Pillar to the Sky (37 page)

And now he was living the dream.

“Five seconds to jet pack shutdown.”

It was nothing dramatic, not like the old days of solid booster separations or the first stage dropping away from a rocket launch. A shudder, an actual sensation of something falling away, acceleration easing a bit, the g level dropping down to 0.5 with the deceleration, a bit of a light feeling in the stomach.

“How we doing, Gary?” Again it was Bock, and Gary just laughed.

“Fire the rocket up. Let’s get going!”

He knew Franklin and the publicity department were now loving every second of this. Some years back, hundreds of millions had watched on their televisions, computers, and iPads as a man slowly rode a balloon nearly twenty-five miles up then jumped out. Franklin had guessed they just might get a billion watching this, and his estimate would turn out to be rather close to the mark.

He got what he asked for a few seconds later, even as Tower Control announced the clear breakaway of the jet pack, a side thruster pushing it away from the tower and deployment of a drogue chute to guide it back for a splashdown near the platform.

The rocket pack hit like a kick in the butt. Throttled up, and seconds later he was at two g’s and 60,000 feet up, when the climb really started. A mile every four seconds. At 75,000 feet they broke sonic, the stress load against the side of the tower low enough as to not be of much concern.

And then he saw it!

Turning his head sideways, he saw the curvature of the earth, the blue band of the lower atmosphere above an ever-darkening sky in spite of the distant sunrise to the east, rays of dawning light splashing across a turquoise and indigo blue sea. While straight overhead the sky became ever darker.

“Stars,” he gasped. “My God, I can see stars!”

And now the rocket pack was at full throttle. The thread of the tower, but a few centimeters wide here, was but a blur in the overhead window. One hundred and fifty thousand feet above was a vast ocean of darkness, except for the stars, and the sunlight reflecting off the tower, which sparkled like an arrow of diamonds pointing straight up.

He struggled to keep up a running account of it all, and felt a sudden longing for Eva to be at his side. In Ukrainian, which he had somehow learned in their years together, he knew her rich, descriptive language would have found the right adjectives, adverbs, and superlatives to describe the absolute wonder of this transcending moment.

“Eva, Victoria, I love you both. I wish you were here with me to share this. My soul would be complete.”

“We’re with you, sweetheart,” Eva replied, voice choked. “I can see it on the cameras—we all can,” and she lapsed into Ukrainian to express her wonder and joy for the adventure her beloved husband had embarked upon.

Two hundred and fifty thousand feet. Less than a minute later 300,000 and still climbing.

“Ascent Pod Morgan, Tower Control, Franklin here.” Gary smiled. “You just got another set of astronaut’s wings. You’ve crossed the hundred-kilometer mark, my friend: you are in space.”

“No need to tell me!” Gary cried. “Eva, I’m swiveling a camera so you can see what I can see out my right-side window.” He fumbled with the touch pad. The g load was still up there at 1.7 but he got the view focused in, angling down, a view across the vast Pacific and what might be Fiji, bathed in light, hundreds of miles away.

“How we feeling, Gary?”

It was the ever-hovering Bock on the private channel.

“Doc, I’m doing great.” It was a lie: the trembling in his legs from the Parkinson’s was hitting him hard. Before departure he had refused to take any sedative or relaxants other than a mild shot for motion sickness, but the hell with that, there was no way they could turn him around now unless he started screaming for help and told them to slam on the brakes.

“OK, Gary,” was all Bock said.

“Believe me Doc, you’re gonna love this when your chance comes.”

And then he hit the line that would be the headlines around the world that day.

“… We must preserve our beautiful world for all those who come after us. That is why we are building this Pillar to Heaven.”

“I can see it on the camera,” Eva replied, and her voice was choked. “It is beyond what I ever dreamed.”

“We, all of us, did this together … and thank you, Franklin—all of the team—for this moment.”

“Rocket pack fuel depletion in thirty seconds,” Tower Control announced.

Gary regretted that news, they were pulling just over two g’s again and he absolutely loved the sensation. He knew what was coming next, and it was his first real worry about this ascent.

He was soaring up the face of the tower at over 2,000 miles an hour, the maximum they dared to try; the lateral stress load on the tower of his passage at this speed was near maximum, given the diameter of the Pillar at this altitude.

It was not the way the design would one day work: with maglev cars riding up and down the sides of the ribbon tower at a slow and steady speed. They needed a “fast and dirty” system for right now until they had the ribbon tower in place where cars would ascend at a stately five hundred miles per hour for the two-day journey to geosynch, with room for a couple of dozen passengers—room to stand up and stretch—along with hot food, tea, even a selection of drinks, and definitely an adequate bathroom arrangement. It was like comparing Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
to a routine transatlantic flight on a 747.

Regardless, he was grinning like a kid, because he was the first to take this ride, and to hell with the risks.

“Ascent Pod Morgan, Tower Control. Rocket pack shutdown then separation in fifteen seconds. Be ready for a little jolt.”

Actually there was no real jolt. He felt a slight shudder and then a most disturbing sensation in his stomach as the rocket pack winked off, the final few pounds of fuel firing from a lateral thruster that pushed the rocket pack clear of the tower.

“Ascent Pod Morgan, Tower Control. Clean breakaway of the rocket thruster. How are you doing?”

With the cutting off of the rocket pack, his vertical velocity, in little more than a second, dropped from two g’s to a momentary zero g. He was not, as most assumed, now weightless because he was in space; it was a simple reality of vertical thrust one second, cutting off the next second. In a jet plane, even a prop-driven plane climbing straight up, if power was cut, the pilot and passengers on board might suddenly feel, for some the disturbing sensation, for others the exhiliration, of just floating “weightlessly.”

The guide tube wrapped around the wire was nearly friction-free, the gravity of the earth the only counterforce to his upward acceleration. With each passing second it exerted an influence to slow him down. He easily soared up past the orbital height of the old Mercury and Gemini space flights, of the likes of John Glenn and Gordon Cooper. Unbelievable to him that he was now zooming past their altitudes, still soaring straight up, on inertia only; but as he looked up at his monitor screen, he could see that the numbers of his vertical ascent were no longer a near blur as gravity slowed his ascent. He still felt weightless. A touch of nausea from it, but not dangerous. He could even sense his heart rate settling, and then the most wondrous sensation of all: he was floating, and imagined that if, rather than being stuck in a pod, he had a vast open field before him, he could soar across it like a hawk or eagle, no longer confined by trembling legs and pounding heart.

“I feel all so free, like an eagle soaring on wings,” he whispered.

His speed continued to drop. The blur of the tower above was becoming a visible line, the wire with the dozen or more cables wrapped around it since the first strand was anchored now coming into focus. A bit troubling now: he clicked to a private channel, reporting that in some places it looked as if the spun cables added on were not adhering well, but then again it could be an optical illusion; it warranted closer scrutiny. The adhesive to bond the carbon nanotubes together in the vacuum of space had been a serious question, and he wondered how much support each strand was lending to the others. This, too, would have to be looked into.

Speed was down to below subsonic if he was still inside earth’s atmosphere, but that was an absurd definition out here in the near total vacuum of more than 250 miles up.

“How’s the view, Gary?” It was Franklin, prompting him.

He looked out his starboard window.

“My God, is that Australia I’m looking at now? I definitely can clearly see Australia, still night there. Guess those are the lights of Melbourne and Sydney.

“Hey, will they blink them for me the way they did for John Glenn?”

That had been a wonderful gesture when Glenn passed over the continent, the citizens having been coached by a television station to flick their house lights on and off at the same time in a gesture of “Good luck and Godspeed” he could clearly see in space.

“I’ll throw in the request, but no promises.”

Speed continued to bleed off; he was coasting now. When the descent/ascent pod was first being designed, there was a lot of debate about how to power it, the consensus leaning at first to using an electrical lift motor right from the ground up. But there were concerns about condensation on the wire from the tropical air getting into the wheels and motor and then, in the vacuum of space, freezing and perhaps shorting the unit out, and the amount of energy needed to throttle it up to even a stately three hundred miles an hour, which would take the pod to geosynch in just under four days. Some thought the combination of the jet pack and the hybrid rocket motor from the Brit’s space plane was overplaying it, but it was a sure way of getting the unit well above the atmosphere quickly, and frankly it did have a certain public appeal to it, with a dramatic sendoff. Eventually, with the ribbon tower, it would be the maglev that would be friction-free, but it would also require a tremendous amount of electrical power for the track, and that was still years off.

All things considered, Gary was delighted with this design: rather than just being several miles up and slowly accelerating, the traction wheels struggling to build up speed, he was now at an altitude beyond that of the space station. He could feel the vibration of the wheels spinning up to nearly 5,000 revolutions per minute, so that when engaged their rotational speed at the edge would match up exactly with the speed at which the wire was racing past them. Too fast or too slow could cause an overstress that might rip the wheels and gearing apart, or perhaps even damage the tower itself.

“Pod One Morgan, Tower Control. Activation of electrical lift in ten seconds.”

Gary took a deep breath on hearing this announcement. The energy for the rest of his climb would transfer from the Pillar to the three small wheels, made of conductive tubing as well that would take in the power from the tower, feed it into lightweight batteries to keep them charged up which in turn then powered the traction motor that would then drive the wheels. Slow compared to the ride of but minutes before, but still sufficient to get him to geosynch in three and a half days’ time.

“Pod One, Tower Control. Engaging traction wheels in five seconds.”

He watched the monitor screen and held his breath. It had worked on the first test spinner to lay out the conductive cables when a thread of the material had been spun from geosynch clear down to earth. It had worked for the spinners. Would it work now? If not, the battery packs on board could get him most of the way there, but not the full distance. They had a second, backup laser beam transferring energy from the geosynch station down to the pod, but that would be one hell of a trick, given how lateral movements as the pod moved up the tower could throw aim off. Even Gary had expressed concern about a laser of such intensity actually hitting the tower.

“Engage.”

There was a shudder, a slight lurch, and for the first few seconds the battery packs spun up the traction wheels before pressing them in tightly against the wire. They held, and then, as Gary watched his monitor, he saw that indeed they were getting electricity off the tower itself, but not quite enough to match the energy output. A momentary pause while the gauge on the screen fluctuated slightly, measuring energy coming in via the wire, energy output, then calculating whether there would be enough to reach geosynch. And then the gauge went green. At the present rate he would indeed make it!

It was working!

“Mission Control”—he forgot himself for a second—“Ascent Pod One. We have good contact, good energy. We are on our way to geosynch!”

Again he could hear the cheers.

“Godspeed, Gary Morgan,” someone said, again harkening back to the glory days and the words spoken to John Glenn as he lifted off. Gary looked off to the west, where he actually thought he could see that the good people of Sydney were indeed flicking their lights on and off in support of his climb to the stars above.

16

Docking

A hard shudder jarred the pod, more than a little disconcerting.

He was trembling slightly from the Parkinson’s, but also the temperature control in the pod had gone a bit offline and it was getting damn cold—a strange balance, actually, with the pod on one side at hundreds of degrees below zero on its outer skin, while on the side facing the sun it was several hundred degrees hot.

He felt the latches snapping loose and nervously took a deep breath. This was the first time this had ever been tried, and then the hatch slid open and a dark, bright, smiling facing looked down at him and grinned.

“Dr. Morgan, I presume!”

That almost did make him laugh. A well-thought-out line indeed, especially for the video feeds, and although his hand was trembling, he reached up.

“Commander Singh, I presume!”

She reached down, taking his hand, and then leaned into the pod and helped unsnap his harness. He was a bit embarrassed: the Parkinson’s was causing some uncontrollable trembling of his legs. Singh effortlessly backed out of the pod, holding his hand to guide him, telling him to just take it easy, float free, and she’d guide him up through the airlock. He let her take control, and she did so with casual ease, used to the months of weightlessness, as they floated straight on “up” into the main chamber of the station.