Pillar to the Sky Read online

  As the helicopter swooped down low, it was obvious that Franklin in his excitement wanted to give them an aerial tour, but out of concern for Victoria he told the pilot to touch down in the middle of the runway and taxi into the open shed hangar.

  There was a gasp of relief from Victoria as the helicopter gently settled down, and once the pilot announced it was safe to get out, Victoria all but sprang from her seat and lost it again within seconds after her feet touched the ground. Eva, in motherly fashion, put a supportive arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

  Several men were coming over; to Gary’s amusement, one of them was wearing an old-fashioned pith helmet, the others the standard yellow or orange construction helmets. The man leading the group and wearing the cork pith helmet was dark-skinned, obviously a native of the area. He grinned, hand extended.

  “Frank, how in hell are you!”

  “George, damn good to see you.”

  The two embraced, patting each other on the shoulders. Quick introductions were made. Franklin explained that George, a civil engineer and a graduate of Stanford, was his chief of construction on the island. George paused, eyes filled with pity for Victoria, and went to her side.

  “Come along with me, little lady. Our doctor has a magic cure; then a dip in the ocean to cool off and you’ll feel just fine. You’re not the first or the last to have a touch of the sickness of the air flying here. We have just the thing for you.”

  She was grateful to be led away. Eva wanted to follow. The pilot had obviously radioed ahead, and a heavyset woman, who George explained was his wife, and one of the doctors for the crew, was already running up to Victoria, giving her a warm embrace in spite of the state she was in, chattering away about how Victoria was the same size as their daughter and they’d get her some fresh clothes and even a bathing suit so she could swim after a quick shot to fix up her tummy.

  “Do you think of everything?” Eva asked, looking back gratefully at Franklin.

  He smiled.

  “I try. I puked my guts out a couple of flights back. I’m sorry I forgot to have you all take some ginger pills before we even landed at Tarawa. Where we are standing now is just several miles from the equator. It gets damn hot, turbulent at midday, and as for the work crews, we have to keep a sharp watch for heat exhaustion. Sarah, George’s wife, is our doctor and a favorite on this island, something of a supermom with six children of their own.”

  He paused, looked around at the construction crew, and pointed out a young man driving a grader leveling the new runway. “That’s their oldest, home from Stanford for the summer. I swear, half the crew feigns sickness on a regular basis just to get some motherly attention from her.”

  He motioned them over to a jeep and they piled in, George driving, and headed off on what started as a paved road, but halfway down the length of the small island became a rutted track, swinging around the road crew, which in spite of the hundred-degree heat were hard at work grading and laying down hot asphalt. Franklin pointed to the right, where the dredging ships were at work, explaining that the plan was to have a 6,000-foot airstrip operational in six months, and within two years an 11,000-foot runway that could handle anything short of an Airbus 380.

  They passed the rows of Quonset huts, most of them empty except for the dining hall serving out a late-morning brunch, and crews at work to the east side, putting up yet more huts to house additional workers, and then came to a stop at the southern tip of the island.

  Franklin got out and, with a touch of a showman, proudly pointed out to sea.

  “Nine hundred and forty-two feet out that way is the equator.”

  Gary and Eva stared out to sea and then both of them laughed, Eva commenting that somehow she half expected to see some sort of line out there marking that it was indeed the equator.

  “I’d take you out there, but if you take one step beyond, both of you will have to endure the ancient ritual of the sea, meeting King Neptune, and graduating from being polliwogs. We’ll save that for another time when Victoria can join in the fun. My friends here put me through hell with that one, but it will be toned down a bit with ladies present.

  “So I flew the three of you all this way to see this,” Franklin said, and he gestured to the huts, the ships anchored in the lagoon, what definitely looked like an oil rig out just beyond the barrier reef … and that was it.

  It was all a bit anticlimactic, Gary thought for a moment. And inwardly he was calculating the expense of just flying them here on a private jet for this view.

  “This, my friends, is where we are going to build our pillar.”

  Neither spoke for a moment. There was no joyful jumping up and down, shaking of hands, or backslapping. The two, more than anything else, were beyond exhausted, and only three days ago had sat in a Senate hearing room, being humiliated and believing their dreams had been crushed.

  “I don’t understand something,” Gary finally said.

  “Go on.”

  “How in hell did you get away with even doing what you are doing now? I keep track of every scrap of news about elevator development, and there has never been a whisper about what you are doing here. There was a bit of a flurry of news some years back when a Japanese consortium purchased an option to build what they claimed was a space port here, because—like the French are doing in Africa—the closer you get to the equator to launch, the more momentum you get from the earth’s rotation and thus cheaper on fuel. I thought it was a cover story, that they were going for a Pillar and would preempt us.”

  “That all fell through years ago when their economy flatlined,” Franklin said, nodding in agreement as he pointed to the horizon. “They had an option on the next island over. You can just barely see it because of the haze, but I now have that option as well and have several hundred working there already.”

  He smiled.

  “A Singapore company quietly picked it up a year ago, and except for the workers out there, no one has really noticed. Nor have they noticed what is going on here. The cover story is that I have gone crazy and think this will be some sort of super resort.”

  “And let me guess: you have controlling interest in that Singapore company,” Gary conjectured.

  “So how did you keep all of this quiet?” Eva asked.

  “Ohhh, what you are looking at is the transformation of an island into a twenty-first-century tourist destination. I just never explained to the media and those who got a bit too nosy as to what kind of tourism I am really thinking about. Besides, investments are spread out between half a dozen companies around the world.

  “The only ones on the inside, so to speak, are some of my friends working here, investors, the president of Kiribati, a team working at another location we’ll talk about later, and that is pretty well it. Though I doubt the cover will last much longer with you two on my team and some others coming aboard as well.”

  “So essentially you just purchased this island and are now carving it up?” Eva asked.

  Franklin nodded.

  Sweat was trickling down Gary’s face as he shaded his eyes and looked out to the sea. Could this be possible? Or were they in the hands of a madman?

  The question of where to build their dream had always been a troubling point. South America, Africa, Indonesia, or out in the Pacific? The first three were repeatedly rejected. Political history always pointed to the question of a major investment of the hundreds of billions of dollars suddenly falling into the hands of an unstable government, one motivated by greed or hostility. Howland Island was in fact still American territory and only half a degree off the equator. But here, in what had once been the Gilberts, was never raised as a possible site for a Pillar. But as he stood there looking about, it struck him. This would indeed be the ideal place, politically, socially, even in terms of protecting it from terrorists—which, after 9/11, had become a major objection to the idea of a tower as well.

  “Let’s get out of this heat,” Franklin announced, and he gestured to a nearby Quonset hut
. Opening the door for them, Gary breathed a sigh of relief: the air-conditioning was on full blast. George went to a fridge and pulled out cans of beer and bottles of water. Franklin went for the beer as did Gary and George, while Eva gratefully took a bottle of water and rubbed it against her forehead for a moment before opening it.

  Franklin sat down in a straight-backed chair and sighed.

  “Let’s start this from the beginning,” he said. “Let me ask: Do you believe in global warming?”

  Gary and Eva looked at each other and smiled.

  “No,” Eva said. “A multibillion-dollar scam. There are natural cycles to weather and climate, including the fact that energy from the sun—from all stars—has a slight variable. In the end it all averages out. But my husband here…”

  Gary looked at her and shrugged.

  “Work for NASA, see some of the hard data from their climatology people, see the models of CO2 output from industrializing China and India, even Africa twenty years from now. Yes, I believe in it.”

  “George, you tell them,” Franklin said, nodding to his friend and construction foreman.

  “If global warming is true? We here believe it is,” George replied, sipping from his cold can of beer. “There is not a spot in our entire nation of Kiribati that is more than twenty-five feet above sea level. Nearly all our people live where it is below ten feet. If we lived anywhere but in the equatorial region where typhoons occur, this nation would be uninhabitable; also if it was in an earthquake zone with threats of tsunamis. The one that hit Indonesia some years ago or Japan more recently would have annihilated us. So climate- and geology-wise, we are one of the safest places in the world.”

  He smiled and nodded to Franklin.

  “Thus my friend’s wisdom in coming to us with his mad scheme.”

  Franklin chuckled and raised his beer in salute.

  “But there is another factor in his wisdom, and that is global warming and thus why our president and those of us who know the true purpose embraced his plan. If global warming is real—if the oceans rise as NASA predicts—our nation will be the first on this planet to disappear, or forced into crowded retreat to a scant few square miles above the high-tide line. Several years back our government signed treaties with New Zealand and Fiji for refugee status. Meaning our entire country will cease to exist and we go in exile to a foreign land. So we do take it seriously.”

  Franklin nodded his thanks to George, motioning for him to sit down, enjoy the air-conditioning and the cold beer, and relax, which he was more than happy to do.

  “Kiribati,” Franklin continued, “at least according to the United Nations, is ranked as one of the poorest nations in the world, though my friend George would debate that vigorously. It might be poor in terms of dollars or yen, but in terms of their lives it is very rich.”

  George nodded.

  “Anyone who would trade living here for being in Washington is insane. Tell me, Dr. Morgan, where would you rather be, here or stuck in Beltway traffic?”

  Gary looked back out the window at the view of the tropical beach and had to nod in agreement. There was some sense to that, and besides, he’d be free of Washington politics and a climate that made him wonder if the Founding Fathers had been more than a bit insane to choose such a spot as their capital. Perhaps the old joke was true that they did so because staying there would be so miserable, sessions of government would be kept as short as possible so they could get the hell out of town and thus do little damage by passing more laws. Someone had even written a paper arguing that the invention of air conditioning enabled the creation of “big government.”

  “When this project goes forward, Kiribati will, I believe, become the center of the global economy. It will be the Dubai and Singapore of the twenty-first century. Certainly there will be some social dislocation. More than a thousand people currently live on this island; the vast majority of the adults are working on building the infrastructure before we go to the main task, and they are earning Western-level wages. I know, because I am funding it.”

  He looked out the window.

  George did not comment, but Gary could see that the man respected Franklin as someone he trusted and not just as his boss.

  “Next consideration: security. Given the current state of world affairs, an investment of this magnitude would sooner or later draw attack. We are thousands of miles from any potential source of threat. I do not feel comfortable speculating yet about how such security will be arranged, but given what happened on September 11, 2001, we will and must be vigilant. I would like to think that ultimately, given the international effort that will go into this project, there will be accord to help with that security. But given the current threat zones of this world, Kiribati is about as remote as you can get.

  “Tied to security, meaning another potential threat, is weather. We’ve done the analysis on major storms and typhoons out here. You need the rotation of the earth, the Coriolis effect, to help spawn them. It’s interesting how they are counterclockwise once north of the equator, and clockwise south of the equator. At the equator they are nonexistent. Earthquakes—that instantly rules out Indonesia along with Ecuador. Therefore, this is one of the best low-risk weather and geological locations on the planet.

  “And now to the fourth consideration: economics. I could go into some long-winded statement on this: I got a young history intern specializing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century industrialization to write that stuff for me. I got another who writes about what is called ‘disruptive technologies’ and is a darn good adviser when it comes to economic impacts and potential political threats that will emerge from that.”

  Eva nodded.

  “You will have a fierce critique from a professor where Victoria is going to school who writes about that topic as well.”

  Franklin smiled.

  “Exactly why I hired away one of her graduate students to work for me.

  “Then you understand my reference. This project will rival, even exceed, the building of the transcontinental railroads in America and Russia. The Hoover Dam or the great dam that just went up in China. It will transform economic structures. I think our world will come out the winner, but there will be many of far shorter vision or pure self-interest who will see it for the threat that it is and do whatever is in their power to stop it. That is why I chose Kiribati, beyond the fact that it is so remote, no one has even noticed yet what is going on here. Imagine if I were trying to pull this off on Catalina Island…”

  He chuckled.

  “My God, the lawyers would be coming in on landing craft to file injunctions that, if stacked atop each other, would be a true Tower of Babel. I remember some political candidate pointing out that America has become so mired in paperwork and rulings, it took twenty years just to get one new runway built at the Atlanta airport, where everyone darn well knew it was desperately needed. Hoover Dam today? Impossible; just imagine someone even suggesting it.”

  He shook his head.

  “Ironic in that I am far more pro-environment than nearly anyone even remotely realizes, but America as a place to build the great mega-projects that turned us into the greatest economic power in history? Those days are done, at least for now.”

  He finished his beer, tossing the empty into a bucket clearly marked “recycle.” Getting another one out of the fridge, he motioned to George, who accepted it, but Gary, still nursing the first one, refused. Gary realized that it was typical of Franklin, who continued to pace the room, filled with nervous energy.

  “The hundred thousand good people of this country, once this enterprise is made public, will see they could be the true gateway into the twenty-first century, and I pray that, as an independent nation, they will support it. That is what matters most, politically. From other sources around the world, I fully expect there will be howls of protest about interfering with space traffic, environmental impacts, economic disruptions, especially from oil-producing countries, but this nation, I am certain, will rally
behind it and others will follow.”

  Franklin paused for a moment to look out the window at a heavy truck—much bigger than anything legal on an American road—hauling what looked like steel beams down toward the beach on the south end of the island.

  What little Gary had seen so far had left him awed. Before even the bare beginnings of a tower had been started on, this man must be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on the ground infrastructure. This, perhaps more than anything, convinced him that Franklin was dead-on serious.

  “You mean America and NASA,” Gary asked.

  “Precisely,” Franklin said forcefully. “NASA was the place of America’s dream in the 1960s; of any government agency, it ranked number one in public esteem. It will do so again. But we need to get something for the American public to grab hold of first and then demand that NASA again take the lead. Something that will override the naysayers in Congress and even in the White House, that the public demands that the project goes forward. That was the tragedy of Apollo. Once Apollo 11 landed, then what? The attitude quickly became ‘Been there, done that,’ and with the waning in public support the dream of building a base on the moon, the logical extension of Apollo, and from there going on to Mars—not just to visit and collect a few rocks but to actually colonize—died with it.”

  Franklin went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside.

  “I want you to look out there and picture it ten years from now. This island from end to end will be transformed into the terminal hub. I don’t want any aircraft except those first landing at Tarawa for a rigorous security inspection coming within fifty miles of it; memories of past tragedy and the need for security mean that once the tower is up and functional, no aircraft will be allowed within fifty miles of it. The airfield on this island now is for bringing in the equipment needed to build the infrastructure and support construction, but once completed, except in rare highly secured situations, it will be shut down and converted to other use. Back at Tarawa we’ll have the main international airport hub, then connect it to here via maglev trains.”