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- Herausgeber: Fresh Ink Group
- Serie: The Starchild Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
SLINGSHOT is a love story – about a man, a woman, another man, another woman, some gender-bending…and a machine, the largest ever built. SLINGSHOT is a mystery – about a missing aviatrix, a conspiracy, a true-believer.
SLINGSHOT is an adventure – about following a dream, the ocean-deep, outer space. SLINGSHOT is about constructing the first space launch- loop stretching 2,600 km between Baker and Jarvis Islands in the Equatorial Pacific. It’s about high finance, intrigue, unlimited ambition, heroism, fanaticism, betrayal…and about opening space to the common person.
The setting is the day-after-tomorrow. Technology has advanced, the web is more pervasive than ever, but human ambition and greed remain unchanged. In SLINGSHOT, Alex Regent, Margo Jackson, and Klaus Blumenfeld reach for the stars as they blend their skills to create the world’s first space launch-loop, backed by major software money. Environmental fanatic Lars Watson with his team of young eco-terrorists are funded by opposing financial interests, who will go to any length to halt the project. Reporter Lori Kutcher indiscriminately applies her own personal skills to ensure it is she who reports the unfolding events to a watching world.
With a cast of 69, SLINGSHOT takes you from Seattle’s world financial district, to the ocean bottom at 5,000 feet off Baker Island, to the edge of space 80 km above. You play with dolphins and battle sharks. You fly and sail and dive, you work and play and love across the vast panorama of an Equatorial Pacific being put to leash to serve humanity’s surge into outer space.
While its accurate science and precise engineering will appeal to hard science-fiction buffs, SLINGSHOT’s major focus is the grand journey, the opening of outer space to the common person by men and women who loom larger than life as they work, play, and love.
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SLINGSHOT TITLE PAGE
Slingshot
Building the Largest Machine in Human History
Copyright © 2023
by Robert G. Williscroft
All rights reserved
Fresh Ink Group
An Imprint of:
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC
1021 Blount Avenue #931
Guntersville, AL 35976
Email: [email protected]
FreshInkGroup.com
Edition 4.0 2023
Cover design by Gary McCluskey
Illustrations by Robert G. Williscroft
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and except for brief quotations in
critical reviews or articles, no portion of this book’s content may be stored in any medium,
transmitted in any form, used in whole or part, or sourced for derivative works such as videos,
television, and motion pictures, without prior written permission from the publisher.
Cataloging-in-Publication Recommendations:
SCI098020 SCIENCE / Space Science / Space Exploration
FIC028130 FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Exploration
FIC027130 FICTION / Romance / Science Fiction
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023911575
ISBN-13: 978-1-958922-28-6 Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-958922-29-3 Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-958922-30-9 Ebook
FRONT MATERIAL MOVED TO BACK OF SLINGSHOT
To facilitate your reading this ebook, the following elements have been placed at the back of the book. Click on the links to see them. Click the title on the arrival page to bring you back here.
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the 1st edition
Foreword to the 2nd edition
Foreword to the 3rd edition
Foreword to the 4th full-color edition
Cast of Characters
Praise for Slingshot
To skip the Table of Contents, click here to go right to the beginning of the story.
TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR—SLINGSHOT
Title Page—Slingshot
Table of Contents
Front Material Moved to the Back of Slingshot
Prologue
IMAGE 1—Amelia Earhart in the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra
Lockheed Electra—Above the Western Equatorial Pacific
Part One—He shall have dominion over the fish in the sea…
IMAGE 2—The Slingshot Space Launch Loop
Chapter One
Equatorial Pacific—Southeast of Baker Island
Chapter Two
IMAGE 3—Diagram of the Western Complex
Western complex—300 km west of Baker Island
Chapter Three
IMAGE 4—Baker Island
Baker Island—Margo Jackson’s Quarters
Baker Island—Airstrip
Chapter Four
Airborne to western complex
Western complex—300 km west of Baker Island
Chapter Five
Eastern Complex—Circular Deflector
Chapter Six
Underway between Baker and Jarvis Islands
Buoy 1528
On the surface at Buoy 1528
Chapter Seven
Submerged on gills at Buoy 1528
Surfaced at buoy 1528
Airborne to Jarvis Island
Chapter Eight
IMAGE 5—Jarvis Island
Surface at buoy 1528
Aboard Green Avenger underway for Jarvis Island
Jarvis Island recompression complex
IMAGE 6—Diagram of the Eastern Complex
Eastern Complex 300 km east of Jarvis Island
IMAGE 7—Cutaway of the tube
Jarvis Island recompression complex
Chapter Nine
Airborne above the Eastern Complex
Jarvis Island recompression complex
Chapter Ten
Eastern Complex 300 km east of Jarvis Island
Jarvis Island Compound
Jarvis Island wharf
Chapter Eleven
Jarvis Island Compound
Jarvis Island tarmac
Jarvis Island Compound
Jarvis Island—Southern beach
Chapter Twelve
Jarvis Island Compound
Eastern Complex
Jarvis Island
Jarvis Island—Southern Beach
IMAGE 8—Wreck of the Barquentine Amaranth
Chapter Thirteen
Seattle—Smith Tower
Jarvis Island Compound
Seattle—Smith Tower
Jersey City—New Jersey
Chapter Fourteen
Jersey City—New Jersey
Seattle—Smith Tower
American Samoa—South Pacific
Seattle—Smith Tower
Baker Island—Margo’s quarters
American Samoa—South Pacific
Baker Island—Margo’s quarters
Part Two—…and over the birds of the air...
IMAGE 9—Amelia Earhart Skyport Illustration
Chapter Fifteen
Equatorial Pacific—Aboard Aku Aku south of Western Complex
Equatorial Pacific—Submerged aboard Alvin
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Chapter Sixteen
Equatorial Pacific—Submerged aboard Wampus
Equatorial Pacific—Submerged aboard Alvin
Equatorial Pacific—Aboard Aku Aku
Equatorial Pacific—Overboard south of Western Complex
Equatorial Pacific—Aboard Skimmer One
Chapter Seventeen
Equatorial Pacific—Submerged aboard Wampus
Equatorial Pacific—At W-1 and W-3
Equatorial Pacific—At W-1
Chapter Eighteen
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Seattle—Smith Tower
American Samoa—Pago Pago
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Western Complex—Control Center
Seattle—Smith Tower
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Chapter Nineteen
Seattle—Smith Tower
Howland and Baker Islands
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Chapter Twenty
Baker Island—Operations Compound
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Chapter Twenty-one
Baker Island—Socket Compound
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Howland Island—Operations Center
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Chapter Twenty-two
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Chapter Twenty-three
Baker Island—Baker Compound Workshop
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Chapter Twenty-four
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Baker Island—Meyerton Landing
Baker Island—Aboard Skimmer One
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Aboard Skimmer One between Baker and Howland Islands
Chapter Twenty-five
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Baker Island—Baker Socket
Aboard Skimmer One between Baker and Howland Islands
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Baker Island—Eastern beach
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Chapter Twenty-six
Seattle—Smith Tower
Pyongyang—DPRK (North Korea)
Seattle—Airborne to Boeing Field
Baker Island
Chapter Twenty-seven
Seattle—Smith Tower
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Jarvis Island—Jarvis Compound
Chapter Twenty-eight
Fred Noonan Skyport
Jarvis Island—Jarvis Compound
Fred Noonan Skyport
Chapter Twenty-nine
Seattle—Smith Tower
Jarvis Island—Jarvis Compound
Baker Island—Baker Compound
Jarvis Island—Jarvis Socket
American Samoa—Pago Pago
Baker Island—Operations Center
Amelia Earheart Skyport
Chapter Thirty
Seattle—Smith Tower
Honolulu—Airport Marriott
Baker Island
Baker Island—Control Center
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Chapter Thirty-one
Baker Island—Control Center
Baker Island—Underway on Skimmer Three
Baker Island—Control Center
Chapter Thirty-two
Seattle—Downtown
Seattle—Smith Tower
Baker Island
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Pyongyang—DPRK (North Korea)
Afterword
Near Baker Island—Submerged on Wampus
Near Baker Island—Aboard RV Amelia E
Amelia Earhart Skyport
Hyperchess Rules
Post a review
About the Author
Other books by Robert G. Williscroft
Connect with Robert G. Williscroft
Material moved from front of book
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword to the 1st Edition
Foreword to the 2nd Edition
Foreword to the 3rd Edition
Foreword to the 4th Full-color Edition
Cast of Characters
Praise for Slingshot
Slingshot Glossary
Book Brochures
The Daedalus Files
Operation Ivy Bells
Operation Ice Breaker
Operation Arctic Sting
Operation White Out
Icicle
The Oort Federation
Submarine-er
SLINGSHOT
PROLOGUE
IMAGE 1—Amelia Earhart in the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra
LOCKHEED ELECTRA—ABOVE THE WESTERN EQUATORIAL PACIFIC
“I
‘m tired, Fred. How much farther to Howland?”
She peered out through the Lockheed windscreen at the endless expanse of Pacific Ocean in front of her.
“Three hundred miles, Doll, just three hundred miles more on this leg. How’re you doing up there?”
The lanky, soft-spoken man looked over his left shoulder at the dungaree-clad woman grasping the control wheel in front of her. In response, she rubbed her hand across her forehead and squinted into the reflected glare from the ocean surface far below. She glanced at her watch and then at the array of instruments in front of her.
“Hundred fifty knots, Fred. How do you make the fuel?”
Fred manipulated the circular dials of his navigator’s slide rule.
“Fine, Girl. We got more than enough.”
He twisted around and peered into the periscopic sextant mounted in the cabin overhead. After jotting down a few numbers, he noted the time and checked a volume on the small table jutting out from the bulkhead in front of him. Then he turned, scowling, and took a second sighting of the sinking sun behind them. A few moments later, he laid aside his reference book and said, “Drop down a thousand feet, will you? We seem to be bucking a pretty strong headwind up here.”
The silver bird dipped its nose in response. The altimeter needle spun until it pointed to 11,000 feet. With her right hand, the pilot picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon in front of her. Fred took another sight on the sun and plotted his results. She turned around and looked at him expectantly.
“We’re goin’ the right way, Doll. But these running fixes—you know the assumptions you have to make...drop another thousand feet, will you please?”
Blood red water astern swallowed the sinking sun as inky blackness spread across the sky before them. She had planned it this way, one last evening star fix to establish more accurately their position before setting a final vector for Howland Island just a few miles north and east of where Equator and International Date Line cross.
July 2, 1937, was drawing to a close; but it would start all over again as soon as she crossed the 180th meridian. Outside, twilight quickly deepened to tropical night. A million stars twinkled to her left and overhead in patterns long familiar, while she had to will the bright points off to her right into recognizable patterns.
“Amelia, Doll,” Fred turned to look at the pretty pilot wearing a leather skullcap, flaps dangling near her chin. “We got a problem, Girl.”
She looked at him with a steady gaze, saying nothing.
“That headwind,” Fred paused to push a pencil back to the center of his table. “It was a good deal stronger than we estimated. There’s still a lot of water ahead of us, Doll, a lot.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Marginal,” he said. “The fuel’s marginal.”
She pursed her lips and scanned the horizon once again in the growing darkness.
“You won’t find it,” he sighed. “It’s still four hundred fifty damn miles out there.”
On they flew into the darkness—one hour, two hours. On Fred’s chart, their plotline crept closer to a dot labeled Howland Island, but that was countered by the fuel gauge needle creeping toward empty.
Fred took another sighting. This time his fix seemed a bit farther from the last than it had from the preceding one. He turned and said into the darkness, “I think we picked up a westerly. Looks like our luck is holding.” Then he scanned the horizon before them through his binoculars. “But no sign of the Itasca,” he said and began fiddling with his transmitter dial.
“KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you…gas is low….”
Static was the only response.
“Damn fool instrument!” Fred snarled as he tried to zero into the homing signal he knew was being transmitted by the Coast Guard cutter. “I guess we should have brought that new-fangled high-frequency receiver after all. It really didn’t weigh that much.” He grinned at Amelia’s silhouette. “Good thing for the westerly, Girl. We need a kick in the rear!”
“A westerly,” the woman’s voice echoed from the pilot’s seat. In her mind, she could see the warning printed near the chart margin: NOTE 3—Surface winds to 10,000 feet generally easterly in this area. Westerly winds usually signal bad weather.
She glanced at the altimeter; it read 10,000 feet.
Might as well take advantage of the wind, she thought, as she pushed the control stick forward and brought the aircraft down to 6,000 feet. Around them, stars disappeared as they dropped through a cloud deck. The aircraft shuddered as a gust of wind hit it. Amelia’s arms tensed as she fought to keep the plane on course. Rain streaked the windscreen, illuminated by the cockpit’s dull red glow. Outside was like a coal sack. She glued her eyes to the artificial horizon bobbing in front of her.
“Do you think this is wise?” Fred spoke matter-of-factly.
“We’ve got to make up some miles,” she responded, a slight edge creeping into her voice as a strong gust buffeted the aircraft. “We’ve seen worse, Fred.
“Hang tight!” she said sharply, as the plane dropped suddenly in a vast air pocket. She poured on power, pulling back on the stick as the altimeter needle spun dizzyingly. Fred held his breath, hypnotized by the spinning dial. He sensed, rather than saw, the struggling woman beside him. As the needle slowed down, he let out his breath with a sigh.
“Some turbulence!”
She wasted no time answering him. Instead, she used precious fuel, bringing the aircraft back to a safer altitude. At 6,000 feet, she leveled off. “How much further, Fred?”
“Hundred fifty, two hundred miles. It’s hard to tell with this wind and no stars to sight.”
The cockpit lighted up brilliantly. A second flash illuminated a gigantic thunderhead towering in front of them.
“Better avoid that one,” Fred advised.
The artificial horizon tilted right. Noonan’s pencil rolled off his desk as the aircraft banked left. Again, the clouds lit up. From the picture frozen in his mind, Fred could see they were flying through a clear valley between two massive thunderheads.
Suddenly, the whole sky flashed around them; the plane jerked hard enough to clear Fred’s desk. Swerving out of its left turn, the aircraft banked sharply to the right, almost standing on its wing. Inside, Amelia struggled desperately to regain control. She flicked her eyes across the gauges in front of her, already knowing what she would find.
“We’ve lost the right engine, Fred!” She glanced over her right shoulder, eyes big and round. “More than that,” she added through clenched teeth. “I think the wing is damaged as well.” She fought to keep the control stick from pulling forward out of her grip. “Strap in, Fred. This is going to be rough!”
As he struggled with his straps, another brilliant flash filled the sky. Once again, the whole plane shook, but when the flash was gone, the right wing continued to flicker.
“I have to ditch her!” Amelia’s voice sounded shrill in the noise around them; it contained a hint of fear. Fred reached out and gripped her shoulder. She turned and saw his grin in the reflected glow of the instrument panel, highlighted by the flickering from outside.
“You’re the best, Doll!” He winked. “Dinner’s on me as soon as we hit Honolulu.”
The damaged wing prevented her from leveling off. The best she could do was to keep the plane’s spiral from becoming too steep. The altimeter blurred. They both began to hear the sound of driving rain against the aircraft skin; the flickering on their damaged right wing disappeared. Again, the sky flashed. Frozen before them, tumultuous waves stretched several hundred feet below. Amelia Earhart pulled back mightily on her control stick, trying to bring the nose up. She wrenched the wheel to her left, jammed her left foot forward.
Neither she nor Fred Noonan saw the waves rush up to meet them. Their damaged right wing caught the water first, flipping the plane up and cartwheeling it to the right.
“Fred!”
He lost his grip on her shoulder as the aircraft struck. Darkness closed in around them, but they could not feel the ocean pour in through the smashed windscreen. In the silence that followed, they felt nothing at all.
∞
Sixty miles to the northeast, a small group of men glanced from a lantern-illuminated runway on tiny Howland Island to a lightning-outlined squall off to the southwest. All they saw was a group of lightning-illuminated thunderheads, but as long as they lived, they would remember.
PART I
“He shall have dominion over the fish in the sea…”
IMAGE 2—The Slingshot Space Launch Loop
CHAPTER ONE
EQUATORIAL PACIFIC—SOUTHEAST OF BAKER ISLAND
M
argo stopped kicking her feet as the ominous gray shapes flashed into her peripheral view. Long, tawny hair floated past her head as her feet dropped below her slim, brightly clad body. She took a deep breath and floated slightly upward. A hint of fear crept into her mind as she turned toward three gray, sleek predators cruising just inside the limit of her vision, about twenty-five meters away.
A gentle touch on her shoulder startled her. She turned to see Alex Regent tapping the depth reading on his dive console with his index finger. Margo reached down and grasped her console, turning it so she could read her depth: twenty-five meters. She had drifted upward five meters since seeing the sharks.
Margo exhaled angrily and let some air out of her breathing bag. She knew better than to lose track of her depth. Out there, her life depended on a constant awareness of exactly how deep she was. Together she and Alex sank back to thirty meters. Off to their right, the three gray shapes drifted with them. Would she ever get used to it, she thought, as she released a bit of air into her bag to stop her descent.
“Alex,” she said.
There was no response.
“Alex!” She tapped the back of her console several times.
“Alex!” Nothing but silence.
Alex placed himself in front of Margo and looked into her face mask. With his right hand, he formed a circle with thumb and forefinger. His three other fingers extended straight up.
Margo returned the sign indicating she was all right while nodding vigorously. Then she pointed to her ear and lifted her console, tapping the back. Alex fumbled at his ear, then tapped his console, and then shook his head.
Great, Margo thought. EFComis busted just when we really need it. Not busted, she corrected herself, just asubmerged antenna. She pointed to the three menacing shapes off to her right. Alex turned and scanned around them. Above and just behind them, the blue-painted hull of their boat bobbed in the gentle waves. About twenty meters ahead of them hung a smooth, horizontal fluorescent orange tube about one meter in diameter. To the left, it stretched into the gloom; to the right, it angled downward. The fluorescent tube was attached to a slender cable angling up to the shadow of a buoy just beneath the surface to their right. Alex turned back toward Margo, making an exaggerated shrug.
Margo reached for her dive console again and pressed a button located prominently on its face. The three sharks turned and commenced a meandering movement toward the two divers. Their front fins extended stiffly downward at about forty-five degrees. Their backs arched slightly, and their blunt snouts moved back and forth as they approached.
Margo felt her hair stand up on the nape of her neck. She turned to Alex and motioned him to her side. Alex withdrew a telescoped baton from its holder at his waist and extended it to its full one-and-a-half-meter length. He checked the safety lever near its handle, and with his thumb he flicked the lever so it pointed forward. As the sharks drew nearer, he held the stick out in front of him, pointed in their direction. Margo glanced around them again and pushed her console button once more. Alex waved the stick about slowly, and then steadied up on the nearest of the three menacing monsters.
Suddenly, with blurring speed, the nearest shark attacked. Alex struck out with his stick, the jolt of its impact rocking him backward. A sharp crack was followed by a hissing sound as carbon dioxide rushed into the shark’s body. In the same moment, flashes of silvery-black streaked from several directions. One of the remaining sharks was struck broadside by a dolphin’s blunt nose. In a flash, it disappeared.
The animal Alex had injected rolled on its side and began a crazed, uncontrolled spiral toward the surface thirty meters above them. On its way up, it was hit several times by charging dolphins. It expired of massive embolisms before reaching fifteen meters. In the melee, the third shark vanished.
Margo reached out for Alex, grabbed a handful of breathing bag, and pulled him close to her. She placed the flat of her full-face mask against his and looked deeply into his eyes, as close to a kiss as she could come under the circumstances. Even down here, they were deep blue. Several bubbles escaped from the positive pressure maintained inside their masks and shimmered their way toward the surface, expanding rapidly as they rose.
Like an old-time scubadiver, Margo thought, watching the rising silvery spheres. Instinctively she checked the volume in her breathing bag and glanced at the gauge on her tiny, ultra-high-pressure air flask. She found she was holding her breath, and as she felt the need to breathe, a gentle pressure developed against her back. She pulled back and turned to confront a two-and-a-half-meter-long dolphin nudging her from behind.
It was one of four that had responded to her sonic signal—George, her favorite. The other three dolphins crowded in around the neoprene and nylon suited divers, jostling each other for attention. Margo rubbed the head dome of each and indicated to Alex that he should do the same. Then the two of them turned their attention back to the tube suspended in front of them.
Alex swam to the angled portion and began to search along the tube’s length, descending slowly. Margo dropped her arm from George’s neck and kicked in Alex’s direction, keeping him in sight, but staying between him and the surface. The four cetaceans arrowed toward the surface and grabbed a gulp of air, then settled back down, playfully cycling between Alex and Margo, gently jostling them. About thirty minutes later, Alex motioned Margo to join him. She released a bubble of air from her bag and dropped down beside him. Her console showed a depth of fifty meters. Alex pointed to a five-centimeter rip in the bottom curve of the tube’s fluorescent covering.
Margo reached into a deep pocket located on the left leg of her suit and withdrew a role of patching tape. Alex stretched the edges of the tear, and Margo applied a strip of self-sealing tape along the opening. Then she located a small pneumatic valve on the top of the tube and attached a hose from her spare air tank. On a signal from Alex, she released air into the tube, forcing water out through a one-way valve on the underside. She stopped when bubbles escaped from the lower valve.
As the tube rose slowly, Margo held on, keeping track of their progress on her console. They stopped rising when the gauge read thirty meters. Margo felt the tube—it was taut and solid. She tapped the back of her console, listening for the faint rush of sound in her ears. Nothing. She pointed to the back of her console and then her ear, and shook her head. Alex offered another of his exaggerated underwater shrugs and grinned, although the only part of the grin she could see was his crinkled eyes. She grinned back and pointed toward the suspension buoy and their boat, making an angled upward sign with her free hand. Alex nodded, checked his console, and they both headed back, slowly rising as they swam.
Margo saw Alex check his console from time to time, making certain they kept below the ever-changing ceiling limit it calculated for him. Since she had remained shallower than Alex for most of the dive, she knew she would be safe following his lead. She looked around at the four dolphins. Her earlier fright was gone, and she simply enjoyed George’s protective nearness and the playful bumps and nudges from the others.
On the surface finally, Alex dropped his face mask down around his neck, fully inflated his bag, and grinned at Margo. “Close call down there!”
Margo shoved her face mask down and patted the glistening snout that appeared in front of her. “Thanks, George. I love you too.”
The dolphin mewed a pleased response, lifted his body out of the water, and backed away, chattering as he went. The other three animals circled at and below the surface, keeping watch over their human charges.
“What happened to the EFCom?” Margo asked. “I expected it to come back online as soon as the antenna surfaced.”
“Broken antenna wire, I imagine,” Alex answered.
“Storm damage, I’m sure,” said Margo, as they turned and headed toward the waiting vessel.
“Probably,” agreed Alex. “But that wasn’t a burst seam,” he added.
“Yeah, maybe the sinking tube snapped the wire.”
Actually, tube flotation chambers flooded regularly. They had patched a full ten percent of them since the project started. But it was a bit unusual to find a rip on the tube bottom, and the Electrostatic Field Communication (“EFCom”) transceivers on the buoys almost always survived.
∞
The EFCom buoy nearest the tear had ceased transmitting, and the buoys on either side of the tear had signaled their departure from datum a day earlier. Alex had opted to employ an electrostatic field communication system because of its clear underwater signal transmission capability that was independent of acoustic conditions since it didn’t rely on sound transmission through the water. Every buoy, each skimmer and floater, and every diver was outfitted with one of the small EFCom transceivers. Alex had inspected the non-transmitting buoy personally during an overflight from Jarvis Island. There was nothing visible on the two kilometers of surface between the buoys; they were closer together, but not so that it was visible to the eye. Nevertheless, the remaining 1,828-odd buoy-suspended kilometers of tube were stressing from the downward pull of the waterlogged section. The buoy near the tear was several meters underwater.
Suspended inside the flotation tube were two virtually impervious, lightweight, hose-like tubes, each about six centimeters in diameter, called vacuum sheaths. Two shallow channels jutted out from the bottom of each vacuum sheath, filled with electronically-controlled suspending magnets. Magnetically suspended inside each vacuum sheath was a five-centimeter tube of segmented soft iron officially called the rotor, but more popularly known as the ribbon, so named from the earliest conceptions back in the 1980s of the Launch Loop inventor, Keith Lofstrom. Alex was eager to check continuity readings to make certain the vacuum sheaths had not breached. They were not yet evacuated, but seawater entry at this stage would seriously delay the entire project. If the EFCom had not crapped out, the tests would already be underway.
Alex glanced ahead at Margo Jackson, cavorting with her four dolphins as they made their leisurely way back to the waiting boat. His field engineer in charge of underwater construction was a remarkable female. Nearly as tall as his own 183 centimeters, her model’s slender figure, encased in electric-blue nylon-covered neoprene, seemed to lack feminine curves. He knew differently, of course, having joined her bikini-clad person from time to time for morning swims since the project began over two years ago.
The project—Alex had lived with it for three years before actual construction began. Longer, actually, if you considered dreams—since before the incredible, worldwide bi-millennial celebration, when he still was a young boy.
There was the nearly simultaneous publication in America and England of practically identical ideas in 1985. Paul Birch published an article in TheJournal of the British Interplanetary Society, while in America, Keith Lofstrom published his article in a supplement to The Journal of the Astronautical Sciences, he recalled. Nobody could agree on the names: Skyrail, Launch Loop, Beanstalk. There were others, but the idea is what counted, the sky-shaking idea that you don’t need rockets to get into space.
Newspapers were full of explanations three-and-a-half years ago when the aging president of a computer software giant made the announcement. He would funnel a significant portion of company profits into the consortium. Space travel would become as commonplace and inexpensive as the personal computers his pioneering work had made possible. He went on to outline the easy-to-understand concept.
Imagine a water hose streaming water in a parabolic arch. Deflect the water and funnel it back to the start through a pump, creating a closed system. Make the stream strong enough and the hose light enough, and the entire structure will support itself—the water holding up the hose structure. Now, replace the water with a thin, closed-loop pipe of segmented soft iron. Make it 5,000 kilometers around and accelerate it to orbital velocity with gigantic linear induction motors from two points on the equator 2,000 kilometers apart. The center section of the structure, including both the outgoing and return legs of the loop, will rise to about eighty kilometers above the Earth. Supply access to the upstream end in space with a Kevlar-hung elevator, and you can launch capsules by magnetically coupling them to the rapidly moving iron pipe.
Slingshot, they called it. The greatest engineering undertaking in the history of the world, they said.
As the on-scene project manager, Alex was responsible for getting the job done, on schedule, on budget. He was building a gossamer structure over 2,500 kilometers long, a frail spider web, completely invisible when viewed from more than a few kilometers. Alex grinned wryly. All Slingshot really consisted of was a fancy evacuated tube, a flexible iron pipe, four linear drivers and their power sources, some guy wires, and a couple of elevators. Put that way, it seemed simple enough. But, of course, it wasn’t simple at all, and for all his skill and engineering competence, and despite surface appearances, deep down, Alex was not entirely sure that he could make it happen.
Margo and Alex climbed up the ladder and onto Skimmer One’s bobbing fantail. This was one of two skimmers on the project—twelve-meter-long surface-effect boats that looked more like a floating aircraft than a traditional motorboat. They were capable of 200 knots, skimming about one-and-a-half meters over the wave tops. They had a small open fantail, just large enough for a couple of divers to doff their gear. Being on the fantail when the skimmer was on its cushion was more than dangerous, and was strictly prohibited throughout the project.
Alex signaled to the waiting coxswain, and they got underway for Baker, plowing through the water while Alex and Margo remained exposed. He and Margo stood near the stern railing and removed their dripping skins. Alex looked back at the buoys, now presumably in their proper places.
“How many more times?” Alex looked quizzically at Margo.
“Who knows?” She glanced back at the bobbing buoys. “We have repair people available at both ends. We shouldn’t be doing this ourselves, you know.” She turned and looked directly at Alex. “What do you think—weather or sabotage?”
Alex shrugged and tossed the spent carbon dioxide cartridge from his shark stick in the general direction of the cavorting dolphins. “I wanted to see for myself, and I still don’t know. Does it matter? We can’t patrol the entire eighteen-hundred-twenty-eight kilometer length anyway.”
“What are we dealing with?” Margo asked. “You don’t get out here in a rowboat.”
“We’re two thousand wet klicks from any kind of civilization,” Alex said. “At minimum, that’s a large motor-yacht or even an ocean sailer—you know, one of those we maybe can afford when this job is done.” He sighed. “We’re dealing with lots of money and someone with a major bitch.”
He looked into her green eyes.
“Just keep my tubes at depth.” His blue eyes flashed, and he turned toward the cockpit to radio his orders to test pipe continuity.
∞
Margo dropped her eyes at his challenge. For the thousandth time, she asked herself if she had bitten off more than she could chew with this assignment. Was it her fault that the flotation chambers kept ripping? Was she missing something important? Was she copping out to imply there might have been sabotage? And yet, Alex seemed to agree that it might be sabotage. When she joined the project two years ago, the newspapers had acclaimed her as the ideal role model for the new twenty-first-century woman. At times that burden lay heavily on her shoulders, as it did now, she reflected.
It was a vast responsibility, and there was no way one person actually could control all of it at once. How Alex handled the weight of the entire project awed her, but she was careful never to let him know.
Margo watched Alex step into the cockpit. He was tall and slender, richly tanned from his constant outdoor work. She felt a softness well up inside her, a gentle warmth spreading out from the pit of her stomach. She bit her lower lip and turned angrily to lean on the after-railing.
None of that, she chided herself. This assignment was too important, and the stakes too high, to let any kind of emotion intrude. As she entered the cabin and sealed the port, the skipper switched modes, and pressurized air quickly filled the hard-sided skirt. In moments the skimmer lifted out of the water, except for the port and starboard skirts that protruded about a meter into the waves. Within seconds, high-pressure water nozzles jetted water from the end of each skirt, and within thirty seconds, Skimmer One was approaching 200 knots.
As Skimmer One headed into the afternoon sun, trailing an arrow-straight wake of white foam, Margo stood looking aft through the sealed port, remembering her instinctive sharing, and their underwater kiss following the fright of nearly becoming shark food. She shook off the sensation and busied herself with putting away their diving equipment. But a hint of a smile remained on her lips as they shot over the surface, finally settling back onto the water as they entered the small protected artificial harbor on the west side of Baker Island, just south of a shallow reef that went dry at low tide.
CHAPTER TWO
IMAGE 3—Apex end of the Western Complex—About fifty kilometers further west, the two arms of the Complex meet at the far side of a twenty-kilometer-wide circle
WESTERN COMPLEX—300 KM WEST OF BAKER ISLAND
“H
ey, Alex! Got control of those tubes yet?” Klaus Blumenfeld stretched out a massive helping hand, his gray eyes twinkling.
Alex glanced at the big man’s uncovered, shaven head. “You’re going to burn that top yet, Old Boy.”
He stepped down from the floater’s cockpit to the pontoon and across to the dock, matching the pace of the tall German engineer as they made their way along the floating catwalk that marked the underwater location of the tube complex, toward a protruding hatch at the intersecting walkway in front of them.
“Like the Schimmelreiter,” Klaus said with a grin.
At Alex’s puzzled look, he added, “You know, the ghost rider in Thomas Mann’s famous novel.”
The hatch did resemble a hooded ghost’s head, looming up from the catwalk, its recessed door lost in dark shadow.
The wheel on the massive oval submarine hatch turned smoothly. Klaus swung the door out and motioned Alex to precede him down the steep staircase or “ladder,” as Klaus insisted on using nautical terminology. Once inside, he closed the outer hatch and joined Alex at the bottom of the ladder some five meters down. He glanced at a monitor panel on the bulkhead, and when the lights had all turned green, opened the hatch in the wall. Alex and Klaus passed through the hatch into a small chamber with a large oval pressure-door that Klaus called a “seal,” set into the opposite wall. Klaus palmed a plate on the bulkhead and, with a faint hiss of compressed air, the seal twisted slightly and slid back into the tube wall.
They stepped through the opening into a chamber that served as both a pressure lock and elevator. To the right were three plates: S for Surface, L for Lock, and T for Tube. The S glowed with a bluish light; Klaus touched L, and the seal closed behind them. A rush of air greeted them. Alex swallowed to clear his ears, and Klaus just yawned and touched T. Alex felt a slight downward motion, and in about thirty seconds, the seal hissed open to reveal the spacious living quarters suspended halfway between the surface and the massive two-kilometer-long linear induction motor Klaus was constructing.
They stepped out into a thickly carpeted passageway, a five-meter-diameter tube that stretched directly out from the combination pressure lock and elevator. Another five-meter carpeted tube stretched to the left. Every few meters, large portholes pierced the curving bulkheads so that the passageways were bathed in eerie, flickering green light. They strode down the left tube, past several portholes, and turned right through an open pressure seal into a small chamber. Klaus palmed a plate on the bulkhead. With a faint hiss, the seal behind them closed, and a few moments later, one in front of them opened.
“Safety first!” Klaus grinned at Alex as they stepped through the emergency airlock into his personal living quarters. Alex had ordered that all living quarter airlocks be interlocked to close automatically should one of the interconnecting tubes breach.
The wall before them was entirely transparent. It looked out over the construction activity through water so clear that it hardly seemed to be there at all. Off to the right, divers assisted a submersible in emplacing a section of tubing. Their back-mounted twin gills twinkled with reflected morning sunlight. The main tube stretched to the right, vanishing in the watery distance. It was punctuated by periodic blisters that formed individual living modules currently occupied by the construction crew, but slated for power plant personnel once the system became operational. To the left, just visible through the transparent wall, their tube extended for 200 meters to intersect the massive vertical Ocean Thermal Energy Converter, or OTEC cylinder as they called it, that started four meters above the surface and ended a thousand meters below. It was a hundred meters in diameter and could be seen clearly through the transparent water to the left.
Alex stood gazing through the wall at the frenzied panorama before him. A classic Beatles song floated through the slightly compressed air surrounding them while Klaus built a head on the beer he handed to Alex.
“Easy to make a head at this depth,” he said with a grin, wiping the foam off his upper lip with a massive hand. “But you should try it at one hundred meters! The bottle sucks air in when you open it!”
“Come on, Klaus....”
“No, really. At that depth, room pressure exceeds bottle pressure. It sucks, let me tell you!”
Both men laughed, and Klaus sat at his desk, turning his chair to look out the transparent wall, while Alex sat in an overstuffed chair facing Klaus.
“Well,” said Alex, “Margo got the tubes back to thirty meters this morning. Lost anchor buoys are giving us more problems than I anticipated, you know.” He crossed his legs. “I’m beginning to come around to Margo’s perspective that there’s more than ocean waves and coincidence at work here.”
“Are we talking pirates and peg-legs?”
“How about ocean sailers with big money backing?” Alex sighed, feeling the weight of his job. “What’s your situation now?”
Klaus reached behind the desk and pulled out a roll of blueprint drawings. He could have called them up on his Link, but he preferred the substantial feel of the older drawings. Alex never could understand the real reason for Klaus’ anachronism, but Klaus was the best, and the paper came with the territory.
Klaus unrolled the drawings on the deck between them and anchored the curling edges with their beer mugs. Several dark circles on the drawings testified to Klaus’ usual mode of work.
“Here we are,” said Klaus, his large hand spread out over a tear-drop-shaped circular feature with its large end about twenty kilometers across and its smaller end drawn to a point about sixty kilometers to the east. “We’ve been lucky, you know.”
Alex raised an eyebrow.
“Look at it this way. My work area at this end is spread out over more than six hundred square kilometers....”
“Wait a minute!” interjected Alex. “Ninety-five percent of what you do takes place right here.” He pointed to the small area in the apex of the point. “That’s one square kilometer at the most...give me a break!” He picked up his beer and took a swig. “And most of that is right out there.” He gestured at the activity taking place outside the transparent wall.
“Okay, Alex, okay. But let’s assume a man is hurt right here.” Klaus pointed to the farthest section of the semicircular deflector. “At best, that’s a half-hour trip, even using the skimmer.” Klaus jammed his finger first at the westernmost end of the deflector and then at the downslope at the structure apex where the two linear induction motors were located. “I need two floaters, Alex, two of them!”
“Klaus, Klaus...the cost! Two planes, the pilots, fuel—that’s a small fortune, man. Don’t you know that?”
“Ja! And make one of them a Fräulein!” Klaus grinned and bumped mugs with Alex. “To the Fräulein pilot!”
Klaus let the top drawing roll up. The second one was a detail containing just the semicircular deflector, a thirty-two-kilometer-long rigid structure formed of powerful electromagnets designed to deflect the rapidly moving tube of segmented soft iron in a 180-degree reversal.
“The electromagnets are going in place this week; actually, should be done by day-after-tomorrow.” Klaus got up and walked over in front of the transparent wall, his back to Alex. “We can test continuity then, but we’re still behind schedule on the well. Give me more men,” he turned and grinned at Alex, “and I’ll do it faster.”
Alex exposed the next drawing. It showed a plan view of a hundred-meter-wide Ocean Thermal Energy Converter with its attendant surface structures. It also showed a foreshortened orthogonal view of the entire structure. Alex worked with it every day, but it still boggled his mind. The massive ferro-cement tube extended a kilometer down into the deep, a gigantic well suspended in the ocean. Surface waters in the well heated by the sun’s rays expanded convectively and flowed out the structure through spillways at the surface. This water was replaced by dense cold water that flowed up through the tube from one kilometer below, turning large turbine blades as it passed, generating massive amounts of power. Power to drive the linear induction motors at this end of Slingshot, to bend the ribbon in its path around the semicircular deflector. Sufficient power to supply a medium-size city, almost five hundred megawatts, like a nuke plant or a large coal plant.
“Have you experienced further problems with the well?” Alex pointed to the orthogonal view of the massive generator.
“Not since the bad shipment of syntactic foam, the batch that collapsed under pressure last week.” Klaus turned around and shrugged. “What the hell, Alex! Nobody’s ever done it before. Bound to be some problems, what?” He grinned. “Now, what about those extra men? I really need them to get back on schedule.”
“I can’t, Klaus. I’m sorry, but there’s just no way.”
“Not even using the money we saved with my modifications?” Klaus’ shoulders drooped a bit.
“Klaus, what you did was magnificent. No! I really mean that. It really was!”
Klaus tried to interrupt.
“Hold on, friend. You conceived of using syntactic foam spherules as binding material in the ferro-cement. That was a stroke of genius. It’s made the difference between staying on schedule and budget instead of whatever-the-hell.” Alex smiled warmly at his friend. “But there still is no way I can hire on more underwater workers.” Alex held up his hand as Klaus was about to speak. “I may be able to find two or three in Margo’s crew...”
Klaus burst into smiles, the sag gone.
“On loan, of course, against your budget.”
The German’s smile remained where it was. He held up his nearly empty mug. “Danke, Margo. I love you!”
Outside, the submersible backed away from the emplaced tube section. The divers disappeared through a hatch in the tube’s side. The faint sound of rushing air could be heard inside the snug living room where the men continued their discussion. Unseen from their vantage point, water rushed out through wells extending through the tube’s underside. When bubbles started pouring through these openings, the rushing stopped. A school of brightly colored fish chased the flashing bubbles swirling up the curved tube walls, but they stopped short as the silver spheres broke free and headed toward the surface.
“I’ll have to inspect that tube section now,” said Klaus. “Those boys are good, but when they know I’m looking over their shoulders, they’re even better.” He grinned apologetically. “You can come, if you want.”
Alex knew better than to take him up on his offer. This was the German’s area of responsibility. His men had to know that the buck stopped with Klaus.
Alex stood to go, leaving the blueprints on the table. “I know my way out.” He headed for the airlock.
Klaus turned toward the opposite wall, looking over his shoulder. “I’m going to swim over. Keeps them on their toes, not knowing where I’ll show up next.”
He passed through a doorway as Alex stepped into the lock. As the seal slid into place, Alex saw Klaus laying out his skins and gills.
CHAPTER THREE
IMAGE 4—Baker Island showing locations of the various facilities
BAKER ISLAND—MARGO JACKSON’S QUARTERS
M
argo stood in front of a large picture window surveying the panoramic spectacle of long Pacific rollers breaking against the exposed coral reef on the northwest side of Baker Island. Her quarters were housed in a low, chalk-white building perched atop a bluff five meters above a rugged tidal flat. At high tide, breakers rolled across the shallow reef, churning white here and there, but always reforming, picking up momentum, to dash against the sun-bleached coral barrier below her window. But now, across the rugged expanse of brown coral, living polyps struggled to survive their exposure to the noontime tropical sun while the long breakers spent themselves against the reef boundary 200 meters further out.
Margo’s gaze focused on the horizon. Sixty-seven kilometers beyond the breakers lay Howland, and some three thousand kilometers beyond Howland lay Honolulu. Amelia’s next leg, she thought, and turned to the framed photo on the wall behind her.
“What happened that you missed Howland? Where are you now?”
Margo was troubled by the puzzling disappearance so many years ago. TIGHAR claimed to have solved the mystery back in the nineties. Members of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery had discovered artifacts on Nikumaroro Island that eventually convinced them Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had somehow reached its shores, some 550 kilometers south of Howland. Margo was not overwhelmed by the evidence. Noonan was one of the finest aerial navigators in the world. His last message to the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, standing off the eastern end of Howland, was: “KHAQQ calling Itasca. We must be on you, but cannot see you…gas is low….”
To Margo, this did not sound like they were hundreds of kilometers off vector. She watched a line of squalls passing the island several kilometers out. Thunderheads dominated the pattern, moving with the squalls like sentinels of doom. A bolt of lightning flickered between two looming cloud towers. Then a flash caught her eye, and she squinted against the noontime glare to make out a small plane banking toward the island.
“Be careful, Alex,” she whispered as she turned to her Link.
With a sigh, she slipped into the straight-backed chair in front of her Victorian-style desk and tapped her Link pad. The space above her keyboard shimmered momentarily. Sparkling points of light coalesced, and then the wall behind her desk faded behind a three-dimensional image of the 1,828-kilometer-long submerged tube complex that had become her sole reason for existence.
The orthogonal birds-eye view arrived at her Link courtesy of GS32, hanging in orbit some 40,000 kilometers overhead. The occasional sparkle on the translucent ocean surface was actual sunlight glinting off a wave. Eighteen-hundred-twenty-eight buoys appeared as tiny specks identifiable only because they formed a continuous line stretching between Baker and Jarvis Islands.
Margo touched her pad, and a faint grid appeared on the ocean surface. The Equator, glowing red, crossed the line of buoys at a shallow angle to the east about halfway to Jarvis Island. She touched the pad again, and the picture zoomed out, revealing the east coast of New Guinea and the Port of Lae, some 4,100 kilometers west and slightly south of Howland. And Nikumaroro Island, about 600 kilometers almost due south. She moved her cursor to hover near Nikumaroro.
“Did you end up here, Amelia?” she murmured. “Is this where you spent your last days while the world searched up here?” She moved the cursor north to the wide end of a purple wedge that started at Lae and terminated with a 500-kilometer-wide cross-section centered on Howland. The wedge contained Baker Island and the growing deflector complex west of Baker. Margo zoomed in on the complex.
Her Link-enhanced satellite image clearly showed the large circular opening of the thermal generator. She tapped her pad, and the Link superimposed a shimmering structure around and above the generator. It looked like a symmetrical teardrop with its point located 330 kilometers west of Baker. The OTEC generator was nestled in its point. A faint line exited the point, angling into the sky at about fifteen degrees. A faint vertical line connected the middle of Baker Island with the sloping line eighty kilometers above the surface.
Margo tapped her pad to zoom the picture out. The faint structure followed the line of buoys for 1,828 kilometers to Jarvis Island, where it joined another vertical line emanating from that island’s center, and then sloped down to a mirror image of the structure west of Baker.
It seemed so small and delicate when viewed this way. Twenty-five-hundred klicks; so vulnerable…to wind, to wave…. She paused in her thoughts and glanced out at the receding squalls. …and to sabotage…. A worried frown settled across her face.
She had found the break on the underside of the tube. How did it get there? They were nowhere near normal shipping lanes, and besides, the break was on the underside; so how did it happen? For now, she decided to write it off to natural causes, but she resolved to undertake a statistical analysis of all the breaks thus far. If it really was sabotage, she needed to know. But it seemed so unlikely. After all, who would care? Who could possibly benefit from damaging Slingshot? Even the Green community seemed to be supporting their project, perhaps because Slingshot would significantly reduce rocket propellant exhaust in the atmosphere. Sabotage seemed so unlikely; but the analysis would show something, she decided, as she turned to listen to footsteps crunching through the crushed coral walkway leading to her door.
The door opened, framing Alex’s silhouette against the noonday brightness.
“Margo!” Alex grinned at her as he strode into the room.
A faint whiff of ozone mixed with aviation fuel accompanied him. He turned and looked out the picture window.
“You definitely have the best view for two thousand klicks in any direction.” He spread his arms as if to encompass the receding thunderheads.
“Drink?” Margo asked, walking toward an antique cabinet against the wall.
“Got any more of that Islay you picked up last month in Sydney?”
Alex glanced at Margo’s Link. “Earhart again…” He grinned at her as she handed him a fluted Glen Cairn Glass containing a clear dark amber liquid.
Margo shrugged. “The mystery isn’t getting any less mysterious.” She pointed to Nikumaroro Island. “How could they possibly have gotten down here, Alex? That’s almost eight-and-a-half degrees off course.” She was referring to the difference in vectors from Lae to Howland Island and Nikumaroro Island. “You certainly wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, and Noonan was as good as they got back then.”
Alex held up his Glen Cairn Glass in a toast. “Maybe that’s the keyword…back then.”
Margo finished pouring herself a glass of Columbia Gorge Merlot, and returned the salute; sunlight sparkled through the deep red liquid. She reached out and tapped her pad as Alex inhaled the pungent fumes collected in his Glen Cairn Glass. The satellite view of Slingshot disappeared, replaced by a translucent, double-layered chessboard with a game several moves in progress. “Do you have time?” she asked.
“Depends,” he answered, “on whether you or your Link made the last move.” His eyes twinkled.
Margo feigned hurt and retorted, “How else can a girl challenge the MIT Hyperchess champion?”
She sat down in front of the mid-air image and tapped her pad. Most of her white pieces still occupied the upper field where they started when the game commenced. The white-queen-bishop-pawn faded from the white square it occupied on the upper field to the white square directly beneath it, where it faced an array of black opponents.
Alex studied the display for a while and then looked at Margo in admiration. “For a duffer, that’s pretty sharp.” And then he added, “That’s not fair of me, Margo, that’s a sharp move, plain and simple. I’m impressed.”
He turned back to the display. After a short while of study, he tapped his pad. The black-king-knight moved from its original black square to white-king-bishop-three and faded to the white square on the field above it. Alex leaned back and smiled, inhaling the fumes from his Glen Cairn Glass before letting a few drops of the precious amber liquid engulf his taste buds.
Margo sipped her wine and leaned forward, frowning. She reminded herself that knights always faded—each move placed them on the opposite field and the opposite square color. All the other pieces either transited by fading to the opposite field, making a move, and fading back to the original field, or they just faded, but not both. She faded her queen-bishop from its normally black square to the black one below—so bishops retained their square-color dependence, but knights took on a color dependence determined by which field they occupied.
Alex’s next move placed his knight under Margo’s king; a translucent cylinder appeared around her king. It was caged, and unless she could capture the caging knight with one of her own, she would inevitably lose the game. She studied the display for several minutes, and then she saw it. Instead of trying to capture the caging knight, if she could distract Alex for one move, she could cage his king in a mating move. But, of course, his game was so good that he probably would see the distraction for what it was. So…how about a second-order distraction?
“Do you think we have a lot in common?” she asked him, holding her glass of Merlot up to the light, turning it, letting the sunlight illuminate its ruby redness. “I mean, Merlot is robust and hearty…you know, the connoisseurs turn up their noses; and Islay, well, Highland it’s not.” She tapped her pad idly, jumping her knight to the upper field, while her eyes twinkled as she offered him a toast.
“To taste...not good taste!” She touched her goblet to his Glen Cairn Glass. They both sipped.
“Dirty pool, Margo!” Alex said. And he faded his king exactly as she hoped he would.
“Mate in three moves!” Margo said with an impish grin.
And it was.
∞
“Down to business.”
Alex stood up and began pacing across the room, silhouetted against the panoramic view of the rising tide over the reef outside the window. Waves were beginning to break over the rough brown surface. Here and there, boiling green water churned up through and across the exposed coral, only to be sucked down again between delicate branches of living rock. A faint mist formed over the entire shelf as it seemed to sink ever so slowly into the sea.
“Klaus is close to activating OTEC West. He’s having problems, too, you know.”
Alex folded his hands across his chest and then stretched them over his head, palms extended upward. Margo’s heart skipped a beat, and she forced herself to concentrate on business.
Alex continued, “Nothing definite yet; just a vague feeling that things are happening that shouldn’t.”
Margo nodded. “Tell me about it.”
She got up and moved her lanky frame to the couch where she sat, propping her legs up. “I’m essentially ready for power, you know.”
Alex looked at her and nodded.
“The rail’s in place,” she continued, “and properly suspended along the entire eighteen hundred twenty-eight klick path. The west deflector section is in place, and my people are working hard on the east deflector section as we speak.” She swung her feet to the floor. “We’re setting the west T-anchors now, and as soon as Klaus can get me power, we can start connecting the tensioners. Half of them are on Baker, and Klaus is holding the other half for me.”
Alex sat down at Margo’s Link and tapped the pad. The Hyperchess game was replaced with a scheduling flow chart. He entered several notations, and then solicited more detailed information about the exact status of Margo’s side of the project. Margo pulled up a chair near him, and for an hour or so, they concentrated on the details of the underwater elements of Slingshot for which Margo was responsible. She tried hard not to respond to Alex’s closeness.
Suddenly the display flashed, and a three-dimensional image of Klaus’ polished pate appeared in the upper-right corner. Margo pushed her chair back and stood up, moving out of the Link scanner’s range. The move was instinctive; she didn’t know why she did it.
“Alex…I was expecting Margo…Is she there? Are you guys alone?” the simulacrum asked.
“Margo’s here. What’s up?” Alex waved Margo to the display.
“I need you out here, Alex. Something has come up…and bring Margo. I think she needs to see this.”
“What is it?” Alex’s voice sounded clipped.
“Not over the Link, Alex.”
The entire operation used normal security precautions. Link connections were routinely encoded to level three, more for data integrity than anything else, since the correlation circuits at level three virtually ensured that no transmission could be lost. Although it was widely believed that security at this level was complete, insiders knew that a determined expert could hack into the system, but could not change anything without leaving evidence of the intrusion. It was odd, though, that Klaus was unwilling to discuss his information over the Link.
Margo’s thoughts flashed to the torn tube.
“Hi, Margo!”
The simulacrum smiled in Margo’s direction. It was a remarkable illusion, she thought, as she answered back.
“Hi, yourself, Klaus!” She smiled self-consciously. “We’re on our way.” She lifted her eyebrows at Alex.
He nodded.
“Have a microbrew ready,” she ordered good-naturedly.
BAKER ISLAND—AIRSTRIP
A
lex popped an Alim on his way out the door. “No sense taking chances,” he said, as they hopped into a white pickup and drove along the berm to the airstrip still leftover from before World War II, but enlarged and fully modernized now.
By the time his engines started up, any residual alcohol from the scotch he had consumed had been converted to simple sugars in his liver. He taxied to the end of the strip on wheels extending through the plane’s pontoon floats and revved his engines.
CHAPTER FOUR
AIRBORNE TO WESTERN COMPLEX
N
ormally Alex would have taken the skimmer, but at its best, it could do about 200 knots, making the Western Complex about an hour away. Since his amphib cruised nearly twice as fast, there was no contest. Klaus’ urgency dictated the fifty percent savings in time. Alex banked right out of a steep climb and headed just south of west. He pressed a button on his console, and a flashing pip appeared in his heads-up display just left of the centerline indicator. He adjusted his course slightly and set the autopilot.
The sky was pale blue and shimmered somewhat in the noontime tropical sun. The passing squall had left a fine mist in the air that scattered the sunlight, softening the line where sky met sea, surrounding them with an ethereal glow.
∞
