On the day in question, most of my energy was spent traveling. It must have been around five o’clock, West Africa Time, when the lights in the railcar flickered, dimmed, then went dark entirely.
My colleague Bernard stiffened beside me. I felt him groping at the seats in front of us as if the train were going to rearrange itself in the darkness. Subvocal utterances revealed his disquietude. I determined he was unaware of his own animal noises and so, surely, he was unaware of the electrical whine of the magnetic brakes engaging beneath us. I was not especially worried by the change; the tunnel had slowed our transport to barely a trot prior to the loss of power. However, I did find myself wondering what it would sound like if the machine had to deploy its kinetic pads to bring us to a halt. Would we hear the metallic scream of an ancient locomotive echoing through this ultramodern coach? Such a thing would only occur if the rail lines lost power completely, of course. The absence of this emergency measure was proof enough that there was no cause for concern. I began to phrase this for Bernard, but he spoke first.
“Aha, observe: the station has already restored its connection.”
His intonation suggested he was trying to reassure me, but it was not I who was craning my neck to take in every inch of the conveyance. Still, I took a gander to humor him
There was enough luminance leaking through the slim slipglass portals to give shapes a some definition. The curved edges of urethane seats repeated themselves down the aisle a dozen meters to the front of the car. The domed window there allowed me to observe dots of light in the ceiling of the tunnel outside. They ran over us, then crept, then came to a halt. I could only observe a few of these lamps before they faded into obscurity in the tunnel’s depths. This amber glow was enough, though, to reveal the falsehood of Bernard’s claim: the power for these lights was quite obviously sourced from battery failsafes. The crisp iridescent bulbs of the platform were left inert, dumbly indicating their disconnection.
For this I was grateful. The ambiance soothed my weary eyes. Sunset red – the lowest end of the visible spectrum – was appropriate for the moments after a blackout. It was appropriate, as well, for the end of a long journey underground. I took to the aisle, spirit renewed, startling Bernard with my confidence. I surmised that he was peering through the slipglass in hope of spotting an attendant coming to aid us. I had already dismissed this as a false hope, and I told him so: though our arrival was scheduled, a remote docking station had no hands to spare for civilian travel. Flatbed freight lines ran on rails parallel to ours, but with tonnes of Earth separating the tunnels. I described how operators were at that moment scurrying to manage the loss of power and still meet their deadlines with the facility above. This was a routine inconvenience for them and only a mild disturbance for us.
He conceded the truth of my words and aided me in dislodging our baggage from their holds. He made a comment about guiding my weak eyes in the dark, which I found rather condescending. Bernard knew of my corrective surgery and, as a scientist, should understand how impeccable the treatment had been. I let the slight pass by without comment. I understood in the moment that he needed to glamorize his youthfulness to combat his childish fear of the dark.
The platform was vast and lonely. The farthest train car doors were far beyond my range of vision in the dim red glow of the station. I could hear them all shut in a chorus: a sound that was never meant to dominate this space. Voices, shouts, the shuffle of footsteps; this was once a bustling place. We ascended the escalators and I let Bernard take the heaviest baggage, one step at a time as we climbed the inert transport mechanism. It occurred to me then that Bernard had never seen this place when it was in its prime. This would be his first ascent into orbital space. Perhaps it was misguided of me to think he had been scared of the dark, rather than the climb into orbit that was in our immediate future.
The silence was broken when we crossed the threshold of the sky bridge. Mercifully, the automatic doors had maintained power. When we entered that glass-enclosed tube we felt the vibrations of the trucks crossing down below. Just as I described, the cargo carriers were operating at full, almost frantic, capacity. I observed them, briefly wondering whether they were behind schedule or if this was their usual frenzy of action before an ascent. The sunset to the west had a glow no stronger than the running lights guiding us across the bridge. The horizon ended over the Gulf of Guinea, I knew, but all that could be seen was a blackening mass of clouds. The storms were rising to consume the night.
I began to comment on the oncoming weather, but I reconsidered it when I remembered Bernard’s first-flight nerves. It was then I discovered he had stopped in the middle of the bridge, several paces behind me. He stood at the apex of the arched structure, staring eastwards and upwards. Even before I followed his gaze into the night sky I knew what he beheld.
“This is not my first time spotting it.”
He seemed to anticipate my question.
“I wrote most of my doctorate in Sri Lanka. In the southern region it was possible to look towards the equator and see it on a clear day. A column of steel. A needle scratching across the grooves of the Earth, playing the music of space.”
I approached the window to stand beside him, leaving the baggage so I would not have to haul it twice. We watched the thing approach us: the International Space Elevator. It was only a line of lights. An innocuous warning for an unstoppable force. The boundary of its airspace was impossible to define, and the lights made no effort to do so, but those points of color climbing into the sky were a marvel of their own. I let Bernard have his flight of fancy, ignoring his erroneous description of the thing as steel. Very little of the structure was metal, or any solid material at all; only beams of magnetism were strong and light enough to maintain such a miraculous formation. And it might as well be a miracle to scientists such as ourselves: archeologists, not engineers or physicists. So I let him have his poetic pronouncement, trying to remember if I had any words as apt when I was his age.
“Come,” I said to him when the marvel had grown stale. “It will be upon us within the hour.”
Bernard broke away with a nod. He took up the bags I had left down the bridge with a renewed spirit of chivalry or excitement. As I struggled to catch up to him I was struck with the thought that this was how my mother must have seen me when I raced ahead to that first ascent, so many years ago. How different was this terminal then: she would have had to watch me through the shifting crowd, all of us pushing forward into the compartments that would carry us through the atmosphere. How different was I, as well: not eager, not hurried by curiosity. Only an old academic’s commitment to research drew me forward and upward. Only an old skeptic’s questions propelled me towards dread.
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Harmless Writing 