The Fountains of Paradise

"Thank you, Mr. President," Morgan answered with heartfelt sincerity. "But there's one annoying roadblock we have to tackle at once – perhaps even before we set up the consortium. We have to go to the World Court, and establish jurisdiction over the most valuable piece of real estate on Earth."

20. The Bridge that Danced

Even in this age of instantaneous communications and swift global transport, it was convenient to have a place that one could call one's office. Not everything could be stored in patterns of electronic charges; there were still such items as good old-fashioned books, professional certificates, awards and honours, engineering models, samples of material, artists' rendering of projects (not as accurate as a computer's, but very ornamental), and of course the wall-to-wall carpet which every senior bureaucrat needed to soften the impact of external reality.

Morgan's office, which he saw on the average ten days per month, was on the sixth or LAND floor of the sprawling Terran Construction Corporation Headquarters in Nairobi. The floor below was SEA, that above it ADMINISRATI0N – meaning Chairman Collins and his empire. The architect, in a fit of naïve symbolism, had devoted the top floor to SPACE. There was even a small observatory on the roof, with a thirty-centimetre telescope that was always out of order, because it was only used during office parties, and frequently for most non-astronomical purposes. The upper rooms of the Triplanetary Hotel, only a kilometre away, were a favourite target, as they often held some very strange forms of life – or at any rate of behaviour.

As Morgan was in continuous touch with his two secretaries one human, the other electronic – he expected no surprises when he walked into the office after the brief flight from ANAR. By the standards of an earlier age, his was an extraordinarily small organisation. He had less than three hundred men and women under his direct control; but the computing and information-processing power at their command could not be matched by the merely human population of the entire planet.

"Well, how did you get on with the Sheik?" asked Warren Kingsley, his deputy and long time friend, as soon as they were alone together.

"Very well; I think we have a deal. But I still can't believe that we're held up by such a stupid problem. What does the legal department say?"

"We'll definitely have to get a World Court ruling. If the Court agrees that it's a matter of overwhelming public interest, our reverend friends will have to move… though if they decide to be stubborn, there would be a nasty situation. Perhaps you should send a small earthquake to help them make up their minds."

The fact that Morgan was on the board of General Tectonics was an old joke between him and Kingsley; but GT – perhaps fortunately – had never found a way of controlling and directing earthquakes, nor did it ever expect to do so. The best that it could hope for was to predict them, and to bleed off their energies harmlessly before they could do major damage. Even here, its record of success was not much better than 75 percent.

"A nice idea," said Morgan, "I'll think it over. Now, what about our other problem?"

"All set to go – do you want it now?"

"O.K. – let's see the worst."

The office windows darkened, and a grid of glowing lines appeared in the centre of the room.

"Watch this, Van," said Kingsley. "Here's the regime that gives trouble."

Rows of letters and numbers materialised in the empty air – velocities, payloads, accelerations, transit times – Morgan absorbed them at a glance. The globe of the earth, with its circles of longitude and latitude, hovered just above the carpet; and rising from it, to little more than the height of a man, was the luminous thread that marked the position of the orbital tower.

"Five hundred times normal speed; lateral scale exaggeration fifty. Here we go."

Some invisible force had started to pluck at the line of light, drawing it away from the vertical. The disturbance was moving upwards as it mimicked, via the computer's millions of calculations a second, the ascent of a payload through the earth's gravitational field.

"What's the displacement?" asked Morgan, as his eyes strained to follow the details of the simulation.

"Now about two hundred metres. It gets to three before –"

The thread snapped. In the leisurely slow-motion that represented real speeds of thousands of kilometres an hour, the two segments of the severed tower began to curl away from each other – one bending back to earth, the other whipping upwards to space…

But Morgan was no longer fully conscious of this imaginary disaster, existing only in the mind of the computer; superimposed upon it now was the reality that had haunted him for years.