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By Root 1826 0

station, and were met at their planes by a dozen men and women who were extravagantly enthusiastic in their welcome, hugging and kissing the six travelers countless times, and laughing as they did so. The six clumped together, more alarmed by this than by the wary greeting of the day before. Their welcomers did not neglect to run laser readers over their wrists to identify them, which was reassuring; but when the AI confirmed that they were indeed receiving six of the first hundred, they burst into cheers, and carried on in the very highest of spirits. In fact when the six were led through a lock into a commons, several of their hosts went over immediately to some small tanks, and breathed in hits of what proved to be nitrous oxygen and a pandorphin aerosol, after which they laughed themselves silly.

One of them, a slender fresh-faced American, introduced himself. “I’m Steve, I trained with Arkady on Phobos in 12, and worked with him on Clarke. Most of us here worked with him on Clarke. We were in Schiaparelli when the revolution began.”

“Do you know where Arkady is?” Nadia asked.

“Last we heard he was in Carr, but now he’s out of the net, which is the way it should be.”

A tall skinny American shambled up to Nadia, and put his hand on her shoulder and said, “We’re not always like this!” and laughed.

“We’re not!” Steve agreed. “But it’s a holiday today! You haven’t heard?”

A giggling woman scraped her face off the table and cried, “Independence Day! Fourteen the Fourteenth!”

“Watch, watch this,” Steve said, and pointed at their TV.

An image of space flickered onto the screen, and suddenly the whole group was yelling and cheering. They had locked onto a coded channel from Clarke, Steve explained, and though they could not decode its messages, they had used it as a beacon to aim their station’s optical telescope. The image from the telescope had been transferred onto the commons TV, and there it was, the black sky and the stars blocked at the center by the shape they had all learned to recognize, the squared-off metallic asteroid with the cable extending out of it. “Now watch!” they yelled at the puzzled travelers. “Watch!”

They howled again, and some of them began a ragged countdown, starting at one hundred. Some of them were inhaling helium as well as nitrous oxide, and these stood below the big screen singing, “We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! Because, because, because, because, because of the wonderful things he does! We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! We’re. . . off to see the wizard!…”

Nadia found herself shivering. The shouted countdown got louder and louder, reached a shrieked “Zero.”

A gap appeared between the asteroid and the cable. Clarke disappeared from the screen instantly. The cable, gossamer among the stars, dropped out of view almost as fast.

Wild cheers filled the room, for a moment at least. But it caught, as if on a hitch, as some of the celebrants were distracted by Ann leaping to her feet, both fists at her mouth.

“He’s sure to be down by now!” Simon cried to Ann over their din. “He’s sure to be down! It’s been weeks since he called!”

Slowly it got quiet. Nadia found herself at Ann’s side, across from Simon and Sasha. She didn’t know what to say. Ann was rigid, and her eyes bugged out horribly.

“How did you break the cable?” Sax asked.

“Well, the cable’s pretty much unbreakable,” Steve replied.

“You broke the cable?” Yeli exclaimed.

“Well, no, we separated the cable from Clarke, is what we did. But the effect is the same. That cable is on its way down.”

The group cheered again, somewhat more weakly. Steve explained to the travelers over the noise, “The cable itself was pretty much impervious, it’s graphite whisker with a diamond sponge-mesh gel double-helixed into it, and they’ve got smart pebble defense stations every hundred kilometers, and security on the cars that was intense. So Arkady suggested we work on Clarke itself. See, the cable goes right through the rock to the factories in the interior, and the actual end of it was physically