Neither Kinte nor the other orbiting stations could help him, now that he wished to look up at the underside of the Tower. This was a task for the searchlight on Sri Kanda itself, pointing vertically towards the zenith.
A moment later the capsule was impaled by a dazzling beam from the heart of Taprobane. Only a few metres away – indeed, so close that he felt he could touch them – the other three guiding tapes were ribbons of light, converging towards the Tower. He followed their dwindling perspective – and there it was.
Just twenty kilometres away! He should be there in a dozen minutes, coming up through the floor of that tiny square building he could see glittering in the sky, bearing presents like some troglodytic Father Christmas. Despite his determination to relax, and obey CORA’s orders, it was quite impossible to do so. He found himself tensing his muscles, as if by his own physical exertions he could help Spider along the last fraction of its journey.
At ten kilometres there was a distinct change of pitch from the drive motor; Morgan had been expecting this, and reacted to it at once. Without waiting for advice from the ground, he cut speed back to fifty klicks. At this rate he still had twelve minutes to go, and he began to wonder despairingly if he was involved in an asymptotic approach. This was a variant of the race between Achilles and the tortoise; if he halved his speed every time he halved the distance, would he reach the Tower in a finite time? Once he would have known the answer instantly; now he felt too tired to work it out.
At five kilometres he could see the constructional details of the Tower – the catwalk and protective rails, the futile safety net provided as a sop to public opinion. Although he strained his eyes he could not yet make out the airlock towards which he was now crawling with such agonising slowness.
And then it no longer mattered. Two kilometres short of the goal Spider’s motors stalled completely. The capsule even slid downwards a few metres, before Morgan was able to apply the brakes.
Yet this time, to Morgan’s surprise, Kingsley did not seem utterly downcast.
“You can still make it,” he said. “Give the battery ten minutes to recuperate. There’s still enough energy there for that last couple of kilometres.”
It was one of the longest ten minutes that Morgan had ever known. Though he could have made it pass more swiftly by responding to Maxine Duval’s increasingly desperate pleas, he felt too emotionally exhausted to talk. He was genuinely sorry about this, and hoped that Maxine would understand and forgive him.
He did have one brief exchange with Driver-Pilot Chang, who reported that the refugees in the Basement were still in fairly good shape, and much encouraged by his nearness. They were taking turns to peer at him through the one small porthole of the airlock’s outer door, and simply could not believe that he might never be able to bridge the trifling space between them.
Morgan gave the battery an extra minute for luck. To his relief the motors responded strongly, with an encouraging surge of power. Spider got within half a kilometre of the Tower before stalling again.
“Next time does it,” said Kingsley, though it seemed to Morgan that his friend’s confidence now sounded somewhat forced. “Sorry for all these delays…
“Another ten minutes?” Morgan asked with resignation.
“I’m afraid so. And this time use thirty-second bursts, with a minute between them. That way, you’ll get the last erg out of the battery.”
And out of me, thought Morgan. Strange that CORA had been quiet for so long. Still, this time be had not exerted himself physically; it only felt that way.
In his preoccupation with Spider he had been neglecting himself. For the last hour he had quite forgotten his zero-residue glucose-based energy tablets and the little plastic bulb of fruit juice. After he had sampled both he felt much better, and only wished that he could transfer some of the surplus calories to the dying battery.
Now for the moment of truth – the final exertion. Failure was unthinkable, when he was so close to the goal. The fates could not possibly be so malevolent, now that he had only a few hundred metres to go. ..
He was whistling in the dark, of course. How many aircraft had crashed at the very edge of the runway, after safely crossing an ocean? How many times had machines or muscles failed, when there were only millimetres to go? Every possible piece of luck, bad as well as good, happened to somebody, somewhere. He had no right to expect any special treatment.
The capsule heaved itself upwards in fits and starts, like a dying animal seeking its last haven. When the battery finally expired, the base of the Tower seemed to fill half the sky.
But it was still twenty metres above him.
54. Theory of Relativity
It was to Morgan’s credit that he felt his own fate was sealed, in the desolating moment when the last dregs of power were exhausted, and the lights on Spider’s display panel finally faded out. Not for several seconds did he remember that he had only to release the brakes and he would slide back to Earth. In three hours he could be safely back in bed. No-one would blame him for the failure of his mission; he had done all that was humanly possible.
For a brief while he stared in a kind of dull fury at that inaccessible square, with the shadow of Spider projected upon it. His mind revolved a host of crazy schemes, and rejected them all. If he still had his faithful little spinnerette – but there would have been no way of getting it to the Tower. If the refugees had possessed a spacesuit, someone could have lowered a rope to him – but there had been no time to collect a suit from the burning transporter.
Of course, if this was a videodrama, and not a real-life problem, some heroic volunteer could sacrifice himself – better still, herself – by going into the lock and tossing down a rope, using the fifteen seconds of vacuum consciousness to save the others. It was some measure of Morgan’s desperation that, for a fleeting moment, he even considered this idea before commonsense reasserted itself.
From the time that Spider had given up the battle with gravity, until Morgan finally accepted that there was nothing more that he could do, probably less than a minute had elapsed. Then Warren Kingsley asked a question which, at such a moment, seemed an annoying irrelevance.
“Give us your distance again, Van – exactly how far are you from the Tower?”
“What the hell does it matter? It could be a light-year.”
There was a brief silence from the ground; then Kingsley spoke again, in the sort of tone one uses to address a small child or a difficult invalid. “It makes all the difference in the world. Did you say twenty metres?”
“Yes – that’s about it.”
Incredibly – unmistakeably – Warren gave a clearly audible sigh of relief. There was even joy in his voice when he answered: “And all these years, Van, I thought that you were the Chief Engineer on this project. Suppose it is twenty metres exactly -”
Morgan’s explosive shout prevented him from finishing the sentence. “What an idiot! Tell Sessui I’ll dock in – oh, fifteen minutes.”
“Fourteen point fIve, if you’ve guessed the distance right. And nothing on earth can stop you now.”
That was still a risky statement, and Morgan wished that Kingsley hadn’t made it. Docking adaptors sometimes failed to latch together properly, because of minute errors in manufacturing tolerances. And, of course, there had never been a chance of testing this particular system.
He felt only a slight embarrassment at his mental blackout. After all, under extreme stress a man could forget his own telephone number, even his own date of birth. And until this very moment the now dominant factor in the situation had been so unimportant that it could be completely ignored.
It was all a matter of Relativity. He could not reach the Tower; but the Tower would reach him – at its inexorable two kilometres a day.
55. Hard Dock
The record for one day’s construction had been thirty kilometres, when the slimmest and lightest section of the Tower was being assembled. Now that the most massive portion – the very root of the structure – was nearing completion in orbit, the rate was down to two kilometres. That was quite fast enough; it would give Morgan time to check the adaptor line-up, and to mentally rehearse the rather tricky few seconds between confirming hard-dock and releasing Spider’s brakes. If he left them on for too long there would be a very unequal trial of strength between the capsule and the moving megatons of the Tower.