Red Mars (63 page)

Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station. The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the northeast. This scoop formed a great gap across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways explosion. But that was the only flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flat. And sixty kilometers across, and a full 5,000 meters deep. Like the start of the mohole to end all moholes. The few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant’s scale, almost invisible from the rim.

The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevator. The attachment point was obvious; it was a massive tan-and-white concrete blockhouse, located a few kilometers east of the big tent town around the train station. Running east along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum black. There were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.

The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base. Apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that afternoon. This turned out to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheless. The end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, and this rocket’s eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurts. The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor and observing a fishing line, dropped down among them from the plum sea surface— a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottom wreck. His blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathe deep. Very peculiar.

They toured the base complex. The gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring of a rim. The walls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a shock-cushioning collar. The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, 37,000 kilometers in all. And only ten meters across.

With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily, but not rapidly, as it had to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic approach. “It’s going to be like Zeno’s paradox,” Slusinski said.

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.

Frank spent this time setting up the head Department of Mars offices in the town, which one day was christened Sheffield. The Burroughs staff protested the move, but he ignored them. He spent his time meeting with American executives and project managers, all at work on various aspects of the elevator or Sheffield, or the outlying Pavonis towns. Americans represented only a fraction of the workforce on hand, but Chalmers was kept busy nevertheless, because the overall project was so huge. And Americans appeared to be dominating the superconducting, and the software involved with the actual elevator cars, a coup that was worth billions and which many people gave Frank credit for, though it was in fact his AI and Slusinski who were responsible, along with Phyllis.

Many of the Americans lived out in a tent town east of Sheffield called Texas, sharing the space with internationals who liked the idea of Texas, or had just ended up there randomly. Frank met with as many of them as he could, so that by the time the cable touched down they would be organized and working with a coherent policy— or under his thumb, as some of them put it. But happy to be there, as long as it gave them any clout. They knew they were less powerful than the East Asian commonwealth, which was building the elevator car shells, and less powerful than the EC, which had constructed the cable itself. And less powerful than Praxis, and Amex, and Armscor, and Subarashii.

Eventually the day came when the cable was going to touch down. A giant crowd gathered in Sheffield to see it; the train station concourse was jammed to well over capacity, as it had a good view along the rim to the base complex, popularly referred to as the socket.

As the hours passed, the end of the black column drifted downward, moving more and more slowly as it approached its target. There it hung, not that much bigger than the leader line guiding it down, smaller in fact than the business end of an Energia rocket. It stood up into the sky perfectly vertically, but it was so thin and the foreshortening was so severe that it looked not much longer than a tall skyscraper. A very skinny tall skyscraper, walking on air. A black tree trunk, taller than the sky. “We ought to be right under it, down on the floor of the socket,” one of his staff said. “There’d be headroom when it stops, right?”

“Magnetic field might scramble you a bit,” Slusinski replied, never taking his gaze from the sky.

As it got closer they saw that the cable was knobbed with various protrusions, and filigreed with silver lines. The gap under it got smaller. Then the end of it disappeared into the base complex, and the seashell roar of the crowd in the concourse grew louder. People watched the TVs closely; cameras inside the socket showed the cable come to a slow halt, still ten meters above the concrete floor. After that came the tweezerlike movement of gantries, and the clamping of a physical collar around the cable, a few meters up from its end. Everything happened in dreamlike slow motion, and when it was done it looked like the round socket room had suddenly gained an ill-fitting black roof.

Over the loudspeaker system a woman’s voice said, “The elevator is secured.” There was a brief cheer. People moved away from the TVs and looked out the tent walls again. Now the object looked much less strange than it had when hanging out of the sky; now it was nothing more than the reductio ad absurdum of Martian architecture, a very slender, very tall black spire. A beanstalk. Peculiar, but not so unsettling. The crowd burst into a thousand conversations, and scattered.

And not long after that, the elevators were working. During the years when the cable was extruding from Clarke, robots had been spidering along it, constructing the power lines, safety cables, generators, superconducting pistes, maintenance stations, defense stations, position-adjustment rockets, fuel tanks, and emergency shelters that marked the cable every few kilometers. This work had proceeded at the same pace as the cable construction itself, so that soon after touchdown the cars were running up and down, up and down, four hundred of them going in each direction, like parasites on a strand of hair. And a few months after that, you could take an elevator into orbit. And you could take another elevator down out of orbit, to the surface.

And down they came, transported from Earth by the fleet of continuous shuttles, those big spaceships that boomed around the Earth-Venus-Mars system, using the three planets and Luna as gravity handles, fielding madly accelerating ferry packets from Earth and Mars. Each of the thirteen operating ships held a thousand people, and they were full every trip out. So there was a continuous stream of people docking on Clarke, descending in elevator cars, and disembarking in the socket. And then pouring into Sheffield’s concourses, wild and unsteady and bug-eyed as they were herded with some difficulty to the train station, and onto trains outbound. Most of these trains then emptied their loads into the Pavonis tent towns; robot crews were building the tents just fast enough to house the influx, and the completion of two new pipelines had secured the water supply, which was being pumped up from the Compton Aquifer beneath Noctis Labyrinthus. So the emigrants settled in.

Back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, and silver. Then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of 300 kilometers an hour. Five days later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars’s third moon. It was a busy place; there was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships, and crews perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in existence. Though most of the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.

And of course media coverage of all the new imagery was immediate and intense; and all in all, despite the decade of waiting, it seemed that on touchdown the elevator had sprung into being like Athena.

But there was trouble. Frank found that his staff was spending more and more time dealing with men and women from the tents, who had come into Sheffield and right into their offices, new arrivals who were sometimes nervous, sometimes loud and angry, rattling on about crowded living conditions or insufficient police or bad food. One bulky red-faced man wearing a baseball cap shook a finger at them and said, “Private security companies come in from tents higher up and offer protection, but they’re just gangs, it’s just extortion! I can’t even give you my name or our security might find out I came here! I mean I believe in the black economy as much as the next guy, but this is crazy! This isn’t what we came here for.”

Frank paced his office, seething. These kinds of allegations were clearly true, but difficult to verify without a security team of one’s own, a big police force in fact. When the man left, he grilled his staff, but they could tell him nothing new, which made him even angrier. “You’re paid to find these things out for me, that’s your jobs! What are you doing sitting around in here all day watching Terran news!”

He canceled a day’s appointments, thirty-seven meetings in all. “Lazy incompetent bastards,” he said loudly as he stalked out the door. He went to the train station and caught a local downslope to have a look for himself.

The local train now stopped every kilometer of the descent, in small stainless steel locks that served as stations for the tent towns. He got out in one; signs in the lock identified it as El Paso. He walked through the open doors of the passage lock.

At least these tents had a view, there was no denying that. Down the great eastern slope of the volcano ran the train piste and the pipelines, and on either side of them tent after tent, like blisters. The clear fabric of the older ones upslope was already turning a bit purple. Ventilators hummed loudly from the physical plant next to the station, and from somewhere a hydrazine generator was adding its high hum. People were conversing in Spanish and English. Frank called his office and got them to ring the apartment of a man from El Paso who had dropped in to complain. The man answered, and Frank arranged to meet him at a café next to the station, then walked over and sat at an outer table. Men and women sat around tables eating and talking like anywhere else. Little electric cars hummed up and down the narrow streets, most piled high with boxes. The buildings near the station were three stories tall and appeared prefab, steel-reinforced concrete painted bright blue and white. There was a line of young trees in tubs running away from the station down the main thoroughfare. Small groups sat on the astroturf, or walked aimlessly from shop to shop, or hurried with shoulderbags and daypacks toward the station. All of them looked a bit disoriented or uncertain, as if they had no habits, or had not yet learned to walk properly.

The man showed up with a whole crowd of his neighbors, all in their twenties, too young to be on Mars or so it used to be said. Perhaps the treatment could fix damage from radiation, allow them to reproduce accurately, who could say for sure till they tried? Laboratory animals, that’s what they were. What they had always been.

It was strange to stand among them like some ancient patriarch, treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, like a grandpa. Irritably he told them to take him on a walk and show him around. They guided him down narrow streets away from the station and the taller buildings, between long rows of what turned out to be Agee huts, which had been designed for temporary shelter in the outlands: research outposts, or water stations, or refugee huts. Now lined up by the score. The slope of the volcano had been hastily graded, and a lot of the huts were on a two- or three-degree slope, so that they had to be careful in the kitchens, they said, and make sure to align their beds properly.

Frank asked them what they did. Stevedores in Sheffield, most replied; offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trains. Robots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscle. Heavy-equipment operators, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workers. Most of them had rarely gotten out onto the surface; some of them never had. They had done similar kinds of work back home, or had been unemployed. This was their chance. Most wanted to return to Earth someday, but the gyms were crowded and expensive and time-consuming, and they were all losing their tone. They had southern accents that Frank hadn’t heard since childhood; it was like hearing voices from a previous century, like listening to Elizabethans. Did people still talk that way? TV never revealed it. “Y’all been here so long you don’t mind being indoors, but I can’t stand it.”
Ah caint stayun det
.