Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 16

As a preliminary to the execution Dallen kept a close watch on Mathieu's movements.

He was quickly rewarded by the discovery that Mathieu, even when he had a freedom of choice, preferred a fixed pattern of activity. The work schedule called for each person in Renard's team to be responsible for two adjacent stacks of grass trays, the most tedious task being the rotation of the sunlight panels to give a reasonable simulation of night and day. Each tray also had to be lightly watered at some time during its "night" period. There was no hard-and-fast rule about exactly when the watering should be carried out, but Mathieu liked to do it as soon as he had removed each sunlight panel, starting at the top of the stacks and methodically working down to deck level. Every morning at eleven, ship time, he climbed a twenty-metre alloy ladder attached to the front of one stack and serviced its top layer of trays. That done, he stretched all the way across the aisle and worked on his other stack from its rear, taking advantage of his long reach to avoid making two separate ascents. It was a technique of which Renard did not approve, but he had contented himself by sourly reminding Mathieu he was not covered by industrial insurance. And Dallen had listened to that particular exchange with satisfaction, knowing it would help smooth his way through what was to follow…

On the fifth morning of the voyage he awoke early. Cona was snoring peacefully in her bed at the other side of the prefab, and Mikel was fast asleep in his cot, one foot projecting through the bars. There was little in the peaceful tallowy dimness of the cabin to indicate that it was part of an engineered structure which was hurtling through distorted geometries of space. Were it not for near-subliminal, amniotic fluttering in the air Dallen could have believed himself to be in a holiday chalet anywhere on Earth or Orbitsville. His thoughts turned at once to Silvia London, only a few paces and partitions away on the same deck, but he hurriedly blanked out a vision of how she might look in bed. His morning erections were becoming painfully insistent, and on this crucial day all his mental and physical energies had to be directed elsewhere.

He quietly got out of bed and took stock of his emotions, trying to ascertain how he felt about his decision to proceed immediately with Mathieu's execution. There was a certain sense of disbelief mingled with a cold sadness and fears for his own safety — but the bask resolution was still there, intact, a dominating force which excluded compassion or regrets.

That's all right, he thought, unaccountably relieved. Nothing has changed.

Taking care not to disturb Cona or Mikel, he used the radiation shower cubicle — wishing it could have been a stinging water spray — and got dressed in the soft shirt and slacks which were his usual working attire. He brought the travel bag out of a closet and took from it the small container of special paint, which he put in his breast pocket.

There was nobody else abroad on Deck 5 when he left his cabin, so we went straight to the tubular elevator cage, dropped himself to the bottom of the cargo hold and stepped out into an angular jungle of scaffolding. Tall stacks of grass trays, half of them glowing under artificial sunlight, created a three-dimensional confusion of brilliance and shadow. There were puddles on the floor and the air was warm and humid, rich with meadow scents, dulling metal surfaces with condensation.

It took Dallen less than a minute to make sure no others had showed up early for work, then he went to Mathieu's two stacks and climbed the innermost ladder, the one always used by Mathieu. At the top, precisely when it was necessary for him to be alert and at peak efficiency, he was numbed by an awareness that he was at the point of maximum danger. He was only a few metres below the ring-shaped Deck 5, in a position readily visible to anyone who might emerge from a passenger cabin, and now his scheme — so foolproof when evaluated in the security of his bed — seemed reckless beyond belief.

With a final swinging glance at the circular guard rail above, he took the paint container out of his shirt pocket and sprayed a colourless fluid on to the ladder's top rung. Highly nervous, fighting off a tendency to shake, he returned the container to his pocket and slid commando-fashion to the foot of the ladder. The greenhouse stillness of the bottom deck was heavy and undisturbed. Dallen ran to the elevator, took it up to Deck 5 and within a matter of seconds was back in the sanctuary of his cabin, where Cona and Mikel were still asleep. The entire sortie had taken approximately three minutes.

Dallen sat down at the table and considered what he had done. The emulsion with which he had sprayed the ladder was manufactured for law enforcement bothes under the brand name of Pietzoff, and it was peculiarly suitable for his purpose. It was used to prevent people clinging to security vehicles and the vulnerable wing generator tubes of aircraft. Finger pressure on the deposited crystals would produce a neural shock which would affect Mathieu's whole body, not only repelling him from the ladder but preventing him from grasping anything which might lessen his fall.

There was no absolute guarantee that the impact with deck would kill him, but Dallen intended to be close to the scene of the "accident", first to reach the fallen man, and would need only the briefest moment to complete his work. An extra shearing of the neck vertebrae would go unnoticed among Mathieu's other injuries. 'The final step would be to ascend the ladder, ostensibly checking for faults, and wipe away the Pietzoff emulsion with the solvent sponge already in his pocket.

At that point, justice having been done, he could return to a normal life.

Dallen spread his hands on the table and frowned down at them as — for the first time — he tried to envisage the future which lay beyond Mathieu's death. What would constitute a "normal" life in his case? A Metagov job sufficiently undemanding that he would be able to devote most of his time to rehabilitating Cona? Perhaps he would be provided with a pension on compassionate grounds and given a house on the edge of one of those heroic developments which straggled a short distance into Orbitsville's endless oceans of grass. That way he could make Cona his life's work — and what would the career landmarks be? The day she learned to flush the toilet for herself? The day she completed her first sentence? The first night on which, in the mental chaos of the dark hours, be foiled to turn her away from his bed?

Abruptly Dallen felt that he was drowning. He dismissed the feeling as a psychological effect, then realised he had breathed out and had actually omitted to initiate the next inhalation, as though his autonomous nervous system had gone on strike. He snatched air in two noisy sighs and sprang to his feet, feeling trapped within the confines of the cabin. The time display on the wall showed that it was not yet eight in the morning. Food? Would breakfast help? Dallen felt his diaphragm heave gently at the thought of eating, but coffee seemed a reasonably inviting prospect, a way of getting through a few minutes.

He made sure that Cona and Mikel were not likely to awaken, let himself out of the cabin and went upstairs to Deck 4, the first full deck. There was nobody in the mealomat area, although he could hear some crew members talking in the adjoining canteen.

Dallen drew himself a cup of black coffee, considered taking it into the canteen, then on impulse walked up another flight of stairs and went into the small observation gallery. It was deserted. Such vantage points tended to be used only during normal-space manoeuvring in the vicinity of Earth or Orbitsville — in mid-voyage, cocooned in a ship's private continuum, there was little to see outside. The universe presented itself as an intense spot of blue ahead of the ship and an equally bright locus of red astern. On the rare occasions when a vessel passed dose to a star an ultra-thin ring of light would expand out of the forward spot, slide by the ship on all sides like a conjurer's hoop and shrink into the speck of ruby brilliance behind.

Unconcerned about the lack of spectacle, Dallen dropped into a chair and sat in the theatrical darkness sipping his coffee, his thoughts still dominated by the future. Fixing the time of Mathieu's execution seemed to have removed a short-term goal which had acted as a barrier. Now the shutters had been lifted and decades lay ahead of him in a blur of shifting probabilities — and from what he could see of the temporal landscape it looked bleak. To be more analytical, without Silvia London it looked bleak. To be even more analytical — and to add a dash of honesty and self-interest — without Cona and without Silvia it looked bleak. And that came the insidious thought, is a circumstance that can easily be changed.

All he had to do was quit being stubborn and accept what qualified physicians had been telling him all along — that Cona Dallen, author and historian, no longer existed. That meant he had no moral obligations to her, that all contracts were nullified. The body Cona had inhabited was entitled to good care, to the comfort and security in which a new personality would be able to develop within its own limitations, but there was no logical reason for Carry Dallen's own life to be subordinated to the process. He should be concerned, but not interned. He had placed himself in a prison whose walls were made of mist, and all he had to do was walk free…

Fine! QED! Welcome to the bright, shadow-free world of rationality!

Dallen felt a surge of elation and wonderment over how easy it had been to put his life into logical order, a sense of giddy uplift which was immediately followed by the plunging realisation that he had achieved precisely nothing. He was building castles of romantic dreams around Silvia London — all on the strength of a few ambiguous words and enigmatic looks. What he needed was hard information, a straight yes or no from the woman in question, but right from the beginning he had behaved like a tongue-tied yokel in Silvia's presence…

"In the name of Christ," he whispered savagely, swept by a sudden boiling surf of impatience over a state of mind in which he could calmly arrange the death of a fellow human being and at the same time cower back from asking one question of a woman. He crushed the empty cup in his right hand, producing a loud crackle which caused a barely-seen figure to glance in his direction from the opposite end of the gallery. The other person was a woman, and he had no idea how long she had been sitting there. He identified the thick-set, middle-aged figure as Doctor Billy Glaister, the Foundation officer who shared a cabin with Silvia, and he found himself moving towards her with no conscious sense of volition. She looked up in surprise, her face an indistinct glow in the darkness, as he halted at her side.

"Hello," Dallen said. "Restful in here, isn't it?"

"Usually," she replied coolly. "I come here when I want peace to think."

"Hint taken." Dallen tried an ingratiating chuckle. "I'll clear off and leave you to it. By the way, is Silvia in her room?"

"I expect so. Why?" The doctor had ceased being distant and now was openly hostile.

The notion that here might be another rival for Silvia immediately appeared in Dallen's mind, but something — all the more momentous for being unanticipated — had happened inside him and he welcomed the extra challenge. He hunkered down beside the woman, deliberately invading her personal space.

"I want to have a word with her. I presume she's allowed visitors?"

"Don't be impertinent. Silvia has had many stressful factors to contend with lately."

"It was decent of you to step out and give her a break." Dallen stood up, left the observation gallery and walked quickly towards the nearest stair. The time was 8:50, leaving him more than two hours before his preordained rendezvous, and he felt a vast relief over the knowledge that he was at last committed to positive action. He was alert and competent, as though he had shaken off an enervating spell. He descended to Deck 5 and, not sparing a glance for the netherworld of scaffolding and tights visible in the central well, went to the box-like cabin being used by Silvia and tapped the door. She opened it, immediately sprung away from him with a swirl of a blue cotton dressing gown, then froze in mid-stride and turned back.

"I thought you were…" Her eyes were wide with surprise, seeming darker than usual against a morning paleness he had never seen before and which gave him a stabbing sexual thrill of such power that he almost gasped.

"May I come in?" he said steadily.

Silvia shook her head. "It's too… I'm not even dressed."

"I've got to come in." He crossed the threshold and closed the door. "I have to talk to you."

"About what?"

"No more games, Silvia. I know I shouldered my way in here uninvited. I know fm being bad-mannered and that my timing couldn't be worse, but I have to know about us. I need a direct statement from you — a simple yes or a simple no."

"You make it seem like a business transaction." Silvia appeared to have recovered her composure, but her colour had heightened.

"Is this better?" He took the single pace that was necessary to close the distance between them and, very slowly, allowing her ample time to twist away, placed a hand at each side of her waist and gently drew her towards him. She came to him, yielding with a peculiar sagging movement which brought their groins together first — sending a shockwave of sensation racing through his body — followed by a leisurely meeting of bellies, breasts and mouths. Dallen drank the kiss, gorging himself until its natural ending.

"I've still got to hear you say it," he whispered, touching his lips to her ear. "Yes or no?"

This isn't fair."

"To hell with fair — I’ve had enough fairness to last me a lifetime. Yes or no?"

"Yes." She thrust herself against him almost aggressively, with a force he had difficulty in matching. "Yes!"

"That's all I need to know." Intensely aware that the dressing gown was no longer fully lapped around her torso, he closed his eyes to loss Silvia again and found himself looking at Gerald Mathieu's broken corpse.

"Trouble is," he said, floundering and distracted, "I'm not sure what to do next."

She smiled calmly. "How about locking the door?"

"Good thinking." Dallen thumbed the door's security button and when he turned back to Silvia the dressing gown was around her ankles on the floor. Dry-mouthed and reverent, he surveyed her body, then took her extended hand and went with her to the bed. She lay down at once and locked herself on to him, now trembling, as he positioned himself beside her. They clung together for a full minute, he still clothed, simulating the sex act in a way which by every law of nature should have aroused him to near-orgasm, but each rime he allowed his eyes to close there was Mathieu's serene-smiling death mask with the tridents of blood at each corner of the mouth and the anaesthetic coldness was gathering in his own loins, emasculating him, denying him any stake in the game of Life. Without waiting for Silvia to sense what was happening, he rolled away from her and dropped into a kneeling posture at the side of the bed. She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him in puzzled reproach.

"It's all right," he said, almost grinning with relief at the clarity of his understanding of the situation. "This won't make any sense to you, Silvia, but I was trying to be two people at once, and it can't work."

"That makes perfectly good sense to me." Her understanding was intuitive, almost telepathic. "How long will it take you to become one people?"

Dallen gazed at her in purest gratitude. "About two minutes. There's something I have to do. Would you please wait? Right here? Like this?"

"I wasn't planning to go anywhere."

"Right." He stood up, strode to the door of the cabin and let himself out. A life for a life, he thought, amazed at the simplicity of the psychological equations in an area where he would have expected layer upon layer of murky Freudian complexity. Being born again allowed for no half-measures. He could not take from both existences, racking up debits in each, and therefore Gerald Mathieu had to be spared.

With the after-image of Silvia's full-breasted nakedness drifting in his vision, Dallen closed the cabin door behind him, but did not lock it. He turned towards the elevator. Two men — Renard and Captain Lessen — were approaching on the curved strip of deck between the cabins and the cargo well. As usual, they were engaged in heated argument, but Renard broke off on the instant of seeing Dallen and came straight to him, his gold-speckled face solemn.

"What were you doing in there?" he said directly. "It's a bit early for visiting, isn't it?"

Dallen shrugged. "Depends on how well people know each other."

"You're not fooling anybody, old son." Renard showed his bow of teeth as he waited for Lessen to sidle by him and get beyond earshot. His gaze was hunting over Dallen's face, and each passing second brought a change of his expression — amiable contempt, incredulity, alarm and dawning anger.

"If you'll excuse me," Dallen said, "I've got work to do." He tried to walk towards the elevator, but Renard detained him by placing a hand on his chest.

"You ‘d better listen to me," Renard said in a venomous whisper. "If I…"

"No, you'd better do the listening for once," Dallen said in matter-of-fact, conversational tones. "If you don't take your hand off me I'll hit you so hard that you'll be hospitalised for some time and may even the."

Renard was trying to form a reply when Lessen called to him in an aggrieved bark from the foot of the stair to Deck 4. Dallen ended the encounter by side-stepping Renard and walking to the elevator cage.

During the quivering descent to the bottom of the hold he indulged in a moment of satisfaction — perhaps Renard's trust in the universe was somewhat misplaced — and when the elevator stopped he went confidently to the lane which ended at Mathieu's stacks, taking the solvent sponge from his side pocket as he crossed the puddled floor. Sounds of movement nearby indicated that somebody was at work on the trays, but it was not until he had actually turned the corner that Dallen realised that things were not what they should be. High in the geometric jungle, amid the scattered bars of light and shade, there were unexpected signs of movement.

Somebody was climbing to the top of Mathieu's ladder.

In the instant of recognising the climber as Mathieu himself, Dallen saw that he was in the act of reaching for the topmost rung. With a despairing grunt, knowing he was too late to prevent the calamity, Dallen hurled himself to the foot of the ladder and turned his eyes upwards, bracing himself for what could easily be a crippling impact.

He was greeted by the sight of Mathieu angled nonchalantly outwards from the ladder, the slim plastic tube of his spray hose coiling down from his waist. His weight was taken by his right hand gripping the top rung.

"What's going on down there?" Mathieu said, his attention caught by the sudden movement.

"Nothing," Dallen assured him. "I slipped, that's all." He backed up the story by pressing a hand to his side as though nursing a strained muscle.

Mathieu descended at once. "Are you hurt?"

"It's nothing," Dallen said, experiencing a strange mixture of emotions at being so close to the man who had so profoundly affected his life. "But we ought to get a mop and take away some of this surface water before somebody really gets hurt." He rubbed his side, excusing himself from the chore.

"I’ll do it," Mathieu said compliantly. "I think there's a kind of broom closet near the elevator." He moved away and was lost to sight among the stacks.

As soon as he was sure of being unobserved, Dallen climbed Mathieu's ladder in a kind of vertical run, stopping when his face was level with the top rung. The light was less than ideal, but he could easily discern the frost-like coating of Pietzoff emulsion on the full length of the alloy tube., which meant that Mathieu should have received a fierce neural jolt as soon as his fingers had exerted pressure on the embedded crystals.

The only explanation Dallen could conceive was that the container he had stolen in Madison had come from a defective batch. Intrigued, momentarily forgetting the need for urgency, he lightly flicked the rung with a fingernail as a test.

The paralysing shock stabbed clear through to his feet.

His muscle control instantly disrupted, Dallen sagged and fell — then recovery came and he clung to the ladder, gasping with fright. He had almost dropped the whole way to the metal deck, a lethal twenty metres below, and had been saved only by the fact that his nail had served as a partial barrier to the Pietzoff s neural charge. And Mathieu was due to return at any second. Striving for full control over his body, Dallen inched upwards to regain the height he had lost. He squeezed the solvent sponge to activate it, wiped the top rung free of paint and got to the bottom of the ladder just as Mathieu appeared with a mop and bucket which could have been props from a period play.

"I love these high-tech solutions to the problems of space flight," he said, gamely cheerful as he set to work on the water-beaded deck, looking like a blond holo star making a bad job of playing a menial.

Dallen nodded, still slightly shaky, still baffled by his experience at the head of the ladder. By all the rules governing such things, Mathieu should have taken the big drop and hit the deck like a sack of bones. Was it possible that his right hand was an extremely lifelike prosthetic? Or was it merely, returning to the prosaic, that there had been an uneven distribution of crystals in the emulsion and Dallen had chosen the wrong place for his test? It hardly seemed likely, but it was the most acceptable explanation he could devise. Nobody was immune to Pietzoff.

"To think I gave up a good job for this," Mathieu said, mopping with casual efficiency. "I must have been crazy."

"Why did you pack it in? Was it Bryceland?"

"Bryceland? Mal-de-mayor?" Mathieu's eyes showed a cool amusement. "No, Carry, it was time for me to travel, that's all."

"I see." Again Dallen found it difficult to cope with the complexity of his reactions to Mathieu. The fact mat the man had been spared a summary execution did not mean mat he should be allowed to avoid the establishment's penalty for a major crime, but was it now too late to bring an accusation against him? What evidence would remain at this late stage? And, underlying everything else, why did the man himself seem to have changed? The difference was indefinable, but it was there. Gerald Mathieu had always given him the impression of being a vain gadfly, a hollow man, but now…

What's the matter with me? Dallen demanded of himself in bemused wonderment. Why am I where Silvia isn't?

He gave Mathieu a dismissive wave, walked back to the elevator and pressed the button for Deck 5. The cage made its customary shuddering ascent, passing layer after layer of miniature grassy plains, some in shadow, others bathed in artificial sunlight. By the time it halted at the ring deck Dallen had relegated Mathieu to the past. Nobody was about — the Hawfe-bead's crew spending virtually all their working hours in the outer hulls — and he was able to go without delay to Silvia's cabin. He was keyed-up and exhilarated as he pressed the door handle, so preternaturally alive mat he could actually feel the subtle agitation of the ship's air. The handle refused to turn. Dallen tapped lightly on the door and stepped back a little, disappointed, when it was opened by the solidly androgynous figure of Doctor Billy Glaister.

"Silvia can't see you now," she announced triumphantly. "She's got to…"

"It's all right, Billy," Silvia said, appearing beside the other woman. In the short interval since Dallen had last seen her, she had brushed her hair back and had dressed in a black one-piece suit. She came out of the cabin, drew the door to, caught Dallen's arm and walked him towards the nearby stair.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Billy is inclined to be over-protective."

"Is that what you call it?"

"That's what it a." Silvia halted and gave him a very wise, very womanly smile. "When you cool down a little you'll be as glad as I am that she came back. This place isn't for us, Carry. Admit it."

Dallen glanced at the environment of smudged metal walls, stanchions and pipe runs. "It's idyllic."

She laughed and, in an unexpected gesture, raised the back of his hand to her lips and kissed it, somehow proving to him that all was well. "Carry, we'll reach Optima Thule in a day or two and as soon as Rick unloads his grass well be going on to Beachhead City, where there are good hotels, and where well have all the time we need to be together and make our plans. That's worth holding on for, isn't it?"

He looked down at her, unable to admit she was right, and forced himself to return her smile.

By the time another day had passed the ship had ceased most of its geometrical manipulations and was rapidly reaching a condition in which it could be perceived as a real object by outside observers. That, in turn, meant that human and inorganic watchers aboard the vessel could once again receive information from the normal space-time continuum.

Still shedding velocity at a rate of more than 1G, the Hawkshead took its bearings from Orbitsville's beacon network and began making course corrections, heading for Portal 36. The entrance had been assigned to k by the Optima Thule Science Commission because the surrounding terrain had never been contaminated by developers and therefore would yield the cleanest data in large-scale botanical experiments.

Professional space travellers rarely devoted any time to visual observation during final approaches to Orbitsville. At close ranges the vast non-reflective shell had always occluded half the universe, cheating the eye and confusing the intellect, creating the impression that nothing existed where in fact there was an impenetrable wall spanning the galactic horizon.

Thus it was that no member of the Hawkshead’ s crew was at a direct vision station when the vessel, guided by artificial senses, began groping its way towards Portal 36.

And thus it came about that it was Doctor Billy Glaister, habitual visitor to the ship's observation gallery, who discovered that Orbitsville had undergone a radical change.

The enigmatic material of its shell — black, immutable, totally inert in two centuries of mankind's experience — was suffused with a pulsing green light.