A few seconds later, he could make out a small circle – no, now both brain and eye agreed that it was a square. He was looking directly up at the base of the Tower, crawling earthwards along its guiding tapes at a couple of kilometres a day. The four tapes had now vanished, being far too small to be visible at this distance. But that square fixed magically in the sky continued to grow, though now it had become fuzzy under the extreme magnification.
“What do you see?” asked Morgan.
“A bright little square.”
“Good – that’s the underside of the tower, still in full sunlight. When it’s dark down here you can see it with the naked eye for another hour before it enters the earth’s shadow. Now, do you see anything else?”
“Nooo…” replied the boy, after a long pause.
“You should. There’s a team of scientists visiting the lowest section to set up some research equipment. They’ve just come down from Midway. If you look carefully you’ll see their transporter – it’s on the south track – that will be the right side of the picture. Look for a bright spot, about a quarter the size of the Tower.”
“Sorry, Uncle – I can’t find it. You have a look.”
“Well, the seeing may have got worse. Sometimes the Tower disappears completely though the atmosphere may look -”
Even before Morgan could take Dev’s place at the eyepiece, his personal receiver gave two shrill double beeps. A second later, Kingsley’s alarm also erupted.
It was the first time the Tower had ever issued a four-star emergency alert.
40. The End of the Line
No wonder they called it the “Transiberian Railway”. Even on the easy downhill run, the journey from Midway Station to the base of the Tower lasted fifty hours.
One day it would take only five, but that still lay two years in the future, when the tracks were energised and their magnetic fields activated. The inspection and maintenance vehicles that now ran up and down the faces of the Tower were propelled by old-fashioned tyres, gripping the interior of the guidance slots. Even if the limited power of the batteries permitted, it was not safe to operate such a system at more than five hundred kilometres an hour.
Yet everyone had been far too busy to be bored. Professor Sessui and his three students had been observing, checking their instruments, and making sure that no time would be wasted when they transferred into the Tower. The capsule driver, his engineering assistant, and the one steward who comprised the entire cabin staff were also fully occupied, for this was no routine trip. The “Basement”, twenty-five thousand kilometres below Midway – and now only six hundred kilometres from Earth – had never been visited since it was built. Until now, there had been no purpose in going there, since the handful of monitors had never reported anything amiss. Not that there was much to go wrong, as the Basement was merely a fifteen-metre-square pressurised chamber – one of the scores of emergency refuges at intervals along the Tower.
Professor Sessui had used all his considerable influence to borrow this unique site, now crawling down through the ionosphere at two kilometres a day towards its rendezvous with Earth. It was essential, he had argued forcibly, to get his equipment installed before the peak of the current sunspot maximum.
Already, solar activity had reached unprecedented levels, and Sessui’s young assistants often found it hard to concentrate on their instruments; the magnificent auroral displays outside were too much of a distraction. For hours on end, both northern and southern hemispheres were filled with slowly moving curtains and streamers of greenish light, beautiful and awe-inspiring – yet only a pale ghost of the celestial firework displays taking place around the poles. It was rare indeed for the aurora to wander so far from its normal domains; only once in generations did it invade the equatorial skies.
Sessui had driven his students back to work with the admonition that they would have plenty of time for sightseeing during the long climb back to Midway. Yet it was noticeable that even the Professor himself sometimes stood at the observation window for minutes at a time, entranced by the spectacle of the burning heavens.
Someone had christened the project “Expedition to Earth” – which, as far as distance was concerned, was ninety-eight percent accurate. As the capsule crawled down the face of the Tower at its miserable five hundred klicks, the increasing closeness of the planet beneath made itself obvious. For gravity was slowly increasing, from the delightful less-than-lunar buoyancy of Midway to almost its full terrestrial value. To any experienced space traveller, this was strange indeed: feeling any gravity before the moment of atmospheric entry seemed a reversal of the normal order of things.
Apart from complaints about the food, stoically endured by the overworked steward, the journey had been devoid of incident. A hundred kilometres from the Basement, the brakes had been gently applied and speed had been halved. It was halved again at fifty kilometers – for, as one of the students remarked: “Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if we ran off the end of the track?”
The driver (he insisted on being called pilot) retorted that this was inpossible, as the guidance slots down which the capsule was falling terminated several metres short of the Tower’s end; there was also an elaborate buffer system, just in case all four independent sets of brakes failed to work. And everyone agreed that the joke, besides being perfectly ridiculous, was in extremely poor taste.
41. Meteor
The vast artificial lake known for two thousand years as the Sea of Paravana lay calm and peaceful beneath the stone gaze of its builder. Though few now visited the lonely statue of Kalidasa’s father, his work, if not his fame, had outlasted that of his son; and it had served his country infinitely better, bringing food and drink to a hundred generations of men. And to many more generations of birds, deer, buffalo, monkeys and their predators, like the sleek and well-fed leopard now drinking at the water’s edge. The big cats were becoming rather too common and were inclined to be a nuisance, now that they no longer had anything to fear from hunters. But they never attacked men, unless they were cornered or molested.
Confident of his security, the leopard was leisurely drinking his fill, as the shadows round the lake lengthened and twilight advanced from the east. Suddenly, he pricked up his ears and became instantly alert; but no mere human senses could have detected any change in land, water or sky. The evening was as tranquil as ever.
And then, directly out of the zenith, came a faint whistling that grew steadily to a rumbling roar, with tearing, ripping undertones, quite unlike that of a re-entering spacecraft. Up in the sky something metallic was sparkling in the last rays of the sun, growing larger and larger and leaving a trail of smoke behind it. As it expanded, it disintegrated; pieces shot off in all directions, some of them burning as they did so. For a few seconds an eye as keen as the leopard’s might have glimpsed a roughly cylindrical object, before it exploded into a myriad fragments. But the leopard did not wait for the final catastrophe; it had already disappeared into the jungle.
The Sea of Paravana erupted in sudden thunder. A geyser of mud and spray shot a hundred metres into the air – a fountain far surpassing those of Yakkagala, and one indeed almost as high as the Rock itself. It hung suspended for a moment in futile defiance of gravity, then tumbled back into the shattered lake.
Already, the sky was full of waterfowl wheeling in startled flight. Almost as numerous, flapping among them like leathery pterodactyls who had somehow survived into the modern age, were the big fruit-bats who normally took to the air only after dusk. Now, equally terrified, birds and bats shared the sky together.
The last echoes of the crash died away into the encircling jungle; silence swiftly returned to the lake. But long minutes passed before its mirror surface was restored and the little waves ceased to scurry back and forth beneath the unseeing eyes of Paravana the Great.
42. Death in Orbit
Every large building, it is said, claims a life; fourteen names were engraved on the piers of the Gibraltar Bridge. But thanks to an almost fanatical safety campaign, casualties on the Tower had been remarkably low. There had, indeed, been one year without a single death.
And there had been one year with four – two of them particularly harrowing. A space-station assembly supervisor, accustomed to working under zero gravity, had forgotten that though he was in space he was not in orbit – and a lifetime’s experience had betrayed him. He had plummeted more than fifteen thousand kilometres, to burn up like a meteor upon entry into the atmosphere. Unfortunately his suit radio had remained switched on during those last few minutes…