The Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,69

It’s still six hundred kilometers up, and we’re on the lowest power of the telescope. Now I’m going to zoom. Fasten your seat belt.”

Dev gave a little laugh at the ancient cliché, familiar from dozens of historical dramas. At first he could see no alteration, except that the four lines pointing toward the center of the field were becoming a little less sharp. It took him a few seconds to realize that no change could be expected as his point of view hurtled upward along the axis of the system; the quartet of tapes would look exactly the same at any point along its length.

Then, quite suddenly, it was there, taking him by surprise even though he had been expecting it. A tiny bright spot had materialized in the exact center of the field. It was expanding as he watched it, and now for the first time he had a real sensation of speed.

A few seconds later, he could make out a small circle—no, now both brain and eye agreed that it was a square. He was looking directly up at the base of the Tower, crawling Earthward along its guiding tapes at a couple of kilometers a day. The four tapes had now vanished, being far too small to be visible at this distance. But that square fixed magically in the sky continued to grow, though now it had become fuzzy under the extreme magnification.

“What do you see?” asked Morgan.

“A bright little square.”

“Good. That’s the underside of the Tower, still in full sunlight. When it’s dark down here, you can see it with the naked eye for another hour before it enters the Earth’s shadow. Now, do you see anything else?”

“Nooo…” replied the boy, after a long pause.

“You should. There’s a team of scientists visiting the lowest section to set up some research equipment. They’ve just come down from Midway. If you look carefully, you’ll see their transporter. It’s on the south track—that will be the right side of the picture. Look for a bright spot, about a quarter the size of the Tower.”

“Sorry, Uncle, I can’t find it. You have a look.”

“Well, the seeing may have got worse. Sometimes the Tower disappears completely though the atmosphere may look—”

Before Morgan could take Dev’s place at the eyepiece, his personal receiver gave two shrill double bleeps. A second later, Kingsley’s alarm also erupted.

It was the first time the Tower had ever issued a four-star emergency alert.

40. The End of the Line

No wonder they called it the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Even on the easy downhill run, the journey from Midway Station to the base of the Tower lasted fifty hours.

One day it would take only five, but that lay two years in the future, when the tracks were energized and their magnetic fields activated. The inspection and maintenance vehicles that now ran up and down the faces of the Tower were propelled by old-fashioned tires gripping the interior of guidance slots. Even if the limited power of the batteries permitted, it was not safe to operate such a system at more than five hundred kilometers an hour.

Yet everyone had been far too busy to be bored. Professor Sessui and his three students had been observing, checking their instruments, and making sure that no time would be wasted when they transferred into the Tower. The capsule driver, his engineering assistant, and the one steward, who made up the entire cabin staff, were also fully occupied, because this was no routine trip. The “Basement,” twenty-five thousand kilometers below Midway—and now only six hundred kilometers from Earth—had never been visited since it was built. Until now, there had been no purpose in going there, since the handful of monitors had never reported anything amiss. Not that there was much to go wrong, because the Basement was merely a fifteen-meter square pressurized chamber—one of the scores of emergency refuges at intervals along the Tower.

Sessui had used all his considerable influence to borrow this unique site, now crawling down through the ionosphere at two kilometers a day toward its rendezvous with Earth. It was essential, he had argued forcibly, to get his equipment installed before the peak of the current sunspot maximum.

Already, solar activity had reached unprecedented levels, and Sessui’s young assistants often found it hard to concentrate on their instruments; the magnificent auroral displays outside were too much of a distraction. For hours on end, both northern and southern hemispheres were filled with slowly moving curtains and streamers of greenish light, beautiful and awe-inspiring—yet only a