The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [44]
20
The Bridge
That Danced
Even in this age of instantaneous communication and swift global transport, it was convenient to have a place that one could call one’s office. Not everything could be stored in patterns of electronic charges; there were still such items as good old-fashioned books, professional certificates, awards and honors, engineering models, samples of material, artists’ renderings of projects (not as accurate as a computer’s, but very ornamental), and, of course, the wall-to-wall carpet that every senior bureaucrat needed to soften the impact of external reality.
Morgan’s office, which he saw, on the average, ten days per month, was on the sixth or LAND floor of the sprawling Terran Construction Corporation headquarters in Nairobi. The floor below was SEA; that above it, ADMINISTRATION—meaning Chairman Collins and his empire. The architect, in a fit of naive symbolism, had devoted the top floor to SPACE. There was even a small observatory on the roof, with a thirty-centimeter telescope, which was always out of order because it was used only during office parties, and frequently for very nonastronomical purposes. The upper rooms of the Triplanetary Hotel, only a kilometer away, were a favorite target, since they often held some extremely strange forms of life—or, at any rate, of behavior.
Since Morgan was in continuous touch with his two secretaries—one human, the other electronic—he expected no surprises when he walked into his office after the brief flight from ANAR. By the standards of an earlier age, his was an extraordinarily small organization. He had fewer than three hundred men and women under his direct control; but the computing and information-processing power at their command could not be matched by the merely human population of the entire planet.
“Well, how did you get on with the Sheik?” asked Warren Kingsley, his deputy and long-time friend, as soon as they were alone together.
“Very well. I think we have a deal. But I still can’t believe that we’re held up by such a stupid problem. What does the Legal Department say?”
“We’ll definitely have to get a World Court ruling. If the Court agrees that it’s a matter of overwhelming public interest, our reverend friends will have to move. . . . Though if they decide to be stubborn, there would be a nasty situation. Perhaps you should send a small earthquake to help them make up their minds.”
The fact that Morgan was on the board of General Tectonics was an old joke between him and Kingsley; but GT—perhaps fortunately—had never found a way of controlling and directing earthquakes, nor did it ever expect to do so. The best that it could hope for was to predict them, and to bleed off their energies harmlessly before they could do major damage. Even here, its record of success was not much better than seventy-five percent.
“A nice idea,” said Morgan. “I’ll think it over. Now, what about our other problem?”
“All set to go. Do you want it now?”
“Okay—let’s see the worst.”
The office windows darkened, and a grid of glowing lines appeared in the center of the room.
“Watch this, Van,” said Kingsley. “Here’s the regime that gives trouble.”
Rows of letters and numbers materialized in the empty air—velocities, payloads, accelerations, transit times. Morgan absorbed them at a glance. The globe of the earth, with its circles of longitude and latitude, hovered just above the carpet; and rising from it, to little more than the height of a man, was the luminous thread that marked the position of the Orbital Tower.
“Five hundred times normal speed; lateral scale exaggeration fifty. Here we go.”
Some invisible force had started to pluck at the line of light, drawing it away from the vertical. The disturbance was moving upward as it mimicked, via the computer’s millions