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.”“But the geostationary platform isn’t finished yet, is it?”“We’re ahead of schedule there, too.”“But it’s not finished.”“Not for another six months,” Bracknell said, feeling almost as if he were admitting a wrongdoing.Somehow Danvers had let the air out of his balloon.By the time they finished their desserts and coffee, theirs was the only occupied table in the restaurant.The robot waiter was already sweeping the floor and two of the guys from the kitchen were stacking chairs atop tables to give the robot leeway for its chore.Danvers bade them good night out on the sidewalk and headed for his quarters.Bracknell walked with Lara, arm in arm.As they passed through the pools of light and shadow cast by the streetlamps, Lara said, “Rev.Danvers seems a little uncomfortable with the idea that we’re living in sin.”Bracknell grinned down at her.“Best place to live, all things considered.”“Really? Is that what you think?”Looking up at the glowing lights of the tower that split the night in half, Bracknell murmured, “Urn … Paris is probably better.”“That’s where the board meeting’s going to be, isn’t it?”“Right,” said Bracknell.“That’s where Skytower Corporation turns me into a news media star.”“My handsome hero.”“Want to come with me?” he asked.“To Paris?”“Sure.You can do some clothes shopping there.”“Are you saying I need new clothes?”He stopped in the darkness between streetlamps and slipped his arms around her waist.“You’ll need a new dress for the wedding, won’t you?”“Wedding?” Even in the shadows he could see her eyes go wide with surprise.Bracknell said, “With the tower almost finished and all this publicity the corporation’s going to generate, I figure I ought to make an honest woman of you.”“You chauvinist pig!”“Besides,” he went on, “it’ll make Danvers feel better.”“You’re serious?” Lara asked.“This isn’t a joke?”He kissed her lightly.“Dead serious, darling.Will you marry me?”“In Paris?”“If that’s what you want.”Lara flung her arms around his neck and kissed him as hard as she could.Geostationary Platform“Look on my works, ye mighty,” quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, the chief engineer, “and despair.”In a moment of whimsy brought on by their joy at his birth, his parents had named him after the poet.Emerson suspected their euphoria was helped along by the recreational drugs they used; certainly he saw enough evidence of that while he was growing up in the caravan city that trundled through the drought-dessicated former wheat belt of Midwestern America.His father was a mechanic, his mother a nurse: both highly prized skills in the nomadic community.And both of them loved poetry.Hence his name.Everybody called him Waldo.He learned to love things mechanical from his father and studied mechanical engineering through the computer webs and satellite links that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.Once he grew into manhood Emerson left the caravan and entered a real, bricks-and-mortar engineering college.All he wanted was a genuine degree so that he would have real credentials to show prospective employers.No caravan life for Waldo.He wanted to settle down, get rich (or at least moderately prosperous), be respectable, and build new things for people.His life didn’t quite work out that way.There was plenty of work for a bright young engineer, rebuilding the shattered electrical power grid, erecting whole new cities to house the refugees driven from their homes by the greenhouse floods, designing solar power farms in the clear desert skies of the Southwest.But the various jobs took him from one place to another.He was still a nomad; he just stayed in one place a bit longer than his gypsying parents did.He never got rich, or even very prosperous.Much of the work he did was commissioned by the federal or state government at minimum wage.Often enough he was conscripted by local chapters of the New Morality and he was paid nothing more than room, board, and a pious sermon or two about doing God’s work.He married twice, divorced twice, and then gave up the idea of marriage.Until a guy named Bracknell came to him with a wild idea and a gleam in his eye.Ralph Waldo Emerson fell in love with the skytower project.Now that it was nearly finished he almost felt sad.He had spent more years in Ecuador than anywhere else in his whole life.He was becoming fond of Spanish poetry.He no longer got nauseous in zero gravity.He gloried in this monumental piece of architecture, this tower stretching toward heaven.He had even emblazoned his name into one of the outside panels that sheathed the tower up here at the geostationary level, insulating the tower from the tremendous electrical flux of the Van Allen belt.Working in an armored spacesuit and using an electron gun, he laboriously wrote his full name on one of the buckyball panels.He laughed at his private joke.Someday some maintenance dweeb is going to see it, he thought, and wonder who the hell wrote the name of a poet on this tower’s insulation skin.Now he stood at the control board in the compact oval chamber that would soon be the geosynch level’s operations center.His feet were ensconced in plastic floor loops so that he wouldn’t float off weightlessly in the zero gravity of the station.Surrounding him were display screens that lined the walls like the multifaceted eyes of some giant insect.Technicians in gray coveralls bobbed in midair as they labored to connect the screens and get them running.One by one, the colored lights on the control board winked on and a new screen lit up.Emerson could see a dozen different sections of the mammoth geostationary structure.There was still a considerable amount of work to do, of course, but it was mostly just a matter of bringing in equipment and setting it up.Furnishing the hotel built into the platform’s upper level.Checking out the radiation shielding and the electrical insulation and the airlocks.Making certain the zero-g toilets worked.Monkey work.Not creative.Not challenging.There was talk of starting a new skytower in Borneo or central Africa.“ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world,” he muttered to himself.“To sail beyond the sunset.”“Hey, Waldo,” the voice of one of his assistants grated annoyingly in the communication plug in his right ear, “the supply ship is coming in.”“It’s early,” Emerson said, without needing to look at the digital clock set into the control board.“Early or late, they’re here and they want a docking port.”Emerson glanced up at the working screens, then played his fingers across the keyboard on the panel [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]