Firstborn(Time Odyssey 3) - By Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,17

way to orbit. Its kept narrower in the lower atmosphere because of the threat regime down there. Of course most of the bad weather is kept away nowadays. The ribbons worst problems actually come when they launch one of those Saturn s; the whole damn earth shakes, and I can tell you theres a lot of grumbling about that.

Ten kilometers, twelve, fifteen; the distance simply peeled away. Earths curve became more pronounced, and the sky above Bisesas head started to fade down to a deeper blue. She was above the bulk of the atmosphere already, she realized.

Another abrupt transition came when the ribbon turned gold: a plating to protect it from the corrosive effects of high-altitude atomic oxygen, Alexei said, ionized gas in Earths wispy upper air.

And still they rose and rose.

So lets get comfortable. Alexei ordered his suitcase to open. The pressure will drop to its spaceside mixlow pressure, a third atmospheric, but high on oxygen. In the meantime I brought oxygen masks. He showed them, and a rack of bottles. And its going to get cold. Your jumpsuits ought to keep you warm. I have heated blankets too. He rummaged about in his suitcase. Were going to be in here a while. I have fold-out camp beds and chairs. A bubble tent in case you dont want to sleep under the stars, so to speak. I have heaters for food and drink. Were going to have to recycle our water, Im afraid, but I have a good treatment system.

No spacesuits, Bisesa said. Shouldnt need them, unless anything goes wrong. And if it does?

He looked at her, as if assessing her nerve. Second worst case is, we get stuck on the cable. There are a whole slew of fail-safe mechanisms to save us until rescue comes, via another spider. Even if we were to lose pressure, we have survival bubbles. Hamster balls. Not comfortable, but practical.

Hamster balls? Bisesa hoped fervently that it wouldnt come to that. And the worst case?

We become detached from the ribbon altogether. You understand that a certain point on the elevator is in geosynchgeosynchronous orbit, turning around the Earth in exactly twenty-four hours. Thats the only altitude that is actually in orbit, strictly speaking. Below that point we are moving too slowly for orbit, and above too fast.

So if the spider were to lose its grip

Below geosynch, we fall back to Earth. He rapped the transparent hull. Might not look like it, but it is designed to survive a low-speed reentry.

And after geosynch? Wed fall away from Earth, right? He winked. Actually thats the idea. Dont worry about it. He held up a flask. Coffee, anybody? Myra grunted. Maybe we ought to get your fancy toilet set up first. Good thinking. While they fiddled with the toilet, Bisesa gazed out of the window.

Riding silently into the sky, soon she was a hundred kilometers high, higher even than the old pioneering rocket planes, the X-15s, used to reach. The sky was already all but black above her, with a twinkling of stars right at the zenith, a point to which the ribbon, gold-bright in the sunlight, pointed like an arrow. Looking up that way she could see no sign of structures further up the ribbon, no sign of the counterweight mass that she knew had to be at the ribbons end, nothing but the shining beads of more spiders clambering up this thread to the sky. She suspected she still had not grasped the scale of the elevator, not remotely.

By an hour and a half in, the fast pace of the events of the early moments of the climb was over. Somewhere above three hundred kilometers high, she could already see the horizon all the way around the face of the Earth, with the ribbon arrowing straight down to the familiar shapes of the American continents far beneath her. Though the stars would wheel around her during this extraordinary ascent, she realized, the Earth would stay locked in place below. It was as if she had been transported to a medieval universe, the cosmos of Dante, with a fixed Earth surrounded by spinning stars.

When she stood she felt oddly light on her feet. One of Alexeis softscreen displays mapped the weakening of gravity as they clambered away from Earths huge mass. It was already down several percent on its sea-level value.

The silent, straight-line ascent, the receding Earth, the shaft of ribbon-light that guided her, the subtle reduction of weight: it was a magical experience, utterly disconcerting,