Hieroglyph (6 page)

At first it was just a shipping container with portholes plasma-torched by Tess's eternally grateful clientele of elite ultra-high-altitude steelworkers. This was back in the early days when the Square Kilometer—as we called the (actually round) platform at the top of the tower—was still only a couple of thousand meters off the ground. Once we broke through four thousand meters it became necessary to start running oxygen concentrators full-time, even for the altitude-adjusted regulars. On the day the Top Click (as we called the Square Kilometer by that point) pushed up past the altitude of Mt. Everest, we moved the whole operation into a pressurized Quonset hut and filled it with sea-level atmosphere. Beyond ten thousand meters we just started calling it the First Bar in Space. There was carping on the Internet but the journalists and businesspeople who rode the helirail up to the top and sat at the bar taking in the black sky and the curvature of the earth—well, none of them doubted.

I'm leaving a lot out: five years of starting the project, ten years of riding it up. Tess and I had two kids, raised them to teenagerhood, and went through a spell of personal-life hell when she had an affair with a Mohawk ironworker who drifted in from Upstate New York and stormed out a year later when Tess thought better of it. I ran the show for a few years until Carl suddenly announced during a meeting that (a) I had done a fantastic job but (b) I was being replaced effective immediately and (c) he was commencing radiation therapy for prostate cancer forty-five minutes from now. He then gave me the world's most unusual commercial real estate gig: selling off the Top Click. Obvious conflict-of-interest issues were raised by my wife's bar; Carl resolved them by giving us a lease in perpetuity, hand-scrawled on the back of a boarding pass.

Shipping materials to the top of the tower only became more expensive as it went up, so we had framed in the big structures while the Top Click had been on the ground, then stockpiled steel and other goods that could be used to finish it later. All of it got a free—but very slow—ride to twenty thousand meters. Additional structural work proceeded at a leisurely pace during the years that the Top Click was rising up through the Dead Zone—the altitudes from about seven to twelve kilometers. Below seven, humans could breathe (though most needed oxygen bottles), move around without pressure suits, and enjoy a decent enough view. It was cold as hell, but you could wear warm clothes; it was like being at a base camp on a man-made Himalaya. Much above seven, there wasn't enough atmosphere to breathe, but there was enough to supply foul weather in abundance. The view down was often blocked by clouds, the view up not yet enlivened by starlight. Past Everest height—nine kilometers or so—we got up into screaming sub-sub-subzero winds that, at their worse, were close to jet stream intensity. There wasn't much point in trying to keep glass in window frames. Even heavy-looking stuff like shipping containers had to be welded down or it would blow off, fall a few miles, and break something on the ground. There were ways to deal with it; but it basically led to Top Click operations being put in suspended animation until the Struders on the ground pushed it up out the top of the Dead Zone. During that time, we had other things to think about: sheathing the horizontal braces in giant wings, and getting them to work right.

Above the Dead Zone, things got nice in a hurry. The buildings, which had been empty shells for several years, got shelled in by space-suited workers and then pressurized with proper atmosphere so that shirtsleeved workers could get in, lay carpet, and put on doorknobs.

It was during that phase, when the Top Click was about seventeen kilometers above the ground, that we threw a party in the First Bar in Space for the purpose of scattering Carl's ashes. The basic idea being that they would fall for a couple of kilometers, get snatched by the wind, and disperse.

I was the last to arrive, carrying the guest of honor—a Ziploc bag full of Carl—in a messenger bag that looked way too hip for a middle-aged mom in the real estate business. My flight from SFO had been delayed by one monster of a storm front: the kind of thing that had been sweeping west to east across the Great Plains since time immemorial but was rarely seen in our part of the Southwest. But like the proverbial frog in a pan of water, we'd all been getting accustomed to shifts in the climate, and weather events unheard of during the previous century. The airline had found a way to route me around the storm, but as I drove in from the regional airport in Tess's pickup truck, I could see clearly enough that it was determined to catch up with me: an arc of stratocumulus anvil clouds stretching, it seemed, from Baja to Utah, blotting out the late-afternoon sun and flashing here and there with buried lightning.

It was the only thing that could make the tower look small.

One of the engineers, way back at the beginning, had described it as “a gas of metal,” which was pretty poetic for an engineer but did convey its gist: the minimum of steel needed to do the job, distributed over the largest volume it could feasibly occupy, but in a specific way meant to solve a host of structural problems. At night, when the lights came on, it looked far more substantial than during the day, when it was a glinting cloud that rose up out of the desert like an inverted tornado. If you let your gaze be drawn up high enough—astonishingly high, far above most clouds—you could see its ladder of wings cruising in the jet stream, like a set of venetian blinds hanging inexplicably in space. Above that, frequently obscured by haze and clouds, was the flare at the very top where it broadened to support the Top Click.

Even though I'd been living with—and on—this thing for going on twenty years, I was still impressed with its scale when I approached it as I was doing now. But having Carl's earthly remains on the passenger seat somehow drew my attention to his ground-level legacy, which now spread out from the base of the tower to a radius of ten or twenty miles. Fanning away to the east-southeast was an expanse of open rangeland, inhabited only by bison, groundhogs, and a few back-to-the-land types:
vaqueros
and the Indians who had always lived in those parts. Part of it was a bombing range. The rest I had acquired, one ranch at a time, using shell companies so that the landowners wouldn't gang up on me. Because one of the questions people had asked was “What if it gets rusty and falls over?” and Carl's answer had been “Then we'll use demolition charges to fell it like a tree down the middle of the Swath,” as this territory had come to be known. Which to me had seemed like bending over backward for the NIMBY types, until I'd understood that Carl had always intended to use the tower as a catapult for launching space vehicles, whose trajectories, for the first twenty miles, would pass right down the middle of the Swath, which he therefore needed to keep clear anyway so that failed rockets would have a place to crash.

The new highway from the airport ran along the Swath's northern border for the last few miles, and as I drove in I enjoyed, to the left, a vista of grazing bison and the occasional horse-riding Indian, and to the right, a generic exurban sprawl of strip malls and big-box stores that had sprung up to fill the needs of all the people who had moved here. Behind that line of development I could hear the long blasts of a locomotive whistle: another huge train rolling in from Chicago carrying prefab steel trusses to feed into the Struders.

The ring line encircling the base was discernible as a crescent of five- to ten-story commercial buildings adorned with the logos of the tech firms and contractors that had set up shop here. Mixed in were hotels and apartment buildings housing temporary residents as well as the younger, more urban crowd who wanted to be close to what had developed into a passable nightlife and entertainment district. From their windows they could look out over residential developments spreading away along the state highway connecting to the college town. All of this had a temporary feel, since it was understood that when the tower topped out and the Struders ground to a halt, the bottom kilometer would develop into a vertical city, a much cooler place to live—climatically as well as culturally.

For now, though, the tower's lower reaches were a web of bare trusses with steelworkers, and their robots, crawling about. Welding arcs hung in it like bottled fireflies, and cranes pivoted and picked like hollow mantises. In most building sites, a crane had to be capable of hoisting itself higher as the building grew beneath it, but here the cranes had to keep working their way
down
the structure as it pushed up from the Struders. It wasn't rocket science but it did make for some crowd-pleasing erector-set gymnastics, watched by vacationing families and know-it-all retirees from covered viewing platforms spotted around the ring road.

Rocket science was the domain of the innermost core, a ten-meter-diameter chimney running all the way up the tower's central axis. During the first couple of years I had pestered Carl with questions about what specifically was going to go into that empty space—that perfectly round hole at the center of every floor plan.

“You're assuming I have a secret plan,” he had said.

“You usually do.”

“My secret plan is that I have no secret plan.”

“Wow!”

“I am going to sell—you are going to sell—that right-of-way to the highest bidder. On eBay if necessary.”

“And what is the highest bidder going to put in it?”

“I have no idea. Since it is twenty kilometers long and pointed straight up, I'm going to make a wild guess that it will be something connected with hurling shit into space.”

“But you really don't know what exactly?”

He had thrown up his hands. “Maybe a giant peashooter, maybe a railgun, maybe something that hasn't been invented yet.”

“Then why did you pick ten meters for its diameter?”

“It was easier to remember than eleven point one three nine zero two four . . .”

“Okay, okay!”

The secret plan worked. The people who won the bidding war—a coalition of commercial space companies and defense contractors—gave the tower a shot of cash and credibility at a time when both had been a little tight.

Now cutting across the ring road, working against an outflow of traffic—workers coming off the day shift, headed home for the weekend—I passed a security checkpoint and rolled across a flyover that had been thrown across the circular railway line. This ramped down to ground level and became a road paralleling the Northwest Spoke.

Instead of paving the spokes all at once—which would have been a huge up-front expense—we had been building them just in time, a few meters and a few weeks in advance of where and when they would be needed. This made it possible to keep the paving crews employed on a steady full-time basis for years. So directly in front of the astonishing bulk of the Northwest Struder was this fringe of preparatory activity: orange flags marking the locations of soil samples, graded and tamped earth, a gray haze of webbed rebar, plywood forms, freshly poured concrete. The giant linked treads and looming hulk of the Struder rising just behind.

On the top of the Struder, evening-shift workers in safety harnesses were ascending from dressing rooms below to busy themselves on the most recently extruded truss section, inspecting, x-raying, installing sensors and lights and wires. A lot of that work had been done hundreds of miles away when the trusses were being prefabbed, but there didn't seem to be any computer-driven process that couldn't be improved upon by humans crawling around on the actual structure and writing on it with grease pencils. As the tower had risen up from the desert, data pouring in from its millions of strain gauges, thermocouples, cameras, and other sensors had given up oceans of information about how the models had, and hadn't, gotten the predictions right, creating a demand for “tweaking crews” to make adjustments to newly extruded work before it got pushed so high into the sky that it became hard to reach.

There was more than one way to the top. Climbing hand over hand had become a new extreme sport. Helipads were available at various altitudes, and work was under way to build a new regional airport at what would eventually be the twenty-five-hundred-meter level—airplanes would land and take off by flying into and out of apertures in the tower's side, saving them huge amounts of fuel as they avoided the usual ascent and descent.

Surrounding that ten-meter right-of-way in the middle were vertical elevator shafts. But the primary transport scheme was the helirail: a cross between a train, an elevator, and an amusement park ride that corkscrewed up the periphery of the structure, ascending at a steady twenty-degree angle. It was really just a simple ramp, about sixty kilometers long, that had been wrapped around the tower as it was built. Cut a triangle out of paper and roll it around a pencil if you want the general idea. Special trains ran on it with tilted floors so that you always felt you were on the level. Train stations were built around it every two thousand meters altitude. One of those—the second to last—had just been roughed in and was dangling there a few meters off the ground. I was able to clamber up into it via some scaffolding and catch the next up-bound train.

Actually
train
was too grand a word for this conveyance, which was just a single car with none of the luxury appurtenances that would be built into these things later when they were carrying droves of tourists and business moguls. All the regulars knew to empty their bladders first and to bring warm clothes even if it was a warm day at ground level. I shared my car with Joe, an aeronautical engineer who was headed up to fourteen thousand meters to inspect the servomechanisms on a wing; Nicky, an astronomer going to the Top Click to work on the mirror stabilization system for the big telescope a-building there; and Frog, a video producer readying a shoot about the BASE-jumping industry, which was already serving a thousand clients a year. After peppering us with recorded warnings, the car began to hum up the helirail, banking slightly on its gimbals as it picked up speed. A recorded message told us where to look for motion sickness pills and barf bags, then moved on to the more serious matter of what to do if we lost pressurization.