All this made me feel somewhat insecure. At the time I was busy writing a whole novel centered on beanstalks. Suppose that the readers and reviewers rejected the whole thing as scientifically impossible?

And then, in the fall of 1978, I heard from Fred Durant. He was and is a friend of mine, and Arthur Clarke’s oldest friend in the United States. Fred lived just a couple of miles away from me, and he spoke with Clarke frequently by telephone. Arthur, he told me, was finishing a new novel — a novel in which a space elevator was a main element.

I won’t say I was pleased. Nervous is a better word. I had never met Arthur Clarke, but at Fred Durant’s suggestion, not to say insistence, I took my completed manuscript and sent a copy to Clarke in Sri Lanka. I had no idea what to expect; what I certainly didn’t expect was what came: first, a very friendly letter from Arthur Clarke, and, soon after, an open letter from him to the Science Fiction Writers of America, stating that coincidence, not plagiarism, lay behind the fact that two books were to be published in 1979 with strikingly similar themes. Not just the space elevator, but each book had as main character the world’s leading bridge-builder; each one employed a device known as a Spider.

The fear that the idea would be mocked disappeared. All that was left were questions that remain to this day. If Clarke had not published his The Fountains of Paradise, how would my The Web Between the Worlds have been received? Would my book have been hailed, as the source of a big idea new to science fiction? Or would it have suffered instant obscurity, as a piece of science fantasy?

I’ll never know.

PROLOGUE

Goblin Night

The voice began again in her ear as she hurried into the airport. It was the merest thread of sound, carrying through the implanted receiver.