"It looks so
thin." She muttered. "I mean, I understand the physics behind it more or less,
but it's almost unbelievable to look at."
"It's only
six inches wide at the base, if I recall." Crow said, craning his neck to stare
as well. "But it has to be tapered, so it's almost six feet wide halfway up,
before it shrinks back down again."
The marines
walked them to a giant room bustling with activity, and left them with a
technician who showed them to a pair of comfortable seats inside a cubicle next
to an odd interior window that looked out on a corridor of personnel busy
moving items around on fork lifts. The window and seats clicked for Rebecca
first.
"My god,
we're in the compartment right now." She said, Crow raised an eyebrow at her
and she gestured wildly around. "We're in the elevator right now. This whole
room goes up."
Crow
whitened a little and stood up to look over the cubicle walls. The room was
half the size of a football field, and rapidly filling with strap-secured
straps and a few dozen sentis in addition to one or two other human passengers.
"It really does look way too thin. I always thought of elevator more literally,
like a little ten by ten compartment that goes up with bad music and fake wood
paneling."
Rebecca
flipped through a pamphlet tucked into a document holders mounted on the wall
and shook her head. "The cable is anchored five hundred feet under the surface
and the entire top of the building opens up to allow a hundred foot diameter
storage car to pass." She held up a diagram to Crow. "We won't even be the only
car, it says here that they run up to eight at a time, slinging them off the
end up there as they come up."
Crow took
his seat and busied himself reading a magazine he found in the same pocket as
Rebecca's pamphlet. He snorted and tossed the magazine aside, acid welling up
in his stomach at the memories it brought. It was the precise issue he had
browsed a couple weeks ago in Dr. Anderson's office. When I still had a little boy.
A senti
stewardess gave them the rundown of the lift procedures once the compartment
had bee filled to the brim. Crow noticed that the other sentis did not pay her
any attention and seemed particularly pre-occupied with themselves.
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