Europe was almost cloud-free, and there was so much detail that the eye was overwhelmed. One by one he identified the great cities whose names had echoed down the centuries; they had been shrinking even in his time, as the communications revolution changed the face of the world, and had now dwindled still further. There were also some bodies of water in improbable places – the northern Sahara's Lake Saladin was almost a small sea.

Poole was so engrossed by the view that he had forgotten the passage of time. Suddenly he realized that much more than five minutes had passed – yet the elevator was still stationary. Had something gone wrong – or were they waiting for late arrivals?

And then he noticed something so extraordinary that at first he refused to believe the evidence of his eyes. The panorama had expanded, as if he had already risen hundreds of kilometres! Even as he watched, he noticed new features of the planet below creeping into the frame of the window.

Then Poole laughed, as the obvious explanation occurred to him.

'You could have fooled me, Indra! I thought this was real – not a video projection!'

Indra looked back at him with a quizzical smile.

'Think again, Frank. We started to move about ten minutes ago. By now we must be climbing at, oh – at least a thousand kilometres an hour. Though I'm told these elevators can reach a hundred gee at maximum acceleration, we won't touch more than ten, on this short run.'

'That's impossible! Six is the maximum they ever gave me in the centrifuge, and I didn't enjoy weighing half a ton. I know we haven't moved since we stepped inside.'

Poole had raised his voice slightly, and suddenly became aware that the other passengers were pretending not to notice.

'I don't understand how it's done, Frank, but it's called an inertial field. Or sometimes a Sharp one – the "S" stands for a famous Russian scientist, Sakharov – I don't know who the others were.'