The Fountains of Paradise

Two obsolete and totally different technologies had been revived for the construction of that unimpressive grey cone. Three hundred years ago, submarine telegraphs had started to operate across the ocean beds; men had lost fortunes before they had mastered the art of coiling thousands of kilometres of cable and playing it out at a steady rate from continent to continent, despite storms and all the other hazards of the sea. Then, just a century later, some of the first primitive guided weapons had been controlled by fine wires spun out as they flew to their targets, at a few hundred kilometres an hour. Morgan was attempting a thousand times the range of those War Museum relics, and fifty times their velocity. However, he had some advantages. His missile would be operating in a perfect vacuum for all but the last hundred kilometres; and its target was not likely to take evasive action.

The Operations Manager, Project Gossamer, attracted Morgan's attention with a slightly embarrassed cough.

"We still have one minor problem, Doctor," she said. "We're quite confident about the lowering – all the tests and computer simulations are satisfactory, as you've seen. It's reeling the filament in again that has Station Safety worried."

Morgan blinked rapidly; he had given little thought to the question. It seemed obvious that winding the filament back again was a trivial problem, compared to sending it out. All that was needed, surely, was a simple power-operated winch, with the special modifications needed to handle such a fine, variable-thickness material. But he knew that in space one should never take anything for granted, and that intuition – especially the intuition of an earth-based engineer – could be a treacherous guide.

Let's see – when the tests are concluded, we cut the earth end and Ashoka starts to wind the filament in. Of course, when you tug – however hard – at one end of a line forty thousand kilometres long, nothing happens for hours. It would take half a day for the impulse to reach the far end, and the system to start moving as a whole. So we keep up the tension – Oh! -

"Somebody did a few calculations," continued the engineer, "and realised that when we finally got up to speed, we'd have several tons heading towards the station at a thousand kilometres an hour. They didn't like that at all."

"Understandably. What do they want us to do?"

"Programme a slower reeling in, with a controlled momentum budget. If the worst comes to the worst, they may make us move off-station to do the wind-up."

"Will that delay the operation?"

"No; we've worked out a contingency plan for heaving the whole thing out of the airlock in five minutes, if we have to."

"And you'll be able to retrieve it easily?"

"Of course."

"I hope you're right. That little fishing line cost a lot of money – and I want to use it again."

But where? Morgan asked himself; as he stared at the slowly waxing crescent Earth. Perhaps it would be better to complete the Mars project first, even if it meant several years of exile. Once Pavonis was fully operational, Earth would have to follow, and he did not doubt that, somehow, the last obstacles would be overcome.

Then the chasm across which he was now looking would be spanned, and the fame that Gustave Eiffel had earned three centuries ago would be utterly eclipsed.

28. The First Lowering

There would be nothing to see for at least another twenty minutes. Nevertheless, everyone not needed in the control hut was already outside, staring up at the sky. Even Morgan found it hard to resist the impulse, and kept edging towards the door.

Seldom more than a few metres from him was Maxine Duval's latest Remote, a husky youth in his late twenties. Mounted on his shoulders were the usual tools of his trade – twin cameras in the traditional "right forward, left backward" arrangement, and above those a small sphere not much larger than a grapefruit. The antenna inside that sphere was doing very clever things, several thousand times a second, so that it was always locked on the nearest comsat despite all the antics of its bearer. And at the other end of that circuit, sitting comfortably in her studio office, Maxine Duval was seeing through the eyes of her distant alter ego and hearing with his ears – but not straining her lungs in the freezing air. This time she had the better part of the bargain; it was not always the case.

Morgan had agreed to the arrangement with some reluctance. He knew that this was an historic occasion, and accepted Maxine's assurance that "my man won't get in the way". But he was also keenly aware of all the things that could go wrong in such a novel experiment – especially during the last hundred kilometres of atmospheric entry. On the other hand, he also knew that Maxine could be trusted to treat either failure or triumph without sensationalism.