Spinneret

Chapter 10

"The shuttle's matched orbits with the cable now," Captain Stewart reported. "It should be just a few more minutes."

Listening in from a few million kilometers away, Meredith swallowed hard against his frustration. He'd desperately wanted to be on the scene when rendezvous was made, and the fuel-efficiency arguments which had prevented the Aurora from stopping first for passengers weren't the least bit comforting.

Whatever that cable was, it was an Astran discovery, and he didn't like the feeling that Stewart was cutting them out of things.

Brown, sitting beside Meredith in Martello's communications center, seemed to feel the same way. "We're still not getting the picture you promised," he told Stewart. "You want to get someone on that, Captain?"

"So far, there's nothing to see," Stewart replied. "Even the shuttle's cameras still only show occasional glints. We'll tie you in when they go EVA for the material tests."

"Do that," Meredith said. "In the meantime, have you refined your dimension estimates any?"

"Not really. We still make it about six centimeters in diameter and something over two kilometers long. When we can get a piece of it to work on we'll get density and composition, but I'll bet you the Aurora we've got your missing metal right here."

"Yeah. Well, there's just one problem with that." Tapping computer keys, Meredith called up a list of numbers. "Our best estimate right now is that we lost about forty-seven hundred kilograms' worth, including all the stuff in the fertilizer.

If the cable's the density of iron, say, it shouldn't be more than a tenth that length.

So where'd the rest of the mass come from?"

"No idea," Stewart admitted. "Maybe the chemical analysis will give us a clue."

He paused. "Okay, they're exiting the lock now. Here we go."

In front of Meredith the screen came to life. To one side of the camera was the bulk of the shuttle, from which a spacesuited man equipped with a maneuvering pack was emerging. On the other side of the picture, the cable was just barely visible. A second figure joined the first, and for several minutes they jockeyed around the cable taking pictures. As Meredith had half expected, there was no more detail to the cable's surface at close range than had been visible farther out.

"That should be enough," Stewart said at last. "Try the cutters now—stay near the end."

"Roger." The first astro had unclipped a set of what looked to Meredith like a mechanized lobster claw. Moving forward, he set the blades against the cable—and suddenly swore. "Damn! It's stuck!"

"What do you mean, stuck?"

"As in glued to the cable. Captain. I barely touched it, and now I can't … I can't even get it loose running the motor in reverse."

Meredith exchanged a quick glance with Brown. "Maybe you can still cut it," he suggested into the mike. "Or at least cut enough groove to give us its hardness."

"Yes, sir." A pause. "I'm trying, sir, but nothing's happening."

"That's impossible," Stewart cut in. "I've seen those cutters handle ten-centimeter tungsten plate without—"

"Look out!" one of the astros shouted, and Meredith flinched in automatic reaction as the men on the screen jerked back.

"You all right?" Stewart asked sharply.

"Yes, sir," the rattled answer came. "We've just lost the cutters. The motor burned out—scattered small bits of itself all over the place. Uh … I can't even see a scratch underneath the blades."

For a long moment there was nothing but the hum of the radio's carrier. "I see,"

Stewart said at last. "Well … does the reflectivity read low enough to try using a laser on it?"

"Just a second, sir … We could try the UV, I suppose; the reflectivity seems to increase with wavelength. But I'm not at all sure it'll do any better than the cutters did."

"Try it anyway," Meredith instructed. "You can at least get a heat capacity estimate that way."

It took a minute to get the laser ready, and two or three more to position the infrared sensors that would measure the cable's temperature. "Here goes, sir.

Laser's going … reflection about thirty-eight percent—that seems low for a metal—"

"Temperature's starting up slowly," the second astro put in. "Up to … what the hell!"

"What?" Stewart snapped.

"The temp just … dropped. Captain; dropped like a stone all the way down to …

well, to a few degrees absolute."

"Superconductor," Brown murmured, sounding awed.

"That's impossible," the astro retorted. "The reading was well above superconductor temperatures when it dropped."

Stewart ordered several more tests run, but each one simply added another mystery to the growing list. A portable wire-tester was hopelessly inadequate for measuring tensile strength—the cable didn't even stretch, let alone break. A

standard metal detector gave no reading even a few centimeters away from the cable, but a direct measurement of resistivity showed that, under sufficiently high voltages, the material became a superconductor of electricity. And possibly the oddest discovery of all came when one of the astros accidentally brushed the cable and stuck fast. In attempting to cut him loose, his partner found that the "glue" had somehow penetrated several centimeters into the spacesuit fabric, rendering that section nearly as unbreakable as the cable itself. In the end they had to cut a gaping hole around the affected material, leaving the astro to do a decompressed reentry to the shuttle.

"I don't know about you," Meredith told Stewart when the two astros were back inside, "but I'm ready to call it a day. It's obvious we're not going to find out anything more with the equipment you've got out there. I think we're going to have to bring the cable back here."

"As in Astran orbit, you mean?"

"As in groundside."

There was a long pause. "And how, may I ask, do you intend to land two kilometers of heavy cable?" Stewart asked. "Without endangering one of my shuttles, that is?"

Meredith looked at Brown, gestured toward the mike. "We've been studying the problem ever since the cable was discovered," Brown told the captain. "Given the length and stickiness, I think it would be most reasonable to wrap it around itself, pretzel fashion, and tow it into near orbit. Once there, you could put a remote booster and some parachutes on it and send it on down. There are lots of open areas we could drop it in—north of Wright might be good, since a lot of our heavier equipment is up there."

"Out of the question," Stewart said. "We'll tow it back to Astran orbit, but that's where it's going to stay. Bring it down and you'll never see it again under the layer of dirt it'll collect."

"And then you'll run off and report all of this to the Pentagon, right?" Meredith asked.

"In a few days, yes. Why?—Were you planning to keep it secret?"

"No. But once you're gone, what's to keep someone else— the Rooshrike, perhaps—from towing the cable back out of orbit?"

There was another long silence. "Do they know about the cable?" Stewart asked.

"I haven't the foggiest. You want to take that chance?"

"Damn." Stewart let out an audible breath. "Major Brown, let's hear those numbers you said you'd worked out."

In the end, with a maximum of difficulty and a minimum of actual damage, they brought the cable down.