The Darwin Elevator Read Online Free PDF

might have years, if they’re even coming back at all. But we could just as easily be too late already. Without data, it’s impossible to know.”
    “I know,” he said. “I know.”
    “Plus, the analysis may take ages. If my assistant, Natalie, could help … She’s brilliant—”
    “Forget it,” Neil said. “Secrecy is paramount. You must do this alone.”
    The breeze picked up again, rustling the leaves along the line of trees.
    “It reminds me of the ocean, that sound,” Neil said. His voice now fatherly, again. “Waves on the shore of Nightcliff, before the disease came.”
    “I barely remember it,” Tania said. “Bits and pieces. My home has always been up here.”
    He smiled. “I used to walk with your parents along the rocks, discussing their research of the Elevator. Your father and I took turns carrying you. You hated to get your feet wet.”
    The mirth drained from his face then. Tania knew this expression well—an inevitable outcome when her parents became the topic of conversation. He’d be thinking now of how they died, and she hoped he wouldn’t talk about it.
    She was twenty-one at the time, in the first days of the disease. Her mother, a doctor, had rushed back to India, hoping to find a way to stop SUBS. A fool’s errand, in hindsight. Tania never heard from her again.
    At the same time, Neil had sent her father to one of the older space stations the company ran, one far from the Elevator. But a freak accident destroyed the place. Her father had been the only person aboard.
    Neil felt responsible for them, despite Tania’s assurances otherwise. They were gone, along with almost everyone else. She found it hard to mourn her parents with so many dead.
    She changed the subject. “You were saying, about preparations?”
    “Yes,” he replied. “You know we’ve spent years trying to complete another habitat station. Hab-Eight.” When she nodded, he continued. “Well, it’s much closer to completion than the council realizes. It’s better if you don’t know more. Point is, I’ve been stocking it like a bomb shelter, just in case.”
    “In case … what?”
    “ What , exactly,” Neil said. “The unknown, one of my least favorite things. Which is where you come in.”
    “There may be nothing to it. It’s only a theory.”
    “A brilliant theory,” he said, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “There’s something to it, Tania. I know it. Call it a gut feeling, I don’t care.”
    She nodded, slowly, despite her disagreement. She couldn’t make that kind of mental leap, not without evidence. “Without the data—”
    “That’s why I wanted to see you today. The data.”
    Excitement rippled through her again, and she couldn’t suppress it now. The anticipation of discovery was too strong. “You have it!”
    “Not yet,” he said, then noted her disappointment. “Soon, I hope. It’s a difficult thing you’re asking. Any venture beyond Aura’s Edge is risky as hell, and your data is quite far from Darwin. It’s going to cost me a small fortune.”
    She said nothing. Neil’s concern about spending a fortune, however small, depressed her.
    He’d become the richest man in the world when the space elevator connected to Earth on land he owned, some seventeen years ago. Platz Industries dominated the ensuing renaissance in space activity. Neil ran the company with ruthless efficiency, Tania’s father always nearby as his chief scientist.
    She caught glimpses of that Neil, the business tycoon, too often. From her perspective none of that mattered anymore. Wealth should no longer have a place in society, and yet it remained—ingrained in the psyche.
    Neil went on. “They’ll have to take their own air and water. Put their lives in the hands of environment suits made decades ago. One little puncture, Tania, and that’s it.”
    Tania knew all this. She’d studied SUBS, as much as one could. Little had been learned before the bulk of the human brain trust perished. It