Charles Sheffield - Skystalk

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Skystalk

by Charles Sheffield

Finlay's Law: Trouble comes at 3:00 A.M. That's always been my experience, and I've learned to dread

the hand on my shoulder that shakes me to wakefulness. My dreams had been bad enough, blasting off

into orbit on top of an old chemical rocket, riding the torch, up there on a couple of thousand tons of

volatile explosives. I'll never understand the nerve of the old-timers, willing to sit up there on one of those

monsters.

I shuddered, forced my eyes open, and looked up at Marston's anxious face. I was already sitting up.

“Trouble?” It was a stupid question, but you're allowed a couple of those when you first wake up.

His voice was shaky. “There's a bomb on the Beanstalk.”

I was off the bunk, pulling on my undershirt and groping around for my shoes. Larry Marston's words

pulled me bolt upright.

“What do you mean,on the Beanstalk?”

“That's what Velasquez told me. He won't say more until you get on the line. They're holding a coded

circuit open to Earth.”

I gave up my search for shoes and went barefoot after Marston. If Arnold Velasquez were right-and I

didn't see how he could be-then one of my old horrors was coming true. The Beanstalk had been

designed to withstand most natural events, but sabotage was one thing that could never be fully ruled out.

At any moment, we had nearly four hundred buckets climbing the Stalk and the same number going

down. With the best screening in the world, with hefty rewards for information even ofrumors of

sabotage, there was always the small chance that something could be sneaked through on an outbound

bucket. I had less worries about the buckets that went down to Earth. Sabotage from the space end had

little to offer its perpetrators, and the Colonies would provide an unpleasant form of death to anyone who

tried it, with no questions asked.

Arnold Velasquez was sitting in front of his screen door at Tether Control in Quito. Next to him stood a

man I recognized only from news pictures: Otto Panosky, a top aide to the president. Neither man

seemed to be looking at the screen. I wondered what they were seeing on their inward eye.

“Jack Finlay here,” I said. “What's the story, Arnold?”

There was a perceptible lag before his head came up to stare at the screen, the quarter of a second that it

took the video signal to go down to Earth, then back up to synchronous orbit.

“It's best if I read it to you, Jack,” he said. At least his voice was under control, even though I could see

his hands shaking as they held the paper. “The president's office got this in over the telecopier about

twenty minutes ago.”

He rubbed at the side of his face, in the nervous gesture that I had seen during most major stages of the

Beanstalk's construction. “It's addressed to us, here in Sky Stalk Control. It's quite short. ‘To the head of

Space Transportation Systems. A fusion bomb has been placed in one of the outgoing buckets. It is of

four megaton capacity, and was armed prior to placement. The secondary activation command can be

given at any time by a coded radio signal. Unless terms are met by the president and World Congress on

or before 02:00 U.T., seventy-two hours from now, we will give the command to explode the device.

Our terms are set out in the following four paragraphs. One-"’

“Never mind those, Arnold.” I waved my hand, impatient at the signal delay. “Just tell me one thing. Will

Congress meet their demands?”

He shook his head. “They can't. What's being asked for is preposterous in the time available. You know

how much red tape there is in the intergovernmental relationships.”

“You told them that?”

“Of course. We sent out a general broadcast.” He shrugged. “It was no good. We're dealing with

fanatics, with madmen. I need to know what you can do at your end.”

“How much time do we have now?”

He looked at his watch. “Seventy-one and a half hours, if they mean what they say. You understand that

we have no idea which bucket might be carrying the bomb. It could have been planted there days ago,

and still be on the way up.”

He was right. The buckets-there were three hundred and eighty-four of them each way-moved at a

steady five kilometers a minute, up or down. That's a respectable speed, but it still took almost five days

for each one of them to climb the cable of the Beanstalk out to our position in synchronous orbit.

Then I thought a bit more, and decided he wasn't quite right.

“It's not that vague, Arnold. You can bet the bomb wasn't placed on a bucket that started out more than

two days ago. Otherwise, we could wait for it to get here and disarm it, and still be inside their deadline.

It must still be fairly close to Earth, I'd guess.”

“Well, even if you're right, that deduction doesn't help us.” He was chewing a pen to bits between

sentences. “We don't have anything here that could be ready in time to fly out and take a look, even if it's

only a couple of thousand kilometers. Even if we did, and even if we could spot the bomb, we couldn't

rendezvous with a bucket on the Stalk. That's why I need to know what you can do from your end. Can

you handle it from there?”

I took a deep breath and swung my chair to face Larry Marston.

“Larry, four megatons would vaporize a few kilometers of the main cable. How hard would it be for us to

release ballast at the top end of the cable, above us here, enough to leave this station in position?”

“Well...” He hesitated. “We could do that, Jack. But then we'd lose the power satellite. It's right out at

the end there, by the ballast. Without it, we'd lose all the power at the station here, and all the buckets

too-there isn't enough reserve power to keep the magnetic fields going. We'd need all our spare power

to keep the recycling going here.”

That was the moment when I finally came fully awake. I realized the implications of what he was saying,

and was nodding before he'd finished speaking. Without adequate power, we'd be looking at a very

messy situation.

“And it wouldn't only be us,” I said to Velasquez and Panosky, sitting there tense in front of their screen.

“Everybody on the Colonies will run low on air and water if the supply through the Stalk breaks down.

Damnit, we've been warning Congress how vulnerable we are for years. All the time, there've been fewer

and fewer rocket launches, and nothing but foot-dragging on getting the second Stalk started with a

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Charles Sheffield - Skystalk

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