One tiny fraction of an inch was the distance between twelve seasons of human struggle and permanent cosmic balance.
At Mile Twenty above the land-wide shelf, the silence was more deep than any sound Giles Croft had ever heard.
The thin, freezing mesospheric wind had dropped to a dead standstill, as if the upper air itself were holding its breath.
Suspended directly above the fifty-foot iron-hard metal collar, the five-hundred-ton Harmonic Core floated upon its tiny film of high-pressure cold air gas.
The pale sapphire quartz metal tube glowed with a faint, internal soft glow. An eerie, crystal-clear eerie glow that cast long, pale-blue shadows across the diamond-plate steel grating of the staging overhead frame.
Four bronze pilot pins, machined to a mirror finish, stood embedded eighteen inches into their receiving metal sleeves. He locked the million-pound monolith into total upright posture.
Giles stood beside the northern check transit, his brass earth-measuring sighting scope leveled upon the main datum ring.
His breath emerged as faint, semi-clear puffs of vapor in the minus thirty-degree air. But his hands were steady inside his fingerless wool-lined leather gloves.
