were a favorite target, since they often held some extremely strange forms of life—or, at any rate, of behavior.
Since Morgan was in continuous touch with his two secretaries—one human, the other electronic—he expected no surprises when he walked into his office after the brief flight from ANAR. By the standards of an earlier age, his was an extraordinarily small organization. He had fewer than three hundred men and women under his direct control; but the computing and information-processing power at their command could not be matched by the merely human population of the entire planet.
“Well, how did you get on with the Sheik?” asked Warren Kingsley, his deputy and long-time friend, as soon as they were alone together.
“Very well. I think we have a deal. But I still can’t believe that we’re held up by such a stupid problem. What does the Legal Department say?”
“We’ll definitely have to get a World Court ruling. If the Court agrees that it’s a matter of overwhelming public interest, our reverend friends will have to move…. Though if they decide to be stubborn, there would be a nasty situation. Perhaps you should send a small earthquake to help them make up their minds.”
The fact that Morgan was on the board of General Tectonics was an old joke between him and Kingsley; but GT—perhaps fortunately—had never found a way of controlling and directing earthquakes, nor did it ever expect to do so. The best that it could hope for was to predict them, and to bleed off their energies harmlessly before they could do major damage. Even here, its record of success was not much better than seventy-five percent.
“A nice idea,” said Morgan. “I’ll think it over. Now, what about our other problem?”
“All set to go. Do you want it now?”
“Okay—let’s see the worst.”
The office windows darkened, and a grid of glowing lines appeared in the center of the room.
“Watch this, Van,” said Kingsley. “Here’s the regime that gives trouble.”
Rows of letters and numbers materialized in the empty air—velocities, payloads, accelerations, transit times. Morgan absorbed them at a glance. The globe of the earth, with its circles of longitude and latitude, hovered just above the carpet; and rising from it, to little more than the height of a man, was the luminous thread that marked the position of the Orbital Tower.
“Five hundred times normal speed; lateral scale exaggeration fifty. Here we go.”
Some invisible force had started to pluck at the line of light, drawing it away from the vertical. The disturbance was moving upward as it mimicked, via the computer’s millions of calculations a second, the ascent of a payload through the earth’s gravitational field.
“What’s the displacement?” asked Morgan as his eyes strained to follow the details of the simulation.
“Now about two hundred meters. It gets to three before—”
The thread snapped. In the leisurely slow-motion that represented real speeds of thousands of kilometers an hour, the two segments of the severed tower began to curl away from each other—one bending back to earth, the other whipping upward to space. But Morgan was no longer fully conscious of this imaginary disaster, existing only in the mind of the computer. Superimposed upon it now was the reality that had haunted him for years.
He had seen that two-century-old film at least fifty times, and there were sections that he had examined frame by frame, until he knew every detail by heart. It was, after all, the most expensive movie footage ever shot, at least in peacetime. It had cost the State of Washington several million dollars a minute….
There stood the slim (too slim!) and graceful bridge, spanning the canyon. It bore no traffic, but a single car had been abandoned midway by its driver. And no wonder, for the bridge was behaving as none before in the whole history of engineering.
It seemed impossible that thousands of tons of metal could perform such an aerial ballet. One could more easily believe that the bridge was made of rubber than of steel. Vast, slow undulations, meters in amplitude, were sweeping along the entire width of the span, so that the roadway suspended between the piers twisted back and forth like an angry snake. The wind blowing down the canyon was sounding a note far too low for any human ears to detect, as it hit the natural frequency of the beautiful, doomed structure. For hours, the torsional vibrations had been building up, but no one knew when the end would come. Already, the protracted death throes were a testimonial that