Spinneret

"What do you mean, stuck?"

"As in glued to the cable. Captain. I barely touched it, and now I can't … I can't even get it loose ru

Meredith exchanged a quick glance with Brown. "Maybe you can still cut it," he suggested into the mike. "Or at least cut enough groove to give us its hardness."

"Yes, sir." A pause. "I'm trying, sir, but nothing's happening."

"That's impossible," Stewart cut in. "I've seen those cutters handle ten-centimeter tungsten plate without—"

"Look out!" one of the astros shouted, and Meredith flinched in automatic reaction as the men on the screen jerked back.

"You all right?" Stewart asked sharply.

"Yes, sir," the rattled answer came. "We've just lost the cutters. The motor burned out—scattered small bits of itself all over the place. Uh … I can't even see a scratch underneath the blades."

For a long moment there was nothing but the hum of the radio's carrier. "I see,"

Stewart said at last. "Well … does the reflectivity read low enough to try using a laser on it?"

"Just a second, sir … We could try the UV, I suppose; the reflectivity seems to increase with wavelength. But I'm not at all sure it'll do any better than the cutters did."

"Try it anyway," Meredith instructed. "You can at least get a heat capacity estimate that way."

It took a minute to get the laser ready, and two or three more to position the infrared sensors that would measure the cable's temperature. "Here goes, sir.

Laser's going … reflection about thirty-eight percent—that seems low for a metal—"

"Temperature's starting up slowly," the second astro put in. "Up to … what the hell!"

"What?" Stewart snapped.

"The temp just … dropped. Captain; dropped like a stone all the way down to …

well, to a few degrees absolute."

"Superconductor," Brown murmured, sounding awed.

"That's impossible," the astro retorted. "The reading was well above superconductor temperatures when it dropped."

Stewart ordered several more tests run, but each one simply added another mystery to the growing list. A portable wire-tester was hopelessly inadequate for measuring tensile strength—the cable didn't even stretch, let alone break. A

standard metal detector gave no reading even a few centimeters away from the cable, but a direct measurement of resistivity showed that, under sufficiently high voltages, the material became a superconductor of electricity. And possibly the oddest discovery of all came when one of the astros accidentally brushed the cable and stuck fast. In attempting to cut him loose, his partner found that the "glue" had somehow penetrated several centimeters into the spacesuit fabric, rendering that section nearly as unbreakable as the cable itself. In the end they had to cut a gaping hole around the affected material, leaving the astro to do a decompressed reentry to the shuttle.

"I don't know about you," Meredith told Stewart when the two astros were back inside, "but I'm ready to call it a day. It's obvious we're not going to find out anything more with the equipment you've got out there. I think we're going to have to bring the cable back here."

"As in Astran orbit, you mean?"

"As in groundside."

There was a long pause. "And how, may I ask, do you intend to land two kilometers of heavy cable?" Stewart asked. "Without endangering one of my shuttles, that is?"

Meredith looked at Brown, gestured toward the mike. "We've been studying the problem ever since the cable was discovered," Brown told the captain. "Given the length and stickiness, I think it would be most reasonable to wrap it around itself, pretzel fashion, and tow it into near orbit. Once there, you could put a remote booster and some parachutes on it and send it on down. There are lots of open areas we could drop it in—north of Wright might be good, since a lot of our heavier equipment is up there."

"Out of the question," Stewart said. "We'll tow it back to Astran orbit, but that's where it's going to stay. Bring it down and you'll never see it again under the layer of dirt it'll collect."

"And then you'll run off and report all of this to the Pentagon, right?" Meredith asked.

"In a few days, yes. Why?—Were you pla

"No. But once you're gone, what's to keep someone else— the Rooshrike, perhaps—from towing the cable back out of orbit?"

There was another long silence. "Do they know about the cable?" Stewart asked.

"I haven't the foggiest. You want to take that chance?"

"Damn." Stewart let out an audible breath. "Major Brown, let's hear those numbers you said you'd worked out."

In the end, with a maximum of difficulty and a minimum of actual damage, they brought the cable down.

Chapter 11

It was known colloquially as the "silent room" because it was the only place in the White House proper that was absolutely guaranteed against all forms of audio, electronic, or laser-scan eavesdropping. Today, President Allerton reflected, it was even more silent than usual. There were none of the normal mutterings or whispered discussions among the assembled advisors, Cabinet officials, and military men; just the soft sounds of pages turning. Generally speaking, their faces made up for the lack of vocal expression.

Allerton gave them plenty of time before clearing his throat. "Well. Comments?"

General Klein got in first with the obvious one. "Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. Something on Astra made this thing?"

National Security Advisor Thomas Morley was staring into space. "I trust you realize, Mr. President, how self-contradictory this report looks. A supersticky metal that doesn't show up on metal detectors? And stronger than graphite-boron sandwich but only four-fifths as dense as water?"

"I assure you, Mr. Morley," Captain Stewart said quietly, "that I was present while the cable was being tested. I don't understand any of it either, but the numbers are accurate."

"Wasn't implying they weren't," Morley said. "I was just anticipating what others are going to say when we release this."

"Why release it at all?" Admiral Hamill rumbled. "It was discovered by American citizens on an American colony—that makes it American property."

"Except that we're technically ru

Hamill's snort concisely gave his own views on that.

"I think Tom's right, sir," Secretary of State Joshua Purvis spoke up. "We've complained all along that the UN should be footing more of Astra's bill.

Someone's bound to accuse us of making up this cable and this—this planet-sized spi

"Why do we have to show them anything?" Hamill persisted. "If you think we have to tell the UN, all right; but if they don't want to believe it that's their problem. I hope they don't, in fact, because that'll leave us free to send our experts out to study the thing."

On that point, at least, everyone was agreed, and the rest of the meeting was devoted to deciding on the procedure for recruiting the necessary scientists and getting them to Astra as quickly and quietly as possible. Afterward, Allerton put through scrambled phone calls to the British, Japanese, Soviet, and Chinese heads of state, whose reactions combined fascination and thinly veiled disbelief in about the proportions Allerton had expected. And lastly, he made a call to UN Secretary- General Saleh.

Saleh was silent for a long moment after Allerton had finished, his face almost expressionless as his eyes probed Allerton's own. "You would not," he said at last,

"insult me by creating such a ridiculous lie. What are your thoughts about this—did you call it Spi