Jumping off the Planet

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At first, dad was a little worried about Doug leaving the cabin. He was afraid that someone might recognize him from the pictures—or any of us—but we'd cut off all our hair and Dad and Douglas were wearing their space hats and Stinky and I were both buzz-cut, so we didn't look very much like the pictures on TV anymore. And then we also realized that it was unlikely that anyone else on this elevator car had even seen that same broadcast. Doug had been watching an El Paso news feed. All the other news was talking about Hurricane Charles and the damage it was doing all across Ecuador. Nobody was going to be looking for us; they were all too busy with much more serious problems.

And even if somebody did recognize us, what could they do? We hadn't broken any laws. And even if we had, who was going to arrest us? The elevator attendants? We couldn't run away anyway.

Of course, once we got to Geostationary, they could have the police waiting for us, but Dad didn't think that was likely. Geostationary wasn't signatory to the SuperNational Treaty and there wasn't any extradition from space. This was because the Loonies weren't willing to agree to it and Geostationary usually sided with Luna more than Earth. According to Weird, anyway.

But there were private security agents available for hire at Geostationary, and if Mom really wanted to make trouble for us, she could hire a couple of those guys to meet us. But what could they do? Could they force us to go back to Earth? Dad wasn't sure what might happen in that case.

Just to be safe, Dad said I should probably stay in the cabin anyway. So I glowered and sulked and tried on different angry faces. And then I got bored. And when I get bored, I get nasty. And when I get nasty, I get disgusting. Just to see how disgusting I can be.

It didn't take long. Dad got so disgusted watching me fart and belch and flick my boogers at the TV screen that he finally said, "Okay, Charles. You win. I can't stand it anymore." He muttered something about teaching hygiene to chimpanzees. Then he said I could go out and walk around again, but only if I promised to keep out of trouble.

It was probably the boogers that did it. Boogers always work. Adults can't stand boogers. They can't even stand the word "booger." Booger booger booger. I didn't even like it when Stinky flicked his boogers, so it was probably a lot worse for Dad when I did it. But it worked.

I went down to the bottom of the car and up to the top, with stops everywhere in-between, looking for a place where something interesting—anything—was happening.

Nothing was happening. Nothing. And more nothing on top of that. The only thing to do was wander around—which I was already pretty good at. Mom called it my "restless lion" prowl. She said all I needed was a dead antelope leg to drag around. Ha ha. That's a grownup joke, only funny to grownups, annoying to those carrying the burden of genetic progress. But at least there was more room to drag my antelope haunch in the whole elevator car than there was in the cabin. Up and down and all around. The only thing weird was that I didn't see Weird anywhere, but I wasn't really looking for him anyway, so I didn't think about it. He'd probably found a terminal somewhere and was redesigning someone's government or something.

So this was what I'd flicked all those boogers for. The big discovery: there isn't anything to do on an elevator. All elevators are the same. You watch the numbers. That's it.

It doesn't matter how pretty the numbers are presented, they're still numbers. You go down to the bottom level and look at the lights on the wire to see if the red one has gotten any farther out and it looks exactly the same. It's impossible to tell. So then, you go up to the top and get something to eat. And after that, you go down to the lounge and watch TV. But you can do that in your cabin, and at least in your cabin, you can choose what you want to watch. So you get up and walk around some more. You go upstairs, you go downstairs.

If you want, the attendants will take you on a tour of how everything works, only it's all the stuff you've already seen, and there isn't that much of it anyway, so out of total boredom, you go back and look out the windows again.

If you go up to the top level, you can see ... the Line and the stars. The cable zips past at a thousand miles per hour, 1600 klicks. It's going so fast, you can't see any details on it at all, it's just a long shining bar of light that stretches up and away into nothing, like a big pointer into the night.

And everything else is stars—godzillions of them. Like God's dandruff on night's black velvet, or something like that. The higher you get, the darker the sky gets and the more stars there are to see. The top observation area is kept mostly unlit, except for tiny guide lights in the carpet, so your view isn't hampered by any glare. Up this high, the stars don't twinkle, so they look different.

Downstairs, the Line points straight down at the Earth; but it doesn't go all the way down, it just disappears into the distance again, so it looks like the elevator is hanging above the world, while this long bar of light drops away beneath you.

And every time you go downstairs to look, the Terminator Line has crept a little farther west across the world. And each time there's a little more world to see as more of it creeps up over the curving horizon. One half of the world glows with reflected sunlight. The other half is dark, speckled with little city lights.

But directly below us, the bright swirl of the hurricane covered everything like a big white eye glaring up at us. The hurricane was really pounding Terminus now. All the news reports were bad. The airport would be out of service for days, and they'd probably have to do a lot of track and highway repair too before anyone could get in or out.

It's supposed to be exciting, a trip up the elevator. But it isn't. Instead, time seems suspended. Everything looks motionless.

I was standing on the longest tightrope ever. A suspension bridge between a rock and a planet. Caught in the middle, between Mom and Dad, Weird and Stinky. Not a child, not an adult, but something in-between.

And all alone. More alone than ever.