The Golden Globe

"How'd you like to ride on the fast train?" I asked him. He allowed as how that was all right with him, and went back to sleep.

Toby is a trusting soul. Well traveled as he is, he might have had second thoughts if he'd known more about the Rim Express.

The Express hadn't been operating the last time I was on Oberon, for what I thought of as an excellent reason: there wasn't much rim to speak of. There was a lot more rim now, but there was still the little matter of a five- or six-hundred mile gap between the arcs. How could a train get from one arc to the other if no rail co

The train car was everything the spoke elevators were not: narrow, cramped, linear. Seats were four across, with an aisle between pairs. The top half of the car was transparent, though you couldn't see anything when you boarded since the car was in a tube, suspended an eighth of an inch above a magnetic induction rail. I settled into an aisle seat. It was deeply padded, and could recline almost forty-five degrees. When the car was about half-filled, the front and rear doors sealed and there was a loud hiss as the air in the tube was bled away. Then I was pressed back in my seat by rapid acceleration.

In only a few minutes we burst silently into space. Toby floated up out of my lap, weightless. He's not bothered by this, simply looking around curiously until I snagged a hind leg and brought him back down. I twisted in my seat and saw the massive trailing edge of Noon Arc dwindling behind us. I could see the pressurehead, several tu

—and standing dead still. It's all relative, you see. Or so I'm told. From a viewpoint on the rotating wheel, we were really skedaddling. But stand away from the wheel, motionless, and you'd see that the train car was just hanging there as the Noon Arc rotated away from it, and the Six Arc approached.

All very neat. Hang suspended there for twenty minutes, then decelerate when the other arc sweeps you up. Travel time: thirty minutes. And, I hear you protest, why the hell would anyone take the fifteen-hour ordeal of a trip through the hub, as Poly did twice a week, when this magical chariot was available?

Answer: money.

There was no real physical reason why the Rim Express should be so expensive to ride. It was cheap to operate, it was safe, it was quick. And the government of Oberon hated the damn thing, wished it would just go away. Since it didn't, they taxed the hell out of it. They added surcharges for every screwball thing a government is likely to get up to, and then they added some more. On top of that, they subsidized the spoke elevators to the point that they were practically free. It was like bus fare as compared to rental of a limousine. The elevators didn't really need a fare box at all. Money from concessions and gambling enabled the service to turn a tidy profit, sort of like a theater that makes nothing at the box office but cleans up selling outrageously priced popcorn and drinks.

But what was the problem with speed and efficiency? Why the hostility to the Express? The answer didn't make sense to me, until I considered the economics of a rotating world under construction.

Since its inception not that many years before, and for some years to come, well over ninety percent of the freight traffic went down. Cargoes arrived at the hub—finished steel, composite, glass, web, imported food, merry-go-round horses, starving actors—and was lowered to the rim. Of that, only the starving actor was likely to return to the hub. And on Oberon, down meant slow. Each kilogram moved from the hub to the rim slowed the spin of the wheel by a few millionths of a second. Consider that millions of kilograms were lowered that way each day. Pretty soon, left to itself, the wheel would run out of juice like a music box winding down its spring. Everybody would get lighter, and lighter, and lighter... and rise up and blow away. (People did get lighter, though not by a lot. When the rotation speed had slowed to a certain point the engineers applied thrust and brought the wheel back up to speed, and slightly over. Included in Oberoni "weather forecasts," actually schedules, was the day's "gravity index." There were light days, and heavy days. Would you believe that suicide rates increased on heavy days? It's true. Also more fistfights, absenteeism from work, and complaints of constipation.) (This quirk of rotation also made spring scales illegal on Oberon. Only beam balances would give true weight.)

Thrust means energy, and energy costs money. You'd think they'd have a kilogram-lowering tax to pay for it, and they did, but not a big one. It was a complex equation, but one that eventually worked out to an outrageous tariff on the Rim Express, since these citizens weren't helping out by keeping the elevators in operation.

There was another way of delivering cargo to the rim. It also involved slowing the wheel. This was a fact of physics that no amount of taxation would correct: more mass at the rim equals less speed, no matter how it got there. But it was quicker, like the Express itself. The wheel is turning, see, and it has these two huge gaps in it. Why not wait for an arc to pass, then move your cargo into position where it could be intercepted and magnetically slowed, much as we were sitting out here in space right now, waiting for the arc to arrive?

Well... sounds great, but these are large shipments. You have twenty minutes to get them positioned exactly right. No margin for error, and it has to work right every time, hundreds of times a day... and I think this is my stop right up here, Mr. Conductorman. It's been fun, and send me a card if you... er, when you arrive safely.

Imagining several million tons smashing into one of the pressureheads, the Oberoni came to the same conclusion I did. No thank you. We'll ease freight into the hub in a slow and civilized ma

Could I afford it? Not really, but my reasoning was thus: if this screwball plan doesn't work out I don't have an agent's chance at the Pearly Gates of getting to Luna in time. In fact, if I'm not off this wheel in twenty-four hours or less my chances of being arrested are almost a certainty. So time was more important than money for me. And all I had going for me at the moment was speed, audacity, and charm.

Actually, that didn't sound so bad to me. I'd stolen out of town many times in the past with less.

They turn the car around before arrival at the Six Arc, so when the deceleration starts you're pressed back into your seat, not jerked out of it. The pilot told us we'd stay weightless for the first ten seconds into the tu

I did turn around, for a while, but I found the sight of the approaching arc much more unsettling than the view of the retreating one. You could actually see it grow during the last minute of free fall, swinging down on you like God's croquet mallet. No openings were visible; I knew they were there, but you couldn't see them until the last second. It was hard to resist the notion that you were about to be batted like a long fly ball to the Andromeda Galaxy. I settled in my chair and hugged Toby securely, and closed my eyes. Presently it got dark, instantly, and then I was pressed back into the seat. In no time the doors were opening and we all crowded out into the station. An elevator took us to the floor of Six Arc.