Back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, and silver. Then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of 300 kilometers an hour. Five days later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars’s third moon. It was a busy place; there was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships, and crews perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in existence. Though most of the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.
And of course media coverage of all the new imagery was immediate and intense; and all in all, despite the decade of waiting, it seemed that on touchdown the elevator had sprung into being like Athena.
• • •
But there was trouble. Frank found that his staff was spending more and more time dealing with men and women from the tents, who had come into Sheffield and right into their offices, new arrivals who were sometimes nervous, sometimes loud and angry, rattling on about crowded living conditions or insufficient police or bad food. One bulky red-faced man wearing a baseball cap shook a finger at them and said, “Private security companies come in from tents higher up and offer protection, but they’re just gangs, it’s just extortion! I can’t even give you my name or our security might find out I came here! I mean I believe in the black economy as much as the next guy, but this is crazy! This isn’t what we came here for.”
Frank paced his office, seething. These kinds of allegations were clearly true, but difficult to verify without a security team of one’s own, a big police force in fact. When the man left, he grilled his staff, but they could tell him nothing new, which made him even angrier. “You’re paid to find these things out for me, that’s your jobs! What are you doing sitting around in here all day watching Terran news!”
He canceled a day’s appointments, thirty-seven meetings in all. “Lazy incompetent bastards,” he said loudly as he stalked out the door. He went to the train station and caught a local downslope to have a look for himself.
The local train now stopped every kilometer of the descent, in small stainless steel locks that served as stations for the tent towns. He got out in one; signs in the lock identified it as El Paso. He walked through the open doors of the passage lock.
At least these tents had a view, there was no denying that. Down the great eastern slope of the volcano ran the train piste and the pipelines, and on either side of them tent after tent, like blisters. The clear fabric of the older ones upslope was already turning a bit purple. Ventilators hummed loudly from the physical plant next to the station, and from somewhere a hydrazine generator was adding its high hum. People were conversing in Spanish and English. Frank called his office and got them to ring the apartment of a man from El Paso who had dropped in to complain. The man answered, and Frank arranged to meet him at a café next to the station, then walked over and sat at an outer table. Men and women sat around tables eating and talking like anywhere else. Little electric cars hummed up and down the narrow streets, most piled high with boxes. The buildings near the station were three stories tall and appeared prefab, steel-reinforced concrete painted bright blue and white. There was a line of young trees in tubs running away from the station down the main thoroughfare. Small groups sat on the astroturf, or walked aimlessly from shop to shop, or hurried with shoulderbags and daypacks toward the station. All of them looked a bit disoriented or uncertain, as if they had no habits, or had not yet learned to walk properly.
The man showed up with a whole crowd of his neighbors, all in their twenties, too young to be on Mars or so it used to be said. Perhaps the treatment could fix damage from radiation, allow them to reproduce accurately, who could say for sure till they tried? Laboratory animals, that’s what they were. What they had always been.
It was strange to stand among them like some ancient patriarch, treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, like a grandpa. Irritably he told them to take him on a walk and show him around. They guided him down narrow streets away from the station and the taller buildings, between long rows of what turned out to be Agee huts, which had been designed for temporary shelter in the outlands: research outposts, or water stations, or refugee huts. Now lined up by the score. The slope of the volcano had been hastily graded, and a lot of the huts were on a two- or three-degree slope, so that they had to be careful in the kitchens, they said, and make sure to align their beds properly.