The third compartment was stacked with crated supplies, primarily foodstuffs, and one cage of the dual elevators waited beside the helical staircase which also led toward the hub. There was nothing alive to see Kelly burst through the doorway.
Each of the elevator shafts was fifteen feet in diameter, large enough to handle any cargo which could be ferried to orbit on existing hardware. The elevators’ size had determined the thickness of the spokes connecting the lobes of the dumbbell to the hub, since strength requirements could have been met by spokes thinner than the thirty-five feet or so of the present structure.
The elevators were intended to move simultaneously and in opposite directions, one cage rising as the other fell, though in an emergency the pair could be decoupled. As a further preparation for emergency, stairs were built into part of the spoke diameter left over when the elevator shafts were laid out, and it was this staircase by which Kelly had intended to cross to the hub.
Using the elevator that gaped like a holding cell would be crazy, Kelly thought as he shuffled to the stairs. With one hand on the railing to keep from overbalancing, he bent backwards to look up the helical staircase. Dabs of light blurred like beads on a string on the steps and the closed elevator shafts beside which the steps proceeded upward. From the bottom they seemed an interminable escalade.
Hell, he’d take the elevator. If he weren’t crazy, he’d have stayed home.
Kelly hadn’t been briefed on the elevators, but the controls could scarcely have been simpler. The door was a section of the cage’s cylindrical wall. It slid around on rollered tracks at top and bottom when Kelly pulled at its staple-shaped handle. The door did not latch, nor did there appear to be any interlock between it and the elevator control.
After considering the situation for a moment, Kelly slid the door open again, faced it, and prodded the single palm-sized button on the cage wall with the muzzle of the flame gun. Nothing happened for long enough that the veteran reached for the door handle again, convinced that he must have been wrong about the interlock. The cage staggered into upward motion before his arm completed its motion. There was simply a delay built into its operation, probably tied to a warning signal in the other elevator, which would start at the same time.
That might or might not be important. Holding the flame gun in a two-handed grip, Kelly grinned toward the elevator shaft that slid past his open door.
He did not see the metal sheathing, however. His mind was trying to imagine the face of the next person it would direct the veteran’s hands to kill. Over the years, he had come surprisingly close a number of times. . . .
The elevator shaft was almost nine hundred feet high-long, in a manner of speaking, because the cage ceased to go ‘up’ as it neared the hub and the effect of centrifugal force lessened. The drive was hydraulic and very smooth after the initial jerk as the pumps cut in. As the impellers pressurized the column to raise the cage in which Kelly rode, they drew a partial vacuum in the other column to drag the cage down from hub level. Ordinary cable operation would not work in the absence of true gravity, and a cogged-rail system like that of some mountain railways would have put unbalanced stresses on the spokes, whose thickness and mass would have had to be greatly increased to avoid warping.
The portion of the design that was critical at the moment was the fact that the pumps were in the lobe, not at the hub, and that the elevator’s operation was therefore effectively silent at the inner end. It didn’t mean that the approaching cage would not be noticed; but at least there would be no squalling take-up spool to rivet the attention of all those in the hub on the elevator shaft.
Kelly’s hands were clammy, though his gloves would keep them from slipping on the triggers of the flame gun. This wasn’t like Istanbul, where he was in too deep too quickly to think. Three hundred yards, three football fields end to end, with the cage moving at the speed of a man walking fast. Plenty of time to review the faces of the men you’d already killed – only the ones you’d really seen, not the lumps sprawled like piles of laundry on the ground you’d raked. . . .