The Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,80

a seat and wearing several kilos of spacesuit. Yet Morgan felt positively buoyant, and he wondered if he was getting too much oxygen.

No, the flow rate was normal. It must be the sheer exhilaration produced by that marvelous spectacle beneath him—though it was diminishing now, drawing back to north and south, as if retreating to its polar strongholds. That, and the satisfaction of a task well begun, using a technology that no man had ever before tested to such limits.

The explanation was perfectly reasonable, but he was not satisfied with it. It did not wholly account for his sense of happiness—even of joy. Kingsley, who was fond of diving, had often told him that he felt such an emotion in the weightless environment of the sea. Morgan had never shared it, but now he knew what it must be like. He seemed to have left all his cares down there on the planet hidden below the fading loops and traceries of the aurora.

The stars were coming back into their own, no longer challenged by the eerie intruder from the poles. Morgan began to search the zenith, not with any high expectations, wondering if the Tower was yet in sight. But he could make out only the first few meters, lit by the faint auroral glow, of the narrow ribbon up which Spider was swiftly and smoothly climbing.

That thin band upon which his own life, and the lives of seven others, now depended was so uniform and featureless that it gave no hint of the capsule’s speed. Morgan found it difficult to believe that it was flashing through the drive mechanism at more than two hundred kilometers an hour. And with that thought, he was suddenly back in his childhood, and knew the source of his contentment.

He had quickly recovered from the loss of that first kite, and had graduated to larger and more elaborate models. Next, just before he had discovered Meccamax and abandoned kites forever, he had experimented briefly with toy parachutes.

Morgan liked to think that he had invented the idea himself, though he might well have come across it somewhere in his reading or viewing. The technique was so simple that generations of boys must have rediscovered it.

First he had whittled a thin strip of wood about five centimeters long, and fastened a couple of paper clips to it. He had hooked these around the kite string, so that the little device could slide easily up and down.

He had next made a handkerchief-sized parachute of rice paper, with silk strings. A small square of cardboard served as payload. When he had fastened that square to the wooden strip by a rubber band—not too firmly—he was in business.

Blown by the wind, the little parachute would go sailing up the string, climbing the graceful catenary to the kite. Then Morgan would give a sharp tug, and the cardboard weight would slip out of the rubber band. The parachute would float away into the sky, while the wood-and-wire rider came swiftly back to his hand, in readiness for the next launch.

With what envy he had watched his flimsy creations drift effortlessly out to sea! Most of them fell into the water before they had traveled even one kilometer, but sometimes a little parachute would be bravely maintaining altitude when it vanished from sight. He liked to imagine that these lucky voyagers reached the enchanted islands of the Pacific; but though he had written his name and address on the cardboard squares, he never received any reply.

Morgan could not help smiling at these long-forgotten memories; yet they explained so much. The dreams of childhood had been far surpassed by the reality of adult life. He had earned the right to his contentment.

“Coming up to three eighty,” Kingsley. “How is the power level?”

“Beginning to drop—down to eighty-five percent. The battery’s starting to fade.”

“Well, if it holds out for another twenty kilometers, it will have done its job. How do you feel?”

Morgan was tempted to answer with superlatives, but his natural caution dissuaded him.

“I’m fine,” he said. “If we could guarantee a display like this for all our passengers, we wouldn’t be able to handle the crowds.”

“Perhaps it could be arranged.” Kingsley laughed. “We could ask Monsoon Control to dump a few barrels of electrons in the right places. Not their usual line of business, but they’re good at improvising…aren’t they?”

Morgan chuckled, but did not answer. His eyes were fixed on the instrument panel, where both power and rate of climb were now visibly