Jumping off the Planet

UP

We were on the second level, where the windows started at waist level and angled outward toward the top, so we could lean out and look almost straight down. I swallowed hard and tried not to look, but I couldn't stop myself from seeing anyway.

First we rose up through the service core, then all of the terraces and balconies began dropping away like toys. At least that part was fun to watch, because we could see how everything was laid out inside the tent. It was a whole different view of Beanstalk City and we could see how big the world under the dome really was.

We rose all the way up to the top, and then the view closed in for just a few seconds as the car slid up through the top of the tent. The elevator starts out slow, so it takes almost two minutes to get to the top, but the timing is perfect because that's where the music gets sort of quiet for a bit, anticipating the next part, then it comes back with a big crescendo just as the car rises up out of the roof and into the open air. The music pounds toward a big dramatic punch and you get to see how the whole city around Terminus is spread out like a giant Monopoly board. And then ... the elevator starts going up even faster.

Even though the day was overcast, Terminus City seemed to have a ghostly bright quality. As it spread out below us, everything shone in vivid colors.

Mostly around the tent there were parks and lakes, but we could also see all of the industrial areas too—all the warehouses, and the shipping and receiving areas, and the highways and tracks and canals. And beyond, there was the rest of the city that grew up around the Line: the dorms where a lot of the construction workers and their families lived while it was being built—and still lived today, because most of them had been guaranteed jobs on the Line when it was finished—and farther out, all the office towers and hotels for tourists and visiting business people, and then the rest of the city beyond, where everybody else lives, the ones who provide ground-side services for the Line and its constant stream of traffic.

We also saw a lot of Tube-Towns scattered below. The slums. Just like home. They ringed the whole area. The gray day made them look almost as depressing from above as they were close up.

If I leaned out far enough, I could see how the shining cables of the Line speared straight down into the center of everything. Its shadow was like a triple knife cut, slicing west across the landscape. It arrowed out toward the horizon, eventually fading away in the distance.

We kept rising and the effect was like one of those pull-back-into-infinity shots that you see on TV all the time. We rose up and up and everything else got smaller and smaller. Pretty soon we could see the dark blue line of the ocean to the west, and more banks of clouds piling up on the horizon, a thick wall of them.

We passed through a small patch of clouds and then a bigger one, and somebody nearby said something about the big storm that was heading in from the Pacific, how we'd probably be able to see the whole thing from One-Hour. Somebody else said if you stood real still you could feel the wind rocking the elevator car, but I tried it and couldn't feel anything. Maybe it was just imagination. It was pretty hard to tell.

Most everybody stood there at the window for at least fifteen minutes, pointing things out to each other while the ground kept dropping away below. It wasn't as bad as I was afraid it would be. At least, not yet. Maybe higher up.

The view of the cable was sort of interesting too. The Line zips past the window like a vertical highway—so fast it's just a big blur. It looks like it's all one smooth surface, but it isn't. A lot of it is studded with solar cells, and every thousand meters there's an outer ring of those high-powered sulfur-incandescent lamps that are brighter than the sun; the ring is outside the elevator tracks so the lights don't accidentally shine in. The projectors are there so the Line will be visible from hundreds of miles away. From a distance, all those lights blend together to look like one solid line of brightness. That's why we could see the Line so clearly all the way to Mexico. The lights are partly to warn airplanes and partly to aid people who are aiming their communication dishes and partly as a navigational aid, and partly just for national pride. I mean, if you had a beanstalk in your country, wouldn't you want to show it off?

The other thing about the beanstalk is that there's a lot of space between the three cables. A couple of square kilometers, at least. But it wasn't empty space. For one thing, most of the tracks on the parts of the cables facing each other—the insides—were for cargo pods. We saw them zipping up and down past us; the cargo pods weren't normally pressurized for passengers and they traveled a lot faster in both directions, because cargo didn't suffer from motion-sickness.

But in addition to the cargo tracks, there were also these great billowy tubes of transparent mylar; they were inflated chimneys of all different lengths. Their bottoms and tops were at different heights and they looked kind of like a big ghostly organ. Some of them reached as high as the four-kilometer mark. Their purpose, Dad said, was to irrigate the atmosphere via the "chimney effect." Apparently when you have two chimneys of different heights and you get wind blowing across the top, you get air current down one and up the other. This is how prairie dogs cool their burrows. Here, at the beanstalk, the idea was to create a steady flow of air from the upper reaches of the atmosphere down into the lower and back up again. The air flow generated some electricity, but more important, it helped cool the land around the base of the Line. Weird said that the Line produced three degrees of local cooling, which could make a real difference on a hot day at the equator.

But—Dad said, some of Ecuador's neighbors blamed the chimneys for the persistent El Nino condition in the Pacific that had been screwing up rain patterns for the past twenty years or so and generating some really nasty storms—like the one growing out in the Pacific right now. But who knew for sure? Weird always said that everything was connected to everything else, but if that was true, then the weather had to be caused by everything, didn't it? Nobody knew for sure, and that was part of what everybody was angry about. According to Dad anyway. That's what fat Señor Hidalgo had been talking about on the train—how the Line was destabilizing everything in the world. Even where people lived.

That was the real surprise—there are people living on the Line. All the way up to the five-kilometer mark. And someday even higher. Every so often, we'd pass through a platform city, three or four or five levels suspended from all three of the cables—with holes of course for the elevator tracks and the chimneys. We zipped through them too fast to see much detail, but what we did see as they dropped away below us was pretty impressive. They were like vertical villages. The first three were open to the air, and we saw clusters of offices and homes and shopping areas—real homes with big windows and yards and even a few swimming pools. There were also public launch balconies for gliders of all kinds.

I wondered what it would be like to live in such a place. You'd have to be very rich to live this high. The sky cities were where important corporation people lived as well as some of the people in Ecuador's government.

One of the attendants said that eventually there would be at least a hundred of these platform towns on the Line; there was room for thousands of sky cities, of course; but every platform town required multiple new filaments on the Line, not to mention the installation of an equivalent weight at the other end of the cables to balance it—the attendant said there were already hundreds of water tanks at the far end of the cable, moving up and down all the time to keep the Line in equilibrium—so there was a practical limit to how much could be hung on the Line.

And then the last of the towns disappeared beneath us, and there was nothing for a while except the humming of the cable. By the time we hit ten kilometers, the sky had turned a very deep blue. I'd never seen it that color before. Now the only settlements we were zipping through were scientific or industrial ones, and there weren't too many of those.

The ground below had become mostly featureless; a blanket of clouds covered most everything below us. To the north we could see a few patches of brown and green. To the east, we could see the wall of the Andes stretching north and south. It looked like a crumpled white sheet. I couldn't believe how steep and jagged the mountains were.

Dad said that the original plan had been to drop the cable down onto one of those mountaintops, but when they looked at the problems of anchoring the Line to a mountaintop so high you needed an O2-mask to breathe, they had second thoughts. Even if you could build Terminus on the mountaintop, you'd still have to extend the elevators down to the foothills; you'd have to build a second Terminus. It was easier to just extend the bottom end of the cable a couple klicks farther. What you traded off in additional stress and tension on the anchor, you got back in construction savings and maintenance benefits.

By now, the view had gotten to be pretty standard airplane stuff, except that the cables sparkling all the way down until they disappeared into the clouds below made it impossible for me to pretend I was in an airplane anymore. As long as I didn't think about the cables, I was fine, but this view was a little too scary for me.

That's when Stinky said, "Is this all there is to do? Stare out the window?"

So Dad said, "Well, let's see what else there is. Come on, let's go upstairs." So we all trooped up to the top level of the car, which wasn't really much of a level, just a little room with a glass dome over the top so you could look straight up the Line if you wanted to.

There wasn't much to see up here either, just the cables of the elevator stretching endlessly up into the dark blue above. For some reason, that was even more disturbing. But it was also more boring, so I went back downstairs to the restaurant level, where I bought myself a Coke and tried to avoid looking at any windows.

About the time I began to wonder how often people freaked out on one of these trips and what the attendants would do if I started screaming, Weird came down the stairs and seated himself next to me.

"So?" he said.

"So what?" I answered.

"Now do you believe me? He's gonna do it."

I shrugged. "You can't prove that." And then another thought occurred to me. "Do you want to go back?"

"Do you?" he countered.

"I dunno."

"If we could prove it, we could tell someone ... " Weird offered half-heartedly.

"Oh yeah, get Dad arrested. That would go down really good. Mom would like that. A lot. But Dad would never forgive us. Not that it would matter. But we'd probably never get to see him again. The courts would terminate his rights. Is that what you want?"

"No. But it isn't right for him to do this without asking us what we want to do."

"Well, what do we want to do? You tell me, Douglas."

Now it was his turn to shrug. "I dunno."

"Well, what do we have to go back to? At least, this is ... something."

"Maybe," he admitted. "But I don't like being pushed into it like this. Do you?"

"Maybe we don't know all of what's going on. Mom has been really angry about a whole bunch of stuff she won't talk about. What's that about?"

"Mom is always angry." Douglas said. "That's why Dad gave up on her. Dad was raised different. He doesn't like arguments."

"Well then, he must really love being around us. That's all we ever do."

"Not always. We're not arguing now."

"No. But we're not doing anything else either, are we?" I said one of those words that Dad doesn't like me to use. Just in time for Dad to hear it as he and Stinky came back downstairs.