He was so startled that he began to get up, and this sent such pain through his body that he collapsed back in the throne, and that motion produced more pain. “I am going to need a well-equipped coffin with nine yards of synthetic flesh-replacement.”

Keirthlin skated to the dais, leaped up, landed neatly, but then stumbled, and was on her knees before the throne. Without even bothering to speak, she snatched the goggles off her silvery eyes and thrust them at the face of Menelaus.

He caught them in his good hand before she could poke him in the eye with an earpiece.

“I thought you might like to see this,” she said, panting, her voice bizarrely calm.

Menelaus donned the glasses.

It was an external view of the camp.

It had been only a short time since he had descended underground, but to see the snowy trees and hillocks of the camp in sunlight again, beneath a sky he had almost forgotten, was like looking into a world from childhood.

The cleft was enlarged. Trees on the hilltop had been flattened and scattered. Raw earth and broken rock, stumbled with boulders and dripping like river deltas of brown and dun and back, now spilled from the hill. Three vast shards of metal, carbon-nanotube-reinforced titanium steel several yards thick, had been bent to the vertical, and loomed like the sails of a ship of stone above the enlarged hole. This was where the magnetic ray from Tycho crater had passed.

The third level was gone, save for a fringe of wreckage ringing a pit. At the bottom of this pit, remarkably free of damage and debris, was the depthtrain station; but the launching and receiving coils, the drop-shaft, and the turntable were all vanished. The head of the evacuated tube was exposed to the snowy air. The outer door was gone. Only the inner door stood between the atmosphere and the airlessness of the depthtrain tube.

He saw nothing to provoke panic. Grief and horror and anger, yes, at the casual destruction of any clients in any coffins that might have been on the third level—but not panic.

Then he realized the visor had infrared, ultraviolet, and other settings. Clicking from one band to another, he now saw that the head of the depthtrain tube was glowing white-hot. The excess of magnetic energy running to the surface from the core of the planet was roughly the same as that found at the North and South Poles—or, rather, to be more accurate, the application of some titanic electromagnetic force had made this spot on Earth into the magnetic North Pole, placing the magnetic South Pole no doubt somewhere off the coast of Australia.

The display of such unimaginable immensity of power was indeed worthy of some consternation. Menelaus, in a tense tone, started to say, “Keirthlin, what is causing…”

Then came the explosion.

Menelaus was flung from his throne and fell heavily to the floor, perhaps hitting every single second-degree burn that had blackened his upper back and lower legs. Fortunately, the pain as the ends of his broken arm bones ground together was so great that the tormenting sensation of his dead skin being peeled off receded to the background.

The goggles did not fall off his face, yet he saw nothing. Keirthlin’s calm voice cut through Soorm’s bellowing and Mickey’s swearing, and told Menelaus to stand by. His implants detected the nodes she wore on her belt seeking other contacts through the Nymph arboreal neural net. Then the picture returned.

The image was from considerably farther away. The view now showed the hill, and what seemed a stream or tube of pure white light, slightly red at the edges, reaching down from heaven to touch the shattered crest of the hill. All the black shadows from the trees, clefts, rocks, and surrounding clouds were leaping and staggering in straight lines of deepest black directly away from the tower of white fire.

The Blue Men had been wise to abandon the camp: the seashell-shaped buildings had been tossed by the shock wave like so many teacups shattered against the hearthstone, cracked and blackened, and the smartwire fence flung across the trees like a snarled fishing line. At that same moment, everything flammable flicked with a yellow-white aura and caught fire; everything not flammable began to melt.

The image vanished, and switched to yet another viewpoint, this one from two or three miles away.

A cloud of smoke, black and oily midmost, but red and yellow with blinding fire at the edge, gushed out from the hill and was yanked upward like a drawn blanket. When seen through the ash cloud, the stream of white light now resolved itself into a lava-stream made of molten iron, catching the light with a glitter of diamond refractions.

Menelaus realized the white stream was not reaching down from heaven, but rushing up into it. And it was not a tower, but a river of material moving so rapidly as to make a blur of all features.

It was Von Neumann crystal. It was a segment of supercompressed iron from the inner core of the planet, having been accelerated by linear magnetic drive throughout the entire radius of the globe-crossing depthtrain system and shot through the crust of the Earth at some seventeen times the speed of sound. It was a semisolid bar of iron, fathom upon fathom of it, being tossed into the sky in a casual display of power that only great natural disasters or great instruments of war ever demonstrated.

The material would be heated like a space capsule making reentry by the friction of the speed of the liftoff; but compared to the molten core of the Earth, the heating caused by breaking through the tiny blanket of atmosphere was as nothing.

Then the white tower was gone. For a moment, so fast was the rate of ascent, the tail of the upflying mass could be glimpsed, a tapering comet-length glowing like a bar in a steel mill. Then the hail started: streaks of light the color of snowflakes appearing and disappearing high above. The launch of the mass had been nearly perfect. Nearly. The loss of even one percent of the mass in the atmosphere, as crystals were peeled away or snapped off, meant that everything Menelaus could see from his vantage point, horizon to horizon, was now being pelted as if with hailstones of fire.

It looked like the first few raindrops touching the slabs of the concrete cloverleaf of his old hometown when the glacier in the distance began to display pockmarks and acne. The steam from the melting ice rose up into the sky.

Then the iron falling was like a shower, and the whole landscape was chewed as if by machine-gun bullets into a moonscape, but a moonscape coating the bottom of a furnace. Then the image vanished for the last time.

He closed his eyes, blinking, trying to resolve the last image that had brushed so briefly against his cornea. It was the faintest possible line of blue reaching from the horizon to the zenith, and at this latitude, the atmospheric distortion made the immensity of the skyhook seem to slant across the sky, curving like a longbow, with its foot somewhere over the horizon to the south.

The line of white-hot iron that had leaped skyward had looked, compared to trees or towers or even the skyscrapers New York the Beautiful was alleged once to have held, like a construction Cyclopes would have been too diminutive to build; but only Titans and elder Uranian beings as could gouge out the seven seas with a mattock, or rear the dome of the sky and lantern it with countless stars.

But when seen against the background of the skyhook, it was like seeing a suspension bridge against the background of mountains blue with distance beyond the water. No matter how big, tall, or heavy a suspension bridge, it is a toy compared to the majestic immensity of mountains. The line of sky-flung iron had been longer than a suspension bridge, but not by much, and may have weighed as much as many aircraft carriers set end-to-end.