The Golden Globe

So already this elevator is different, right? In fact, Noon elevators departed every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Only here, Noon was a destination as well as a time. It's a source of great confusion in communication, but it's solidly entrenched by now, and the Oberoni don't seem to mind it.

The huge partly finished clock face that is Oberon seen from space is the original Twelve and Six spokes, Twelve being flanked by spokes going to Eleven and to One, Six being between Five and Seven. Got it? The one designated as the twelve o'clock position is known as Noon Arc, and the other is Six Arc. People from Twelve are called Nooners. People from Six are called Aussies. I don't know why.

I boarded with plenty of time to spare, found a seat, and strapped in. I spent my time looking out the window until the hatch was sealed. The elevator was only half full, on this level, anyway.

The deck under my feet began to flash in pale blue letters: FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. A bell sounded, and I sank gratefully into my chair as the car accelerated. Nice to be back in some gravity again.

"All clear," came a voice, and most of the people around me unbuckled and got up. So did I. The acceleration was mild, and didn't last for long. It was quickly followed by another period of weightlessness. The whole trip would be like that.

An elevator moving up and down the spoke of a spi

Now they had a new type of car. What it had to do was quickly and smoothly adjust to acceleration and deceleration, and to transform itself from a weightless environment to a 0.4 gee environment during the length of the trip.

There is no way I could describe all the ingenious dodges the engineers did to pull this off. If that was all they did, it would be impressive enough. But the car also had to be able to start and stop during the trip, and it had to deal with the angular force of Oberon's rotation. Just how this works is far beyond me, but you can see how the turning motion of the spoke would result in gradually increasing weight. It's called, I think, the Coriolanus Force, though why they should name it after him is beyond me. It produces a ride that even seasoned spacers sometimes find hard to take.

I was thinking of taking the elevator—the internal elevator—up to another level when the bell sounded again. A wall—I was pretty sure it had been the "ceiling" when we started—began to flash FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. The wall I was pretty sure had been the FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR when I sat down now had no chairs attached to it. I couldn't think where they had gone; stolen while my back was turned, no doubt. But being only "pretty sure" of one's location and attitude was a common experience in zero gee, so I didn't worry about it. I was reassured when chairs began sprouting from the new FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR, some of them with sleeping people already strapped in. I kicked over to one, turned my feet to touch the FLOOR3, and felt the weight return to me gradually. Which meant we were slowing down again already, right? Well, it would seem so, but from inside the elevator it was hard to tell just what was happening. I felt a moment of nausea when we abruptly went weightless again—meaning we were now motionless?—and felt that superb lunch turn a cartwheel in my stomach. But the urge to purge went away. I've always had good space legs.

If you think you have good equilibrium as well, the Noon elevator is a good place to give it an acid test. Many a traveler have been humbled by the constantly shifting tides of the trip. The Oberoni call the condition C-sickness. About a quarter of the passengers were wearing Chuck-O-Laters, basically heavy-duty barf bags that strap over your face like a gas mask, with a constant suction and replaceable trap. In spite of them and in spite of the Herculean efforts of cleaning robots, the Noon elevator always smells faintly of vomit.

Soon we were under way again—a new FLOOR, with new people sleeping in new chairs—and I took the elevator up six floors to the casino. That trip was a tummy-twister in itself.

What a delightful place the casino was. I've seen craps played in weightlessness, and in one-sixth gee, and 0.4 gee. But never had I seen craps tables and roulette wheels that had to quickly change from one state to the other. The place was a blur of motion and a haze of smoke and flashing lights, and it seemed every ten minutes or so it would all reorient itself, the croupiers would put away the gravity dice and wheels and break out the zero-gee stuff. It was fascinating to watch. Soon I was hopelessly disoriented, but it hardly seemed to matter.

I spent the next hour on a tour of the various levels. There were staterooms, sleeping berths, six restaurants, a carnival and game rooms for children, an infirmary, and movie theaters. No pool, though. The Oberoni engineers were not quite up to that one. And no legitimate stage.

The trip is five hundred miles. The elevator makes it in an average of five hours. It would do it a lot faster but for the constant stops and starts needed to avoid collision with the spiders. I wanted to see one. A steward told me they usually encountered one close enough to see, and directed me to the forward observation bubble. It was the first place I'd been to that gave me a clear view of the massive spoke itself, like a column of ice five miles thick. It dwindled in the distance, where the wide, bright band of the Noon Arc could be seen. A single rail mounted on the outside of the spoke was our guideline. To each side of it I could see huge pipes, wires, and mysterious structures, but never enough of them to spoil the clean, perfect line of the spoke itself, pure and pristine as the swooping cable of a suspension bridge.

I knew the cable was not made of ice, but that's what it looked like. Bright white in color, with a dull surface, crisscrossed with thousands of lines like ice-skater's tracks on a measureless rink.

Spider silk. Trillions and trillions of strands of spiderweb.

That was the breakthrough that had enabled the building of Oberon II. They had found a way to produce massive quantities of the strongest material known to man. As it so often turns out to be, the solution was obvious.

Build a bigger spider.

We stopped several times during the first hour, for no reason I or anyone else in the dome could see. I was starting to get discouraged, because I knew the largest spiders never went to the high-gee environments from about a third of the way down the spoke. Lower than that and their legs could not support the weight of their bodies.

"Some of the first experiments on animals in weightlessness were done on spiders," someone to my left said. I turned to look at her. She had not been in that chair when I sat down. Believe me, I would have noticed.

"Is that right?"

"Back in the twentieth century," she said. "They wanted to find out if they'd spin webs in zero-gee." She was lovely. Heart-shaped face, green eyes, a slender figure.

"Did they?" I asked.

"They built very strange webs."

"Not as strange as this one, I'll bet."