"William Forstchen - Article 23" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forstchen William R)

"Departure in ten seconds," the computer notified them.

The Skyhook car shuddered again as it rolled along its track and then locked itself on to the side of the
tower. Justin pressed his face against the window and looked out across the terminal. Dozens of cars,
which were nothing more than long thin tubes eighty feet long and twenty feet wide, were loading up with
passengers. On one side of the cars were the heavy magnetic locks that hooked to the tracks located on
the side of the tower. The rest of the car was ringed with small porthole windows so that the hundred and
twenty passengers on board could watch the show. Once loaded, the car, standing upright, slid out of its
terminal gate onto a conveyor track that guided it to one of the vertical magnetic tracks strapped to the
side of the tower.

The cars would then ride up the side of the tower into space. Directly in front of the car the track would
carry a negative charge while directly behind the car the track was positively charged, the combination
propelling the positively charged car in the desired direction. It was the same system used in the magnetic
levitation trains that now hooked the world together, with the Express running from New York to Los
Angeles in five hours.

The lights in the cabin flickered slightly and the car started up. Justin felt the seat pushing into his back as
the terminal floor appeared to drop away. A couple of seconds later they were through the top of the
building. It was a scorching hot morning in Brazil, heat shimmers rising off the parking lot and the
magnetic levitation train station outside the terminal. To the south of the passenger terminal Justin could
see the vast warehouses where cargo bound for space and manufactured goods returning down the
tower were stored. Rio had replaced Gape Kennedy and Star City in Russia as the major port into
space, though Brazil would soon have competition when the second tower was finished in Indonesia just
outside of Jakarta.

He felt as if he were sinking into the seat as the car sped up to over eight hundred kilometers per hour,
the fastest it would go while inside the Earth's atmosphere. Within seconds they were nearly six
kilometers above the ground.

Justin turned to the computer screen mounted on the seat in front of him and switched it to show the
forward view.

Overhead the Skyhook Tower rose like a white finger pointing straight up into space. Of course it was
impossible to see the far end of it, which terminated at just over thirty-seven thousand kilometers above
the surface of the Earth. It was, he realized once more, the engineering miracle of the 21st century. It had
been constructed from the top down. In the same way that the cables of a suspension bridge are woven
together, back and forth across a river, the cables that made up the heart of the tower were lowered
thirty-seven thousand kilometers down from space and anchored to the ground. It in fact had to be made
in space, since the cables were uniquely engineered metal-carbon fibers, with strength ten thousand times
that of steel at only a fraction of the weight. They could only be made in the zero gravity and vacuum of
space. What was fascinating as well was that the tower was actually held erect by centrifugal force. The
rotation of the Earth and the angular momentum thus created held the tower aloft.

The tower was really an elevator to the stars, with nine tracks mounted on the side of the tower. Two
were for passengers, one up and one down, with cars departing every minute, and six for cargo, while
the final track was for the maintenance crews.

Justin found it to be fascinating that there was a staircase inside the tower that went all the way from the
ground up to the first station, which was located five hundred kilometers up. A bizarre new sport had