The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [80]
The Sea of Paravana erupted in thunder. A geyser of mud and spray shot a hundred meters into the air—a fountain far surpassing those of Yakkagala, and one almost as high as the Rock itself. It hung suspended for a moment in futile defiance of gravity before tumbling back into the shattered lake.
At once, the sky was full of waterfowl wheeling in startled flight. Almost as numerous, flapping among them like leathery pterodactyls who had somehow survived into the modern age, were the big fruit bats who normally took to the air only after dusk. Equally terrified, birds and bats shared the sky.
The last echoes of the crash died away into the encircling jungle, and silence swiftly returned to the lake. But long minutes passed before its mirror surface was restored and little waves ceased to scurry back and forth beneath the unseeing eyes of Paravana the Great.
42
Death in Orbit
Every large building, it is said, claims a life; fourteen names were engraved on the piers of the Gibraltar Bridge. But thanks to an almost fanatical safety campaign, casualties on the Tower had been remarkably low. There had even been one year without a single death.
And there had been one year with four—two of them particularly harrowing. A space-station assembly supervisor, accustomed to working under zero gravity, had forgotten that though he was in space he was not in orbit, and a lifetime’s experience had betrayed him. He had plummeted more than fifteen thousand kilometers, to burn up like a meteor upon entry into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, his suit radio had remained switched on during those last few minutes. . . .
It was a bad year for the Tower; the second tragedy had been much more protracted, and equally public. An engineer on the counterweight, far beyond synchronous orbit, had failed to fasten her safety belt properly, and had been flicked off into space like a stone from a sling.
She was in no danger, at that altitude, of either falling back to Earth or being launched on an escape trajectory. Unfortunately, her suit held less than two hours’ air. There was no possibility of rescue at such short notice; and despite a public outcry, no attempt was made.
The victim had co-operated nobly. She had transmitted her farewell messages, and then, with thirty minutes of oxygen still unused, opened her suit to vacuum. The body was recovered a few days later, where the inexorable laws of celestial mechanics brought it back to the perigee of its long ellipse.
These tragedies flashed through Morgan’s mind as he took the high-speed elevator down to the operations room, closely followed by a somber Kingsley and the now almost forgotten Dev. But this catastrophe was of an altogether different type, involving an explosion at or near the Basement of the Tower. That the transporter had fallen to Earth was obvious, even before the garbled report was received of a “giant meteor shower” somewhere in central Taprobane.
It was useless to speculate, Morgan thought, until he had more facts; and in this case, where all the evidence had been destroyed, they might never be available. He knew that space accidents seldom had a single cause. They were usually the result of a chain of events, often quite harmless in themselves. All the foresight of the safety engineers could not guarantee absolute reliability, and sometimes their own over-elaborate precautions contributed to disaster.
Morgan was not ashamed of the fact that the safety of the project now concerned him far more than any loss of life. Nothing could be done about the dead; one could only ensure that the same accident would never happen again. But that the almost completed Tower might be endangered was a prospect too appalling to contemplate.
The elevator floated to a halt, and he stepped out into the operations room—just in time for the evening’s second stunning