"I'm the
Prince of Wales!" Crow shouted to them. "Jolly-O!"
Two of them
took pictures reluctantly before the hatch to the transport closed on them. A
yeoman showed Rebecca and Crow to worn leather seats of surprising comfort near
the cockpit and demonstrated the use of the seat belts. Crow stretched his legs
out to their full length.
"I guess
when they transport tanks in these things, they can afford to give you more leg
room than the commercial ones, huh?" Crow asked.
"You're
happy for a kidnap victim." Rebecca muttered and stared out the window at the
bustle of enlisted men fueling the planes and running through maintenance
checklists.
"We weren't
kidnapped." Crow said. "We just rated an escort is all." He grunted. "I thought
you'd be happy. We don't have to kidnap Green Eyes now."
"No."
Rebecca said. "If he needs kidnapped, we'll be three hundred thousand miles
away, and I doubt our cell phones will work from the moon."
A hundred
miles from Los Angeles, they could see a strip of metal sparkling in the
sunlight above the smog layer, which roiled underneath the plane in a thick
yellow stew. A ribbon divided the sky like a crack in the glass of the windows,
disappearing into the smog below and into the distance above, a gentle curve
steering it also off to the horizon. The sheer size and length defied
description, at least in part because the magnitude made it impossible to
actually bring the strand into focus. It seemed like it must just be a sliver
of metal caught on the window, a hair dropped down over their eyes.
The
engineering community had protested for years the chosen site of the space
elevator. It had to be along the equator, they insisted. Putting it in Los
Angeles defied all engineering logic. Of course, any suitable engineering site
along the equator defied all political logic as far as the government was
concerned. In time, it was hashed out that placing the site farther north made
the problem more difficult, not impossible, at which point a societal raised
eyebrow and a sigh by the engineering community got the job done for three
times the price of an equatorial model.
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