“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; it would have been worse, but the air was so thin at that elevation that it did not carry much force. Now the survivors in Sheffield wanted to know whether to run south to escape the next wrapping, or try to get around the caldera to the north.
They got no reply. But more escapees from Korolyov, on the south rim of Melas Chasma in Marineris, reported over one of the rebel channels that the cable was now falling so hard it was shattering on impact. Half an hour later an Aureum drilling operation called in; they had gone out after the sonic booms, and found a mound of glowing brecciated debris, stretching from horizon to horizon.
There was an hour’s absence of any new hard information, nothing but questions and speculation and rumor. Then one of the headphoned listeners leaned back and showed thumbs up to the rest of them, and clicked on the intercom, and an excited voice came on yelling through the static: “It’s exploding! It came down in about four seconds, it was burning top to bottom and when it hit the ground everything jumped right under our feet! We’re having trouble with a leak here. We figure we’re about eighteen kilometers south of where it hit, and we’re twenty-five south of the equator, so you should be able to calculate the rest of the wrap from that, I hope. It was burning from top to bottom! Like this white line cutting the sky in half! I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve still got afterimages in my vision, they’re bright green. It was like a shooting star had stretched. . . Wait, Jorge is on the intercom, he’s out there and saying it’s only about three meters high where he is. It’s soft regolith here, so the cable’s in a trench it smashed for itself. He says it’s so deep in places you could bury it and have a level surface. Those’ll be like fords, he says, because in other places it stands five or six meters high. I guess it’ll do that for hundreds of kilometers at a stretch! It’ll be like the Great Wall of China.”
Then a call came in from Escalante Crater, which was right on the equator. They had evacuated immediately on news of the break with Clarke, but had gone south, so that the arrival of the cable had turned out to be a close thing. The cable was now exploding on impact, they reported, and sending sheets of molten ejecta into the sky, lava-esque fireworks that arced up into their dawn twilight, and were dim and black by the time they fell back to the surface.
During all this time Sax never left his screen, and now he was muttering through pursed lips as he typed and read. The second time around the speed of the fall would accelerate to 21,000 kilometers an hour, he said, almost six kilometers a second; so that for anyone within sight of it— a dangerous place to be, deadly if you were not up on a prominence and many kilometers away— it would look like a kind of meteor strike, and cross from horizon to horizon in less than a second. Sonic booms to follow.