Hieroglyph (5 page)

Then one day the following text message showed up on my phone:

Buy all 4

To which I replied:

Lol really?

And he answered:

As long as you think they can be resold without serious loss.

And, moments later:

Don't spend it all in one place

Referring, I guess, to the fact that I was about to collect four commissions on four separate purchases—and perhaps as many as three more when he decided to resell the ones he didn't want to use (“losers” in Carl-speak).

I was beginning to suspect that the tower was a ruse and that he was actually making some kind of incredibly complicated play in desert real estate.

The reality became clearer to me when Carl bought all of those properties and then began to visit those towns and show the locals the dog-and-pony show his engineers had been preparing on the subject of why it was such a great thing to have a twenty-kilometer-high tower in one's community. Lots of PowerPoint slides explaining, in the most soothing possible way, why it was impossible for the thing to fall over and crush the town. Even if it got hit by a 747.

I ended up going on many of these dog-and-ponies. I had already done the part I was qualified to do. But my job title kept morphing as the project developed. For Carl was no respecter of titles and credentials. Whomever he trusted, was in his field of vision, and hadn't said anything colossally stupid recently tended to end up being assigned responsibilities. I ended up becoming one of the advocates for this thing, completely trashing my regular business (it was okay, we worked it out in the aftermath), and had to buy a pocketbook to contain all of my loyalty program cards for Hertz, United, Marriott, et al. Then a purse to contain the pocketbook. Then skirts to go with the purse. Which I mention because I'd always been a wallet-in-the-pocket-of-my-jeans kind of girl. Tess watched my sartorial transformations with amusement and alarm, accusing me of traveling to the Intermountain West in drag. It became a little tense between us until one day the lightbulb came on and I explained: “They don't give a shit that I'm gay.”

“Really?”

“Really. They actually think it's kind of cool. Most of them.”

“I just thought—”

“No. The clothes are about being taken seriously.” Tess was mollified, though not fully convinced.

“People are afraid it's going to fall over on them. The explanation of why this is never going to happen needs to come from someone who is not wearing black leather.”

I could do the PowerPoint in my sleep. As a matter of fact I often
did
do it in my sleep, tossing and turning in my hotel bed. We'd hired a graphics firm to make a nice animated film showing the transformation of the site. Leveling the ground. Planting trees to make it purty. A new railway line, lollipop-shaped, terminated with a perfectly circular loop nine miles in diameter. Extending inward from that, the spoke lines. Half a dozen of them, one for each of the Primaries—the primary supports that would hold the tower up. A little homily here on the subject of “why six?” In theory you could build a stable tower with only three. But if something happened to one of them—I didn't have to mention a jumbo jet strike, since everyone was clearly picturing it in their heads—the other two wouldn't be able to hold it up. You might be able to make it survivable with four, but it would take some structural legerdemain. Five was a safer bet. Six gave you even more of a safety margin as well as some benefits resulting from symmetry. The greater the number of Primaries, the closer each was to its neighbors, and that simplified, somewhat, the problem of webbing them together structurally. So six it was.

The next step was to construct the foundation strips: six reinforced-concrete tracks, each straddling one of the spoke lines. This part of the presentation went pretty fast; there wasn't much interesting you could say about pavement.

The concept of a rolling factory was harder to explain. Factories they got, but no one had ever seen one crossed with a main battle tank the size of a shopping mall. This was where the computer-graphics renderings really came in handy, showing how the thing was built from the ground up on huge steel treads, how it accepted its inputs (steel! steel! and more steel!) from the railway line that ran right through the middle of it, assembled them into trusses, connected them to the bottom of the Primary, and then pushed them straight up through a hole in the roof. It was all reasonably easy to follow, once you got the gist of it. The one part that was a little hard to convey was that each of these six rolling factories—one for each Primary—was also a structural foundation supporting its share of the tower's whole weight. The factory didn't just have to roll (slowly!) along the runway. It didn't just have to assemble trusses and feed them out its ceiling. It also had to contain hydraulic rams for pushing the tower up, transmitting its share of the weight down through its structure into the big steel tank treads and from there into the foundation strip and finally into Carl's precious bedrock.

Having gotten those preliminaries out of the way, I was able to proceed to the big all-singing all-dancing animation (complete with moving symphonic music) showing the six Struders (as we had come to call the truss-extruding factories) poised at their starting positions at the innermost extremes of the spokes, nearly touching one another. Six trains came chugging up the lollipop handle and went their separate ways around the rim line. A seventh went straight into the center, headed for a central, nonmoving Struder designed to extrude the tower's core. Once each of the seven had been supplied by its own train, steel trusses—kinda like radio towers—began to emerge from the holes in their roofs, growing upward like stalks from magic beans. There was a pause as cranes went to work framing in a platform that joined the six Primaries with the core. This was my opportunity to wax poetic as I marveled over the fact that this platform would one day be twenty thousand meters above the ground, for all practical purposes in outer space, where the sky was black and the curvature of the earth visible. Honeymooners would luxuriate in pressurized suites, astronomers would gaze at the universe through glass eyes undimmed by atmospheric pollution. Rockets would launch from it and extreme skydivers would jump off.

And yet 99 percent of the workers who built it would never have to leave the ground.

The reaction to
that
was mixed. Oh, everyone understood why it made sense—you couldn't have a large workforce commuting straight up into the sky every day, breathing from oxygen tanks and swaddled up in space suits. But it did take some of the romance out of it. At some level I think that every blue-collar worker who ever attended one of these presentations was telling himself that he would be one of the tiny minority of employees who would actually get to go up high on the tower, inspecting and troubleshooting.

The rest of the movie was predictable enough. The trains kept rolling in, the Struders kept extruding, pausing from time to time so that the freshly extruded Primaries and core could be webbed together with stiffening trusses—Kavanaugh's “core muscles.” We speeded up the movie, of course, once people got the gist of it. Push, pause, web. Push, pause, web. With each push the factories rolled outward imperceptibly on their tracks, moving about one meter for every fifteen meters of stuff they extruded, keeping the tower's height-to-width ratio fixed. Though, toward the end, they started moving a bit faster, making the base splay out, giving it a bit of an Eiffel Tower feel. Even the people who walked into the room claiming to be worried that it would fall over were convinced by this; it had a wide enough stance that it just
looked
stable. Up and up went the steel as I recited lore that I had picked up from Wikipedia and from meteorology textbooks and long conversations with Ph.D. metallurgists about the different layers of the atmosphere and the varying challenges that the tower would have to contend with: down below, rain and rust. Up higher, icing. Higher yet, wind loading, the possibility of contact with a wandering jet stream (or a wayward jet). Profound cold that would render the metal brittle if we had been dumb enough to use the wrong alloys. Thermal expansion and contraction as the unfiltered sun shone on its higher reaches in the day and then disappeared at night. Each challenge was an opportunity to generate energy with photovoltaics (up high) or convection ducts (down low) or wind turbines (in the middle).

So much for the pitch.

And so much (almost) for my marriage, which barely survived all of the absences, all of those nights in chain hotels far from home, all of those alarming changes in wardrobe and hairstyle.

IF I WERE TO
write a book about building the tower, I'd here interpolate a three-year-long chapter entitled “Politics and Lawyers.” Halfway through it, I got a text message from Carl:

CALI = LOSER

meaning, “Sell the property in California.”

My response was

OK

but my reaction was a little more complicated. I had known all along, of course, that we'd end up selling at least three of the four properties. But I'd spent time in each of those places and had made friends with the locals, and I didn't look forward to breaking them the news that their bid—for by this point, each of these things had mushroomed into a complicated bid package binding together state and local governments, unions, banks, and other worthies—had been rejected.

The answer, simply, was that the tower was going to be visible from the hills above Oakland and Berkeley: a spendy part of the world where lots of rich people were accustomed to looking out the windows of their nice houses and seeing the landscape. And
only
the landscape. They didn't want their views marred by a twenty-kilometer-high “monstrosity” whose “stark, ugly, industrial profile” was going to be “cluttered” with “ungainly industrial encrustations” and “gaudy” with a “Las Vegas–style light show” that would “sully the purity of the skies night and day.”

Southwestern Texas got killed six months later by environmentalists being used as sock puppets by an unholy alliance of—well, never mind. Demonstrating in court that their claims were bogus would have been expensive. Bankrolled as well as they were, they could have stretched the process out forever by filing legal challenges. Arizona was the next domino to fall. It had always been a long shot, but we'd held on to it mostly to give us greater bargaining power over the Nevada site, where local politicians had smelled money and begun to let us know, in various ways, that we were going to have to play ball.

So that was how I came to earn four commissions by purchasing four “losers” for Carl, and another four by selling each and every one of them. We made money on two, lost money on another two, and pretty much broke even on the whole deal.

That was how the project ended up where it did: between an Indian reservation and a decommissioned military bombing range, out in the southwestern desert, in an area that had already demonstrated its openness to radical transformations of the landscape, first by bombing the crap out of it, then by building a casino complex, and most recently by its wholehearted acceptance of wind farms.

At about the same time we closed a deal on an aging complex near the Illinois-Indiana border and got to work building a new kind of steel mill. The Great Lakes were still the best place in the world to make steel. This was a far cry from our original scheme to have the mill on-site. But in the intervening years it had become clear that lots of people wanted the kind of steel that a new mill could produce. Hard as it was to believe, the tower had become a minor customer.

Transportation wasn't that big of a deal. Smaller pieces could be shipped southwest on freight trains. Big stuff was barged down the river system to the Gulf, dragged through the Panama Canal, landed at the head of the Gulf of California, and then transported overland using land trains.

The site was twenty minutes' drive from a college town, which gave the employees a place to educate their kids and entertain themselves and gave us a ready supply of fresh young engineering talent.

As well as a cowgirl-themed gay bar. Which became pretty important when Carl told me—as if this should have been obvious from the beginning—that I was moving there to run the whole thing.

“I'm not qualified to construct a twenty-kilometer-high tower,” I pointed out.

“Since it has never been done before,” he said, “no one is.”

“The engineering is totally beyond my—”

“We have engineers.”

“All the legal ins and outs—”

“Lawyers.”

I was dreading the conversation with Tess but she'd seen it coming long ago. Hell, maybe Carl had even prepped her.

“Let's go,” was all she said.

Bless her beautiful heart,
I thought. But what I said was “Huh?”

“I've been looking into it. Precleared it with my boss. I'll telecommute.”

NEITHER OF US REALLY
believed that, of course. Her job lasted for all of twelve weeks after we moved.

She cashed in some stock options and bought the cowgirl bar for less than what she had spent on her last car. With what was left over she bought a pickup truck from a rancher who had sold his land to Carl.

Five years later, the bar had morphed into
the
hangout for all the engineers, gay and otherwise, who had moved to the area.

Another five years after that, Tess was operating the First Bar in Space.

Oh, people argued about it. Space tourism had been gathering steam. Queasy/giddy tourists drifted around the tiny envelopes of their suborbital capsules and sucked premixed cocktails from nippled sacs and this got billed as the first bar in space. It became like the debate on who had built the first computer: well, depends on what you consider a computer.

What do you consider a bar? For Tess it had to have a jukebox, a dartboard, and gravity. You can't get a head on your Guinness in zero gee.