"Here," said Beekman, indicating the archipelago, "or here." The Transitorian west coast.

"Why?" asked Marcel.

"Big mountains in both places. You want the highest base you can get. So you put it on top of a mountain."

"But a structure like that would be big."

"Oh, yes."

"So where is it?" Marcel looked at both sites, the archipelago, where several enormous mountains stood atop islands that appeared to be volcanic. And the coastal range, which featured a chain of giants with cloud-covered peaks.

"I don't know." Beekman held out his hands.

"Tell me," said Marcel. "If you had a skyhook, and something happened to it, so it collapsed, which way would it fall?"

The project director smiled. "Down."

"No. I'm serious. Would it fall toward the west?"

"There'd be a tendency in that direction. But the kind of structure we're talking about, thousands of kilometers of elevator shaft and God knows what else. Mostly it would just come down." Someone was knocking. Beekman kept talking while he opened the door and invited Drummond inside. "If it were here, in Transitoria, the base could be hidden on one of these peaks under the clouds. But that still doesn't explain where the wreckage got to. It should be scattered across the landscape."

Marcel looked at Drummond. "Maybe not," Drummond said.

"Suppose you wanted to take it down. With minimum damage to the terrain below. What do you do?"

"I have no idea, John," Beekman said. "But I'd think we would want to separate the shaft at a point where the longest possible section would get hauled up by the counterweight. What's left-"

"Falls west-"

"— into the ocean." Beekman drummed his fingers on the table-top. "It's possible. If you've got a hell of a good engineer. But why would someone deliberately take it down? I mean, that thing's got to be an architectural nightmare to put up in the first place."

"Maybe they developed the spike and didn't need it anymore. Maybe it was becoming a hazard. I'd think one of those things would need a lot of maintenance."

"Well." Beekman shrugged. "There are a number of mountains in that range. We'll have an orbiter in the area in a bit. Why don't we run some scans and see what we can see."

MEMO FOR THE CAPTAIN

11726 1427 hours From Bill

The cruise ship Evening Star transited from hyperspace four minutes ago. It has set course for Maleiva III and will arrive in orbit in approximately two hours.

People boarding cruise liners usually did so via standard GTOs, Ground-to-Orbit vehicles that employed the spike for lift and standard chemical thrusters for velocity. The Star's onboard lander was a luxury vehicle, seldom used, maintained primarily to accommodate VIPs who had commercial or political reasons for shunning the more public modes of transportation.

It resembled a large penguin. It had a black-and-white hull with retractable white wings. The nose was blunt, almost boxy, with Evening Star emblazoned in black script below the TransGalactic Starswirl. The interior was leather and brass. It had a small autobar and a pullout worktable so that riders could shuffle papers or relax as they wished.

After making arrangements to send the shuttle down, Nicholson had become concerned that some of his other passengers would learn about the flight and demand places on board. He had consequently impressed on MacAllister that he was to say nothing to anyone. The news that he wished to take another journalist along had been unsettling, but Nicholson had been caught by then, committed, and wanted to do nothing to upset his illustrious guest.

This was not the first time the old editor had discovered the advantage of his reputation for volcanic outbursts against those who, for whatever reason, had incurred his wrath. Consequently he and Casey remained, aside from the pilot, the only persons aboard.

The pilot's name was Cole Wetheral. He was a taciturn man who would have made a successful funeral director. He had morose eyes and a long nose and long pale fingers that fluttered across the controls as if they were an organ keyboard. He gave preflight instructions and information in a stentorian tone: "Please be seated." "You will wish to check the status board above your seat before attempting to move around the cabin." "We want you to enjoy your excursion; please feel free to ask if there is anything you need." He informed them also that it would be early morning local time when they arrived.

Casey looked dazzled, and MacAllister wondered whether it was a condition brought on by the chance to visit a world a few days before it was to end, or by his own presence. He waited until she was inside, then climbed in and sat down beside her.

"Have you ever been down on another world before, Mr. MacAllister?" she asked.

He hadn't. Had never seen a point to it. He perceived himself as the end product of three billion years of evolution, specifically designed for the Earth, and that was where he was inclined to stay. "I expect," he told her, "that this will be the only visit I ever make to alien soil."

She had, as it turned out. She'd been to Pinnacle and Quraqua, and to Quraqua's airless moon, with its enigmatic city on the plain. Doing features, she explained.

The pilot closed the hatches. Interior lights came on. He spent about a minute hunched over his control board, then reached up and threw a couple of switches on an overhead panel. "We are depressur-izing the bay," he said. "We'll be ready to depart in just a couple of minutes."

The vehicle rose slightly.

"I appreciate your doing this," Casey told him.

He smiled benevolently. MacAllister liked doing things for people. And there was nothing quite so gratifying as the appreciation of a young person to whom he was lending the luster of his name. "To be honest, Casey," he said, "I'm glad you asked. Without your initiative, I'd have spent most of the next week in The Navigator."

The lander's motors whined and began to pulse steadily.

She smiled. MacAllister had made a career of attacking women in print, as he had attacked college professors, preachers, farmers, left-wing editorial writers, and assorted other do-gooders and champions of the downtrodden. Women, he'd argued, were possessed of an impossible anatomy, top-heavy and off-balance. They could not walk without jiggling and rolling, and consequently it was quite impossible for men of sense to take even the brightest of them seriously.

Many women perceived him as that most dangerous kind of character: an articulate and persuasive demagogue. He knew that, but accepted it as the price he had to pay for saying the things that everyone else knew to be true, but which they denied, even to themselves. To a degree, his literary reputation protected him from the rage that surely would have fallen on the head of a lesser man. It demonstrated to him the intellectual bankruptcy of both sexes. Here, after all, was this sweet young thing, beaming and smiling at him, hoping to improve her career through his auspices, and quite willing to overlook a substantial series of ill-tempered remarks on his side, should he choose to make them, simply because they would provide excellent copy. "There is a perfectly good reason, my dear, why the downtrodden are trodden down. If they deserved better, they would have better."

The bay doors opened.

"We'll lose all sense of gravity after we launch," said the pilot.

Harnesses swung down and locked them in. The interior lights blinked and went out. Then they sank back into their seats and began to move through the night. MacAllister twisted around and looked back at the great bulk of the Evening Star. Lights blazed fore and aft. An antenna mounted just beyond the launch pod rotated slowly.

The power and majesty of the great liner was somehow lost when it was in dock. He'd not been all that impressed when he'd boarded her back at the Wheel. But out here the Star was in her element, afloat among strange constellations beneath a sun that wasn't quite the right color, above a world whose icy continents bore unfamiliar shapes. This view alone, he decided, was worth the side trip.