Morgan smiled, without much humour. “Of course not, and I don't want to tell him until I've worked out all the details.”

“I can appreciate some of the complications,” said the President shrewdly. “One of them, I imagine, is ensuring that Senator Collins doesn't invent it first.”

“He can't do that – the idea is two hundred years old. But he, and a lot of other people, could slow it down. I want to see it happen in my lifetime.”

“And, of course, you intend to be in charge… Well, what exactly would you like us to do?”

“This is merely one suggestion, Mr. President – you may have a better idea. Form a consortium – perhaps including the Gibraltar Bridge Authority, the Suez and Panama Corporations, the English Channel Company, the Bering Dam Corporation. Then, when it's all wrapped up, approach TCC with a request to do a feasibility study. At this stage, the investment will be negligible.”

“Meaning?”

“Less than a million. Especially as I've already done 80 percent of the work.”

“And then?”

“Thereafter, with your backing, Mr. President, I can play it by ear. I might stay with TCC. Or I might resign and join the consortium – call it Astroengineering. It would all depend on circumstances. I would do whatever seemed best for the project.”

“That seems a reasonable approach. I think we can work something out.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Morgan answered with heartfelt sincerity. “But there's one annoying roadblock we have to tackle at once – perhaps even before we set up the consortium. We have to go to the World Court, and establish jurisdiction over the most valuable piece of real estate on Earth.”

Even in this age of instantaneous communications and swift global transport, it was convenient to have a place that one could call one's office. Not everything could be stored in patterns of electronic charges; there were still such items as good old-fashioned books, professional certificates, awards and honours, engineering models, samples of material, artists' rendering of projects (not as accurate as a computer's, but very ornamental), and of course the wall-to-wall carpet which every senior bureaucrat needed to soften the impact of external reality.

Morgan's office, which he saw on the average ten days per month, was on the sixth or LAND floor of the sprawling Terran Construction Corporation Headquarters in Nairobi. The floor below was SEA, that above it ADMINISRATI0N-meaning Chairman Collins and his empire. The architect, in a fit of naпve symbolism, had devoted the top floor to SPACE. There was even a small observatory on the roof, with a thirty-centimetre telescope that was always out of order, because it was only used during office parties, and frequently for most non-astronomical purposes. The upper rooms of the Triplanetary Hotel, only a kilometre away, were a favourite target, as they often held some very strange forms of life – or at any rate of behaviour.

As Morgan was in continuous touch with his two secretaries one human, the other electronic – he expected no surprises when he walked into the office after the brief flight from ANAR. By the standards of an earlier age, his was an extraordinarily small organisation. He had less than three hundred men and women under his direct control; but the computing and information-processing power at their command could not be matched by the merely human population of the entire planet.

“Well, how did you get on with the Sheik?” asked Warren Kingsley, his deputy and long time friend, as soon as they were alone together.

“Very well; I think we have a deal. But I still can't believe that we're held up by such a stupid problem. What does the legal department say?”

“We'll definitely have to get a World Court ruling. If the Court agrees that it's a matter of overwhelming public interest, our reverend friends will have to move… though if they decide to be stubborn, there would be a nasty situation. Perhaps you should send a small earthquake to help them make up their minds.”

The fact that Morgan was on the board of General Tectonics was an old joke between him and Kingsley; but GT – perhaps fortunately – had never found a way of controlling and directing earthquakes, nor did it ever expect to do so. The best that it could hope for was to predict them, and to bleed off their energies harmlessly before they could do major damage. Even here, its record of success was not much better than 75 percent.

“A nice idea,” said Morgan, “I'll think it over. Now, what about our other problem?”

“All set to go – do you want it now?”

“O.K. – let's see the worst.”

The office windows darkened, and a grid of glowing lines appeared in the centre of the room.

“Watch this, Van,” said Kingsley. “Here's the regime that gives trouble.”

Rows of letters and numbers materialised in the empty air – velocities, payloads, accelerations, transit times – Morgan absorbed them at a glance. The globe of the earth, with its circles of longitude and latitude, hovered just above the carpet; and rising from it, to little more than the height of a man, was the luminous thread that marked the position of the orbital tower.

“Five hundred times normal speed; lateral scale exaggeration fifty. Here we go.”

Some invisible force had started to pluck at the line of light, drawing it away from the vertical. The disturbance was moving upwards as it mimicked, via the computer's millions of calculations a second, the ascent of a payload through the earth's gravitational field.

“What's the displacement?” asked Morgan, as his eyes strained to follow the details of the simulation.

“Now about two hundred metres. It gets to three before -”

The thread snapped. In the leisurely slow-motion that represented real speeds of thousands of kilometres an hour, the two segments of the severed tower began to curl away from each other – one bending back to earth, the other whipping upwards to space…

But Morgan was no longer fully conscious of this imaginary disaster, existing only in the mind of the computer; superimposed upon it now was the reality that had haunted him for years.

He had seen that two-century-old film at least fifty times, and there were sections that he had examined frame by frame, until he knew every detail by heart. It was, after all, the most expensive movie footage ever shot, at least in peacetime. It had cost the State of Washington several million dollars a minute.

There stood the slim (too slim!) and graceful bridge, spanning the canyon. It bore no traffic, but a single car had been abandoned midway by its driver. And no wonder, for the bridge was behaving as none before in the whole history of engineering.

It seemed impossible that thousands of tons of metal could perform such an aerial ballet; one could more easily believe that the bridge was made of rubber than of steel. Vast, slow undulations, metres in amplitude, were sweeping along the entire width of the span, so that the roadway suspended between the piers twisted back and forth like an angry snake. The wind blowing down the canyon was sounding a note far too low for any human ears to detect, as it hit the natural frequency of the beautiful, doomed structure. For hours, the torsional vibrations had been building up, but no-one knew when the end would come. Already, the protracted death-throes were a testimonial that the unlucky designers could well have foregone.

Suddenly, the supporting cables snapped, flailing upwards like murderous steel whips. Twisting and turning, the roadway pitched into the river, fragments of the structure flying in all directions. Even when projected at normal speed, the final cataclysm looked as if shot in slow motion; the scale of the disaster was so large that the human mind had no basis of comparison. In reality, it lasted perhaps five seconds; at the end of that time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had earned an inexpungable place in the history of engineering. Two hundred years later there was a photograph of its last moments on the wall of Morgan's office, bearing the caption “One of our less successful products”.