Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,242

the asteroid. But we landed with a bunch of our robots in a shipment of stuff from orbit, and dug into the interior and placed thermal bombs outside the cable casing, and around the magnetic generator. Then today we set them all off at once, and the rock went liquid at the same time the magnets were interrupted, and you know Clarke is going like a bullet, so it slipped right off the cable end just like that! And we timed it so that it’s going directly away from the sun, and twenty-four degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic as well! So it’ll be damned hard to track it down. At least we hope so!”

“And the cable itself?” Sasha said.

It got loud with cheers again, and it was Sax who answered her, in the next quiet moment. “Falling,” he said. He was at a computer console, typing as fast as he could, but Steve called out to him, “We have the figures on the descent if you want them. It’s pretty complex, a lot of partial differential equations.”

“I know,” Sax said.

“I can’t believe it,” said Simon. He still had his hands on Ann’s arm, and he looked around at the revelers, his face grim. “The impact’s going to kill a lot of people!”

“Probably not,” one of them replied. “And those it does kill will mostly be U.N. police, who have been using the elevator to get down and kill people here on the ground.”

“He’s probably been down a week or two,” Simon repeated emphatically to Ann, who was now white-faced.

“Maybe,” she said.

Some people heard this and quieted down. Others did not want to hear, and continued to celebrate.

“We didn’t know,” Steve said to Ann and Simon. His expression of triumph was gone, he was frowning with concern. “If we had known, I guess we could have tried to contact him. But we didn’t know. I’m sorry. Hopefully—” he swallowed—“Hopefully he wasn’t up there.”

Ann walked back to their table, sat down. Simon hovered anxiously at her side. Neither of them appeared to have heard anything Steve had said.

Radio traffic increased somewhat, as those in control of the remaining communications satellites got the news about the cable. Some of the celebrating rebels got busy monitoring and recording these messages; others continued to party.

Sax was still absorbed by the equations on the screen. “Going east,” he remarked.

“That’s right,” Steve said. “It’ll make a big bow in the middle at first, as the lower part pulls down, and then the rest will follow.”

“How fast?”

“That’s hard to say, but we think about four hours for the first time around, and then an hour for the second time around.”

“Second time around!” Sax said.

“Well, you know, the cable is thirty-seven thousand kilometers long, and the circumference at the equator is twenty-one thousand. So it’ll go around almost twice.”

“The people on the equator had better move fast,” Sax said.

“Not exactly the equator,” Steve said. “The Phobos oscillation will cause it to swerve away from the equator to a certain extent. That’s actually the hardest part to calculate, because it depends where the cable was in its oscillation when it began to fall.”

“North or south?”

“We should know in the next couple of hours.”

The six travelers stared helplessly at the screen. It was quiet for the first time since their arrival. The screen showed nothing but stars. No vantage point existed from which to view the elevator’s fall; the cable, never visible for more than a fraction of its length to any single observer, would stay invisible to the end. Or visible only as a falling line of fire.

“So much for Phyllis’s bridge,” Nadia said.

“So much for Phyllis,” said Sax.

The Margaritifer group reestablished contact with the satellite transmissions they had located, and they found they were also able to poach a number of security satellites. From all these channels they were able to piece together a partial account of the cable’s fall. From Nicosia, a UNOMA team reported that the cable had fallen north of them, crumpling down vertically while yet still rapidly covering ground, as if it were cutting through the turning planet. Though north of them, they thought it was south of the equator. A staticky, panicky voice from Sheffield asked them for confirmation of this; the cable had already fallen across half the city and a line of tents east of it, all the way down the slope of Pavonis Mons and across east Tharsis, flattening a zone ten kilometers wide with its sonic boom;