One tiny fraction of an inch per minute was a speed that tested human sanity.
To any observer standing across the deep pit of the upper stratosphere, the five-hundred-ton Harmonic Core appeared fully stationary.
It hung within its forged nickel-steel staging cradle above the fifty-foot iron-hard metal collar, a massive stone eighty-foot metal tube of pale sapphire crystal suspended between the black sky and the curved blue horizon of the earth below.
Yet deep within twelve forged high-pressure cylinders spaced evenly around the outer edge of the collar, high-pressure polyol ester fluid was bleeding through tuned needle orifices at four cubic inches per second.
Each metal tube, machined from solid chrome-moly steel with a ten-inch bore and eight-inch wall thickness, carried an engineered static load of forty-one point six tons.
Giles Croft stood on the central running pulpit, his clockwork split-second stopwatch clicking in his left palm.
His right hand rested lightly against the polished walnut handle of the master pipe hub bypass valve. His knuckles were pale in the biting mesospheric wind.
Before him sat an array of Bourdon tube pressure gauges. Their brass needles shook against black enamel dials marked in increments of fifty pounds of pressure.
