He had to find a way to escape the tube, but no idea came to him. He had nothing he could throw to gain momentum. The coolant jet throbbed behind him, but relative to the blur of motion in the walls he could not tell whether it did any good. It occurred to him that if he was too successful he would crash into the speeding wall and be torn to pieces in an instant. Somehow the abstract nature of these things, the dry, distant feel of science, frightened him all the more.
The tube is flaring out. We are approaching one side of it, but I cannot judge our velocity well. As we rise, the hoop curves away to make its great arc outward. The majesty of it is impressive, I must say. No mechtech I have ever heard of matches this. Grey says the historical records suggest even greater works near the Eater.
“Forget that. What can I do?”
I am trying to see how we can use our situation, but I must say that a solution continues to elude me. The dynamics—
“We’re gettin’ close. Come on!”
The rock around him had already ceased glowing. Beyond the walls lay complete darkness. He could not understand how he could be moving up from the center of New Bishop and yet still feel that he was falling. No matter; science was a set of rules to him, and this was simply a rule he did not comprehend.
The tunnel was broadening. A shimmering golden passage flared gradually as he gazed between his boots at shards of light that rushed toward him. More vast lava lakes, brimming with angry reds. The injury to the whole axial length had brutally shoved great masses together, making the walls around him froth with the planet’s jagged orange wrath.
Again he thought of what would happen if he could do nothing up ahead. The cool logic of dynamics would, Arthur said, fling him back into the core. The heat would kill him on the next pass. Or if it managed only to send him into delirium, there would be another cycle, and another, and another…. He would bob endlessly, a crisp cinder obeying simple but inexorable laws.
Instantly he was swimming in light.
Stars bloomed beneath his feet. A bowl of brilliant gas and suns opened as he shot free of the planet’s grasp, above the twilight line. After the sultry darkness this sky was a welcoming bath of colors and contrasts.
Out, free!
He could feel his suit cool as it lost heat to the cold sky. It went ping, pop as joints contracted. Wrinkled hills rose above his head, the whole landscape stretching as it drew away. Here, too, was the stripped look, as though the polar ice had only recently been vanquished.
The golden walls fell away from him on one side, but in front of him the radiance did not fade or recede. It was much closer. He had gained some significant speed, then.
But now he was losing his speed along the tube. He watched the planet above his helmet turn into a gigantic silvery bowl. The dawnline cut this bowl in half. A ruby sky-glow of dustclouds and stars dominated the wan day.
As he rose the world’s curve brought into view a far-off scruff of woodland and stark, jutting mountains. Fluffy white clouds clung to shallow valleys.
His rate of rise dwindled. The far side of the hoop-tube was bending away. In front of him the glow was brighter. He took a few moments to be sure he was in fact curving over along with the hoop walls. Could he see the flicker of motion from the rapidly rotating string? He had begun to think of the walls as solid, and now he became aware of their gauzy nature.
The cosmic string can exert pressure only when it is very near you, of course. You will not in fact strike the cosmic string itself, I judge.
“Thought you said it’d take off my hand.”
I have conferred further with Grey. She believes that normally a string would function like a scythe. However, this highly magnetized string is different. Until now you were moving with respect to the string at high speeds. Now you will have a low relative velocity, but only for a brief moment. At such speeds the string’s magnetic fields will repulse your metallic boots and suit.
“Huh.” Killeen supposed this was good news, but the Aspect spoke as though this was just another dispassionate physics problem. “Look, you save any that cooler stuff?”
Yes, I had anticipated that we might need another push. But there is very little. I needed it all to keep us from losing consciousness back there, and so—
“Get ready.”
Already he could detect no further shrinking in the wrecked face of New Bishop below. He must be near the top of his swing.
“Fire it!”
He felt the jetting pressure at his back. The glowing hoop-tube curled away like an opening funnel. Beyond he could see the gossamer surface generated by the globe-spanning cosmic string. It appeared now to wrap the world in a rib-bony stranglehold.
The venting at his spine gurgled to a stop.
Whuum-whuum-whuum, the magnetic rotor sang.
Vibrant, intense glow spread all around him. He wind-milled his arms and brought his boots down toward the golden surface. It pulsed with freshening energy.
He felt as though he were a fragile bird, vainly flailing its wings above a sheet of translucent, wispy gold. Falling toward it. Performing his own sort of experiment…
The impact slammed him hard. It jarred up through his boots like a rough, wrenching punch. He had crouched, letting his legs absorb the momentum. Suddenly he was shooting along the surface of the sheet.
It has conveyed impulse to you, an infinitesimal fraction of its spinning energy.
Killeen felt himself loft slightly higher. Then he came down toward the sheet again. He had shot sidewise, away from the polar axis, going out on a tangent like a coin flung off a merry-go-round.
He hit again. This time the jolt twisted his ankle. It felt like a hand grabbing at him, then losing its grip. But it gave him another push—outward.
I estimate you are gaining significant velocity from these encounters. It is difficult to calculate, but—
Killeen ignored the tiny piping Aspect. His ankle ached. Was it broken?
He had no time to bend over and feel it. The shimmering plain came rising toward him again, hard and flat.
He grunted with pain. The shock caught his feet and flung him off at a steep angle, twisting him with a sharp, wrenching stab.
You will have to be more careful as you set down upon it. It can convey spin, but if your velocity is not aligned with it, there is a vector coupling, a torque—
“Shut up!” He did not want to set down on the golden surface again, the ghostly curtain that could clutch and break him like a stick.
But the velocity he was picking up from the thing flung him sidewise, not up. Only his rebounding kept him above the flickering radiance. If he slipped, tumbled, went shooting across the damned thing as he spun out of control—
