Fatal Ascent

By Gordon McKinzie

In a remote area of the South Pacific, an airplane suddenly spins out of the overcast and crashes, the reason known only to a small group of scientists at a nearby atoll who have been developing the world's first space elevator in absolute secrecy. The atoll soon gives up its secrets, including a diabolical plot to murder innocent civilians and commandeer the incredible Ladder to Space project for military purposes that will hold the entire world hostage. Only heroic actions by a lone USAF reserve F-16 pilot can deflect the momentum of the destructive forces about to be unleashed -- if it isn't too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257163960

Book preview

2010

Principal Characters

Chapter 1:

Charlie

15 June, 7:35 AM

Line Island Group, 142°15’W, 1°38’S

That must have been some really shitty rum last night! Charlie Vance forced a weak grimace as he slouched even farther down into the seat of the Cessna Caravan amphibian. The plane was flying between two heavy cloud layers at eight thousand feet on a compass heading of 94 degrees. He had a blinding headache and was flying into an equally blinding southeastern Pacific sunrise, squinting and rubbing his eyes so hard the instrument panel was swimming in and out of view much too often. The cloud cover above and below him cast the outside scene as one of a billowy tunnel, with that damned sunrise sandwiched smack dab in front of him.

The Caravan throbbed along with the authoritative howl that only a turboprop can produce, and the large four-bladed prop presented a light gray whirling veil of distortion that the pilot unconsciously tried to blink out of his forward vision. Churning along at an indicated 160 knots but only making 140 against a steady headwind, Charlie was heading out to one of the most remote atolls in the Line Island group, a bird-shit encrusted pile of coral called Hiva 157, roughly five hundred miles northeast of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. It was a dull, routine mission he never could get too excited about; he was in his fifth year as a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service supply pilot, with a gig to pick up and replenish motion-activated surveillance tapes at a rookery for a large Frigate bird population on this and other microscopic atolls.

Pretty shitty work, but the flying is good, he was often heard to remark. The shitty tag was apt, since he inevitably found himself tiptoeing through matted layers of bird guano each time the camera installations were serviced.

Today’s monthly run to Hiva 157 was the first leg of eight Charlie had scheduled for the day, which wouldn’t have him back into Nuku Hiva until sundown. With a seven-hour flying day ahead of him, Charlie had bristled at the thought of making a twenty-minute dogleg around R-237, which was a Restricted Area on the map. R-237 was an area bounded by a fictitious circle sixty miles in diameter in the middle of nowhere, and twenty minutes was a lot of flying time, not to mention one hundred pounds of fuel—and pretty fucking unnecessary. He had already complained about R-237 to some of the boys back in operations. Hell, that Restricted Area has been posted on the Notice to Airmen bulletin board for more than a year now, and I’ll bet some part-time beachcombing bureaucrat forgot to ask the local aviation hotshots if the NOTAM was still valid!

In fact, Charlie recalled, there was a well-publicized rocket launch in that area a few years ago when a big Russian Federation Zenit rocket and its classified payload was fired from a Boeing-built floating platform called Sea Launch, a sea-going launching pad that could be deployed anywhere in the world. The Sea Launch platform had been towed all the way from Long Beach, California, to a favorable launch location near the equator. By now it was certainly no longer in the area—probably even back in California. R-237 should have disappeared when the Sea Launch platform left town, Charlie often grumped.

So Charlie made a command decision: When in doubt, go direct. He switched on his Garmin 500 GPS display, punched the TERRAIN button to highlight his destination (it appeared as a cream-colored, irregular blob against an aquamarine background), noted the heading that would take him there in a straight line, and adjusted the autopilot HDG cursor accordingly.

On the new heading, Charlie continued to blink and squint into the unrelenting glare of the sunrise, but now the bulk of the blaze was thankfully a little bit off to his right in the opposite windscreen. He reached for his coffee mug, turned it by rote in his hand and probed with his tongue to locate the recessed drinking hole, then tilted the whole affair up to begin gulping down his second mug of the morning. As his head rotated up, just past the curvature of the mug, a striation of vertical lines appeared in his forward vision. He lowered the mug slightly, then did a double take. Damn, he thought to himself, how could this windshield be cracking right down the middle?

That thought never matriculated. In one horrible instant, something unseen grabbed the Caravan in mid-flight in a sickening deceleration accompanied by a crescendo of tearing metal and an intrusion of blastforce wind and deafening engine noise. The Caravan was wrenched to the left, then dumped inverted as the left wing folded back on itself at the root, unleashing eight hundred gallons of Jet A fuel into a blossoming spray. The airplane continued in its mangled twist-tumble death gyration, plunging through the overcast with Charlie’s vision a frantic repetition of sea-sky-sea-sky through a narrowing g-induced peephole of swirling metal, acrylic, and a cloudy aerosol of fuel and debris. His last conscious thought was that the vertical lines were still there—and in a final split second before the tumbling g-forces mercifully blacked him out—Jesus Christ! I just ran into some wires up here!

Chapter 2:

An Airplane has Crashed

15 June, Just Before Midnight

San Francisco Bay Area

Mark Darden was definitely the Man of the Hour, but also definitely a man about to flame out. As CEO of Space Grid International, he had been working nonstop for the past nine months on bringing his fledgling project, the Ladder to Space, onto an international stage with a full scale proof-of-concept demonstration. Earlier today, Saturday, he was enjoying a rare break from the office, sitting on the balcony of his A-frame houseboat moored in a private cove close to Sausalito, drinking coffee after his morning run. That all changed with the phone call from his station chief that a plane had crashed only a half mile from their private research facility, which was situated on a tiny atoll in the southeastern Pacific.

Damn! he had thought to himself, what next? There were so many details that kept him awake nights and permeated his every thought and action, and now there was this crash in their backyard, with the who, what, and why still unanswered. When he first received the news about the tragedy, relayed via satellite phone, he called his assistant, Monique Santos, to put together a meeting of what he called his critical mass of trusted corporate operatives at SGI headquarters in Pleasanton, twenty miles east of San Francisco. He needed to gather their collective input and counsel and make plans for a group visit to their South Seas facility. Since his entire Ladder to Space project was virtually unknown outside the corridors of academia, it was almost a certainty that the crash would trigger local news to some degree. His worst fear was that the story would go international, reducing the impact that his Demonstration Day in early August was planned to elicit.

Mark and eight of his brain trust spent the latter half of Saturday roughing out some strategy scenarios, and right on schedule at 12:05 AM, their fractional-leased Falcon 50EX corporate jet screamed westward out of Livermore Airport, took up a fixed track heading out of a Pacific gateway one hundred miles southwest of Monterey, and climbed out into a moonless night.

Mark Darden, double PhD in physical and polymer chemistry and youngest researcher to ever be elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, was clearly enjoying life. At 43, he was in his prime; physically fit, tall and tanned, and still a passable rendition of the dark-haired scholar-athlete who had rowed Stanford’s 8-man shell to the 1984 NCAA championship as number one oar. Never married, Mark did not find it difficult to fill in the social voids, but until the Ladder to Space project was successfully culminated and relegated to a stable stock quote and occasional director’s meeting, he felt he could only nurture one passion at a time.

The Ladder to Space project was now in its twelfth year of development, having first germinated in the early ‘90s as a collaborative PhD thesis investigating carbon chain structuring. Mark and his fellow doctoral candidates had eventually stumbled onto a process that would build on the spectacular research of Drs. Smalley, Curl, and Iijima, the discoverers of new carbon bonding phenomena that became known as buckytubes. Now called nanotubes, they were basically carbon molecules strategically arranged in super-strong tubular form with end caps. Mark was fascinated every time he studied the amazing properties of these microscopic nanotubes, which could be intertwined into the likeness of a rope smaller in diameter than dental floss, yet strong enough to lift a city bus. He had devoured all the literature from giants in the research community on the subject as far back as 1985, each reading only reinforcing his conviction that a tremendously long nanotube tape could be used to support an elevator that could move objects from the earth into near space.

Mark found that it always made good cocktail conversation to reveal that he was someday hoping to extend a cluster of tapes more than sixty-two thousand miles into space. When pressed further, Mark would expound on the benefits of freeing up a dependence on expensive rockets and pricey launch and recovery operations, opening up space in ways never before imagined. He would emphatically note, however, that his greatest passion was to capture the earth’s abundant ration of solar energy closer to the source. By so doing, all of the electricity the earth and its people would ever need would become available, finally ending a tenuous dependency on a dwindling supply of fossil-based fuel. The prospect of bringing such a concept to fruition occupied his every waking moment.

Solving the riddle of fabricating the microscopically small and short laboratory nanotubes into infinitely long and continuous strands became Mark’s driving pursuit and preoccupation for almost six years. Once he had achieved the breakthrough, Mark and some equally gifted associates were inspired to launch Space Grid International. Their avowed challenge was to create and fabricate the strongest version of a double-walled nanotube in a composite matrix, but their overarching goal was contained in their mission statement: Capitalize on the energy and wealth of exploration that can derive from a safe and economical access to space, for the benefit of all mankind.

The Falcon touched down in Papeete, Tahiti, at 5:00 AM after an eight-hour flight, at which point the SGI executives were steered, zombie-like, to another airplane—one that sported a V-shaped hull, high wing, and a T-tail. The engines were mounted on top of the wing—obviously an amphibian, most of them surmised, but at that hour in the morning after a restless night, what did it matter? At 5:45 AM, that strange airplane, a Russian-made Beriev Be-200, lifted off into a soft pink Polynesian sunrise and turned northward toward the smallest of blips on the pilot’s GPS screen…

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Ladder to Space Concept Diagram

1:1 Scale: The elevator cable would be invisible at this scale.

Chapter 3:

National Transportation Safety Board

16 June, 8:00 AM

Signature Aviation Facility, Honolulu International Airport

Clay Elliott couldn’t remember being around this many pissed-off people in a long time. As lead investigator in the National Transportation Safety Board Honolulu Field Office, he had probably endured more than his normal share of frustration and discontent during his twenty-one years with the NTSB, but rarely had he seen everybody around him in such foul moods.

It had been shit city from the moment headquarters reached him on the red line last night about the Caravan crash. Without wanting to know why the supposed time of the accident was over twelve hours old before he was contacted, he was pissed that there was apparently some sort of blackout in play; information should be flowing directly from the site of the accident, some remote little unnamed atoll down on the equator. The call that he received via a patch from headquarters was obviously the result of somebody reluctantly working their way down some goddamn telephone tree checklist, with the NTSB being at the very bottom of the communication latrine. And a twelve-hour no comm. gap for a little no-brainer crash with one reported fatality was pretty fucking ridiculous, Clay thought. Maybe some witch doctor on a jungle drum down at the crash scene just didn’t have a clue that the Honolulu NTSB office was the point of initial contact for anything involving incidents or accidents to planes, trains, and ships operating with U.S. registries in the Pacific. Hah! Anyway, his scorecard back at home base in D.C. was already in the toilet when it came to the category of response time.

His team members, God bless ’em, had been willing to drop everything, as was the drill, and meet him at his requested 8:00 AM time at the airport with their personal luggage (not to exceed 25 pounds) in hand, and those ubiquitous NTSB brain bags loaded with whatever their specialty required. Clay and most of his team had been through this dozens of times, although in the Hawaiian Islands it was rare that they would be deployed to locations that would be so far away that extended travel or lengthy hotel stays would be required.

So precisely at 8:00 AM, Clay and members of the prestigious Honolulu NTSB Field Office Accident Go Team were camped out in the lounge of Signature Executive Aviation, located on the remotest back lot of Honolulu International Airport, waiting for their ride down to the equator, and getting pissier by the minute. Clay was mentally bracing himself for the incredible minutiae that would soon descend on him, courtesy of the NTSB Field Manual. He reminded himself that even though this was just a no-brainer one-plane, one-pilot crash, the attention to NTSB format and protocol had to be every bit as thorough and professional as the biggest tragedy that would hopefully never come during his tenure.

As the clock rolled past 8:30 AM and Clay crumpled up his second styrofoam cup of the morning and tossed it into the trash, he had that uncomfortable twinge in the gut that told him something was not right— something had jumped the track. Where was the goddamn transportation? Sonofabitch! Clay muttered as he flipped open the cover of his cell phone and speed-dialed the restricted number for the NTSB operations desk in Washington. Ops, this is CIIC Clay Elliott on the ramp at Honolulu waiting for our ride to an accident scene. Our Accident Team Mobilization Authority Code is 14423 for this mission. My Go Team is assembled and we are time critical. D.C. confirmed at oh-five-hundred our time that they were coordinating. What can you tell me?

The awkward silence that followed told Clay everything he needed to know. He stiffened, then punched his next words out through grimaced teeth: Ops, please listen. We are going to assume total coordination for deployment per ATMA 14423. We are ready to move out and can mobilize necessary resources ASAP in accordance with emergency field protocols. Please acknowledge if you can support. Clay was tempted to add, "And if you can’t support, then go jump into that sewer you call the Potomac, find a rock to hang on to, and see how it feels to be fucked around on a little tiny island!" Clay’s second thought, however, was that prudent silence on the first thought was what probably kept agents in the field until a ripe old age, particularly at plum field office assignments like Honolulu. The Honolulu Field Office, he had to periodically remind himself, didn’t even exist five years ago, but was spun off from the larger Gardena Regional Office in the Los Angeles area, which had been his turf for over twelve years.

Clay had to wait a few minutes while the other end of the line went on hold, then came back with a few oblique apologies. He then opened his local contact files in his PDA to arrange transportation. A number of calls later, Clay determined that the only available executive jet that could be spared for that duration of a trip was on the ground in Kona, 145 miles away. Let’s do it, ordered Clay, and the call went out to retrieve the Kona Lear 45 leased to Executive Island Charter for immediate ferry over to Honolulu, then a turnaround to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands and return.

Clay released the team to go grab a bite over at the terminal because he knew that time was not necessarily of the essence down on the Big Island, and that even more delay, on the order of one to two hours, was inevitable. Still ticking through the checklist, Clay made satellite phone contact with a dispatch clerk on Nuku Hiva requesting that some local transportation and hotel accommodations be arranged for the evening (no native huts, please, he had cautioned). He also proffered the magic words U.S. Government Transportation Request and asked to be handed off to the airfield operations manager, specifying a float plane to be available for a dawn departure to the crash site. The float plane would have to be large enough for a pilot and four passengers, including 250 pounds of flyaway kits, and have an unrefueled round-trip range capability of at least twelve hundred miles, plus reserves. Jesus! Clay thought to himself as a bizarre thought suddenly struck home—The only float plane in the whole goddamn ocean down there is probably the one that crashed!

Four hours later, the Lear 45 wheeled into view across the ramp. The two pilots, who had earlier been promised a 24-hour layover in Kona with some high expectations of action in the Busted Bulkhead Saloon, killed both engines in a fast taxi and jolted to a coasting stop on the transit ramp, bolting out the barely down-and-locked cabin door and into the dispatch area. As Clay entered the glass-fronted building, he spotted the first officer at the service counter busily filing a flight plan and determining fuel load and weight and balance requirements. Clay introduced himself and began assisting with the details of the passenger manifest and government expense billing forms, which he always suspected had been designed by the same warped individual that had concocted the IRS Tax Code.

At the far end of the dispatch area, facing outward with his elbows planted on the counter, the Lear captain was looking a little worse for wear. Sweaty and disheveled in his short sleeve white dress shirt with black tie and four-stripe shoulder epaulets, Captain Mayday Malloy was clearly on a rant to anybody who would listen:

"So we get this hurry-up and shit call from you guys here in Honolulu to get the airplane back for some NTSB passengers, which is fine, but nobody knew where the goddamned maintenance log was and the fuel wagon out there doesn’t move at the speed of light! Mayday knew he had a captive audience, and was just warming up. So we take off with six thousand pounds of fuel onboard at fourteen-forty-five and file direct for this place. But about thirty minutes out it all turns brown when we are the zillionth guy in line for ‘eight right’. Shit, I haven’t landed on that boondock runway for more than a year. Why today?"

Mayday was starting to show the first signs of hyperventilation, his chest heaving and his breath coming in shorter gasps. "So help me God, the Air Traffic Control assholes wave me off fucking twice on my approaches. I can’t believe it—a whole parade of Cessnas are jammed up too close in trail and more of those little bastards are ‘goin’ around’ than are landing. Do you think they care that I’m burning over six hundred pounds of fuel dickin’ around out there? I finally busted every speed in the book to get in front of another string of high wing hotshots, but that still put me on the ground after sixteen hundred. By the time we probably ran our tires flat on the world’s longest taxiway getting from out there to over here, it’s been over an hour and a half since we left Kona!"

Wiping a formation of spittle from the corners of his mouth, Mayday was winding down. "I should have told those traffic control cocksuckers that I had ‘NTSB business’ and needed some expeditious handling!" Mayday had drawled out the word expeditious with a blurred flourish.Then a slight pause and a very audible, assholes!

Not to be left out in this superheated verbal ventilation, the dispatch clerk, a large Hawaiian in a sweat-stained aloha shirt with a sharkstooth necklace and severely pock-marked face had the final say: Shit, brudda, dere’s no love lost between the NTSB and the FAA around here. If you told those tower assholes you wanted NTSB ‘expedite service’ they’d probably uncork those old shore batteries over at Fort Ruger and blow you the fuck out of the sky!

Chapter 4:

No Fun Atoll

16 June, 9:15 AM

SGI Station One, 142°15’W, 1°38’S

Mark Darden lifted himself partially out of the co-pilot seat and craned his neck over the glare shield as he scanned the forward horizon. Tony Drake, pilot of the Beriev Be-200 jet-powered transport amphibian, switched the GPS display to the fifty-mile range. We’re coming up on the thirty-mile perimeter boundary, Mr. Darden, and the security coordinator is standing by.

Mark re-adjusted his headset and glanced over at the pilot. That’s good, Tony. I’ll let you know when we get the laser, then I’d like you to break off on a simulated evasive heading. After that, we need to get down to the station as quickly as possible. I’ll help with the radio.

I can see it! Bank right! Mark barked, and the Beriev heeled over on its right wing and began reversing course. Mark had just been alerted by the blinding light of a 20-megawatt ruby laser, telling him that the airplane was penetrating the 30-mile defensive perimeter of one of the most remote, tiniest outcroppings of coral in the Pacific. But, because of its tenant, Space Grid International, it was potentially the most valuable piece of real estate in the world.

Tony throttled back the two wingtop-mounted Rolls-Royce BR715 engines and changed heading to once again approach the atoll, but through a corridor clearly marked on his GPS screen. Nofun tower, this is Company One. We are twenty-three miles out and lining up for splashdown in the southern box. Please disarm the burglar alarm. Mark had to smirk at the Nofun tag—it was created when one of the engineers realized that Nofun Atoll, or No Fun at All, was an apt moniker for this desolate outpost, particularly for the younger guys—they were tantalizingly close, but not close enough, to the sights, sounds, and most importantly, the curvaceous wahines of Nuku Hiva.

Roger, tower. I’ve got the boss onboard, along with five passengers. Say the wind, please. The final transmission from the atoll was Company One, wind calm, altimeter two niner niner one. Tony rogered the call, pulled off all of the power, notched in the maximum flap setting, and let the Beriev touch down in a nearly flat attitude at 120 knots. As the forty-ton seaplane settled, Tony deployed the water rudder and moved the throttles into an aft detent that activated pairs of thrust reversers on each engine.

Mark had a great admiration for the Beriev seaplanes, which were truly unique as being the only commercially successful turbojet amphibians, certainly a concept whose time had come. Too bad this airplane seems to be spending most of its time out of the mainstream, mused Mark, as Tony came to a dead stop at the entrance to a large domed structure with a four-segment array of overhead doors that rotated upward to reveal the interior of a beautiful azure-tinted lagoon.

The engines were shut down as a small launch arrived at the nose of the Beriev, attaching a towing cable to a large eyebolt on the forward keel spline and winching the amphibian smoothly over to the dock. It pivoted about the nose bumper and came softly to rest against the dock cushions.

Mark eased out of the right hand seat, gave Tony a well done slap on the back, and moved aft into the cabin to open the passenger door. He pulled the translating boarding ramp into the doorway, secured it into the channel guides, then turned to face his eight passengers, who collectively were showing various degrees of fatigue, curiosity, and apprehension. Well, folks, we’re home. Let’s go step into some shit!

The eight passengers filed off the airplane, and with Mark leading the way made their way along the dock and up a metal staircase that brought them into a reception area. They were met there by a smiling, redheaded Texan in a well-tailored dark blue jumpsuit with the SGI logo embroidered on his sleeve.

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Y’ all just come right in and make yussef at home, chirped SGI Station Chief Walter Tex Benner, as he held the door open for his guests. His name was displayed on an enameled metal nametag pinned above his left breast pocket. Howdy, folks. For those who don’t know me, my name is Walt, and Mr. Darden says I’m going to be responsible for y’all, he added with a slight wink, while you’re our guests at the station.

Mark was turned slightly aside from the group, talking on his cell phone. He snapped the cover shut with a pop! and turned to directly face the new arrivals. Thanks, Walt. I know a few of you remember Walt from your earlier trips, and you also know that he gets pretty feisty if we don’t start calling him ‘Tex’, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mark paused, as if to shift gears into a more serious vein. As I mentioned on the flight in, we need to get briefed by some of the station personnel here, right away, so let’s take whatever short break we need for physiological needs and meet right back here in the conference room promptly at ten.

Fewer than twenty minutes later, the group was easing their bodies into leather seats around a large walnut rectangular table in a conference room that was designed to accommodate the six or so key operating personnel of the station, plus a handful of outsiders. The room had an aura of ambience and quietude that could rival any corporate board room, and was in fact modeled after the SGI Executive Conference Room in California, although on a smaller scale. The working elements of the conference room were all located at the forward end of the room, where a bank of four video monitors were built into the wall above a recessed set of sliding whiteboards.

This morning it was all corporate, with room for four or five additional regulars from the station. Chef Manulo Manihi, a slight and wiry Tahitian whom Mark had been able to commandeer from the kitchen of the Te Tiare Beach Resort on Huahine (at three times the salary and, most importantly, a guaranteed safe haven from Manulo’s three hundred-pound wife who was still threatening him with infidelity), soon appeared in the room with a cart of steaming scrambled eggs, fried ham and pineapple slices, toast with butter and jams, and a large platter of tropical fruits and juices. After he had made his way around the table with the cart and the coffee was poured, he parked the cart along the wall and silently departed.

Mark let the breakfast proceed for a few minutes with light chatter, introductions of some of the operating personnel who had joined the group, and talk of the long flight and a few questions about the Beriev. In a few minutes, the empty plates and glasses had been placed back on the cart. Mark poured a cup of coffee and sat down.

First of all, Mark started, leveling his gaze in a sweeping arc around the table, we need to hear from the staff who can fill us in on all of the details of what happened out here. Second, we need to discuss what to do with the information once we’ve distilled it, and make risk assessments of the various alternatives as we move forward. Mark nodded to a solidly-built, middle-aged man with dark chiseled Polynesian features and graying hair surrounding a mostly bald pate. He was wearing the same type of dark blue SGI jumpsuit as Walt, with a nametag that spelled out Hilario.

Ituri Hilario had been with the Ladder to Space project practically since the day of its arrival in the equatorial belt of the South Pacific. He had been hired by Mark originally as a local handyman and guide (truly right off the dock according to Ituri) when the fledgling SGI team was still floundering around the expanse of ocean between Christmas Island and the Galapagos looking for potential research sites. Ituri had become a trusted advisor as well as a patient and articulate interpreter during Mark’s explorations of some of the more remote islands, and was innately skilled in working with all types of tools. When Mark discovered Ituri, the Marquesan native was a foreman of crews building a number of deepwater docking facilities at many of the resort villages in the nearby islands, and just prior to that had been overseeing the erection of power plants and telephone relay towers on the islands. Ituri was a widower, and the fact that he had never remarried was in his favor, since Mark had established definite criteria for the isolated confinement of Station One that included a specification that no wives or family would ever step foot on the facility. Personnel could still be married, but the duty cycles were nominally three months before shore duty would be granted, and then only for brief periods. This arrangement ideally suited Chef Manulo, who was thankful for the five hundred miles of ocean separating him from his threatening wife, and he would often politely pass up his designated rotation opportunity back to his home island.

Mark continued. Ituri, you have the floor.

Ituri Hilario cleared his throat, stood up, and got right to it, an attribute that Mark clearly appreciated in his operations manager. Mark told me to brief you folks as if you knew nothing at all, Ituri began.

"You got that right, we don’t know squat!" blurted Chief Financial Officer Sam Arford, who was answered by a sideward glance, more of a glare, from Mark.

Yesterday, at about oh-seven-thirty, myself, Ben, and Vito—we were in the spooling vestibule getting the climber unit ready for its fifth ascent when its anchoring mechanism went crazy, as if something were trying to pull the carbon tape out of its spool with a tremendous force. Now, as you all know, our cluster of three separate tapes, each only fifty microns thick, extends all the way up to our satellite in geostationary orbit, about 23,000 miles overhead, but it continues to extend out twice that distance to the counterweight mass in deeper space.

Everyone around the table was familiar with the bizarre design details of this unbelievably long space tether to varying degrees of technical depth, with the exception of CFO Arford, who was immediately uncomfortable with anything he couldn’t see, smell, or assign a credit or debit to. He had never quite come to terms with the concept of something that looked like three pieces of black electrical tape extending straight up into the sky until they were out of sight. Jesus! he thought, I can’t wait to hear the next installment of this!

There’s about 200 meters of surplus tape on each spool, and if something ever did get the surplus tapes pulling out of the spool at a really good clip, the spool mechanism would try to slow the runaway spool down gradually with brakes, or snubbers, so that the tape did not suddenly snap and break, like a length of thread when you give it a good yank. If the braking system sensed that the tape was getting close to its one hundred meter run-out point, it would insert a metal rod, or ‘dog’ into the reel mechanism as a last resort to keep the anchored end of the tape from ripping away.

And floating out into space, intoned Mark. Not a pretty prospect!

The ‘dog,’ continued Ituri, is exactly like the stick you used as a kid to poke into the spokes of your bike to stop a wheel rotation. Ituri was searching the table for any signs of confusion or vacant looks from his listeners—there were none, not even from Arford. At the same time, an emergency alarm went off, but we sort of expected that, so we basically ignored it since the dog stop was our most urgent priority.

Krishnamurty Karemcheti, or Krish, SGI’s director of research who had flown in with Mark and the others, seemed to be rolling his eyes back in his head with an expression that said I don’t need to be hearing a PR pitch for the tape—get on with it! Krish was mulling the broken tape scenario over in his mind and was clearly agitated. If the tapes were truly damaged, it could mean reeling in thousands of feet of tape and trying to make an effective splice, or worse, replacing them entirely. That would set the project back for more than a year!

Krish Karemcheti, native of Bangalore, India, and brilliant research chemist who had eclipsed all of his peers at the universities in Calcutta and Hyderabad, had been with Mark’s team longer than any of the others. The two had met when Krish was teaching polymer (plastic) matrix transform theory on an exchange grant at Stanford to a very small group of hand-picked students, one of whom was the intensely creative Mark Darden. The two scientists hit it off immediately, resonating on a variety of academic similarities and lifestyles. Mark had helped to develop Krish’s backhand into a feared weapon on the faculty tennis courts, and Krish had introduced Mark to the sport of cricket, giving him an appreciation, if not a real understanding, of the sport.

Krish was senior to Mark by eight years. Although he started out as a mentor and faculty advisor to Mark, their friendship soon matured into an academic equilibrium. In time they found themselves leveraging off each other as a means to maintain the momentum of their individual passions for research. When they came together as co-scientists at SGI, with Mark also filling the role as CEO, Krish was rightfully elevated to head of all fresh research. However, his overriding preoccupation was in seeing that all the expectations of the Ladder to Space that he and Mark had conceived were fulfilled, down to the most innocuous of disciplines, as he liked to put it.

And then—, Ituri put both hands onto the table, knuckles down, arms stiffened. And then the squawk box came on. It was Gaddy, outside on top, shouting that an airplane had just come spinnin’ straight down out of the clouds and crashed! Ituri’s head lifted slightly. I asked him where, and he said it was just east of us about half a kilometer.

After that, the three of us left the vestibule and headed outside through the east catwalk where we could see what was left of it—I had a pair of binoculars, and it looked like a pontoon, like from a float plane, was sticking up, kinda on its side. There were also some pieces of airplane, like a wing, but I couldn’t make out what kind of airplane it was. Had some yellow color to it, I recall.

Ituri straightened up, no longer talking down to the table. He glanced to his right. Glenn, you were already out there when it crashed. Tell these folks exactly what you told Tex and me.

Glenn Gaddington, Station One facilities coordinator, was leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back. Glenn was also jumpsuit-attired, with a scholarly-looking tanned and creased face set off by thick-rimmed glasses. "I was out on the eastern reef wall checking out the corrosion damage to the valve on our down-ocean effluent discharge system when I heard the alarm go off. I looked back at the tape and could see that it was deflecting big time in a southerly direction, and the stored tape was unwinding like mad from below, coming up from the spool vestibule. I could see smoke coming up out of the platform."

Krish elevated a finger from a hand that was poised on a notepad. Glenn, could you see the diagonal ‘end of reel’ stripes on the tape?

Sure could! That’s how I knew something weird was going on—plus that damned alarm wouldn’t stop!

At this point, Mark interrupted, Glenn, since you’re right there at the board, could you draw us a little diagram of what you saw?

Glenn fumbled for a colored marker then and sketched a simple diagram that showed the original tapes projecting straight up into a billowy cloud base, then the deflected tapes depicted as a dotted line angling off of the vertical. His final embellishment was a curlique line coming out of the clouds to designate the falling airplane. This is about what the overcast looked like yesterday, which we sighted in with the theodolite height-finder as being at eight hundred meters.

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Glenn Gaddington’s Sketch Describing the Deflection of the Tapes and the Airplane Crash

Glenn stepped back slightly to make sure everybody could see the sketch. He glanced around for a pointer, and finding none, simply gestured toward the dotted line he had just drawn. Not exactly to scale, but I saw the tape ‘way over in this position, then it snapped back pretty quickly.

At that point, Krish raised his hand in a stop gesture, and zeroed in on Glenn. After the snubber went into the dogging mode, could you notice that the tapes were back into vertical alignment, and if so, were steps taken to reel the surplus tapes back in?

Glenn appeared a little flustered by the question, No sir, to be honest, that damn alarm was still going off, and our first concern was whether the tapes were going to break or not. We never developed a response protocol for this sort of thing. To answer your question, the surplus tapes are still unwound off of their reels.

Krish’s previous accommodating demeanor vanished completely. His eyes were narrowing down to slits and drilling holes in Ituri, who appeared startled and rattled. Krish’s words were acidic projectiles:

"Your inaction yesterday in not taking steps to rewind the surplus tapes that were deployed under those circumstances is unacceptable! Any surplus length of tape that is unreeled should be considered an emergency condition, and you should have taken steps to restore the tapes back to their working lengths immediately! This is not the time and place to discuss this, Ituri, but you have put this whole project at risk, and we are still vulnerable!"

Mark didn’t like the tension that was building between Ituri and Krish, and he put both hands on the table with palms up in a supplicating gesture. I agree with your assessment, Krish, and I know Ituri will want to jump on that rewind. He turned to his operations manager. Ituri, unless you have anything to add to this recap of events, why don’t you start a very slow draw down of the tapes, and let us know if you run into any problems. Ituri acknowledged that he would alert Ben and Vito to meet him back in the vestibule, and quietly excused himself.

Mark drummed his fingers for a few seconds during the lull that occupied Ituri’s departure, then refocused on the presenter at the front of the room. So, Glenn, that brings us back to your ‘show and tell’—please proceed.

Glenn had watched Krish’s dressing-down histrionics with a large dose of sympathy for Ituri, who was probably the most conscientious guy on the planet. Every time Krish visited the facility, he treated Ituri like one of the technicians and not as the head of all operations, a position Mark had created specifically for him, apparently over Krish’s objection. Ituri had often lamented to Glenn, Krish probably thinks my true talent is out chopping copra with a machete, with a damn bone through my nose!

The room had reached an attentive ambience again and Glenn picked up his narration: I put all of my observations in a written report, but the gist of what I wrote is this: About the time the tape sprung back, I caught a flash of something directly east, and realized that it was an airplane falling right out of the overcast. Everything appeared pretty intact when it hit the water, although it appeared upside down and still spinning. It didn’t make much of a splash.

One more thing! It was Bruce Bye Byerson, who had flown in with the group and was listed on the manifest as outside counsel, ostensibly to assist SGI’s VP of Legal Affairs, Rod Bay, in any issues that might develop out of the crash and subsequent inquiries. Mark and Rod knew better, though: Bye was a stocky, tanned and goateed hired gun for the