Death Sentence by Roger Macbride Allen

Author:Roger Macbride Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780553903744
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

SIDEWAYS REALTIME DOWN

Hannah followed Jamie down the access ramp. It moved in a straight line for a while, but then led through a doorway and into a section where what the eye saw and the body felt were two very different things. It looked as if they were walking uphill on an extremely steep ramp, but no matter how far Hannah walked forward, down was always directly beneath her feet, with the way ahead always looking as if it was sloping upward. The local gravitational axis was shifting step by step. She looked ahead at one point and saw the top of Jamie’s head as he walked along what appeared, from her point of view, to be a section of wall.

It was disconcerting, but not surprising, given the Metrannan susceptibility to changes in gravity. The artificial gravity field aboard the Free Orbit Level Station was oriented with “up” being toward the planet below—in other words, upside down as seen from anyone looking up at the Elevator from the surface of the planet. Obviously, at some point in the process of traveling aboard the Elevator between the ground and Free Orbit Level, there had to be some method of transitioning between one orientation and the other.

As best Hannah could judge, the engineers had decided to make that transition by having passengers walk along a spiral path designed to rotate the gravity field gradually to the orientation used aboard the Elevator car without forcing the walker to move through any area that was not under full and normal Metrannan gravity.

They reached the Elevator car itself and stepped through a hatch and into its dimly lit interior. Jamie staggered a bit as he went through, and Hannah stumbled herself, almost crashing into him. Gravity had shifted from Metrannan standard to Earth standard right at the entrance. It didn’t help matters that the lighting inside the car amounted to nothing but a dim red glow.

The hatch automatically closed and sealed itself behind Hannah. A moment or two later the room suddenly brightened as light burst in through massive overhead windows, dazzling her. Only after her eyes had adjusted to the sudden shift in light could she see where they were.

The size and opulence of their elevator “car” was startling—and so was its physical orientation. Hannah had expected something like a large and comfortable standard elevator car, and had been wondering exactly how anything like that could serve as their quarters while on the planet.

What they had instead was something like an elongated hotel room, built lengthwise into a cylindrical structure about four meters in diameter and twelve meters in length. Hannah took in a general impression of appointments similar to a human-style hotel room—two beds, a table, chairs, a small bathroom—but all that was trivial, minor stuff, compared to the breathtaking and disconcerting view out the top side of the cylinder. The endcaps of the cylinder were solid, and so was the floor under their feet—but the entire top half of the cylinder was transparent and provided a startling view.

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