Read Online Hieroglyph by Ed Finn - Free Book Online Page B

of my life to getting him to admit that my job would be easier and the Top Click would be more valuable if it had a breathable atmosphere that wouldn’t cause simultaneous frostbite and sunburn. Building one big dome on the top was too inflexible, and we had ended up with a mess of cylindrical and hemispherical structures (because those shapes withstood pressurization) joined by tubular skybridges. The Top Click helirail terminal was a hemispherical dome, already awe-inspiring in a Roman Pantheon way even though it was just a shell. Radiating from it were tubes leading to unfinished casinos, hotels, office buildings, and the institute that Carl and some of his billionaire friends had endowed. The observatory was there, and that was where Nicky went after saying good-bye and exchanging contact data with me. I shouldered the bag with Carl in it and hiked down a tube to a lobby where I changed to another tube that took me to the First Bar in Space. Frog, the video producer, walked with me; having slept most of the way through the ride, he was in the mood for a drink. I helped him tow his luggage: a hard-shell case full of video gear and a Day-Glo pink backpack containing the parafoil he intended to use for the return trip.
    It was a pretty small party. Carl didn’t have a lot of friends. Alexandra, his daughter from a long-dead marriage, had flown in from London with her boyfriend, Roger, who was some sort of whizbang financial geek from a posh family. Tess was there to greet me with a glass of wine and a kiss. Our kids were off at college and at camp. Carl’s younger brother Dave, a college volleyball coach, had come in from Ohio. He was already a little tipsy. Maxine, the CEO of Carl’s charitable foundation, and her husband, Tom, a filmmaker. We took over one corner of the bar, which was pretty quiet anyway. Marla the bartender and Hiram, one of the regulars, were watching a Canadian hockey game on the big screen. Hiram, a teetotalling Mohawk ironworker, was knocking back an organic smoothie. Frog grabbed a stool at the other end of the bar, ordered a Guinness, whipped out his phone, and launched into a series of “you’ll never guess where I’m calling from!” calls.
    It was lovely to be home in my bar with my wife. I was just a few sips into that glass of wine, starting to wish that all of these nice guests would go away and leave us alone, when heads began to turn and I noticed that we had been joined by a woman in a space suit.
    Not totally. Nicky Chu had had the good manners to remove the helmet and tuck it under her arm. She said, “Sorry, but I think we all need to get under cover. Or over cover is more like it.”
    â€œOver cover?” I asked.
    Roger broke the long silence that followed. I don’t know, maybe it was that British penchant for wordplay. “What’s coming up from beneath?” he asked. “And how’s it going to get through the floor?”
    â€œHigh-energy gamma ray bursts,” Nicky said, “and some antimatter.”
    â€œAntimatter?” several people said at once.
    â€œI’ll explain while you’re donning,” she said, and started backing toward the exit. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to put down your drinks.”
    Donning, as most of us knew, meant putting on space suits. It was to living on the Top Click what the life vest drill was to an ocean cruise. Thanks to the space tourism industry, it had become pretty idiot proof. Even so, it did take a few minutes. They were stored in a vestibule, which for very sound reasons was a sealable windowless capsule. Nicky insisted we drag them out into an adjacent sky lobby—a future restaurant—with big west-facing windows. She wanted us to get a load of the storm.
    And this bore no resemblance to watching a storm approach on the ground. We’ve all done that. From a distance you can look up into the structure of the high clouds, but as it gets