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‘Actually Pavonis Mons would be a better choice,’ Willis said. ‘Not as big but slap on the equator. Yes, Frank, that was how I figured it; Tharsis had to be a site, if not the only one . . . Hmm.’
‘What?’
‘I’m getting better visuals now. Up here, out of the dusty air. As it happens the cable line doesn’t quite line up with the summit of Pavonis. Engineering details. Soon we’ll know for sure. Come on.’
They flew on, Sally tracking Willis, heading steadily east, away from the setting sun, over slowly uplifting land. The shadows speared out from the rocks and pooled deep in the craters, where Sally imagined she saw mist gather.
At last she thought she could see the cable itself with her naked eye, a baby blue scrape down a sky turning a bruised purple. She tilted her head, watching it spear up, up out of her vision, impossibly tall.
‘Like a crack in the sky,’ Frank said. ‘What’s that old song?’
‘It makes me feel kind of giddy,’ Sally said. ‘In an inverted way. I’m glad I can’t see the anchor satellite, poised up there. What if this thing broke and fell?’
‘Well, the cable would wrap around the planet as it rotated, and cause a hell of a lot of damage. There was a novel called Red Mars—’
‘It’s not going to fall,’ Willis said.
‘How do you know?’ Sally snapped.
‘Because it’s very ancient. If it was going to break and fall, it would have done so by now. Ancient, and lacking maintenance for a long time.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘Look at the ground below.’
The featureless plain was scattered with meaningless shadows. No structure, Sally realized. No sign even of a relic.
Willis said, ‘Think where we are. At the foot of a space elevator, this should be the hinterland of a port that serves a major chunk of the planet. Where are the warehouses, the rail lines, the airports? Where’s the city to house the travellers and the workers? Where’s the farmland to feed them all? Oh, I know whatever race built this probably had totally different ways from the human of solving those problems. But you don’t build a space elevator unless you want to bring materials down from space, or ship goods back up into space, and you don’t do that without some kind of facility to handle stuff on the ground.’
‘And there’s nothing down there,’ Sally said. ‘How much time, Dad? How much time to erode everything to invisibility?’
‘I can only guess. Millions of years? But the elevator survived all that time, the dust storms and the meteor impacts – and its own exotic hazards, such as solar storms and cable-snipping meteors further up. Whoever built that built it well . . .’
Suddenly the wonder of it hit her, the strangeness of the situation. Here was the product of a long-vanished indigenous civilization, about which Willis could have known nothing. Nothing about their nature, the detail of their lives – their rise, their fall, their evident extinction. And yet, from the sheer planetary geometry of Mars, he had deduced they must exist, or must have existed, and they must have built a space elevator. And he was right, here was that final monument, their last legacy, with everything else about them worn to dust. As if they had only ever existed for this one purpose, to fulfil Willis’s ambition. And he, in turn, had crossed two million Earths, the Gap, and three million copies of Mars, in the utter certainty of what he would eventually find. Not for the first time in her life she wondered what it must be like to live inside her father’s head.
‘OK,’ Willis said, ‘we’re coming up on the base of the cable. We’re still a ways short of Pavonis Mons. I guess the base could have been relocated . . .’
The gliders dipped towards the ground. They lit up the darkling landscape ahead with their searchlight beams, and Willis fired off a couple of flares. The artificial light made the cable gleam, a mathematical abstraction above the chaotic jumble of the plain.
At last Sally saw where the cable touched the ground – but it did not stop there. The blue line dived down into a circle of darkness, foreshortened from this distance. At first Sally thought it was a crater. Then, as the gliders flew overhead and looped past the cable itself, she realized she was looking down into a hole, a shaft that might have been a half-mile wide – smooth, symmetrical, a well of darkness.
Willis growled, ‘I pinged it with my radar. That’s where the cable goes, all right; that’s where the root station is. Down there. Damn thing is over twenty miles deep.’
That shocked Sally. ‘How deep?’
‘Deep enough to contain a decent thickness of air.’
Frank the trained astronaut took over. ‘Deep enough that we wait until the morning before taking a look inside.’
Willis hesitated. Sally knew his instinct would be to uncoil a rope and just plunge down there with a flashlight, Martian night or no Martian night. But at length he said, ‘Agreed.’
Frank said, ‘You hotshot pilots just make sure you don’t run into that cable on the way in to landing. I’m guessing that if this thing has lasted as long as you say, Willis, then if we pick a fight with it our gliders are going to come off worst . . .’
And as they came down, Sally thought she saw a light in the landscape, off in the distance, far away from this beanstalk root. A single light in the dark that was extinguished when she looked again. If it had ever existed at all.
38
IN THE MORNING the three of them resolved to hike to the pit, leaving the gliders behind. That was basically Frank and Willis’s plan. A plan that entailed leaving the gliders unguarded . . .
Sally didn’t contribute much to the discussion. She was doubtful about the plan, however. This was Mars, a typical Mars – a dead Mars, aside from whatever they were likely to encounter in the pit. There were no real hazards here. Even a dust storm, pushed by Mars’s feeble air, would barely leave a mark of its passing. The only real danger was an unlucky meteor strike, and no sentry could ward off that. To post a guard, thus splitting their tiny team, would have been absurd.
Wouldn’t it?
Sally was cautious by nature; living alone in the wild worlds of the Long Earth had made her so, long ago. But her caution was of a different degree to Frank’s. He thought in terms of physical effects, equipment failures – a meteor strike, a solar flare, a leaky pressure hull. While Sally had learned to think in terms of malevolent life – creatures out to kill her, one way or another. Maybe she was importing an over-caution bred on a too-alive Earth to a too-dead Mars where it wasn’t appropriate. Maybe this was just a distraction.
Wasn’t it?
She went along with the guys’ plan. But in her head a small alarm sounded softly, continually.
And she remembered that light she’d thought she’d seen, glowing in the Martian night.
So the three of them walked to the pit. In the bright daylight the thread of the cable was even more striking than in the twilight, a brilliant eggshell blue like no natural colour Sally had seen on any of the millions of Marses they had visited.
As they walked, Willis held up a small sensor pod to study their target. ‘That cable is about a half-inch thick,’ he said. ‘A finger’s width. You know, I’m betting it doesn’t need to be that thick.’
‘A safety factor,’ Frank suggested. ‘Maybe the apparent thickness is mostly dummy, a lightweight safety coating. You don’t want to be slicing off the wing of your flying machine—’
‘Or your limbs—’
‘On a super-strong thread that’s too fine to even see.’
As they talked Sally was studying the ground, the lip of the approaching pit. ‘No raying.’
‘What?’ Frank asked.
‘No splash debris, like from any other crater on Mars, or the moon.’
‘Umm,’ Frank said. ‘But there is a crater wall, of sorts . . .’