sweaty sheets, Bracknell thought: This is the real test. Do you trust your work enough to risk her life on it?

  And Lara understood: He worries about me so. He lets others ride the elevator but he’s worried about me.

  The next day was a Sunday, and although a full team of technicians was at work, as usual, Bracknell walked over to the operations office and told the woman on duty there that he and Lara would be riding up to the LEO platform.

  The operations chief that Sunday morning was a portly woman who wore her ash-blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun, and a square gold ring on her left middle finger.

  “I’ll tell Jakosky,” she said, grinning. “He’s won the lottery.”

  “What lottery?” Bracknell asked, surprised.

  “We’ve been making book about when you’d let your lady take a ride up,” said the operations chief. “Jackpot’s up to damn near a thousand Yankee dollars.”

  Bracknell grinned weakly to cover his surprise and a pang of embarrassment. As he left the building and started back up toward his quarters, he saw Molina coming down the street, heading toward him. Victor’s going to be leaving, Bracknell knew. Going to Australia to start a new career in astrobiology. And he’s sore at me for not letting him publish the work he’s done here.

  “Hello, Victor,” he called as the biologist neared. He knew that Molina despised being called Vic.

  “Hi, Mance,” Molina replied, without slowing his pace.

  Bracknell grasped his arm, stopping him. “Lara and I are riding up to the LEO deck. Want to come with us?”

  Molina’s eyes widened. “You’re taking her up?”

  “Just to the lowest level.”

  “But the safety certification…”

  “Came through a week ago. For the LEO platform.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come with us,” Bracknell urged. “You’re not doing anything vital this morning, are you?”

  Molina stiffened. “I’m finishing up my final report.”

  “You can do that later. You don’t want to head off to Australia without riding in the tower you helped to build, do you? Come on with us.”

  With a shake of his head, Molina said, “No, I’ve got so much to do before I leave…”

  Bracknell teased, “You’re not scared, are you?”

  “Scared? Hell no!”

  “Then come on along. The three of us. Like old times.”

  “Like old times,” Molina echoed, his face grim.

  Bracknell knew that he himself was frightened, a little. If we bring Victor along I’ll have him to talk to, to keep me from worrying about Lara’s safety. But he knew that was an excuse. Superstition again: nothing bad will happen if it isn’t just Lara and me riding the tube.

  Molina, who hadn’t been alone with Lara since he’d confessed that he was in love with her, allowed Bracknell to turn him around and lead him back to their apartment building. What the fuck, he said to himself. This may be the last time I see her.

  “It’s like we’re standing still,” Lara said as the elevator rose smoothly past the hundred-kilometer mark.

  “Like Einstein’s old thought experiment about the equivalence of gravity and acceleration,” Bracknell said.

  The elevator cab was big enough to handle freight and new enough to still look sparkling and shiny. An upholstered bench ran along its rear wall, but Lara and the two men remained standing. The walls and floor of the cab were buckyball sheets, hard as diamond but not as brittle, coated with scuff-resistant epoxy. The ceiling was a grill-work through which Lara could see the shining inner walls of the tube speeding smoothly by.

  No cables, she knew. No pulleys or reels like an ordinary elevator. The entire tube was a vertical electric rail gun; the elevator cab was being lifted by electromagnetic forces, like a particle in a physics lab’s accelerator or a payload launched off the Moon by an electric mass driver. Pretty slow for a bullet, Lara thought, but they were accelerating all the way up to the halfway point, where they would start decelerating until the cab braked to a stop at the LEO level.

  Molina stayed tensely silent. He hadn’t said more than two words to either of them since Lara had joined them for this brief trip into space.

  Leo Platform

  “You should have windows,” Lara said as she walked to the bench along the cab’s rear wall and sat down. “It’s boring without a view.”

  Bracknell sat beside her and glanced at his wristwatch. “Another twenty minutes.”

  Molina had not spoken a word since they’d boarded the elevator, more than a half hour earlier. He remained standing, pecking away at his palmcomp.

  “You need a window,” Lara repeated. “The view would be spectacular.”

  “If you didn’t get nauseous watching the Earth fall away from you. Some people are afraid of glass elevators in hotels, you know.”

  “They wouldn’t have to look,” Lara replied primly. “I think the view would be a marvelous attraction, especially for tourists.”

  Conceding her point with a nod, Bracknell said, “We’ll be adding several more elevator tubes. I’ll look into the possibilities of glassing in at least one of them.”

  “Are we slowing down?” Lara asked.

  “Should be.”

  “I get no sensation of movement at all.”

  “That’s because we’ve kept the cab’s acceleration down to a minimum. We could go a lot faster if we need to.”

  “No,” she said, with a slight shake of her head. “This is fine. I’m not complaining.”

  As he sat next to Lara, Bracknell got a sudden urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But there was Molina standing a few meters away, like a dour-faced duenna, his nose almost touching his handheld’s screen.

  “Victor,” he called, “come and sit down. You don’t have to work all the time.”

  “Yes, I do,” Molina snapped.

  Turning back to Lara, “Tell him to put away that digital taskmaster of his and come over here and join us.”

  To his surprise, Lara responded, “Leave Victor alone. He’s doing what he feels he has to do.”

  Feeling a little puzzled, Bracknell clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cab’s rear wall. It felt cool and very hard. We ought to put some cushioning along here, he thought, making a mental note to suggest it to the people who were handling interior design. And look into glassing in one of the
outer tubes, he added silently.

  When the cab finally stopped, a chime sounded and a synthesized female voice announced, “Level one: Low Earth Orbit.”

  And all three of them floated slowly upward toward the ceiling.

  “We’re in orbit now,” Bracknell said, pushing lightly against the wall to force himself down. “Zero-g. Weightless.”

  Lara looked fine, but Molina was pale. Bracknell fished a pillbox out of his trousers pocket. “Here, Victor. Take one of these. It’ll help get your stomach out of your throat.”

  The elevator doors slid open and the din of work teams immediately assailed their ears as they floated out of the elevator cab. Bracknell hooked a floor loop with the toe of his boot and pulled Lara down to the floor, then Molina. Standing there anchored to the floor and weaving slightly like a sea anemone, Lara saw a wide expanse of bare decking topped by a dome that looked hazy in the dust-filled air. A drill was screeching annoyingly in the distance and the high-pitched whine of an electrical power generator made her teeth ache: Sparks from welding torches hissed off to her right. The dust-laden air smelled of burnt insulation and stranger odors she could not place. Men and women in coveralls were putting up partitions, most of them working in small groups and tethered to the deck, although she spotted several floating weightlessly along the scaffolding, high above. An electrically powered cart scurried past on a rail fastened to the deck plates, its cargo bed piled high with bouncing sheets of what looked like honeycomb metal. Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else:

  “Hold it there! That’s it!”

  “I need more light up here; it’s darker than a five-star restaurant, fer chrissakes!”

  “When the hell were you ever in a five-star restaurant, bozo?”

  “I’ve got it. Ease up on your line.”

  Bracknell made a sweeping gesture and hollered over the din, “Welcome to level one.”

  Molina scowled out at the noisy activity, his face still slightly green. Lara clapped her hands over her ears; the motion made her bob sideways in her floor loops.

  Pointing off to their left, Bracknell led them carefully, one set of loops to the next, past a gaggle of workers gathered around a small table that held a large stainless steel urn of coffee. At least, Lara assumed it was coffee. Several of the workers raised their covered plastic squeeze bulbs to Bracknell as he led them past. Mance nodded and grinned at them in return.

  “Sippy cups,” Lara said, with a giggle. “Like babies use.”

  “You need them in zero g,” Bracknell said.

  There were curved partitions in place here, and the noise abated a little. As they walked onward, the partitions became roofed over like an arched tunnel and the din diminished considerably.

  “As you can see—and hear,” Bracknell said, “level one is still very much under construction.”

  “My ears are ringing,” Lara said.

  “They’re a noisy bunch, all right,” Bracknell conceded. “But if they were quiet they wouldn’t be getting any work done.”

  Molina gave a half-hearted nod.

  Pointing to the curved metal overhead, Bracknell said with a hint of pride in his voice, “These partitions were scavenged from the heavy-lift boosters that brought most of the materials up here.”

  Lara grinned at him. “Waste not, want not.”

  “In spades. Nothing of the boosters was returned to Earth except their rocket engines.”

  She pointed to the floor. “There aren’t any floor loops set into the floor.”

  With a nod that sent his whole body bobbing, Bracknell said, “The crew hasn’t gotten this far yet. We swim the rest of the way.”

  “Swim?”

  “Just push yourself along the wall with your fingertips. It’s easy.” Then Bracknell saw Molina’s grim expression. “Victor, will you be okay?”

  “I think so,” Molina said, without much conviction.

  As they floated along the bare decking of the corridor, brushing the curving metal wall with their fingers, Bracknell explained, “Back there where we came in, the biggest area will be a preparation center for launching satellites.”

  Lara said, “You’ll carry them up here on the elevators and then launch them at this altitude?”

  “It’ll be a lot cheaper than launching them from the ground with rockets,” Bracknell said. “All we need is a little kick booster to place the satellite in the orbit its owners want.”

  “You’ll launch geostationary satellites from the platform up at that level, right?” Lara asked.

  “Right. Again, with a little maneuvering thrust to place them in their proper slots.”

  “Masterson Aerospace and the other rocket companies aren’t going to like you,” she said.

  “I guess not. The buggywhip makers must have hated Henry Ford.”

  Lara laughed.

  The noise was far behind them now, still discernable, but down to a background level. They came to a heavy-looking hatch set into a wall. Bracknell tapped out the proper code on the keypad set into the wall and the hatch sighed open. Lara felt a slight whisper of air brush past her from behind.

  “You wanted a window?” Bracknell said to her. “Here’s a window for you.”

  They stepped through and Lara’s breath caught in her throat. They were in a narrow darkened compartment. One entire wall was transparent. Beyond it curved the gigantic bulk of Earth, sparkling blue oceans gleaming in the sunlight, brilliant white clouds hugging the surface, wrinkles of brown mountains.

  “Oh my god,” Lara gasped, gliding to the long window.

  Molina hung back.

  Bracknell rapped his knuckles against the window. “Glassteel,” he said. “Imported from Selene.”

  “It’s so beautiful!” Lara exclaimed. “Look! I think I can see the Panama Canal.”

  “That’s Central America, all right,” Bracknell said. Pointing to a wide swirl of clouds, “And that looks like a tropical storm off in the Pacific.”

  Molina pushed up behind him and peered at the curling swath of clouds. “Will it affect the tower?”

  “Not likely. Tropical storms don’t come down to the equator, and we’re well away from the coast anyway.”

  “But still…”

  “The tower can take winds of a thousand kilometers per hour, Victor. More than three times the most powerful hurricane on record.”

  “I can’t see straight down,” Lara said, almost like a disappointed child. “I can’t see the base of the tower.”

  “Look out to the horizon,” said Bracknell. “That’s the Yucatan peninsula, where the ancient Mayas built their temples.”

  “And those mountains to our right, they must be the Andes,” she said. The peaks were bare, gray granite, snowless since the greenhouse warming had struck.

  “Mance,” said Lara, “you could use glassteel to build a transparent elevator tube.”

  He snorted. “Not at the prices Selene charges for the stuff.”

  Molina glided back toward the open hatch. “This door is an airtight seal, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Bracknell answered. “If the outside wall of this compartment is punctured and there’s a loss of air pressure, that hatch automatically closes and seals off the leak.”

  “And traps anybody in this compartment,” Molina said.

  “That’s right,” Bracknell replied gravely.

  Lara said, “But you have spacesuits in here so they can save themselves. Don’t you?”

  Bracknell shook his head. “It would take too long to get into the suits. Even the new nanofiber soft suits would take too long.”

  “What you’re telling us,” Molina said, “is that we’re in danger in here.”

  “Only if the outer shell is penetrated.”

  “How likely is that?” said Lara.

  Smiling tightly, Bracknell said, “The tower’s been dinged by micrometeorites thousands of times. Mostly up at higher altitudes. No penetrations, though.”

  “Wasn’t there a satelli
te collision?” Molina asked.

  “Every satellite launch is planned so that the bird’s orbit doesn’t come closer than a hundred kilometers of the tower. The IAA’s been very strict about that.”

  “But a satellite actually hit the tower?” Lara looked more curious than afraid.

  With a nod, Bracknell replied, “Some damnfool paramilitary outfit launched a spy satellite without clearing it with the IAA. It smacked into the tower on its second orbit.”

  “And?”

  “Hardly scratched the buckyball cables, but it wrecked the spysat completely. Most of the junk fell down and burned up in the atmosphere. We had to send a team outside to clean off the remaining debris and inspect the area where it hit. The damage was very superficial.”

  “When you stop to think about it,” Lara said, “the impact of even a big satellite hitting this tower would be like a mosquito ramming an elephant.”

  Bracknell laughed as he turned back toward the open hatch.

  “The only way to hurt this beanstalk,” said Molina, “would be to somehow disconnect it up at the geostationary level.”

  Bracknell looked over his shoulder at the biologist. “That’s right, Victor. Do that, and the lower half of the tower collapses to the ground, while the upper half goes spinning off into deep space.”

  “The tower would collapse?” Lara asked. “It would fall down to the ground?”

  Bracknell nodded. “Only if it’s disconnected from the geostationary platform.”

  “That would destroy everything?” Lara asked.

  “Quite completely,” said Bracknell. “But don’t worry, we’ve built that section with a two-hundred-percent overload capacity. It can’t happen.”

  Yamagata Estate

  Nobuhiko Yamagata’s knees ached as he sat on the tatami mat facing this, this … fanatic. There was no other way to describe the leader of the Flower Dragon movement. Like a ninja of old, he thought, this man is a fanatic.

  Yoshijiro Umetzu was named after a shamed ancestor, a general who had surrendered his army rather than fight to the death. From earliest childhood his stern father and uncles had drilled into him their expectation that he would grow up to erase this century-old stain on the family’s honor. While upstarts like Saito Yamagata made vast fortunes in business and Japanese scientists earned world recognition for their research work, Umetzu knew that only blood could bring true respect. Respect is based on fear, he was told endlessly. Nothing less.