Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“We don’t have much time.” He snapped his fingers and the suitcase opened. It contained two more orange suits, neatly folded, and more gear: blankets, water bottles, packets of dried food, what might have been an assembly-kit chemical toilet, a water purifying kit, oxygen masks.

Bisesa looked at this junk with apprehension. “It’s like the gear we used to take on field hikes in Afghanistan. We’re taking a ride, are we?”

“That we are.” Alexei hauled the jumpsuits out of the suitcase.

“Put these on, please. This corner of the facility is low on surveillance, but the sooner we’re in camouflage the better.”

“Right here?”

“Come on, Mum.” Myra was already unzipping her blouse.

The jumpsuit was easy to put on; it seemed to wriggle into place, and Bisesa wondered if it had some limited smartness of its own. Alexei handed her boots, and she found gloves and a kind of balaclava helmet in a pocket.

In the Florida sun, once she was zipped up she was hot. But evidently she was headed somewhere much colder.

Myra bundled their clothes into a smaller pack she took from the car, which also contained their spare underwear and toiletries.

She threw the pack into the suitcase, which folded closed. Then she patted the car. Empty, it closed itself up and rolled away.

Alexei grinned. “All set?”

“As we’ll ever be,” Myra said.

Alexei snapped his fingers again. The tarmac under Bisesa’s feet shuddered.

And a great slab of it dropped precipitately, taking the three of them and the suitcase down into darkness. A metal lid closed over them with a clang.

“Shit,” Bisesa said.

“Sorry,” Alexei said. “Meant for cargo, not people.”

Fluorescents lit up, revealing a concrete corridor.

Alexei led them to an open-topped vehicle a little like a golf cart.

They clambered aboard. Bisesa felt bulky and clumsy, moving in her jumpsuit. Even the suitcase was more graceful than she was.

The cart moved off smoothly down the tunnel. It was long and crudely cut, and it stretched off into a darkness dimly lit by widely spaced fluorescent tubes. There was a musty smell, but at least it was a little cooler down here.

“This is kind of a cargo conduit,” Alexei said. “Not meant for passengers.”

“But it’s away from prying eyes,” Bisesa said.

“You got it. It’s a couple of klicks but we’ll be there in no time.”

His accent was basically American, Bisesa thought, but with an odd tang of French, long vowels and rolled r’s. “Where are we going?”

“You’ve slept through the rebuilding, haven’t you? We’re heading for LC-39.”

Faint memories stirred in Bisesa’s head. “Launch Complex 39.

Where they launched the Apollo s from.”

“And later the space shuttles, yeah.”

“Now it’s used for something else entirely,” Myra said. “You’ll see.”

“Of course it had to be LC-39 they used,” Alexei said. “As indeed it had to be Canaveral. I mean, it’s not an unsuitable site, especially now they have the hurricanes licked. There are better locations, closer to the equator, but no, it had to be here. The irony is that to launch the new Saturn s that are taking the Apollo retreads into orbit, they had to build a new pad altogether.”

Bisesa still didn’t know what they were talking about. They used the pad for what ? “Carel — how do I know that name?”

“You may have met my father. Bill Carel? He worked with Professor Siobhan McGorran.”

It was a long time since Bisesa had heard that name. Siobhan had been Britain’s Astronomer Royal at the time of the sunstorm, and had ended up playing a significant role in mankind’s response to the crisis — and in Bisesa’s own destiny.

“My father was with her as a graduate student. They worked together on quintessence studies.”

“On what?… Never mind.”

“That was before the sunstorm. Now Dad’s a full professor himself.” The cart slowed. “Here we go.” He hopped nimbly off the cart before it had stopped. The women and the suitcase followed a bit more cautiously.

They gathered on a block of tarmac. A lid opened above them with a metallic snap, revealing a slab of blue sky.

Alexei said, “We shouldn’t be challenged aboveground. If we are, let me do the talking. Hold tight, now.” He snapped his fingers.

The tarmac block became an elevator that surged upward with a violence that made Bisesa stagger.

They emerged into sunlight. Alexei had seemed more comfortable underground; now he flinched from the open sky.

Bisesa glanced around, trying to get her bearings. They were at the focus of roads that snaked out over the flat coastal plain of Canaveral, crammed with streams of vehicles, mostly trucks. There was even a kind of monorail system along which a train of podlike compartments zipped, glistening and futuristic. All this traffic poured into this place.

And before her was a vast rusting slab, a platform that reminded her oddly of an oil rig, but stranded on the land, and mounted on tremendous caterpillar tracks. The crude metal shell of the thing was stamped with logos: mostly “Skylift Consortium,”

a name that rang faint bells. Close by stood more strange assemblies, squat tubes that stood erect in mobile stands, like cannon pointing up at the pale blue sky.

“This platform looks for all the world like one of those old crawlers they used to use to haul the Saturn s and the shuttles out to the pad.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Alexei said. “A mobile launch platform, reused.”

“And what are those cannon? Weapons?”

“No,” Alexei said. “They’re the power supply.”

“For what?”

Myra said gently, “Things have changed, Mum. Look up.”

Mounted on top of the big crawler was what looked like a minor industrial facility, where unlikely-looking machines rolled around in a kind of choreography. They seemed to be trucks, basically, but with solar-cell wings on their flanks, and on their roofs were pulleylike mechanisms that made them look like stranded cable-cars. Their hulls were all stamped with the Skylift logo.

These peculiar engines were lining up before a kind of ribbon, shining silver, looking no wider than Bisesa’s hand, that rose up from the platform. Each truck in turn approached the ribbon, dipped its pulley spindle, clung to the ribbon, and then hauled itself off the ground, rising rapidly.

Bisesa stepped back and lifted her face, trying to see where the ribbon went. It rose on up; Bisesa could see the trucks climbing it like beads on a necklace. The ribbon arced upward, narrowing with perspective, becoming a shining thread tilted slightly from the vertical, a scratch ruled across the sky. She tipped her head back higher, looking for whatever was holding the ribbon up—

Nothing was holding it up.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “A space elevator.”

Alexei seemed interested in her reaction. “We call it Jacob’s Ladder. In 2069, it’s an everyday miracle, Bisesa. Welcome to the future.

Come on, time to find our ride. Are you up to a little climbing?”

They had to scramble up rusty rungs, fixed to the side of the mobile platform. Bisesa struggled, Hibernaculum-enfeebled, encased in her suit. The others took care of her, Alexei going ahead, Myra following.

Once on the upper surface of the platform they gave her a few seconds to catch her breath. The trucks rolled to and fro in their orderly way, their motors whirring gently.

Embarrassed, she tried to say something intelligent. “Why use a crawler?”

Alexei said, “It’s best to keep the base of your elevator mobile.