3001 The Final Odyssey

chapter 14 A Farewell to Earth
II - GOLIATH

Chapter 14 A Farewell to Earth

'Anything you want within reason,' he had been told. Frank Poole was not sure if his hosts would consider that returning to Jupiter was a reasonable request; indeed, he was not quite sure himself, and was beginning to have second thoughts.

He had already committed himself to scores of engagements, weeks in advance. Most of them he would be happy to miss, but there were some he would be sorry to forgo. In particular, he hated to disappoint the senior class from his old high school - how astonishing that it still existed! - when they planned to visit him next month.

However, he was relieved - and a little surprised - when both Indra and Professor Anderson agreed that it was an excellent idea. For the first time, he realized that they had been concerned with his mental health; perhaps a holiday from Earth would be the best possible cure.

And, most important of all, Captain Chandler was delighted. 'You can have my cabin,' he promised. 'I'll kick the First Mate out of hers.' There were times when Poole wondered if Chandler, with his beard and swagger, was not another anachronism. He could easily picture him on the bridge of a battered three-master, with Skull and Crossbones flying overhead.

Once his decision had been made, events moved with surprising speed. He had accumulated very few possessions, and fewer still that he needed to take with him. The most important was Miss Pringle, his electronic alter ego and secretary, now the storehouse of both his lives, and the small stack of terabyte memories that went with her.

Miss Pringle was not much larger than the hand-held personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist. She could communicate with him by audio or Braincap, and her prime duty was to act as an information filter and a buffer to the outside world. Like any good secretary, she knew when to reply, in the appropriate format: 'I'll put you through now' or - much more frequently: 'I'm sorry - Mr Poole is engaged. Please record your message and he will get back to you as soon as possible.' Usually, this was never.

There were very few farewells to be made: though realtime conversations would be impossible owing to the sluggish velocity of radio waves, he would be in constant touch with Indra and Joseph - the only genuine friends he had made.

Somewhat to his surprise, Poole realized that he would miss his enigmatic but useful 'valet', because he would now have to handle all the small chores of everyday life by himself. Danil bowed slightly when they parted, but otherwise showed no sign of emotion, as they took the long ride up to the outer curve of the world-circling wheel, thirty-six thousand kilometres above central Africa.

'I'm not sure, Dim, that you'll appreciate the comparison. But do you know what Goliath reminds me of?'

They were now such good friends that Poole could use the Captain's nickname - but only when no one else was around.

'Something unflattering, I assume.'

'Not really. But when I was a boy, I came across a whole pile of old science-fiction magazines that my Uncle George had abandoned - "pulps", they were called, after the cheap paper they were printed on... most of them were already falling to bits. They had wonderful garish covers, showing strange planets and monsters - and, of course, spaceships!

'As I grew older, I realized how ridiculous those spaceships were. They were usually rocket-driven - but there was never any sign of propellant tanks! Some of them had rows of windows from stem to stem, just like ocean liners. There was one favourite of mine with a huge glass dome - a space-going conservatory...

'Well, those old artists had the last laugh: too bad they could never know. Goliath looks more like their dreams than the flying fuel-tanks we used to launch from the Cape.

Your Inertial Drive still seems too good to be true - no visible means of support, unlimited range and speed - sometimes I think I'm the one who's dreaming!'

Chandler laughed and pointed to the view outside.

'Does that look like a dream?'

It was the first time that Poole had seen a genuine horizon since he had come to Star City, and it was not quite as far away as he had expected. After all, he was on the outer rim of a wheel seven times the diameter of Earth, so surely the view across the roof of this artificial world should extend for several hundred kilometres...

He used to be good at mental arithmetic - a rare achievement even in his time, and probably much rarer now. The formula to give the horizon distance was a simple one: the square root of twice your height times the radius - the sort of thing you never forgot, even if you wanted to...

Let's see - we're about 8 metres up - so root 16 - this is easy! - say big R is 40,000 - knock off those three zeros to make it all klicks - 4 times root 40 - hmm - just over 25...

Well, twenty-five kilometres was a fair distance, and certainly no spaceport on Earth had ever seemed this huge. Even knowing perfectly well what to expect, it was uncanny to watch vessels many times the size of his long-lost Discovery lifting off, not only with no sound, but with no apparent means of propulsion. Though Poole missed the flame and fury of the old-time countdowns, he had to admit that this was cleaner, more efficient - and far safer.

Strangest of all, though, was to sit up here on the Rim, in the Geostationary Orbit itself - and to feel weight! Just metres away, outside the window of the tiny observation lounge, servicing robots and a few spacesuited humans were gliding gently about their business; yet here inside Goliath the inertial field was maintaining standard Mars-gee.

'Sure you don't want to change your mind, Frank?' Captain Chandler had asked jokingly, as he left for the bridge. 'Still ten minutes before lift-off.'

'Wouldn't be very popular if I did, would I? No - as they used to say back in the old days - we have commit. Ready or not, here I come.'

Poole felt the need to be alone when the drive went on, and the tiny crew - only four men and three women - respected his wish. Perhaps they guessed how he must be feeling, to leave Earth for the second time in a thousand years - and, once again, to face an unknown destiny.

Jupiter-Lucifer was on the other side of the Sun, and the almost straight line of Goliath's orbit would take them close to Venus. Poole looked forward to seeing, with his own unaided eyes, if Earth's sister planet was now beginning to live up to that description, after centuries of terraforming.

From a thousand kilometres up, Star City looked like a gigantic metal band around Earth's Equator, dotted with gantries, pressure domes, scaffolding holding half-completed ships, antennas, and other more enigmatic structures. It was diminishing swiftly as Goliath headed sunwards, and presently Poole could see how incomplete it was: there were huge gaps spanned only by a spider's web of scaffolding, which would probably never be completely enclosed.

And now they were falling below the plane of the ring; it was midwinter in the northern hemisphere, so the slim halo of Star City was inclined at over twenty degrees to the Sun. Already Poole could see the American and Asian towers, as shining threads stretching outwards and away, beyond the blue haze of the atmosphere.

He was barely conscious of time as Goliath gained speed, moving more swiftly than any comet that had ever fallen sunwards from interstellar space. The Earth, almost full, still spanned his field of view, and he could now see the full length of the Africa Tower which had been his home in the life he was now leaving - perhaps, he could not help thinking, leaving for ever.

When they were fifty thousand kilometres out, he was able to view the whole of Star City, as a narrow ellipse enclosing the Earth. Though the far side was barely visible, as a hair-line of light against the stars, it was awe-inspiring to think that the human race had now set this sign upon the heavens.

Then Poole remembered the rings of Saturn, infinitely more glorious. The astronautical engineers still had a long, long way to go, before they could match the achievements of Nature.

Or, if that was the right word, Deus.