Jumping off the Planet

ONE-HOUR

The one-hour platform is called that because it takes exactly one hour to get there. It's also the legal limit of the atmosphere, so anyone who visits One-Hour can say that he or she has traveled into space.

One-Hour is also one of the biggest of the platform cities. Seven stories thick, it's suspended from all three cables; it fills the space between them and extends quite a ways out beyond as well. It's a city floating in the sky. If you could stand away from it, you would see that there are towers projecting up from it and more towers hanging down.

And the view from One-Hour is spectacular. You're high enough to see the curvature of the Earth in all directions. You can see as far as Mexico to the north and Peru and Bolivia to the south. To the west, the Pacific Ocean curls away out of sight under a frosting of clouds.

There are balconies and observation posts all around the edges of One-Hour and all over the bottom, so there are places where you can look straight down ... if you want to.

I didn't want to, but everyone else wanted to see the storm, so we went—except it wasn't a storm anymore. Now it was a hurricane. And it looked ferocious. It was a great whorl of white, so big it covered more than half the globe visible below us. From up here it looked as peaceful as a swirl of whipped cream on top of a big lemon pie, but if you watched long enough, you could see the banks of clouds moving majestically around a common center. The attendants said that the winds were already up to 200 kilometers per hour and expected to rise as high as 250 or maybe even 300 by the time the storm started inland. Somebody else said that the winds might get as high as 350 klicks before the storm hit the coast. They said the eye of the storm was expected to pass very close to the beanstalk. In fact, the storm was the only thing anybody was talking about up here.

The U.N. Weather Authority had tried seeding the storm's western edge in an effort to steer it southward, but this storm had a mind of its own and was still moving east. The Line Authority was beaming microwaves into it too; that wasn't helping either. The news was calling it Hurricane Charles, but I didn't feel honored.

Then Stinky asked the important question: "Can we call Mom now? And tell her where we are?"

"No. Let's wait until we reach Geostationary," Dad said. "Like we agreed."

"But I wanna talk to Mommy now." There was something real frantic about the way he said it.

Dad looked uncomfortable. He glanced to both Weird and me as if looking for help—but Weird just said, "It might not be such a bad idea, Dad. Mom might be a little worried about us. We should let her know we're out of the storm."

This made Dad even more annoyed. "I said no."

But Stinky had already run to a phone booth, one of the ones with the glass bottoms, so you could see all the way down, and he was already punching for Mom. "I wanna show her my monkey!" He'd already put his phone-home card in the slot, so there was nothing for Dad to do except step sideways out of camera range. Me, I studied the walls, the ceiling, anything but the floor, until the screen finally lit up. First it showed a map of North America, and then it zoomed down in as it tracked her location.

Mom wasn't at home; she was in San Francisco. She answered almost immediately; she looked tired but happier than we'd seen her in a while. Behind her we could see somebody's apartment, and out the window, we could even see what looked like trees or bushes. In the background, I got a quick glimpse of someone—a woman, Mom's age—but I didn't see her clearly.

"Hi, Mom!"

"Bobby! Where are you calling from?" At first her expression was surprised—as if she hadn't expected to see any of us for a while, but then her eyes flicked down as she read the information at the bottom of her display. Her expression darkened immediately. "Put your father on!"

Dad stepped into view then. "Hello, Maggie," he said grimly.

"You're doing it, aren't you!"

"I told you I would. It's the only way to be fair."

"You son of a bitch! The court said no."

"The court said not without your agreement."

"And I said no! So that means the court says no too!"

"Maggie—" Dad was keeping his voice deliberately calm. "I will not let you abuse the children as a way of getting even with me. They're old enough now, they're entitled to make up their own minds." Douglas shot me an I-told-you-so look.

"I'm going to stop you, Max—I'll see you in jail, you lying pig!" Abruptly, she remembered that Weird and Stinky and I were there too. She said, "You kids—Bobby, Charles, Douglas—why did you let him do this? You stay where you are! Don't you go anywhere with him. I'm calling the police." Behind her, a woman's voice was asking, "Maggie? What's going on—?" And then the screen went blank.

There was silence in the phone booth for a moment. Finally, I said, "So this wasn't such a good idea, was it, Dad?"

"Shut up, Chigger!" said Weird.

"I wanna talk to Mommy!" Stinky wailed.

I realized then that after her hello, she hadn't said a thing to any of us kids, except to order us to stay put. For some reason, that made me feel really angry at her. If she really cared about us as much as she said she did, why was she yelling at us? At least, Dad didn't yell. He just went silent.

He was silent now. He looked uncertain. Actually, he looked old. Beaten up.

"Dad?" asked Weird. "Are you all right?"

"No," he said. "Look. I need you to understand something. All three of you. Your Mom didn't want me to bring you on this trip. So I did it without her permission. Maybe it wasn't the smartest thing to do. But I needed to do this. I really did." Dad dropped to his knees in front of Bobby and me and put his hands on our shoulders. "I've made a lot of promises to you kids, and I haven't been able to keep all of them. Maybe none of them. And I know you resent me for it. You're probably right to do so. I guess I haven't been the best dad in the world. I'm sorry about that. It hurts me something awful to know that I've let you boys down. You mean more to me than anything else in the world. That's why I did it. Just once in my life, I wanted to do something extraordinary for you. And this is it. And I wasn't going to let anybody say no."

He looked so sad and vulnerable—and for a moment, he even looked old—that I couldn't help myself. I flung myself into his arms. And so did Bobby. And Douglas. Not because he was right, but because he was Daddy. And he needed us. And suddenly it was very scary, the whole thing, and I guess we needed him too, and then Stinky started crying. And I have to admit, even I—

Dad pulled back and looked me in the eyes. "Are you all right?" I guess he'd felt me trembling.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm fine. I just don't like her yelling at us all the time. That's all."

"Me neither," said Stinky petulantly.

Dad looked at Weird. "Douglas?"

Weird shrugged noncommittally. "It's just Mom. That's just the way she is."

"Do you want to go back?"

"She's going to call the cops on you."

Dad sighed and nodded. "I hope she doesn't. For your sakes—" he added sadly. "Because then we could both lose custody. And you guys would end up in foster homes. And that wouldn't be good for anyone. That's why." He looked sorry he'd said it, but it was too late to take the words back.

Abruptly, he looked at his watch as if he had an appointment to keep. He straightened up. "So? Are we going to Geostationary? Gotta make up your minds now."

I looked to Weird. He gave me a half-and-half expression, and finally said, "Well, it'd be silly to come all this far and not go all the way."

"Yeah!" I said. Because I really did want to go, no matter what Mom said. And so did Stinky.

We were going up again.