Orbitsville Judgement

Chapter 12

The rifle had roughly the same lines as an old-fashioned sporting weapon, but for the most part its appearance was an exercise in cosmetics and nostalgia. Its stock looked like polished wood and was designed to fit snugly into the user’s shoulder, although firing produced no recoil; it was operated by a conventionally styled trigger, although a simple button might have been more appropriate for the unleashing of bolts of ultralaser energy. It had an effective range of three kilometres in dry, clear weather; and a computerised smartscope guaranteed impressive accuracy, even in the hands of a total novice.

A perfect killing machine, beautiful in its own way, the rifle looked incongruous among the frayed umbrellas in the antique hall-stand. Nicklin gazed thoughtfully at it for a few seconds, knowing he was supposed to take it outside with him, then he shook his head. On several previous occasions he had slung the weapon on his shoulder when going out to the hill, and each time had felt like an overgrown child playing frontiersmen or soldiers. He took his old sun-hat from a peg on the hall-stand, squared it on his head and—leaving the double doors wide open—went out of the huge house.

The Fugaccia mansion had become a ready-made headquarters for the mission, though not through Montane’s free choice. Ves Fugaccia’s heirs lived a hundred kilometres to the east, in a well-developed part of the region, and had never taken any interest in the unmanageable property perched right on the edge of civilisation. They had, however, a good nose for business, and on sensing the obsessive nature of Montane’s interest they had flatly refused his offer to buy the buried ship and take it off their hands. That would have been a betrayal of their grandfather’s trust, they had said. Good Roman Catholics could never acquiesce in the desecration of a loved one’s tomb, they had said. But, somehow, their group conscience had allowed them to contemplate selling the Altamura estate in its entirety; and—when their lawyers had thrice succeeded in jacking up the price—their religious and family scruples had vanished altogether.

Directly above Nicklin the sun had just emerged from a nightband, and the day was still cool in spite of being intensely bright. Before him was what had once been the garden fronting the Fugaccia mansion. Now it was a daunting tangle of overgrown shrubs, many of which had been smothered by riotous wild plants, vines and native grasses. In some places the vegetation rose into mounds whose general shape only hinted at what lay beneath—here a summerhouse or an arch, there a fountain or a belvedere. At one point the head of a classical marble statue of a woman raised itself above the leafy ferment, the blank orbs of the eyes contemplating the chaos of greenery in apparent sorrow.

Beyond the ruins of the garden was a small, rounded, man-made hill. It was vividly outlined against a scenic backdrop in which grasslands, lakes and enigmatic forests sifted and tapered through each other, creating horizontal designs which grew slimmer and slimmer until, misted by distance, they merged into ranges of remote grey-blue mountains. Striking though the general panorama was, Nicklin had eyes only for the small hill in the foreground—because the ship was cocooned inside it.

He had just finished breakfast, but he knew, despite the earliness of the hour, that Montane and big Gerl Kingsley were somewhere on the hill, already hard at work with picks and spades. Power tools had been purchased, and at that very moment were on their way from Beachhead with the main body of the caravan, but Montane was unable to hold himself in check. Ownership of the Fugaccia estate had passed into his hands four days earlier, and since then the monkey had been on his back. He had to see the ship for himself. Not until he had actually touched its metal skin would he be able to relax in the knowledge that the greatest hurdle of all was safely behind him.

Picking his way along the path that had been hewn through the wilderness, Nicklin smiled as he recalled Montane’s antics of the recent past. The preacher had actually broken down and wept on hearing that the ship was an unmodified Type 83.

“Why!” he had said to Nicklin, blinking at him through lenses of tears. “You want to know why! Because, you smirking great idiot, it’s one of the Explorer class!”

It had taken a few seconds for the significance of the statement to penetrate Nicklin’s mind. To him the flight to New Eden was a preposterous fantasy, one which had no hope of being realised, and he had given no thought to the practicalities involved. Had he considered the matter he would have seen at once that, while the crossing of hundreds of light years of interstellar void could be accomplished routinely, dropping down through the final hundred kilometres to achieve landfall gave rise to unusual problems.

The great majority of spaceships constructed in the previous two centuries were designed to ply between Earth and Orbitsville—from the parking orbits of the former to the docking cradles of the latter—and therefore had no provision for transferring personnel to and from the surface of an unprepared world.

Montane had always anticipated the difficulty and expense of equipping his starship with a pinnace, and now—suddenly and unexpectedly—the problem had ceased to exist. “It’s an omen, Jim,” he had said. “This is the Lord’s way of telling me not to despair, that He is still tending His flock.”

The sheer irrationality of that proposition had dissuaded Nicklin from trying to argue. The Lord, it seemed, had not tended very hard in the case of Apryl Fugaccia. A penniless hairdresser of Scandinavian stock, she had professionally met the elderly billionaire, Ves Fugaccia, in a Beachhead salon. He had been captivated by the newly minted gold of her Nordic good looks, and she had been equally drawn by the prospect of wealth and limitless opportunities for travel and adventure. She must have counted herself among the luckiest people in the universe when, on their first wedding anniversary, Fugaccia had granted her dearest wish by presenting her with a starship of her very own. Only a comparative handful of exploration craft had been built—the Orbitsville syndrome had seen to that—and the enormous expense involved had been yet another proof of her husband’s boundless love. So infatuated had Apryl been with the notion of becoming a planetary first-footer that she had sneaked on board her new toy while it was land-docked at Portal 9, and had donned her HESS (Hostile Environment Survival Suit) without first mastering the intricacies of its breathing-gas regulatory system. Her body had been found in the left-hand seat of the pinnace’s cockpit.

How Montane could construe such a pathetic sequence of events as evidence of the existence of a caring Almighty was a source of puzzlement to Nicklin. To him it was a prank worthy of that greatest of all tricksters, the Gaseous Vertebrate, but he had refrained from making any comment, and had continued quite happily with his duties as second-in-command of the mission. For the present those duties consisted of little more than living with Montane and Kingsley in the decaying Fugaccia mansion and waiting for the rest of the team to arrive.

In particular, he was waiting for the arrival of Danea Farthing. He had devised a new plan for dealing with her, one which would take time to put into effect, but which had the merit of promising to make her humiliation—when it finally came—all the more complete.

The thought, enlivened his stride as he reached the base of the hill and began to climb. Clearing a way through the vegetation had been easier here because the hill was plentifully endowed with stone steps and paths, exactly as in his dream. He wound his way to the crest on meticulously fitted hexagonal paving and found Montane and Kingsley standing in a broad but shallow excavation which was the result of their combined labours.

Its floor resembled streaky brown glass copiously studded with nodules of grey and white, reminding Nicklin of a gigantic slab of nut candy. The discovery of the fused-earth and rock carapace below the topsoil had bothered Montane at first, because it delayed his progress, but he had been consoled by the thought of the excellent protection it afforded the ship. Seventy years would have been a long time for any metal artefact—even one constructed from electron-sated alloys—to resist the chemical ravages of damp earth.

“Good morning, navvies,” Nicklin called out. “How are the calluses today?”

Montane looked up from the drawing he was studying and responded to the greeting in amicable tones. He had been in Nicklin’s company almost continuously for three months, while they were finding Ves Fugaccia’s heirs and negotiating the purchase of the property, and understood that the best way to preserve their enmity was to masquerade as friends. Kingsley, the huge ex-farmer, who had no time for such strategies, confined himself to giving Nicklin a barely audible grunt.

“You’re an engineer,” Montane said, beckoning to Nicklin. “Take a look at this drawing and tell me what you think.”

“I used to fix egg-beaters,” Nicklin replied. “Spaceships are a bit out of my line.”

“Take a look at the drawing!”

Nicklin shrugged and did as ordered. The photocopy paper was old and creased, but the original drawing had been even older—a fact which was obvious from the numerous wrinkles and smudges which had been reproduced along with the linework and text. It had been issued by the Nissan-Vickers company of Birkenhead, England, and showed the three principal elevations of a spaceship. The ship had the classical Starflight configuration—three equal cylinders joined together in parallel, with one projecting forward by almost half its length—but it was distinguishable from a standard vessel because of the pinnace. Needle-nosed and streamlined, shaped by a different set of operational requirements, the pinnace was slung in its flying attitude beneath the centra! main cylinder.

The title box of the layout established it as the general arrangement of the Explorer-class vessel Liscard, but it had been used as the basis for a later and entirely different kind of drawing. Superimposed on the flawless computer graphics of the original were hand-drawn outlines, obviously the work of a landscaping contractor, depicting the rounded earthwork which now covered the starship. Clustered about each of the elevations were thumbnail sketches giving details of path and wall construction, and there were notes about the plants to be sown in various areas.

“Apparently Fugaccia wasn’t much of a one for keeping records,” Montane said. “This was the only drawing available, and I was lucky to get it.”

“You should have it framed.”

Montane indicated a pencil mark he had made on the side view of the hill, directly above the nose of the ship. “I’d say this is where we are—what do you say?”

“You might be right, but until we get some fairly acc—” Nicklin paused and looked again at the drawing. “Corey, this thing doesn’t even tell you which way is north!”

“So?”

“So we might be standing above the arse end of the ship.”

“Oh!” Montane looked abashed for a moment, then his face brightened. “All the more reason to shift dirt, my boy-get yourself a spade and start digging.”

With the arrival of machine tools imminent it was pointless to squander muscle power, Nicklin knew, but arguing with Montane in his present state of mind would have been even more futile. Besides, the formerly slight bulge above his belt had become quite noticeable during three months of inactivity, and a spell of hard work would do him no harm at all. He looked about him, wondering if he could find a legitimate task which would be less of a bore than digging, then seized a pick and began to demolish a low stone wall.

The invasive vegetation had been unable to find many good footholds here, and he was able to work without too much hindrance from vines. There was a kind of black satisfaction in obliterating another man’s patient craftsmanship, in being an instrument of disorder, and he found it easy to lose himself in the repetitive physical effort. And as he worked he was very much aware of being in a borderland.

Four kilometres to the east was the town of Altamura, its buildings visible as a sparse scatter of confetti in the green immensity that was Orbitsville. It had been founded more than a hundred years earlier by a batch of settlers from southern Italy—a hard-working people who had fully expected their new home to become a prosperous regional centre as the tide of immigration rolled on past it. But actuality and the dream had not coincided; the successive waves of settlers had never materialised. In fact, the well-delineated edge of civilisation had receded slightly, leaving Altamura in a no man’s land between the known and the unknown.

There had been no particular reason for men and women to turn back from the area. It had simply happened that way. The tracts of land to the west of Altamura—which Nicklin could survey each time he raised his head—were every bit as rich and inviting as any other part of the Big O, but the mathematics of chaos had dictated that the outward surge of humanity would falter and lose impetus just there.

“There are too many places to go, and not enough folks to go to them,” the Fugaccias’ local agent had said philosophically, giving his summation in a strong Italian accent. “That’s why the town has been slowly dying ever since it was born—a pure demographic fluke.”

A talkative man, one who obviously relished storytelling, he had gone on to paint a hectically coloured picture of life in that part of the frontier.

“Mind you, that doesn’t mean there’s nobody west of the Irsina river. Some pretty weird characters have headed out that way from time to time. Some of them were pure misfits—sort of hermits by trade, if you know what I mean—but quite a few had the police on their tails when they went.

“They’re still out there. Maybe some have banded together, maybe some are raising their own broods in their own way. Sometimes you see smoke in the distance… sometimes you find a cow or a sheep with its hind legs missing… sometimes you find a man or a woman, or even a child—unfortunates that have had very bad things done to them…

“That’s why people around here carry weapons when they go far out of town—and I advise you to do the same.”

Recalling the agent’s words, Nicklin found it difficult to reconcile them with the prehistoric peacefulness of high summer which lay over the surrounding land. Intellect told him that Orbitsville had to have a darker aspect, that where all men were free to live as they pleased some would choose paths whose very existence was denied by anyone who wanted to go on treasuring his night’s sleep.

On the positive side, however, was the fact that he had lived for more than thirty years without once encountering the really bad stuff, the moral equivalent of anti-matter. Oh yes, people were shit—that much he had proved—but in general they stopped short of stuff like torture, murder and cannibalism. There was no reason to suppose that the sprinkling of heliumheads, eccentrics and downright crazies who undoubtedly formed part of the population of the Altamura area were any worse than their equivalents in Orangefield county.

Having attuned himself once more to the bright sanity of the morning, Nicklin worked steadily until he had dismantled about ten metres of wall, then he began levering up the paving slabs of the adjoining path. The work was arduous but satisfying in its own way, and he was surprised to note that two hours had passed when Montane called a break for refreshments.

Nicklin would have walked back down to the house to eat, but Kingsley opened a coolbag and produced bulbs of iced tea, sandwiches and a selection of fruit. Glad to have been spared the journey, Nicklin seated himself on a pile of rubble and joined in the simple meal. The cold tea, which had never been one of his favourite drinks, tasted better than he would have believed possible.

“I think I could take to this life of simple toil,” he said, after slaking his thirst.

“I’m pleased to hear it.” Montane, now in the role of jovial foreman, nudged Kingsley with his elbow. “You stayed in bed so long we were beginning to think you had died.”

Kingsley guffawed, spilling particles of bread from the corners of his mouth.

“I was monitoring the news for you, Corey. I know how you like to be kept informed of all the…” Nicklin paused as he suddenly remembered an item which had come in that morning on the audio line from Altamura, one he knew would be of genuine interest to the preacher. “There’s been a new development about the green lines.”

Montane eyed him intently. “Yes?”

“It’s connected with the fields. You know, the vertical force fields above the lines?”

“Yes, yes—go on, Jim.”

“Well, it turns out they aren’t as inert as they seemed,” Nicklin said. “Apparently they weaken the molecular lattice in any piece of material they pass through. It happens very gradually, but some buildings in… in Lomza, P83, I think it is… are starting to split in half. The buildings straddle one of the lines, and it’s gradually chopping them in half—roof beams, walls, floors, foundations, everything. It’s acting as if it was a very weak valency cutter.”

“My enemy never rests.” Montane went on chewing a piece of banapple, but he was doing it mechanically now, no longer tasting the fruit. Completing the purchase of the ship had relieved him of a burden of anxiety, and he had since been enjoying a relaxed but active life in the open air. He had actually grown younger in appearance during the unplanned break, but within the last few seconds the weight of the years had come down on him again, hard.

Good job I didn’t remember the news about the lines earlier, Nicklin congratulated himself. This way the old boy’s digestive juices have been stopped in their tracks. Or should I say tracts?

“Aw, come on, Corey,” he said, “you can’t put everything down to Old Nick. Wouldn’t it be more like his style to chop buildings up suddenly and let them crash down on people?”

Montane gave him a sombre stare. “I don’t know what’s in the Devil’s mind—he’s playing a very subtle game—but I do know that when it’s over none of us will be laughing. And that goes for you, too.”

“I wouldn’t dream of laughing,” Nicklin said, belying his words with a faint smile.

“You’d better not,” Kingsley warned, jabbing in Nicklin’s direction with a forefinger which resembled a gnarled billet of wood. “You start laughing at Corey—I’ll break bits off your skeleton.”

“Go on with your lunch, Gerl.” Montane soothed the giant by patting him on the knee, and a certain dryness in his voice showed that he was recovering his equilibrium. “I’ll give you the nod when I want bits broken off Jim’s skeleton.”

End of conversation, Nicklin thought, again obliged to acknowledge the older man’s mental wiriness. To show that he regarded Montane’s tactic as unsporting, he shifted position until he was sitting with his back to the others, facing down the western slope of the hill. There was no wall or fence to mark the limit of the Fugaccia estate—the foot of the hill shelved into scrub which was punctuated with anvil trees, and beyond that Orbitsville went on for ever.

Allowing his thoughts to return to Danea Farthing and his plans for her, Nicklin wondered how long it would be before the rest of the mission arrived. He and Montane had flown out from Beachhead to New Taranto, whose airport was the nearest to Altamura, and the whole journey had taken only a day. Gerl Kingsley had set off at the same time in Montane’s camper and had completed the trip in five days, but to do so he must have driven like a maniac and almost without sleep. Nicklin had derived quite a bit of amusement from trying to decide whether the big man’s haste had been inspired by loyalty to his boss, or by a disinclination to spend many nights alone with Milly Montane and her metal coffin. (Your wife’s a nice woman, boss—but she’s permanently canned.)

All the other vehicles had remained at the base camp in Beachhead until four days ago, when Montane had wired the news that all was well. They would be proceeding at the speed of the slowest member, with proper rest halts, and it was hard to predict their time of arrival.

Deciding not to squander his mental energy on the matter, Nicklin was gazing around him in boredom when he saw something faintly peculiar happen.

A few paces down the slope from him was a group of yellow flowers, much resembling tulips, and while he was looking directly at them the head of one of the flowers detached itself from its stalk and dropped to the ground.

With little else to occupy his mind, he wondered idly if such events were commonplace in the botanical world. Orbitsville had many varieties of insects, some with bizarre feeding habits, but surely any bug intent on devouring a plant would tackle it from the bottom. Could there be a type which had a taste for petals only, and which first dragged them back to the nest?

As he was tiring of the speculation there occurred a second strange event—a humming, rushing sound close to his left ear, a brief and fluttery agitation of the air. He told himself that it must have been a hornet, but there had been a disturbing hint of power to the sound, and in that instant a preposterous idea was born in his mind.

“Corey,” he said quietly, “this may sound like one of my jokes—but I think we’re being shot at.”

“Shot at!” Kingsley tilted his head back and roared with laughter. The fact that his mouth was wide open possibly saved his life, for the bullet which might have shattered his skull passed cleanly through both his cheeks. He clapped a hand to the bloody, star-shaped exit wound and pitched sideways to the ground.

Nicklin gaped at him, thunderstruck, then realised he was still sitting upright. He hastily bellied down behind the heaps of rubble, losing his sun-hat in the process, fear masked by self-loathing—he had been imbecilic enough to risk death rather than make a chump of himself by needlessly diving for cover. He looked towards Montane, who had also dropped to the ground, and found the preacher staring at him in wide-eyed accusation. Nicklin understood the terror-logic perfectly—he was the one who had talked of shooting, therefore he had caused it to happen.

What next? What the holy fuck do we do next? The questions were a flurry of drum-beats in his mind. I know! Kingsley will take command of the situation and save us all! Good old Gerl is big and tough and he has farmed wild country all his life and he’s probably been shot at hundreds of times and he probably thinks no more of a little bullet wound than he does of a mosquito…

The thought foundered as Nicklin belatedly became aware of Kingsley’s condition. The big man was lying on his side and blood was literally pumping out of his mouth. His tongue was protruding and, although it was swathed in gouting crimson, Nicklin could see enough to tell him that it had been ploughed almost in half. He could also see that good old Gerl was not going to take command of any situation, and his feeling of helplessness increased.

“The rifle,” Montane whispered. “Where’s the rifle?”

“It’s back in the house.”

“You should have brought it.” Montane’s face was stern. “You were told to carry it everywhere.”

Absurdly, Nicklin’s fear was displaced by indignation. “You came out first! You and your pal should have—”

His words were lost in the sound of a new bullet strike. This time the slug, having glanced off a nearby rock, howled like a demented being as it flailed the warm air. Nicklin, who had never been close to a ricochet before, was appalled by its sheer ferocity.

“Go and get the rifle,” Montane commanded, breaking the ensuing silence.

“But you can’t stay up here,” Nicklin said preparing to crawl away.

“I’ll bring Gerl as fast as I—” Montane made an angrily impatient gesture. “For God’s sake, man, get the rifle!”

Nicklin nodded and slithered down on to the bared expanse of fused earth. At the far side of it he rose to his feet and ran down the only clear path, bounding recklessly where there were flights of steps. In seconds he had reached level ground and was sprinting towards the colonnaded facade of the house.

Can this really be happening to me? he wondered, his mind distancing itself from bodily turmoil. Who’s out there doing the shooting? Does somebody really want to kill us, or is it just a hunting trip gone wrong, a few drunks taking potshots at anything that moves for the pure bloody hell of it?

The thought reminded Nicklin that there had been no audible reports from the unseen weaponry. It meant that whoever was out there was using tail-burning ammunition—in effect, miniature rocket projectiles which in spite of dubious accuracy were favoured by some hunters because there was no muzzle blast to frighten off their prey.

Nicklin’s mind seized on the new thought, somehow managing to find a glimmer of reassurance in it. The worst of the trouble might already be over if a couple of liquored-up hunters were responsible. Having had their bit of fun, they could easily have developed cold feet and retreated into the bush. The idea took on a life of its own, isolating Nicklin from normal time, expanding its solitary theme into a monotonous fugue. Oh yes, things were bad. There was no denying that things were bad—especially after what had happened to poor Gerl—but they weren’t all that bad. After all, nobody had been killed. Gerl’s face was in a hell of a mess, one had to admit that, but nobody had actually been killed…

A subjective aeon had passed by the time Nicklin lunged up the broad steps of the house, through the open doors and into the shade of the entrance hall. I probably won’t even have to use this, he chanted to himself as he snatched the rifle out of the antique oak stand. Even in that moment of extremity the machine-lover in him appreciated the weapon’s lightness.

He ran back outside to the sunshine, shaded his eyes and scanned the hillside, fully expecting to see Montane and Kingsley working their way down the slope. There was no sign of them, no movement anywhere. The scene had a slumbrous Sunday afternoon look about it, a Monet landscape quality which Nicklin found quite astonishing. Forcing his mind to deal with real time again, he was even more astonished to realise that only forty or fifty seconds could have passed since he began his dash from the hilltop.

That was a very brief period indeed, no time at all, for somebody who had to tend a wounded man, or for hunters moving tentatively under cover. He started running once more, seeming to swoop above the ground like a low-flying bird. The wilderness of the garden flicked past him, the contrived slope of the hill sank behind him—then he was back on the rubbled centre stage of the drama. Montane was kneeling beside Kingsley, helping him to wad a handkerchief into his mouth, but otherwise nothing had changed during Nicklin’s absence. He bent as low as he could, scurried forward and threw himself into a prone position close to Montane.

“Well?” he breathed. “Well?”

“It’s still going on.”

“You’re sure?”

“I saw dust.” Montane gave Nicklin an expectant look, a look which ended his naive hopes of remaining little more than an observer.

“In that case…” He slid the rifle to the top of the low bank of earth and pebbles, then slowly raised his head behind the weapon, wondering how much he would know about the event if his brain were to be pulped by a miniature rocket. His life continued. The land lay silent beneath the high sun, a pulsing blaze of tall grass, brushwood and flat-topped trees, betraying no enemy presence.

He moved his head slightly, bringing his eyes into the focus zone of the rifle’s smartscope, and at once the scene changed. There was no magnified but curtailed image, as would have been produced by a traditional lens system. Instead, as the scope analysed and edited a superhuman range of frequencies, projecting the result directly on to his retinas, Nicklin saw a glare-free representation of all that lay before him. In that strange, colour-adjusted universe—seen through bright blue cross-hairs—leafy matter was almost transparent. And clearly visible among gauzy stands of ghost-grass were two human figures, glowing with a neon pinkness. They were down on their stomachs, wriggling towards the hill with a snaky lateral motion, their breath feathering up like smoke signals. Not far behind them was a tree whose thick trunk, opaque to the smartscope, seemed to be emitting little smoke signals of its own.

The machine-lover, the game-player in Nicklin took immediate control of his mind and body. He moved the intersection of the cross-hairs on to the nearer of the crawling figures and squeezed the trigger. A breath of heat touched his forehead and the figure abruptly lost its human outlines, becoming a shapeless smear which was further blurred by swirls of luminous pink vapour. A second later, its arrival delayed by the intervening two hundred metres, came a dull, soggy thud-thud.

The knowledge that he had heard a man’s internal organs and torso exploding would have appalled Nicklin had he been in a normal state of mind, but the game was on—and the cross-hairs were already centring themselves on the second figure. He squeezed the trigger again, and this time—amid the blotch of destruction—he actually glimpsed the target’s ribcage snapping wide open like some spring-loaded mechanical device.

“Do you think you hit anything?” Montane had appeared at Nicklin’s side, and his eyes—inefficient biological organs—were blindly scanning the innocent, sun-drenched scene.

“Oh, yes,” Nicklin assured him. “I hit something.”

Montane gave him a worried glance. “Maybe we should go down there and—”

“Wait!” Nicklin, still under the spell of the smartscope, had transferred all his attention to the vicinity of the tree. Flickers of pink brilliance informed him that the person who had been standing behind the trunk was now running away and attempting to keep the tree in between him and the dealer of death. But almost at once he was forced to detour around a shrub and, long hair streaming, came fully into Nicklin’s inhuman view. The cross-hairs quartered his back on the instant and Nicklin’s trigger finger made the appropriate response. The fleeing figure disintegrated, shedding an arm which spun off to one side like a broken propeller.

An unexpected blow on his shoulder startled Nicklin, recalling him to the real world.

“Why did you do that?” Montane’s face was distorted, accusing. “There was no need for that.”

“Why did I—!” Nicklin pointed at Gerl Kingsley, who had risen to his knees and was fingering a pronged whitish object which was emerging from the bloody hole in his cheek. “Ask him if there was any need for it!”

“For God’s sake, the man was running away!”

“Yeah, to fetch the rest of his clan! What the fuck’s the matter with you, Corey? Are you tired of living? Is it all getting too much for you?” The physical after-effects of Nicklin’s sprint down the hill and back, seemingly held in abeyance to make him a steady gun platform, suddenly began to manifest themselves. His breathing became harsh and rapid, and a salty froth thickened in his mouth.

“You don’t know what the man was going to do,” Montane said, shaking his head.

“Perhaps he remembered he’d left the bath water running,” Nicklin suggested, putting on his smile. Did I kill three men? Did I really and truly vaporise three men?

“You can joke? How can you joke?”

“It’s easy,” Nicklin said, determined to brook no more questions—from without or within. “All you have to do is remember that everybody is a piece of shit.”

“We have to get Gerl to a doctor,” Montane said, after a pause.

He turned away, but before doing so he gave Nicklin a prolonged look. His eyes betrayed no hatred, which was something Nicklin had expected and could have savoured. Instead, they showed simple contempt.

Chapter 13

The coming of autumn had brought many changes, not least in the appearance of the hill itself. Once a perfect ovoid, it had been deprived of its entire upper half, like a gargantuan boiled egg which somebody had chosen to cut open from the side. The lower half was hidden beneath slopes of scree made up of masonry, rubble, clay and jagged fragments of the fused-earth shell. Projecting from the shambles was the entire main cylinder of the Liscard, complete with the toy-like pinnace slung under the nose section. The hull of the mother ship, copiously stained with ochreous mineral deposits, was obscured in places by scaffolding, plastic weather screens and banks of ladders.

Digging through to the ship had taken much longer than Montane or anybody else connected with the project had originally anticipated. On breaking through the outer shell they had quickly penetrated about a metre of compacted fill—only to encounter a second shell, also of vitrified earth. Montane had curbed his natural impatience with the consoling thought that his ship had been superbly protected during its seventy years of incarceration, but even he had been taken aback by the discovery of a third carapace.

It appeared that the disconsolate Ves Fugaccia had been determined to make his young bride’s tomb as inviolable as that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The third shell had proved to be the innermost—with nothing inside it but clean sand—but even then there were further obstacles to entering the ship. All three doors 011 the upper surface of the cylinder were found to have been welded along the whole length of the seams. Unwilling to have them mutilated by cutting gear, Montane had waited until the side doors of the cylinder were uncovered—and those, too, had been welded.

As Nicklin climbed towards the ship, in the pale lemon sunlight of autumn, he could see that one of the side doors was finally being breached. A valency cutter would have been too fierce and indiscriminate in its action, therefore old-fashioned oxy-acetylene was being employed in the hope of persuading the weld metal to come away without excessive damage to the adjacent structure. Showers of yellow sparks were occasionally visible through the screen of men and women who had stopped work to watch the operation.

The size of the group of spectators was a reminder to Nicklin of another change that had come about, one that he had never envisaged. Soon after the upper section of the Liscard had been uncovered, journalists had taken an interest in the proceedings and had begun visiting the site by light aircraft and helicopter. The resultant publicity had attracted quite a few enquiries from people who, swayed by Montane’s message, either wanted to work with him or to reserve places for themselves and their families on the flight to New Eden. A fair proportion of them had been prepared, as Nicklin had done, to liquidate all their assets to buy into the project.

One of the earliest had been Scott Hepworth, a physicist from the Garamond Institute, who had arrived at the site one morning on foot, having walked all the way out from Altamura. Montane and Nicklin had been sitting on the front steps of the mansion arguing about the purchase of laundry equipment, when the plump man in his sixties—red-faced and sweating—had approached them…

“Mr Montane?” the stranger said. “My name is Scott Hepworth, I’m a top-class physicist, and I want to work for you.”

“Everybody calls me Corey,” Montane replied, with the wry smile—now familiar to Nicklin—which established him as the humblest of democrats. “And this is Jim Nicklin. Would you like to sit with us for a while?”

“Thank you.” Hepworth nodded to Nicklin as he seated himself, took out a handkerchief and began to wipe his neck. “I think I’m a bit too old for hiking around in this heat.”

Montane looked sympathetic. “Would you like some tea?”

“Tea!” A look of distaste appeared on Hepworth’s roundly padded face. “The kind of thirst I have can only be quenched with gin and tonic. Any lesser brew would be an insult to the taste buds which have served me loyally for more years than I care to remember. I don’t suppose you—”

“I don’t believe in strong liquor,” Montane said.

Nicklin, who had been prepared to dislike the newcomer, largely because of his overbearing approach, decided not to be too hasty. Many another man—the former Jim Nicklin included—when courting a prospective employer would have pretended to love tea, but Hepworth had come straight out and said he was a boozer. Terrible interview technique, but it indicated that he was his own man.

Discreetly studying Hepworth, Nicklin was interested to note that he did not look anything like a senior scientist at a university which was famed for conservatism and stuffiness. His lightweight suit was cheap and ill-fitting. It was not a case of it being “well-worn but of good cut”—the hackneyed old novelistic phrase which showed that a character had the right sort of background but had “fallen into straitened circumstances”. This suit had started out shoddy, and had not improved with time. It was complemented by a rumpled shirt and comprehensively scuffed sandals.

Scott Hepworth was something of an oddball, Nicklin decided, and as such ought to be encouraged. “I’ve got some gin in my room,” he said, rising to his feet. “Ice and a slice of lime?”

“All the trimmings, my boy,” Hepworth said, looking deeply grateful.

Rewarded by a disapproving glance from Montane, Nicklin hurried to his room to prepare the drink. He was not particularly fond of gin, having bought it because it was easier to transport from town than beer, but he mixed himself a large one as well, knowing that it would further annoy Montane. He returned to the front steps in time to hear Montane ask the visitor why he had quit the Garamond.

“It wasn’t through choice,” Hepworth replied easily. “I got thrown out.” As if there might be some doubt about his meaning, he added, “I was forcibly ejected. Given the boot.”

Now positively warming to the man, Nicklin winked as he handed him a dewed glass. Hepworth took it eagerly, but, instead of drinking immediately, held it under his nose and breathed deeply of the aroma.

“May I ask why the university saw fit to dispense with your services?” Montane said, the stilted wording and coolness of their delivery showing that he was far from being impressed by Hepworth.

“I had an argument—some might call it a stand-up fight—with the head of my department.” Hepworth smiled into his drink as though enjoying pleasant memories. “He’s been trying to show me the door for quite a long time, and I finally gave him a good excuse.”

“What was the argument about?”

“I stumbled on some evidence that Orbitsville has jumped into a different universe, but Professor Phair disagreed with my interpretation.”

“A different universe!” Montane stiffened visibly. “Is this something new? We’ve already been told that the whole globe has moved.”

“Yes, but not so far.” Hepworth took an appreciative sip of his gin before going on. “I’m not talking about some kind of warp-transfer into a distant part of the familiar old continuum. I’m saying we jumped into an entirely different continuum—an anti-matter universe where time is reversed.”

“But—” Montane glanced helplessly at Nicklin.

“It’s a beautiful idea,” Nicklin said, vaguely aware of once having discussed a similar notion with Zindee White, “but what about these starships they’re starting to use on interportal runs? Shouldn’t the ions they scoop up just blow them apart?”

Hepworth shook his head. “I see you’ve already done some thinking on this, but in your scenario the ships wouldn’t be able to operate at all. If they were familiar hadronic-matter starships which had been popped into an anti-matter universe, their scoop fields would repel the surrounding anti-matter particles. What I’m saying is that our beloved Orbitsville and everything on it—present company included—has been flipped over in the process of being translated into a different universe. We have also been hurled about forty billion years backwards in time, but leave that aside for the moment. My main point is that we are composed of anti-matter now; our ships are composed of anti-matter now—so everything works cxactly as before.”

“In that case,” Nicklin said, fighting off bemusement, “there wouldn’t be any way to detect the change.”

“That’s what I would probably have said—before last week.” Hepworth drank again, more deeply this time. “For the last three years, on and off, I’ve been trying to design an ultra-sensitive flow meter for use in liquid oxygen. It had to have a self-contained source of electrons, so I decided to use radioactive cobalt. There were all kinds of design complications, which I won’t go into because they’re so boring, but cobalt 60 was great for the job, because the nuclei spray more electrons out of their south poles than from their north pole’s.

“Normally they cancel each other out, but if you cool the stuff right down you can use magnetism to align a lot of the atoms—and you get a blob of metal which shoots more electrons out of one end than out of the other.”

Hepworth paused, eyes alert and twinkling, to scan his listeners’ faces. “Does any of this ring a bell? A school bell, perhaps.”

Nicklin, anxious to make Montane feel dim by comparison, ransacked his memory. “Wasn’t there a famous experiment with cobalt 60…back on Earth… three or four hundred years ago?”

“There was indeed!” Hepworth said. “The one which proved that the universe is not symmetrical! Perhaps that gives you an inkling of how I felt last week when I hauled my flow meter out of a locker, where it had languished for the best part of a year, and discovered that my little electron beam was going the wrong way!”

Nicklin’s mind balked at the implications of what he had just been told. “Perhaps you set the equipment up wrong.”

“That’s what Professor Phair tried to put across on me.” Hepworth gave a reminiscent little smile. “Just before I punched him in the throat.”

Montane made a faint sound of disapproval.

“I don’t get this,” Nicklin said. “Surely, if everything in the universe was reversed, including time, all processes and relationships would be unaltered, and you wouldn’t be able to detect the change. If your electron beam was pointing at the lab door before the Big Jump, it would still be pointing at the lab door after the jump.”

Hepworth’s smile did not fade. “You’re forgetting that parity is not conserved in the weak nuclear force.”

“Am I?”

“Yes. Have you a nuclear physics degree?”

“All I’ve got is a degree of discomfort,” Nicklin said. “From sitting on these steps.”

“Enough said, I think.”

Left with an uncomfortable feeling that he had failed to assimilate a vital point, Nicklin stared at Hepworth’s chubby countenance. His thoughts became unfocused as he noticed that Hepworth had an enormous blackhead at the side of his nose. Located just where nose merged into cheek, the blackhead had a faint bluish umbra and was so big that it presented a visible disc. How can he go around with a thing like that on his face? Nicklin wondered, his mind surrendering to irrelevancy. Why doesn’t he squeeze it out, for Christ’s sake?

“Something still troubling you, Jim?” Hepworth enquired mildly.

“The time aspect has me stumped,” Nicklin said, choosing not to make any offensive personal comment. He no longer had scruples about such things, especially since the day he had exploded three human beings in less than ten seconds, but he was loath to alienate someone who could turn out to be an interesting companion. Good conversationalists were a rare breed among the mission’s workers, and the few who had something worthwhile to say had no wish to say it to him.

“Time is one of the great imponderables,” Hepworth stated in the grand tones of an unemployed and unemployable actor. He drained his glass, then allowed his gaze to rest for a brief moment on Nicklin’s untouched drink. Nicklin, who had almost forgotten the pleasures of rapport, at once handed him the glass.

“Imponderable is the right word,” he said. “Where did you get the forty billion years from?”

“I can assure you that I didn’t pluck them out of a hat.” Hepworth, having got his throat warmed up for action, swallowed half his second drink in a single gulp. “Richard Gott’s historic theory proposed that the Big Bang created two universes—the one we all used to inhabit, which went forwards in time; and the one we’re in now, which is going backwards in time. The Region One universe, as Gott dubbed it, was about twenty billion years old; this one, Region Two, appears to be about the same age—so it’s reasonable to assume that we have jumped back some forty billion years.

“The symmetry in that proposal also has a certain appeal to—”

“This is all very interesting,” Montane cut in, the dryness in his voice showing that he had become bored, “but I’m afraid the work here calls for practical skills rather than… May I ask, by the way, if you’re a believer? Do you accept my message that Orbitsville is a trap which the Devil has set for God’s children?”

Hepworth snorted. “No more than I believe in that other great trinity—Goldilocks, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood.”

Well said, Scott, Nicklin thought regretfully, but your job interview technique grows worse.

“In that case, I don’t think we should take up any more of each other’s time,” Montane said. “Unless there are other considerations—”

“Considerations?”

“Corey wants to know if you have any money,” Nicklin said helpfully.

“Not a penny!” Hepworth seemed as proud of being broke as he had of being fired from his job. “Not a red cent, not a brass farthing, not a sou!” He gave Nicklin a puzzled glance. “Do I look as if I’ve got money?”

Montane placed his hands on his knees with an air of finality and rose to his feet. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, Scott.”

Hepworth showed no inclination to move. “I used to design ramjet engines—the same kind that you have on that starship over there—and I can repair and maintain them. I can also, if called upon, serve as a pilot.”

Looking ahead as he went up the slope, Nicklin could see Hepworth among the crowd waiting for their first glimpse of the Liscard’s interior. The physicist had used most of his last stipend to buy a duvet coat, a garment which made him easily recognisable at a distance because of its violent shade of lime green. Montane, Kingsley and Affleck were there too, plus a number of people whose names Nicklin had yet to learn, but the one person he really wanted to see was missing.

Danea Farthing’s absence was a direct consequence of the improvement in the mission’s fortunes. First there had been the publicity. Not only did it come free, but the news agencies and television companies were prepared to pay substantial sums for interviews and pictorial rights.

The global exposure had brought in some moral and financial backing—then the enigmatic green lines had entered the headlines again, this time with the discovery that they were visible on the outside of the Orbitsville shell. Interest in and support for Montane’s cause had promptly increased.

Nicklin was not sure why the reports had caused such a widespread frisson of public unease. It might have been due to the fact that a green luminosity had swept the exterior of Orbitsville shortly prior to the so-called Big Jump. Or, more likely, it had been because the force field associated with the lines was known to weaken any material it passed through. If it could slice a building into pieces, the thinking was, perhaps it was doing the same thing to Orbitsville itself.

It mattered not that ylem, the shell material, had for two centuries resisted technology’s fiercest efforts even to scratch it. There was a human personality type, exemplified by Montane himself, which had always been susceptible to paranoia and pessimism, to which every unusual event was an omen. They were the kind of people who saw portents of doom in an increase in the bug population, in a portrait falling off the living-room wall, in the creepy twilight which can herald a bad storm.

They were a minority, and only a tiny fraction of that minority were sufficiently motivated to take action, but in comparison to the mission’s previous scale of operations they made up an avalanche. Quite suddenly, Montane had been inundated with money and new obligations. He had found it necessary to open an office in Beachhead to deal with the flow of enquiries about the New Eden flight, and to handle legal work in connection with donations and bequests.

And, to Nicklin’s annoyance, he had given Danea a special job—a roving assignment in which she made discreet checks on applicants and their families. Nicklin could not guess how someone was assessed as the potential founder of a new race, and even if such vetting were possible he very much doubted that Danea was the right person to do it. She had a gift for weighing strangers up at a glance- he could testify to that from bitter experience—but working out their Adam-and-Eve quotient… ?

His principal source of discontent, though he could not voice it, was that his revised scheme for revenging himself on Danea was being impeded. He had been too direct, too brutal in his previous approach; now he wanted to go softly. If he could win her over by being Mr Nice Guy, by courting her with contrition, humour, consideration and gentleness he would do so. It could even go as far as marriage. And only then—when she was totally unprepared, when their relationship was a mirror image of the one they had started out with—would he let her see what it was like to be destroyed by the one person you had been unwary enough to love.

The new plan was superior to the old, it had a gratifying flavour of genuine evil to it, but it was nearly impossible to implement unless the victim was constantly at hand.

Nicklin tried to dismiss Danea from his mind as he reached the level at which the undisturbed surface gave way to mud, rubble and slippery duckboards. From that viewpoint the ship, fully a hundred metres in length, resembled a geological feature, something which had been in the earth for ever. It was impossible to imagine the vast outcrop of metal inching along highways on multi-wheel trailers, let alone ghosting through space at more than the speed of light.

He walked along the planks beside which the top of the left-engine cylinder was emerging through the protective sand. As he neared the group surrounding the cutter only one person, Gerl Kingsley, acknowledged his arrival. Kingsley had never doubted that Nicklin had done the right thing in killing the fleeing attacker, and had been overtly friendly ever since. He still had great difficulty in speaking, however, and his sociability was largely restricted to winks and salutes, plus occasional whispers of, “Sewage farm, eh, Jim!”

The cryptic greeting was a reference to the comment Nicklin once made when a woman, smarting because he had bested her in an argument, asked if he felt no remorse over having killed three fellow humans. Not the slightest—all I did was send three pieces of shit to the great sewage farm in the sky. He had been pleased by how quickly the remark had echoed through the mission’s personnel. It had earned him renewed dislike from practically everybody except Christine McGivern, on whom it appeared to have acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating her natural inventiveness when they were together in bed.

The incident now seemed unreal to Nicklin, especially as Petruzzicho, the local sheriff, had not even bothered to come out of town to view the bodies. “It sounds to me like you ran up against the Lucci brothers, and nobody around here is going to grieve much over those characters,” he had said. “I’ll make you a deal, Jim—you bury the evidence and I’ll consider the case closed.”

Nicklin had done as requested, and that part of the incident had not paled in his memory. During the bleak hour it had taken him to bury the remains he had retched so violendy and frequently that towards the end he had been bringing up fresh blood. He had chosen to remain silent concerning the bout of squeamishness, feeling that it would not have squared too well with his public image.

On reaching the edge of the group he saw that the woman operating the cutter had almost completed the circuit of the door seam. Skilfully holding the gas nozzle at an acute angle to the line of work, she was melting the weld material and blowing it away in coruscating showers, with minimal damage to the ship’s hull. When the last molten blob was gone she stepped back, her torch popping loudly as it was turned off, and Montane took her place.

He had his familiar brown greatcoat buttoned well up to the throat, and appeared quite untroubled by the coldness of the air, in spite of having stood by for a long time. It was obvious to Nicklin that he was trying to look calm, but his mouth kept twitching with repressed jubilation as, amid the congratulations of the onlookers, he grasped the recessed door handle in a gloved hand and pushed it down. The lever did not move. He leaned his weight on it, pushing and tugging, but in spite of all his efforts the door remained firmly in place.

Aw, how could you do such a thing, O Gaseous Vertebrate? Nicklin thought, grinning. You’ve gone and screwed up Corey’s big moment!

Making no effort to conceal his amusement, he waited near the scene for twenty minutes during which obstinate fragments of metal were coaxed out of the door’s seam and quantities of penetroil were pressure-sprayed into its mechanisms. Finally, under the combined efforts of three men, the door was pulled open to reveal a rectangular airlock.

Nicklin, without being obvious about it, had worked his way into the front line of spectators. He was ready to surge forward with them, but held back when he saw that only a slim gangplank led to the inner door, which was already slightly ajar. Two metres below it was a “floor”, one which was oddly adorned with printed notices, communication sets and instrument panels, which showed that it laid equal claim to being a “wall”. He was reminded that spaceships were designed to manufacture their own gravity by means of acceleration and deceleration. The Liscard’s diaphragm decks were now perpendicular to the ground, and the narrow walkway—which facilitated reaching its interior—was there only because the ship had been land-docked at the time of Apryl Fugaccia’s death.

Having appraised the situation, Montane turned to face the group and raised his arms. “My friends, we have waited a long time for this moment—for years in quite a few cases—and I want to thank you for all the hard work you have done on behalf of the mission. God has begun to reward you for all those efforts. Atj last we are about to enter the Ark he has seen fit to provide for us—but there is one thing I would ask you to remember.

“This ship is more than the instrument of our salvation. It is also a tomb, and while inside it we must conduct ourselves accordingly-as we would while treading any plot of consecrated ground.” Montane paused and gave his audience a sombre stare.

“Our first duty is a harrowing one. We must remove the mortal remains of Apryl Fugaccia from the ship, and transfer them to the last resting place with all due respect and…”

Consecrated ground, mortal remains, last resting place. Nicklin, bored with the rhetoric, occupied his thoughts by trying to compose an aphorism. The art of religious oratory is stringing the maximum number of cliches together with the minimum of… let’s see… fresh verbiage in between? No, the last bit is too stilted, not pithy enough. Virgin grammar? That’s even worse. Now I know how Oscar Wilde must have felt when… Nicklin abandoned the composition, becoming apprehensive as he realised that Montane’s eyes were drilling into his.

“Naturally, as God’s appointed leader of the mission, I am taking it upon myself to move the body, but I will need the assistance of one other person,” Montane said, his gaze still fixed on Nicklin’s face. “Let’s go, Jim.”

He switched on a portable light and immediately started across the gangplank. Nicklin swore inwardly, acknowledging that the preacher had scored another point in their private duel. The very last thing he wanted to do was manhandle a seventy-year-old corpse, or even go near a seventy-year-old-corpse, but there was no way in which Killer Nicklin could evade the task with half the mission watching. He was, after all, the man of ice.

“I hope this won’t take long,” he said, shouldering forward through the spectators. “I’m dying for something to eat.”

As he followed Montane out of the sunlight and into the shaded interior of the ship he was surprised to find that the air smelled of something like dead leaves. The earthy aroma, which perhaps also hinted of mushrooms, was not what he would have expected in a triple-sealed tomb. He forgot about it as Jock Craig, the electrician, who was carying an armful of lights, crowded into him from the rear. Petra Davies, similarly burdened, was following close behind.

The group moved slowly forward through the ship, with the electricians extending the area of illumination by attaching the miniature suns to every convenient surface. Nicklin’s first impressions of a starship’s interior were distorted by his being at a right angle to the normal lines of every open space. The webwork of shipfitters’ scaffolding and staging, looking as though it had been left in place during a temporary halt in the work, further complicated the alien environment.

Being in the lead, Montane must have found the going even more difficult, but Nicklin had trouble in pacing him as they went through deck after deck. He caught up at a place where the catwalk passed over a circular hatch whose location established that it led down to the pinnace. The two men lowered themselves on to the surrounding wall, which gravity now designated as a floor. Taking care not to tread on the indicator panels and controls, they swung the hatch up to reveal a short dark well. Light spilling into it showed that another circular door at the bottom was already open, a silent invitation to enter the pinnace…

Ves Fugaccia’s money-wise heirs had been delighted at the chance to unload the Altamura estate, but some remnant of propriety had led them to put in a stipulation. The small family burial plot at the rear of the house was to remain in their name, and the body of Apryl Fugaccia was to be interred in it with all due respect. Although Corey Montane hardly qualified as a priest in their eyes, they had agreed to have him conduct the ceremony. The concession had gratified Montane, in spite of Nicklin’s suggestion that things would have been otherwise had the tragic young bride become a convert to the true faith of old Rome.

He would have further demonstrated his scepticism by not attending the burial ceremony—had it not been for an unexpected internal event. The sight of Apryl Fugaccia’s small figure in the left-hand seat of the pinnace’s cockpit, still clad in her custom-made vacuum suit, had inspired him with the sudden and unmanning idea that disturbing her was an act of genuine crassness.

All dressed up and nowhere to go, he had thought, but no amount of smart braintalk could allay his feeling that the Gaseous Vertebrate had played enough pranks on her, that one more was one too many. Since before he was born, through all the time he could remember, she had been sitting there in the silent blackness… flying her expensive toy spaceship into the Dawn of Nothing… and, by rights, the pointless, aimless, beautiful flight should have gone on for ever. She should not have been grounded by a manic preacher who had been led to her by his capering, morally clubfooted assistant.

So Nicklin had attended the burial ceremony, while the cold airs had drifted in from Orbitsville’s endless savannahs, and afterwards he had drunk gin with Scott Hepworth until his ability to taste it had failed.

Chapter 14

It had taken almost a year for the starship to complete the journey from Altamura to Beachhead City, and at some stage in that painful, frustrating trek Nicklin had fallen in love with the huge and unprepossessing vessel.

Standing at the front window of the mission’s Beachhead office, he had an excellent view of the Tara—as it had been renamed by Montane—and could see nothing in its appearance to explain his emotional involvement. The three-cylinder layout had been introduced more than two centuries earlier by the historic Starfiight corporation, and had survived because of its efficiency, but even the most romantic of enthusiasts had to concede that it was ugly. Snow was caking on the Tara’s upper surfaces, swirling around the scaffolding and gathering in soiled drifts beneath the drive cylinders, giving it the forlorn appearance of an abandoned civil engineering project. The pinnace, which might have added a touch of aerodynamic glamour to the ponderous structure, had been unslung from beneath the nose section and transported separately.

More than ever, to Nicklin’s eyes, the ship looked quite incapable of flight, but he felt for it the special passion that some men and women can develop for a machine which was designed for a difficult task and has the potential to carry it out superbly.

The love affair had begun inauspiciously.

When the excavators bared the twin drive cylinders, upon which the ship had rested during its long incarceration, they discovered that Ves Fugaccia had made a mistake of the kind to which obsessive monument builders had been prone throughout history. In his determination to make his wife’s tomb impregnable he had swathed it with layer after massive layer of defences—and the combined weight of them had split the ferro-concrete foundation upon which the great edifice was constructed. In addition, somebody had forgotten to seal off the ventilators, purging ducts and drain tubes which had been opened for the ship’s overhaul in land-dock.

The apertures were comparatively tiny, almost invisible in the expanses of impermeable pressure hull, but they had been like six-lane highways for the myriads of fungal, crawling and slithering life-forms which existed in Orbitsville’s fertile soil.

When Montane’s workers opened the doors leading from the central cylinder into the engine cylinders they entered a dank and unwholesome netherworld. It was a jungle of tendrils and threads emanating from huge, pallid, fronded growths—some of them oozing in decay—among which there lived vast populations of things which moved on many legs or no legs at all. For seventy years they had fought among themselves for control of that dark microcosm, squirming armies of them disputing the principality of a fuse box or the kingdom of a transformer housing. They were united, however, in their dislike for the giant invaders from the world of light, and they demonstrated the fact with every means at their disposal.

It took many days for the humans to reclaim and fumigate the drive cylinders, and much longer for the fetid smell—a hint of which Nicklin had picked up when he first entered the ship—to be totally eliminated. And, inevitably, the machinery and equipment in the cylinders had suffered during the alien occupation. Some of the damage had been caused by dampness, but anything soft—insulation, seal materials, vibration mounts and the like—had disappeared into a multitude of tiny digestive systems.

Corey Montane had been appalled by visions of the consequent delay and expense; but the machine-lover in Nicklin had commiserated with the ship itself. I’ll make you well again, he had promised it, conceiving an alluring plan to comprehend every scientific and engineering principle, to master every system, to learn every part number, and use the knowledge to restore the patient, uncomplaining entity that was the ship to a state of good health.

It was a grandiose project, one which very few would have undertaken, but it had kept him sane during the heartbreaking year on the road. He had built up a library of manufacturers’ manuals in book, disk and tape form, and had eased the frustration of each new delay in the journey by telephoning orders for components which could be installed on the move. He had been aided in diverse ways by Scott Hepworth, who had imparted relevant knowledge in exchange for gin, and by Gerl Kingsley, who had thrown his muscular power into physically demanding tasks that a man could not accomplish on his own.

Now that the Tara was safely docked on the rim of Portal One the main restoration work was beginning. Nicklin and Hepworth had made a joint decision that every aspect of it could be handled by existing mission personnel, working under their guidance. Montane had been happy to accept that arrangement because it was likely to be the most economical. Moving the ship to Beachhead—an undertaking which had involved building temporary bridges in some places—had cost a fortune, and his financial resources were not unlimited.

The Tara was classed as an exploration vessel, and therefore had not been designed to carry large numbers of passengers, but it had the same major dimensions as all other ships of the 5M general type. The ubiquitous 5M label showed that the Tara’s three cylinders had an external radius of five metres—and therefore would accept a vast range of standardised off-the-shelf components, including diaphragm decks. At present it had only eight such decks—the minimum legal requirement for stiffening the central cylinder—but the plan was to fit many more at a spacing of two metres, thus making twenty-five available for passenger accommodation.

On that basis, it seemed that the maximum complement for the New Eden flight would be in the region of “two hundred souls”, as Montane had put it. Nicklin—for whom it was all a kind of a game, an academic exercise—had suggested that, for straightforward biological considerations, all but a few of the souls should be housed in the bodies of nubile women. Montane had given him the expected lecture on the need to preserve moral standards, making it clear that he wanted to sign up only young married couples with a proven record of church-going.

He had reverted to being secretive about his corporate finances, but Nicklin had picked up enough clues to let him know that the preconditions imposed by Montane were limiting the mission’s revenue. There were quite a few eccentric individuals around who were prepared to hand over large sums to secure places on the much-publicised expedition, but only a small minority of them fully matched Montane’s stringent requirements.

The argument had reminded Nicklin of a basic fact which at times could slip his memory—that Corey Montane was an irrational being. He was not a religious maniac in the usual sense of the term; he was a certifiably insane person whose delusions simply happened to have a religious theme. His Ordinary Joe dress and general demeanour made it possible to forget about the coffin-cum-teatable, about the consultations with the corpse that lay within, about the deeply seated megalomania, about the lunatic goal towards which his entire life was directed.

It was difficult to imagine anything more ludicrous than the latest revelation—that Montane seemed to visualise the first landing on an unknown planet as something akin to an exclusive Youth For Christ adventure holiday, with air-beds and leaflets on how to erect the perimeter fence.

It was easy to ridicule the preacher and his crazy ideas, but crazy ideas sometimes had a way of translating themselves into reality. The massive, ungainly structure beyond the office window was proof of that. As he watched the snow sifting down over the mountainous triple hull, Nicklin experienced a strange, cool moment of unease. It was preposterous, he knew, but was a day going to come—was it really going to come?—when that grimy feature of the landscape would slide down into the portal and, like a seal entering water, be transformed by its new environment into a creature of confidence and surging power? Was it really going to bore through the blackness towards dim and irrelevant points of light? And might people die as a result? He was committed to restoring the Tara to its former magnificence, but purely as a machine—a fascinating toy—and ideally it would then be placed on static display, in a drowsy museum of technology, so that visitors could wonder at the polish and perfection of every component. It was oddly disconcerting to think that the results of his hobbyist enthusiasm and toil might end up in a decaying orbit around some remote planet, or—just as likely—drifting into infinity.

I’ll tell you something for nothing, O Gaseous Vertebrate, he thought. If she ever does head off into the wild black yonder, yours truly will be at home in his favourite armchair, feet up and glass in hand, watching the big event on television…

“When is this man going to get here?” Hepworth demanded, coming to stand at the window.

“You should ask Corey that.” Nicklin glanced sideways, and as always his eyes triangulated of their own accord on the enormous blackhead at the side of Hepworth’s nose.

“I wouldn’t like to interrupt him, just to ask what’s the hold-up with our distinguished visitor.”

“The weather is probably delaying him a little,” Montane said unconcernedly, without looking up from his desk. “Try to be a little more patient.”

“Yes, and try not to fidget as much—you’re like a pair of infants,” added Ropp Voorsanger, Montane’s accountant and legal adviser, from his position at the next desk. Voorsanger was a narrow-headed, narrow-faced man who was about thirty and looked twenty years older. He was also a lay preacher, which probably had something to do with his recruitment to the mission, but he was less tolerant and more severe than Montane in his manner. He had no time at all for either Nicklin or Hepworth.

“I do beg your pardon,” Hepworth said to Voorsanger, his plump features showing indignation, “but there is work waiting for me in the ship. Real work! Not the sort of unproductive crap that you occupy your time with.”

Nicklin suppressed a smile, knowing that the real work Hepworth had in mind was his hourly tot of gin. His original hope that the untidy and verbose physicist would make a good colleague had been realised. In spite of the heavy drinking, Hepworth never became muzzy or unwilling to pull his weight, and Nicklin made a point of backing him in every dispute.

“That’s right, Corey,” he said. “Scott and I have things to do, and-”

“And I’m tired of sending out search parties for you,” Montane cut in. “No, I want the both of you here when Renard arrives. I want you to hear what he has to say, so just try to relax.” He raised his head and looked significantly at Hepworth. “Why don’t you have a cup of tea?”

Nicklin would have been interested in Hepworth’s reply, but at that moment he saw a coloured blur moving behind the translucent screen which separated Montane’s office from the next. It meant that Danea Farthing had returned from one of the field trips which took her all over the Pi area, and which kept her away from Beachhead for weeks at a time. Trying not to be obtrusive, he walked quickly to the connecting door and slid it open.

“Well?” Danea paused in the act of taking off her snow-dappled cape. She was wearing a belted suit of cobalt blue shot silk which clung expensively to her slim-hipped figure. Her heavy-lidded eyes regarded him with minimal interest, as though he were a piece of furniture.

“Very well, thanks.” he said. “And you?”

“I didn’t mean that—what do you want?”

“Who says I have to want anything?” I want you, you cold bitch, because you’re the best-looking woman in the universe—and you owe me! “I just thought I’d say hello, and welcome you back to the office.”

“Very kind of you.” Danea stood quite still, making no move to hang up her cape, obviously waiting for him to leave.

“Have you come straight from the airport?”

“Yes.”

“Long flight?”

“Yes.”

“How about relaxing with a couple of drinks and a good lunch?”

“I’ve already arranged to do that, with a friend,” Danea said, still not moving. “He’s calling for me at noon.”

“That’s nice.” Montane composed a rueful smile. “I just thought I’d ask.”

Danea made no response, so he nodded to her and backed out of the small office, sliding the door shut between them. As soon as he was screened from her sight he allowed his sad little smile to develop into the full happy hayseed grin. A casual observer would probably have said that he had been well and truly frozen out, but he had picked up two signs of what he regarded as encouragement. During the exchange Danea had stood with the cape held to her throat, unconsciously—and revealingly—shielding her body from him. That was a Freudian give-away if ever he had seen one. Also, there had been no need, no need at all, for her to disclose that her lunch appointment was with another man. You’re getting there, Jim lad, Nicklin told himself with calm satisfaction. It’s taking a hell of a long time—but you’ll get to her one fine day—and when you do…

“That didn’t last long,” Hepworth said cheerfully when Nicklin rejoined him at the window. “Take the advice of an old hand at this kind of thing and give up gracefully—it’s obvious the woman wants nothing to do with you.”

“You don’t understand,” Nicklin replied, not pleased by the comment. How could anybody with a blackhead the size of a dinner plate claim to be an expert on women?

“Did you ask her out to lunch?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“She already has a date. With a man.”

Hepworth nodded. “Probably Rowan Meeks. She met him through the books.”

Nicklin would have preferred not to talk about Danea, but the cryptic reference had aroused his curiosity. “What books?”

“The talking variety. Danea spends a lot of her spare time putting books on tape for blind people. Apparently she has a very good voice for that sort of thing.” Hepworth paused and gave Nicklin a quizzical look. “Didn’t you know?”

“How would I know?”

“There you have it!” Hepworth said triumphantly. “You’ll never get anywhere with a woman unless you’re interested in her as a complete human being. The trouble with you, Jim, is that you’re interested in only one thing—and it shows.”

I wasn’t always like that, and where did it… ? Nicklin interrupted the thought, angry at being required to defend himself. If this keeps up there’s going to be talk about the care and feeding of blackheads.

“I had an idea that blind people used reading machines,” he said, offering a conversational lure which was likely to inspire one of Hepworth’s impromptu lecturettes.

“Voice synthesisers are still no good for literary readings, and, the way things have turned out, it looks as if they never will be,” Hepworth said, happily seizing on the topic. “It’s the old Orbitsville syndrome again. It’s more than three hundred years since the first synthesisers were tried out, and you’d think they should have been perfected in all that time. But… but… where’s the motive? The great machine of science and technology has slipped a few cogs and will go on slipping cogs because we allow it to do so.

“Why? Because, on a crowded, polluted and thoroughly kneed-in-the-groin Earth, science and technology promised that one day everything would be put to rights, that one day there would be a perfect world for everybody to enjoy. That’s what attracted the funding, that’s where the motivation came from. But now the promise has been forgotten—both by the promisers and the promisees. We’ve got our perfect world. We’ve got millions of them, in fact.

“Orbitsville handed them to us on the proverbial plate, so scientific and technological progress has pretty well come to a halt. Research is only carried out by ‘eggheads’ who have a personal interest in it, and, even when they do come up with something that has a lot of practical potential, it can’t be developed because the kind of concentrated industrial base they need simply isn’t there.

“There are quite a few people,” Hepworth added portentously, “who would argue that Orbitsville hasn’t done the human race any favours.”

“You’re beginning to sound like you-know-who,” Nicklin said, nodding towards Montane, who was still busy at his desk.

“You-know-who is doing some of the right things for all the wrong reasons.”

Nicklin was surprised. “You mean you want to get away from Orbitsville before the Devil presses the button?”

“No, I just want to get away from Orbitsville,” Hepworth said placidly. “I want to see what an anti-matter planet looks like. Nobody but Corey has any intention of going to one, so I’m going to go with him.”

“But…” Nicklin shook his head in disbelief. “You’re saying that if the Tara actually manages to take off you’ll be on board?”

“Jim, why do you think I joined this preposterous outfit? It wasn’t for the miserable stipend that Corey doles out to us, I can assure you. That bajely covers my tonic water, let alone the necessary. The only reason I’m here is that, as a paid-up member of the mission, I’m guaranteed a place on the ship when the big day comes.”

A pained expression appeared on Hepworth’s face. “I wish I hadn’t mentioned drink. My thirst pangs were quite bearable until I mentioned the stuff.”

“Too bad,” Nicklin said abstractedly, still assimilating the news that Hepworth actually planned to journey off into nothingness on the Tara. He had tacitly assumed that, like him, the physicist was only hitching a ride on the Nowhere Express, standing on the footplate and preparing to jump clear in his own good time. Also, the subject of the anti-matter universe had cropped up again. To Nicklin, all the talk of Region One and Region Two universes, and of reversed time and electron-spraying isotopes, was merely a game of words- but it was transpiring that, to Hepworth, all these things were as real as his next glass of gin or the whistle trees which on a windy day mourned the passing of summer.

Not for the first time, Nicklin found himself wondering about the ingredient which perhaps had been left out of his mental make-up. For him reality had always comprised those things which directly affected his daily life and immediate well-being. Everything else was relegated to quasi-reality or total abstraction; thus he had always felt himself to be at a comfortable remove from those strange individuals who could dedicate their lives to shining principles or die for great causes. Life was complicated enough and tricky enough as it was. On a lesser scale, it had always been a matter for self-congratulation that he was immune to mysticism and superstition and religion. Scott Hepworth shared the same materialistic outlook, and yet here he was, ready to gamble his life on a desperate plunge into black emptiness, merely because he was curious about the electrical charge of sub-atomic particles. As a motive for risking death, there was not much to choose between it and Montane’s bizarre fantasising.

“Explain just one thing to me, Scott,” he said. “What difference does it make to anybody if it turns out that—”

He broke off as the outer door of the office slid open to admit a man and a woman. Nicklin at once recognised Rick Renard, whose ostentatious style of dress made him a focal point for the drab room, but although the woman’s face seemed familiar there was a delay before he remembered having seen her on television. It had been in the Whites’ living room, all that time ago, on the day Orbitsville was supposed to have made its Big Jump. That had also been the day Corey Montane and his entourage had come to town and Nicklin’s private world had made a Big Jump of its own. In his mind he could hear Zindee White’s voice: Her name is Silvia London.

“I’ve always wanted to be in London,” he said under his breath, his eyes taking in the woman’s full-bosomed figure, the voluptuous lines of which alerted his sexual instincts in spite of being modestly swathed in a charcoal grey coatdress. His amatory bouts with Christine McGivern were becoming too perfunctory and he had a hankering for something fresh.

Hepworth leaned closer to him. “What was that?”

“I think our presence is required, don’t you?” Nicklin moved towards Montane and Voorsanger to become part of the little group which welcomed the visitors. Renard introduced the woman as his wife, a fact which in Nicklin’s eyes added a certain spice toj her appeal.

“I’m sorry we’re late,” Renard went on when the formalities had been completed, smiling in the oddly challenging manner which Nicklin had noticed before, even via television, and which rendered the apology meaningless.

Montane nodded. “The weather…”

“No, the snow didn’t hold me back at all, but when I got here I couldn’t resist having a stroll around the outside of your ship,” Renard said. “It doesn’t look much, does it?”

“It looks good to me,” Nicklin said quickly.

Renard smiled directly at him. “I doubt if you’re qualified to adjudicate.”

“Adjudication runs in my family,” Nicklin replied. “Why, I learned to adjudicate at my mother’s knee.” And I adjudicate that you need a good kick up the balls, you arrogant bastard. He smiled in return as he projected the thought with all the vehemence he could muster, but the only outcome of the telepathic attempt was a flicker of satisfaction in Renard’s blue eyes.

“Why don’t we sit down and talk in comfort?” Montane cut in. He gestured towards the cheap table, used mainly for in-office meals, which was the only piece of furniture at all suitable for a conference.

“Why not?” The amusement in Renard’s eyes grew more evident as the chair he had selected emitted a metallic protest when he sat down.

For one instant Nicklin wished that Montane had not been so miserly over renting office space and equipment. Then it came to him that he was being lured into a personality duel. Renard was a man for whom every meeting had to be a skirmish, and every relationship a contest. I’m not playing that game, he thought, his antagonism towards Renard fading. He glanced at Renard’s wife and caught a hint of what seemed to be resignation and embarrassment in her expression. She doesn’t think much ofit as a spectator sport, either—perhaps she’s in the market for a little diversion. He moved quickly to ensure getting a seat next to Silvia at the table.

“I have another appointment this morning, so let’s get on with what we have to do,” Renard said to Montane. “I’m ready to give you four million monits for the ship as she sits. Your team can walk out and mine will walk in, and you won’t even have to turn off the lights.”

“Rick, I have already told you that the Tara isn’t for sale,” Montane replied. He was impressively cool, Nicklin thought, for someone who was refusing to become a millionaire.

“If you’re planning to hold on, waiting for the price to go up, you’re making a mistake.” Renard was equally emotionless. “An interstellar ramjet isn’t really suitable for interportal work, so the offer is a generous one.”

“Perhaps, but I’m not interested.”

“It won’t be all that long before the first of the new short-range jobs start coming off the line—and when that happens the value of your old tub will drop.”

Montane sighed. “I hate to appear discourteous, Rick, but you’re not the only person whose diary is full- so let’s not waste each other’s time. The Tara is not for sale. All right?”

“I can only offer you the jam—I can’t force you to eat it.” Unperturbed, Renard leaned back in his seat, drawing more creaks from it.

“Now that we’ve got my dietary preferences out of the way,” Montane said drily, “what was the other proposal you had in mind?”

“How many target stars have you selected?”

“Eight within a thousand light years.”

“Good prospects?”

“I’m assured that they are very good.” Montane glanced expectantly at Scott Hepworth.

“Omnirad analyses from the Garamond Institute show that three of them have an eighty per cent probability of yielding an Earth-type planet,” Hepworth said in his grandest tones.

Renard raised his eyebrows, looking unexpectedly boyish in his surprise. “That’s better than you would have got back home, isn’t it?”

Nicklin, who had been taking heady draughts of Silvia’s perfume, renewed his interest in the conversation as he realised that “back home” meant a different universe. The use of the phrase showed that Renard, hard-headed and materialistic as they come, had accepted the Big Jump hypothesis. Furthermore, he evidently saw the ethereal never-never land of the astrophysicists and cosmologists as a place where it was possible to turn a profit.

“It’s a lot better,” Hepworth said. “Worlds for the picking, you might say.”

Renard addressed Montane again. “We can still do a deal. Let rne put two or three scientific people on the ship, plus a spare flight crew to bring it back when you have finished with it—and you can still have the four million.”

Corey, this is the proverbial offer you can’t refuse, Nicklin thought, and almost winced as he saw Montane’s patient smile of rejection.

“My conscience wouldn’t allow me to go along with that,” Montane said. “It would mean denying places to some of my own people. You must realise that I’m answerable to God in this matter.”

“All right, I tell you what we’ll do,” Renard said. “When the ship gets back here I’ll lease it out to you for a second round trip. That way you’ll be saving two lots of souls.”

Montane’s smile became more patient, more condescending. “The Tara will make one flight, and only one flight. There will be no time for another. No second chance.”

“Who told you that?”

“God.”

“God?” The sheer incredulity in Renard’s voice betrayed the first tiny crack in his composure.

Nicklin turned away in amusement—Renard probably ate hard-nosed business tycoons for breakfast, but he had never dealt with a deranged preacher whose chief adviser was a dead woman in a box. He discovered that Renard’s wife was looking directly at him.

“Could I trouble someone for a hot drink?” she whispered.

“Coffee?”

“I could whip up some tea,” he replied, also whispering, pleased by the unexpected opportunity to separate her from the others.

“Tea would be fine.”

“I’ll join you in a cup.” He flicked a glance towards Montane and Renard as he left his seat. “This could go on a long time.”

“I was beginning to get that impression.” She stood up and walked with him to the cupboard at the far end of the office where the meagre refreshment supply was kept. This is good, Nicklin told himself. Things are going well, but Scott was right in what he said. The trick is not to be too direct. Show an interest in the woman as a rounded human being (and this one certainly qualifies on that score). Ask her about her beliefs and hobbies and dreams, and all that stuff…

As he was spooning tea out of Montane’s antique caddy he tilted his head, frowned a little and said, “I think I’ve seen you on television. Was your name London?”

“It still is,” Silvia replied. “I kept my previous name when I married Rick.”

“I thought I was right.”

“Perhaps you picked up some of the transmissions from Portal 36 on the day when… when everything changed.” Something seemed to happen in Silvia’s brown eyes as she spoke. It was a swift and fleeting change, the wind brushing the surface of a deep lake, but it was enough to persuade Nicklin that the events at Portal 36 should be left alone.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but I’m thinking more of… Was it called the Anima Mundi Foundation?”

“Yes!” Silvia’s face was animated, suddenly made younger. “Are you interested in Karal London’s work?”

Nicklin spurred his memory and it did not fail him. “On the survival of the personality after physical death? Fascinating subject.”

“It’s the most important subject of all. Have you attended any of the Foundation’s seminars or seen any of the publications?”

“No—I’ve been out in the sticks for the last year or so, and I didn’t have much chance to…”

Silvia touched his arm. “But you’re familiar with the basics of mindon science?”

“I never quite got to grips with it,” Nicklin said cautiously as he set out two cups.

“But it’s all so beautifully simple!” Silvia continued, still keeping her voice low, but speaking with a fervent rapidity. “The mindon is a class of particle which was postulated a long time ago, but its existence wasn’t finally proved until last year. Thanks to Karal’s work we now know that mind is a universal property of matter, and that even elementary particles are endowed with it to some degree…”

Nicklin went on preparing the tea, nodding occasionally and awaiting his chance to divert Silvia on to more personal matters. Having led off with claims he had trouble accepting, she progressed—in tones of utter conviction—to something called “mental space” in which there existed mindon duplicates of human brains.

He found himself growing bemused under the bombardment of mystical ideas expressed in the jargon of nuclear physics, and still the right conversational opening failed to arrive. What in hell is going wrong with everybody today? he wondered as he filled the two cups. Ami the only person in the whole world who is still anchored in reality?

“…shows that a personality is a structure of mental entities, existing in mental space, and therefore it survives destruction of the brain even though it required the brain’s complex physical organisation in order to develop.” Silvia eyed him intently. “You can see that, can’t you?”

Nicklin moved her cup a centimetre closer to her. “Do you take milk?”

She ignored the tea, her gaze hunting across his face. “I really would like to hear what you think.”

“I think the whole concept is very impressive,” he said. His original dreams of hotel bedroom afternoons with Silvia were fading by the minute, and a disagreement at this stage could put paid to them altogether.

“Impressive.” Silvia nodded to show her awareness of the word’s ambivalence. “All right—what bothers you most?”

Amazed by how far the conversation had deviated from the one he had visualised, Nicklin said, “I guess it was all that stuff about how a personality is created. If, as you say, all matter has a mindon component—and all that’s needed for a personality to be conjured into existence is physical complexity—then you don’t need to bring in any biological—”

“Jim!” Corey Montane’s intrusive voice was thorned with impatience. “Bring your tea to the table, will you?”

Nicklin put on a rueful expression. “I have to slide over there and do some work—but I’d like to go on with this.”

“I’d like that, too,” Silvia said. “We can talk some more after the meeting.”

He smiled, keeping his eyes on hers. “That’s not what I meant.”

Her expression remained unchanged for a moment, and he realised she had plunged so deeply into her special realm of metaphysics that she was having genuine difficulty in getting back to the mundane world. But when it came her reaction was unequivocal.

“You said you had to slide back to your work—so why don’t you do that?” She turned away from him to pick up her teacup.

Nicklin was unwilling to be dismissed so easily. “I was only checking. No harm in checking.”

“Do people like you never get bored with themselves?”

“I could ask you the same question,” he said pleasantly as he moved away to rejoin the group at the table. He found that events had moved quickly during his absence. Renard had apparently shelved the idea of acquiring the Tara, and had assumed the role of broker for every type of component.

“I understand from Corey,” he said, “that you’re in the market for a couple of dozen 5M decks.”

“That’s about right.” Nicklin was careful not to show any enthusiasm. “We’re thinking of putting in perhaps another twenty-five.”

“I’ve got them.”

“What price?”

“Oh…” Renard closed his eyes for a second, pretending to make a calculation. “Let’s say thirty-thousand. Monits, that is—not orbs.”

Nicklin ignored the implication that he was a country boy and unaccustomed to global currency. The price was much less than he had expected from a business shark like Renard, and he began to look around for a catch.

“What condition are they in?”

“Unused,” Renard said comfortably. “They’re pretty old, of course, but unused. Most of them are still in the plastic skins.”

Nicklin saw Montane and Voorsanger exchange congratulatory glances, and his conviction that something was wrong with Renard’s offer grew stronger. He went over the figures again in his mind, and suddenly he understood the cat-and-mouse game that Renard was playing. The bastard! he thought with reluctant admiration. He’s even more of a shit than I gave him credit for!

“Well, Rick,” Montane said, “on that basis I believe we can go ahead and—”

“Before you go too far,” Nicklin cut in, “ask Mr Renard if thirty-thousand is the unit price.”

Montane frowned at him, then gaped at Renard. “But that would make it… three-quarters of a million for twenty-five old decks!”

“We’re in what’s commonly referred to as a sellers’ market,” Renard said, his lips twitching in amusement.

Nicklin smiled to let Renard see that he too had enjoyed the bit of fun. “All the same, Rick,” he said, “don’t you think it’s going just a teensy-weensy bit far to try selling old decks for three times the price of new ones?”

“Their value has escalated. Most of the new decks disappeared when the exterior stockyards vanished, and my associates have bought up any that were left sitting around the land-docks.”

“In that case I’ll use older ones,” Montane said doggedly, staring down at his desk.

“We’ve got most of those, too.” Renard slowly shook his head, as though in commiseration. “Interportal trade must be restored as quickly as possible, you see, for the good of society. We have to get those ships out there as soon as we can, even if it means taking short-cuts in the manufacture.”

“In that case,” Montane said, riging to his feet, “I’ll use the old decks you rejected or missed. I’ll dig them out of the ground in scrapyards, if necessary, and I’ll glue them together with spit.” His voice had developed a kind of magisterial power. “No human agency will stand in the way of the Tara being completed—and I promise you that in the name of God.”

“You’ll need all the help He can give you to get flight certification,” Renard murmured.

Montane stared at him in loathing. “Why don’t you—? Why don’t you—?”

“Allow me,” Nicklin came in, turning to give Renard a contented smile. “Corey is a man of the cloth and that makes it difficult for him to express certain sentiments—but it’s my guess that he wants you to fuck off.”

The mocking gleam in Renard’s eyes abruptly faded and he turned back to Montane. “You should choose your colleagues with a bit more discretion.”

“My colleague’s language has grown increasingly vile ever since I met him,” Montane said. “It’s something I usually deplore—but not on this occasion.”

“I’ve wasted too much time here as it is,” Renard said, getting up from his seat. He beckoned to Silvia, who had already set her teacup down, and they walked in silence to the exit.

Nicklin continued gazing wistfully after Silvia until the door had slid shut behind her. “It’s the wife I always feel sorry for.”

“I noticed you feeling sorry for her,” Hepworth said in jovial reproof. “You were trying it on, weren’t you?”

“That woman deserves something better out of life than Rick Renard.”

Hepworth chuckled. “And obviously you didn’t measure up.”

“Do we have to put up with this kind of talk?” Voorsanger said to Montane, his elongated face registering disgust. “It seems to me that things have taken a bad enough turn without our having to listen to smut.”

“Ropp is quite right.” Montane directed a sombre stare at Nicklin and Hepworth.

“I thought we dealt with Mr Renard rather well,” Nicklin said. “You in particular, chief. I was quite proud of you at the end.” He was still speaking in a flippant manner, and it was only after the words were out that he realised he actually meant them. Montane, crazy or not, had stood up for his principles and beliefs against a rich and powerful opponent.

“The fact is,” Montane replied quietly, “that completing the Tara is going to take a lot longer than we expected—and I have a feeling there may not be enough time.”

Chapter 15

Obtaining a new job had proved much easier than Nicklin had expected.

Yip & Wrigley was a new company which had been formed to enter the booming market in medium-sized interportal freighters, and—unusually—had decided to locate its manufacturing facility in Beachhead. Traditionally, Orbitsville had relied on Earth for spaceship production. It had only a few yards with manufacturing capability, and they were sited in Dalton, the great industrial conurbation at P12. Beachhead had always been a spaceport, with limited repair and maintenance facilities, and as a consequence had no pool of the kind of expertise Yip & Wrigley needed.

Tommy Yip, the company’s president, had at first been concerned over Nicklin’s lack of formal engineering qualifications, and then—as a fellow machine-lover—had been impressed by his practical skills and computer-like ability to carry hundreds of component specifications in his memory. As a consequence, Nicklin had been offered a senior position in engineering management—title and responsibilities yet to be defined—and was expected to take it up as soon as he had disengaged from Corey Montane.

He had mixed feelings as he entered the portal complex on foot and saw the massive triple hull of the Tara. It was a fresh, breezy morning in early spring and the ship’s skin, now immaculate, was gleaming with the coppery lustre which was peculiar to electron-sated metals. The rakish, crimson-and-white shape of the pinnace was in place underneath the nose section, and the Tara gave the impression of being ready to go among the stars.

It was difficult for Nicklin to accept that more than two years had passed since the ship, moribund and begrimed, had been hauled into place at the rim of the portal. He had laboured unceasingly during that time, refusing even the shortest vacations, surrendering much that made up normal existence to his private obsession. In many respects he had been like a general waging a bitter campaign against enemies who continually changed their positions and tactics.

Major structural elements—such as diaphragm decks and bulkheads—had been only part of his remit. There had been the thousands of minor components, ranging from stair treads and handrails to storage racks; and the multitudinous systems relating to everything from ventilation to waste disposal. A starship was a machine for keeping hundreds of human beings alive in a hostile environment, and the complexities of that machine were almost endless.

At every stage of procuration the work had been hampered by the unseen forces of Renard’s consortium. At the blackest times Nicklin had felt a paranoid certainty that Renard was personally and vindictively blocking his progress, but on the whole he had accepted that the Tara was an incidental casualty of the consortium’s activities. The real opponent was the immutable law of supply and demand, with some backing from an ancient foe which had been known to engineers since the dawn of technology, and which they had dubbed Murphy’s Law.

Nicklin had often been obliged to accept parts intended for a slightly different mark of vessel, and which should have been very easily adapted. But in many cases, as though malign and leering gremlins were responsible, the chance shaping of a flange or the placing of a single stud had been all that was required to trigger vast series of time-consuming modifications. The mission’s little army of workers had at times been required to operate a three-shift system, and under Nicklin’s close supervision had developed an impressive range of manual skills.

Scott Hepworth had faced parallel difficulties with the Tara’s drive machinery, on occasion having to employ specialists from outside, but in the end—after more than two years of dedicated effort—the work had been completed.

The bird is ready to fly, Nicklin thought as he walked in the prism of shade cast by his sun-hat. The only trouble is that nobody is going to open the cage.

Reaching the main ramp leading up to the ship’s passenger cylinder, he paused as he saw Lan Huertas descending to ground level. Huertas, the mission’s solitary black man, had been the first person to speak to Nicklin on the fateful day of his induction in Orangefield. He was also the one, making no bones about his personal dislike, who now spoke to him least.

“Good morning, my old buddy, my old chum!” Nicklin spoke cheerfully, following his policy of irritating Huertas with a show of effusive friendliness. “How are you this morning?”

“Okay,” Huertas muttered, attempting to slide past.

“I’m really glad to hear that,” Nicklin said. “Tell me, my old cobber, is Corey in the ship?”

“Hotel.”

“I’m indebted to you.” Nicklin gave Huertas a comradely punch on the shoulder and turned away in the direction of the Firstfooter Hotel. The Firstfooter, having depended almost entirely on spaceport traffic, had been in serious financial trouble since the Big Jump, and its management had been happy to give special concessions on the small amount of business Montane brought its way. It accommodated a few families of his pilgrims, mostly from outlying parts of the Pi region, who had come to Beachhead without waiting to be given a departure date.

Nicklin had seen them wandering around Garamond Park in a group, the children delighting in the unprecedented holiday, the parents instinctively banding together to fend off their sense of belonging nowhere. He saw them as pathetic figures who had renounced their stake in one world and would remain in a limbo of irrelevance until they reached another. He felt no concern for the adults, on the grounds that anybody who was so crazy as to give everything away because of a religious fad deserved little sympathy. You never should beggar yourself unless it’s for a really important and sensible reason—such as a snake-hipped woman telling you you’re a good lay. But it was taking the joke a bit far, even for the Great Prankster himself, when the lives of small children were so profoundly distorted.

Nicklin sometimes wondered if Montane was totally immune to experiencing doubt on that issue. Hurling them off into the void towards some putative speck of dirt brought quite a new meaning to the phrase “suffer the little children”. Their best hope for the future lay in the fact that the Tara had so little chance of ever setting out for New Eden—the Certification Wars, as Nicklin thought of them, were seeing to that.

Warned of the difficulties of getting operational clearance, Montane had carried out an astute move in making all his disciples into shareholders in a registered company. Legally they were now part-owners of the Tara, which meant that it had become a private rather than a public transport and therefore was subject to less rigorous controls. Such niceties seemed to be cutting little ice with the Space Transport Department inspectors, however.

Nicklin had seen Metagov officials arrive and depart in droves, most with the fixed prim expressions of bureaucrats who regarded the resurrected ship as a threat to their entire mode of existence. Their philosophy, as he had explained it to an uncomprehending Montane and Voorsanger, was that a bolt hole which had been drilled in situ by one worker was not as good as a bolt hole drilled by another worker in a properly licensed factory.

There were two ways out of the impasse, he had added. One was to resort to extensive bribery, at the highest and lowest levels; the other was to burn through the STD locks on the Tara’s slideway and drop the ship through the aperture in the dead of night. Montane had treated both suggestions as bad jokes, and apparently was waiting for a divine intervention to enable him to set sail with his band of pilgrim fathers and pilgrim mothers-to-be.

This is definitely the right time to go, Nicklin thought as he walked away from the ship. I’ve done all that I set out to do—with the notable exception of Danea—and I’m ready for what the Gaseous Vertebrate has to offer next.

He came out of the port authority land through a deserted cargo entrance and crossed Lindstrom Boulevard. The crystal pyramid of the Firstfooter was on his right, its sloping aspects mirroring the pale blue archways of the Orbitsville sky. He had just turned in the direction of the hotel when he saw a tall young woman walking towards him. She was wearing a lime sun-hat and matching shorts-and-halter outfit which complemented her blonde hair and tanned skin. The overall effect was of confident, graceful good looks, but what drew Nicklin’s attention was that she was smiling directly at him. There was also something about her which struck a mnemonic chord in his mind, and for a moment he wondered if she could be one of the many young prostitutes he had dallied with in the past two years.

“Jim!” she called out. “I was just coming to find you!”

He stared at her perfect, small-chinned face as she drew close and it was the look of recognition in her eyes which completed his own memories. “Zindee! Zindee White!”

She came to him with open arms and clung to him as they kissed. Even in the midst of his pleasurable surprise, he was aware of the pressure of her compact breasts and that she was kissing him full on the mouth, expertly and generously. This is good, he thought, as good as I’ve ever known it to be…

“Let me look at you,” he said as they ended the embrace. “Why, the last time I saw you you were a little girl!”

He had often heard adults use exactly the—same words when confronted by a young person who had been transformed in a few years, but he was quite unable to improve on the formula. Biological magic had been at work on Zindee, and he could only stand in awe of the outcome. She was still the child he had known, but that component of her was overwhelmed by the sheer physical presence of a beautiful woman.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “What age are you now?”

“Seventeen.”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe this! Zindee White!”

“You never wrote to me” she said reproachfully.

“I know, and I’m sorry. I didn’t forget about you, but things have been happening.”

“I heard about them. In any case, I couldn’t have forgotten about you.” She gave him an oddly shy smile and fingered a small bronze disk which was on a chain at her throat. He had taken it to be a medallion, but on closer inspection saw that it was an ancient coin.

“What are you doing in this part of the world?” he said.

“Family visit to the big smoke.” She took her hand away from the coin for an instant looking saddened, and it occurred to him that either of her parents might have come to Beachhead to attend one of the large medical institutes.

“How are Cham and Nora these days?” he said.

“They’re fine. We checked in at the Firstfooter about an hour ago, and the information centre flashed me where to find you.” She looked beyond him towards the port area. “I was hoping to get there before you left.”

“In other words, you only want me for my spaceship.”

Zindee half-closed her eyes. “I wouldn’t say that—but I’ve never even seen one before.”

“Come on!”

They crossed the boulevard to the port authority gatehouse, where at Nicklin’s request a uniformed guard issued Zindee with a visitor’s pass in the form of a circular silver badge. As they walked arm-in-arm towards the ship, their sun-hats rubbing edges, Zindee explained that she was planning to take a general sciences course at the Denise Serra Memorial in East Beachhead, perhaps as a prelude to majoring in entomology. Her parents had come with her to combine a preliminary look at the college with a vacation.

“That’s great news,” Nicklin said. “If you’re going to be living in Beachhead for two or three years we’ll be able to see each other regularly.”

Zindee’s step faltered. “But… Aren’t you going away?”

Her meaning eluded him for a moment, then he gave a surprised laugh. “Christ, no! Nothing, but nothing, would induce me to risk my valuable little ass on a trip to nowhere—especially with that bunch of heliumheads.”

“I hadn’t realised,” Zindee said. “I thought you and—”

“Danea? The Bitch in Black? That never came to anything—not that it was anything to start off with.”

“You sound bitter, Jim.”

“Why should I be bitter? She got me out of Orangefield, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m a new man now, Zindee, my girl.”

“I see.”

Zindee began to bring him up to date on events and local characters in Orangefield, but in the main her words were passing him by. The distraction was the nearness of her lithe young body, the erotic effect of which was enhanced by memories of the special relationship which had long existed between them. Making love to Zindee would be quite unlike the casual coupling with strangers, the sexual diet to which he had never become fully accustomed. It would be warm, profoundly exciting and—above all—fulfilling. It was precisely what he needed at this turning point in his life, and it was a fabulous piece of good fortune that she had materialised out of the past at the perfect moment. Truly, the Gaseous Vertebrate was in a good mood.

“So that’s what a starship looks like,” Zindee breathed. “It’s beautiful!”

“It’s not bad,” Nicklin agreed, running his gaze over the lustrous hull of the Tara, which was coming into view from behind a docks office building. “You should have seen the mess it was in a couple of years ago.”

“And there’s the portal itself! I can’t wait to have my first look at the stars.”

“They’re nothing to get worked up about,” he said. “Would you like to have a look around inside the ship?”

“Can I?” Zindee hugged his arm excitedly.

“You bet!” Again feeling the pressure of her breasts, he wondered if she knew what she was doing, then decided she knew exactly the effect the intimate contact would have. Everything about her told him she was sexually active, and now it was up to him to get things moving. He was twice her age, which might create a problem with the straight-laced Cham and Nora, but there were ways around such difficulties—especially for an old and trusted friend of the family. The idea that he might be able to lie down with the golden child-woman later that same day caused a slow blood-pounding throughout his body.

But don’t rush your fences, he told himself. It all has to happen naturally. Slowly, naturally and inevitably…

“Can we go in right now?” Zindee said.

“Any time you…” Nicklin paused as he noticed a car with STD markings waiting near the foot of the main ramp. Scott Hepworth was standing beside it, talking to three men who looked like Metagov officials. The agitated movements of Hepworth’s arms made it apparent that he was involved in some kind of argument. He turned abruptly and strode up the ramp, followed by the officials, and the four men disappeared into the dark rectangle of the main hatch.

“We’d better wait here for a few minutes,” Nicklin said. “It’s going to be a bit crowded inside for a while.”

“Even in such a big ship?”

“Now that the fitting-out is finished there’s only one gangplank to get around on. Besides, there’s likely to be a lot of vile language floating about—not the sort of thing for an innocent maiden’s ears.”

Zindee stepped back from Nicklin and tilted her sun-hat, giving him a breathtaking smile. “Who says I’m innocent? Or even a maiden?”

Tonight, he vowed, resisting the urge to kiss her again. It has to be tonight.

“Zindee,” he said, “I doubt if even a sophisticate like you is ready for Scott Hepworth.”

“Why not?”

“He drinks too much, he eats too much, he’s a slob, he tells lies, he wastes all his money, he has a filthy mind—in short, he has all the qualities I expect of a friend.”

Zindee laughed. “What else do you like about him?”

Encouraged by her response, and knowing he had sufficient Hepworth anecdotes to pass a full hour if necessary, Nicklin described how and why the physicist had been thrown out of the Garamond Institute. “Any idiot can see the world in a grain of sand,” he concluded, “but only Scott Hepworth could see another universe in a lump of metal.”

Unexpectedly, Zindee looked thoughtful. “Is he supposed to be your scientific adviser?”

“We don’t go in for formal titles, but… yes. Sort of. He’s mainly concerned with the engines.”

A scornful expression appeared on Zindee’s face, making her look like the child Nicklin remembered. “I hope he knows more about engines than he does about physics.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jim, even I know that the cobalt 60 experiment wouldn’t show that Orbitsville had become part of an anti-matter time-reversed universe. Have you never heard of the CPT rule?”

Nicklin blinked. “Should I have?”

“Perhaps not,” Zindee said, “but it states that where everything is reversed there’s no way to detect the change. It also states that your friend made a balls of setting up his equipment.”

“But he swears he had it right,” Nicklin said. “According to Scott he came up with definite proof of the Big Jump.”

“That’s ox droppings, Jim.”

He smiled on hearing one of Zindee’s pet phrases and was reminded of her precocious ability to get things right. “Do you think all this stuff about a big jump is nonsense?”

“I don’t know if it’s nonsense or not. All I’m saying is that no amount of fiddling around with cobalt 60 or any other isotope will produce any evidence, one way or the other.”

Nicklin considered the notion that the restoration work on the Tara’s drive units had been governed by a man who was capable of making basic errors. Or, what was worse, the type of man who refused to acknowledge a mistake once it had been made. It was probably just as well for all concerned that the Metagov inspectorate was proving so stubborn over issuing any spaceworthiness documents for the ship.

“It’s all academic, anyway—the Tara isn’t going anywhere, in spite of all the news stories,” he said, shrugging. “Do you want to walk to the front end and have a better look at the pinnace?”

“Yes, please.” As they went closer to the black lake of the portal the morning breeze whipped Zindee’s flimsy clothing against her body, making her look like a tawny creature from a sexist advertisement. Nicklin became aware that all the men within visual range were staring at her. You can’t have any, folks, he gloated. It’s all mine!

“It must be wonderful to fly in something like that,” she said, holding her sun-hat in place as she gazed up at the sleek aerodynamic form of the pinnace. Suspended in its flying attitude beneath the Tara’s nose section, the little ship was quite close to the rim of the portal and the’imagination could see it straining to glide forward and swoop down into its natural environment.

“The pinnace is worth a fortune by itself these days,” Nicklin said. “If Corey ever gets enough sense to sell up and forget about his loony mission he’ll be a rich man.”

“You don’t think much of him?”

“He’s a bollock-brain.” Nicklin amplified his statement by telling how Montane took his wife’s body everywhere he went and had been overheard conversing with the corpse.

Zindee looked incredulous. “Have you been sniffing something, Jim?”

“It’s the truth! The late Mrs Montane is locked up inside there at this very minute,” Nicklin said, pointing at Montane’s camper which was parked close to the ship. “Corey sleeps in there at night instead of bunking down in the hotel with the rest of us. And he uses the coffin as a tea table.”

Zindee narrowed her eyes at him. “This is one of your stories—light?”

“Wrong! I quit trying to jolly people along years ago. I give them the facts dead straight, and if they don’t like what they hear that’s their problem, not mine.”

“How’s your popularity rating?”

“Everybody around here adores me,” Nicklin said. “Specially this character.” He nodded towards the lumbering figure of Gerl Kingsley, who was approaching from the direction of the First-looter, probably on one of the obscure errands he was always running for Montane. “Mind you, I did save his life.”

Kingsley slowed down as he came near and gave Nicklin the terrible lopsided grin which was a legacy from the day a bullet had passed through his head. His eyes were firmly fixed on Zindee the whole time he was passing.

“I think he likes you as well,” Nicklin commented. “And I can’t say I blame him.” He tried to slip his arm around Zindee’s waist, but she moved out of his reach.

“How did you save his life?” she said.

“Marksmanship.” He related the episode that had taken place in the quietness of the Altamura countryside one morning, in what now seemed a distant summer. The events had rarely surfaced in his mind during the intervening years, and as he spoke he could iilmost believe they were part of someone else’s life. By the time he had finished describing the grim aftermath—his disposal of the remains—the narrative, even to him, had something of the quality of a fevered dream.

“In case you’re thinking that was another Nicklin special,” he mlded, “I can assure you it all happened.”

“I believe you,” Zindee said. Her eyes were scrutinising his face and her expression was oddly intent, like that of a person searching for a valuable which had been lost or stolen.

Suddenly uncomfortable, he gestured towards the ship. “I wish Hepworth would get his backside out of there.”

“I don’t need to go inside.”

“The old sod is bound to come out soon.”

“Perhaps I’ll walk over to the edge of the portal and…”

Zindee let the sentence go as her attention was drawn to a car which was drifting to a halt close by. It was a convertible with the top folded back. In it could be seen Danea Farthing with a man and woman and two children, obviously new arrivals being given their first look at the ship.

“Zindee’s expression changed. “Isn’t that… ?”

“That’s Danea, all right,” Nicklin said. “Lock up the silver.”

“I didn’t realise she had so much style.” Zindee’s voice was appreciative as she took in Danea’s tight-belted peacock blue silks and stetson-like sun-hat. She impulsively raised her hand and waved as Danea glanced in her direction. Nicklin, remembering the natural antagonism that Zindee had displayed towards the older woman on their first meeting, was surprised by the action.

“She has a style all of her own,” he agreed, giving the words a private bitter connotation, as Danea said something to her charges and came towards Zindee. His reaction to the sight of the sleepy-lidded eyes, bruised-looking mouth and hipless easy-striding figure was the same as ever—a blend of hatred and unadulterated, knee-weakening desire. For three years she had eluded, fended off and frustrated him, displaying an adamantine side to her character which no amount of guile could undermine, and which—though it tortured him to admit it—had brought her total victory in their running battle.

“Hello,” Danea said, her gaze solely on Zindee. “Suddenly I’m persuaded that all little girls should be fed on a diet of ice cream sundaes.”

Zindee smiled. “You’ve got a good memory.”

“For faces—I’m not so good on names.”

“This is Zindee,” Nicklin said, putting an arm around Zindee’s shoulders in a proprietary manner which Danea would not be able to miss. “Zindee White.”

“It’s good to see you again, Zindee,” Danea said. “You’re not joining the ship, are you?”

“No.”

“I thought not. We have one family of Whites, but they don’t have any connections with Orangefield.”

“I’m here on holiday with my parents,” Zindee said.

“I wish you were joining us.” Danea gave her a look of rueful warmth. “Time is running out for Orbitsville, you know. Corey Montane has told us that many times, and we all know in our hearts that he is right.”

Nicklin squeezed Zindee’s shoulder. “Corey Montane is the man who thinks he’s married to a sardine.”

“I have to go now,” Danea said, still without looking in Nicklin’s direction. “I wish you well, Zindee.”

“What did you think of that performance?” Nicklin murmured in Zindee’s ear as he watched Danea walk back to the group by her car. “That woman is, without doubt, the silliest and most—” He broke off, shocked, as Zindee pushed him away from her with surprising force.

“Keep off me,” she snapped, her eyes flaring with white coronas of anger. “You’re not making me part of your pathetic little game.”

“Zindee!” He took a step towards her, but was halted by the look of contempt which was distorting and ageing her features. “Look, there’s been a misunderstanding somewhere. Let’s go back to my hotel room and—”

“Goodbye, Jim!” Zindee snatched the bronze coin from her throat, snapping its chain. “And here’s something to remember me by!” She threw the coin to the ground at his feet, turned on her heel und walked quickly away.

“But—” Stupefied, he looked down at the coin and a dam seemed to burst in his memory. I gave her that- on the day I left Orangefield.

He picked the coin up, with the intention of running in pursuit of Zindee, and had taken a single step forward when silently—and with the abruptness of a door being slammed—the entire world turned black.

Nicklin gave an involuntary cry of fear as for one pounding moment he thought he had been struck blind. The blackness seemed so absolute—there were no street lights, no office lights, no vehicle lights, no floodlights surrounding the ship—that it had to come from within, and he was being punished for his transgressions. Then his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and slowly, like a design emerging on a photographic plate, the delicate ribbed pattern of the night sky unfurled itself above him, spanning the horizons.

Nicklin looked up towards the zenith and saw that the sun was hidden behind one of the opaque bands whose progression across the heavens created day and night on Orbitsville.

His fear returned with renewed force as he realised that somehow—and for the first time in humanity’s experience—Orbitsville had leaped from the brilliance of morning into the blackness of midnight.

Chapter 16

“You can see for yourselves that the trap is closing.” Corey Montane’s face was grey and haggard as he addressed the group of about twenty workers who had assembled in the mission’s third-floor office. To Nicklin he seemed dejected and slightly irresolute, just when he needed to rally and inspire his followers.

“You don’t need me to tell you that the Devil is rubbing his hands tonight,” Montane went on. “We must get away from this cursed place very soon, my friends—otherwise it will be too late.”

Nicklin listened to the message, and for the first time since he had known Montane, felt no urge to scoff. The glowing display of the office holoclock, apparently floating in the air near a wall, showed 12.06—but the windows were jet black. In place of the usual midday panorama of sunlit buildings and distant hills there were the stacked, serried and scattered lights of Beachhead City at night.

Nicklin’s body clock was telling him that something had gone terribly wrong with the natural order of things, but even more disturbing was the feeling that vast supernatural forces were at work. A mystical and superstitious element of his character—one he would have sworn did not exist—had been alerted, and it was whispering things he had no wish to hear. He had often tried to visualise the helplessness and despair experienced by someone caught in an earthquake. What must it be like, he had wondered, knowing there is no place to run to when the very ground has become your deadly enemy? Now he no longer had to imagine that sense of bleak futility. Where is there to hide when a great hand parts the curving blue canopy of the sky, displacing night and day, and its owner casts a baleful eye on all that lies below?

“How soon can we go, Corey?” a man called out. Nicklin glanced round and saw that the speaker was the electrician, Jock Craig.

“It has to be as soon as possible,” Montane replied. “I’m going to the Space Transport Department when—” He broke off, looking surprised, as his words were lost in a rebellious outcry from at least half of his audience.

“Nobody cares about certificates at a time like this,” Craig shouted, abandoning the slightly obsequious tone with which he usually addressed the preacher. “We should cut the locks and go right now!”

His words produced a widespread murmur of approval. Montane quelled the sound by the familiar trick of raising both his hands and making a damping movement. The gesture was not as effective as usual, however, and the ensuing silence was less than complete.

“Do I hear you properly, Jock?” Montane said. “Are you proposing that we should leave most of our brethren behind? Don’t forget how many of them are still waiting at home all over Pi.” He pointed at the communication panels, where columns of winking orange lights showed that dozens of callers were waiting to be answered. “What do we say to them? Do we tell them to go to the Devil?”

“It’s better for some to be saved than none at all,” Craig insisted, looking about him for support.

“I think we’re all jumping the gun a little,” Scott Hepworth cut in, booming, projecting his voice as though addressing a much larger audience. “We’ve seen one minor disturbance of the solar cage, and apart from that nothing has changed. Some kind of self-regulating mechanism could have been activated up there, something which routinely balances forces and adjusts the shadow pattern now and then. Don’t forget we’ve been on Orbitsville for only two centuries, and that’s no time at all in astronomical terms.”

Hepworth’s admonitory gaze swept around the assembly. “My advice is that we shouldn’t panic.”

There speaks the voice of cool reason, Nicklin thought. Trouble is that nobody believes a word of it—and that includes me.

“Scott is absolutely right,” Montane said loudly, doing his utmost to reassert his authority. “We will begin calling in every one of our families, starting this very minute, but in the meantime I want…”

His voice faltered—hushed by a silent burst of light—as the daytime world in all its brilliance sprang into view beyond the office windows.

It materialised instantaneously, looking normal and serene and eternal, as though nothing out of the ordinary had ever taken place. Nicklin saw birds wheeling in the sunlit air, and flags stirring gently on the masts above the main passenger terminal. The scene remained pulsing on the eye for several seconds—during which nine the people in the room exchanged stricken, speculative glances with their neighbours—then it vanished into blackness again amidst a chorus of terrified shouts and screams.

Nicklin was one of those who gave an involuntary cry because, on the instant of the new advent of night, he felt the entire floor of the office drop away beneath his feet. He knew at once that the building was collapsing, and that he was about to plunge down into its ruins. Then his eyes confirmed the curious fact that the office, and everything in it, was still firmly in place. Ashen-faced men and women were clutching at the furniture for support, but—astonishingly—the building showed itself to be perfectly intact and undamaged. A moment later the floor resumed its pressure on the soles of his feet.

The sensations normally associated with space flight were alien to Nicklin; he had never even ventured on funfair parabola rides—but his mind was quick to concoct an explanation for what had happened.

“There has been a temporary loss of gravity,” Hepworth shouted above the hubbub, confirming the worst suspicions of all those present. “That’s all it was—a temporary loss of gravity… nothing to become too alarmed about.”

Nicklin gaped at the physicist’s untidy figure, wondering if he had any idea how ridiculous he looked and sounded while trying to pass off the loss of gravity as though it had been a minor occurrence like an interruption to the local electricity supply. Nothing like this had ever happened on Orbitsville before. Even the sudden switching of day into night, terrifying though it had been, had not created the same degree of visceral fear, because light was only light after all, and everybody knew how simple it was to flick it on and off. But gravity was different! You did not fuck around with gravity. Nobody had ever succeeded in tampering with it or modifying it in any way. When gravity vanished every man, woman and child immediately became a learned professor of physics with a deep understanding of the fundamental forces of nature, knowing that where something so basic to existence could go wrong existence itself was in the balance.

As though the Gaseous Vertebrate wanted to endorse and applaud Nicklin’s thought processes, the sunlit world outside the office blazed into being once more, but only for the time it took Nicklin to snatch a breath, then there was night again. The effect was so similar to lightning, or perhaps a thermonuclear flash, that he winced in dread of the appalling detonation which had to follow. Instead there was a profound silence in which came a series of shorter appearances—day, night, day, night, day, night—a calendar month compressed into a dozen stroboscopic seconds. Once or twice during the staccato sequence gravity slackened its bonds, but not so completely as before—then it was all over. Peaceful night reigned outside. The ceiling lights reasserted themselves, shining calmly over the humdrum microcosm of the office and its cheap furniture and all the frightened people who had expected to die.

“My God,” a woman said quietly, “this is the end of the world!”

It would be more correct to say that Orbitsville has become unstable, Nicklin mused. Of course, it comes to the same thing in the end…

Hepworth pounded a table with his fist. “Does anybody know where Megan Fleischer is?”

The mention of the pilot’s name was all the catalyst that was needed to convert apprehension into action. Not much was said, there were few outward signs of mortal fear, but everybody began to move, to busy themselves, and Nicklin knew they shared the same objectives—to warn their relatives and friends, to gather up vital belongings, to get on board the ship as quickly as possible. He knew exactly what was going on inside their heads because, suddenly, he was one of them.

Orbitsville was home for countless millions of humans and for two hundred years it had been a good home. Its mountains and prairies and oceans appeared to have the permanence of old Earth, but there were few of its inhabitants who had not, at one time or another, felt a pang of uneasiness over the fact that the Big O was a bubble. It was the most insubstantial object imaginable—a film of enigmatic material with a circumference of almost a billion kilometres and a thickness of only eight centimetres.

Nicklin’s life had been one of blissful unconcern about such matters. He had insulated himself from them, or had dismissed ihem along with other concepts he found difficulty in handling. Nevertheless, a simple distaste for the idea of living on the inner surface of a bubble was part of his primal subconscious. It was out in the open now. The time bomb had detonated, and he had entered a new mental state in which his actions were governed by the compulsion to get away from Orbitsville before the unimaginable happened.

In that land-locked, self-oriented condition his perceptions of what was going on around him became patchy and flawed, magnifying some events and diminishing others.

At one stage he was very much aware of Montane hovering on the fringes of the action, virtually ignored by most of his subordinates. Montane looked like a man on the verge of collapse. He gave the impression of being bewildered, of not quite believing the evidence of his senses. It occurred to Nicklin that he might never have uccepted in his innermost self that this day would really arrive. Given the choice, he might have gone on and on until he died, making endless preparations to lead the escape from Orbitsville, delaying the actual event for increasingly trivial reasons.

In another disconnected fragment of time Nicklin found that he was standing at the telephone in a smaller office, with no clear idea of why he was there. He stared at the instrument for a few seconds, waiting for his hold on reality to improve, then told it to connect him to the Whites’ room in the Firstfooter Hotel. Almost at once (lham White’s red-gold head appeared at the set’s projection focus. He was wearing the unnaturally polite smile of a man who has just been sentenced to death.

“Jim!” he said. “Jim Nicklin! What’s happening, Jim?”

Nicklin shook his head impatiently “There’s no time to talk about it. Do you want to get out?” “Out?”

“Out of Orbitsville. On the ship. Do you want to go?”

At that moment sunlight washed through the room in which Nicklin was standing, showing that the banded pattern of the sky had shifted again. Cham’s image, transmitted through a kilometre of cable, brightened simultaneously.

“I’m afraid, Jim,” he said, his squirrel-brown eyes wide with shock.

“We’re all afraid, for Christ’s sake,” Nicklin snapped, losing his temper. “That’s why I’m asking you if you want to take off out of here. How about it?”

“Nora and I thought about it more than once. We used to look out for you on television, and I guess that put the idea into our heads, but we never took it seriously enough. We never dreamed it would come to this. We have no tickets or whatever we would need for-”

“The ship will be travelling half-empty,” Nicklin cut in, amazed at Cham’s Montane-like ability to waste time on senseless trivia. “Is Zindee with you?”

Cham glanced to his left. “She’s in the bedroom with her mother.”

“Get them both down to the ship,” Nicklin said urgently. “I’m talking to you as a friend, Cham. Get them down to the ship—and do it right now. I’ll wait for you at the foot of the main ramp. Have you got that?”

Cham nodded unhappily. “What should we pack?”

“Pack! If you wait around to pack anything you’ll end up fucking well dead!” Nicklin shook his fist in Cham’s face and his knuckles went into the image, causing it to swirl like coloured smoke. “Get to the ship right now—and don’t let anybody stop you!”

He turned away from the telephone as the last sentence he had blurted out sank into his own consciousness. Other people would want to scramble on board the Tara in this extreme hour; people who had no connection with the mission; people for whom the enterprise had been nothing more than an extended piece of silly-season journalism—until the Big O’s Day of Judgement had arrived.

Half the population of Beachhead will want to ride, Nicklin told himself. And they won’t take no for an answer…

In another fragment of time’s mosaic he found himself in the ill-ventilated room, across the corridor from the main office, where miscellaneous effects belonging to mission personnel were stored.

Opening his own locker with a thumbprint, he took out the radiation rifle, which had been a useless encumbrance since that far-off morning in Altamura. When the Fugaccia mansion was being vacated he had taken the weapon for no reason other than a feeling that such a dangerous artefact ought not to be left lying around, perhaps for inquisitive children to find. Now it no longer seemed an encumbrance. It looked functional and deadly—qualities which were entirely appropriate to the situation.

He checked the rifle’s power indicators, slung it on his shoulder mid hurried out of the room.

When Nicklin emerged from the office building with the rest of the mission’s staff it was into daylight conditions. The sun had been shining without interruption for more than ten minutes, and the fact that to him it seemed quite a long time was an indication of how much his confidence in the natural order had deteriorated. He moved out from under the building’s broad eaves, looked up at the ky and felt a pang of sick dismay.

All his life the alternating bands of azure and lighter shades of blue—representing day and night regions on the opposite side of Orbitsville—had possessed a geometric regularity and perfection. Now they were wildly distorted, and—the feature which brought a clamminess to Nicklin’s brow—were visibly in motion. For the most part the movement was a slow writhing, but there were several small areas where the stripes narrowed into lines and ran together in seething agitation. Those patches were forming at random in parts of the sky, boiling and shimmering for a brief period before smoothing out and dissolving.

Looking up at them, Nicklin guessed that a similar convergence had caused the frenzied alternauon of light and darkness in the Beachhead region. The shadow play also told him the solar cage was convulsing like an invisible heart in its death spasms. The end of the world is nigh.

Quelling a forceful upheaval in his stomach, he looked towards the ship and saw that about thirty people, many of them spaceport workers, had already clustered around the main ramp. They were not attempting to pass Kingsley and Winnick, who were blocking access to the ramp, but the tension in the air suggested it would not take much to start them surging forward. Glancing in the opposite direction, Nicklin saw that the main gates had been closed. A crowd was forming outside. Some of its members were pressing against the bars and arguing with the uniformed guards, who were nervously pacing within. The sections of Lindstrom Boulevard visible between buildings were thronged with cars.

Corey Montane, looking more assured now that the big decision had been forced upon him, ran towards his camper, accompanied by Nibs Affleck and Lan Huertas. A larger group went towards the ramp, headed by the spindle-legged figure of Voorsanger who, incongruously, was carrying a computer under one arm. Four men, Jock Craig among them, were running to the kiosk which housed the slideway controls. The mountainous bulk of the Tara, reflecting the sun in a coppery glare, provided a towering backdrop to the scene of complex activity.

Nicklin remained where he was, feeling isolated from all that was happening around him, then became aware of shouting from the crowd at the main gate. He looked in that direction and at once saw Danea Farthing ushering men, women and children through the adjoining personnel entrance. Some uniformed guards had moved outside and were clearing a small space by pushing back intruders, but they were in obvious danger of being overwhelmed. As Nicklin watched, a burly man penetrated the line by sheer force. He darted through the entrance and collided with two guards who had just emerged from the gatehouse. They grappled with him and the three began a lurching struggle which drew alarmed cries from women nearby.

Knots of migrants, some of them carrying suitcases, had already separated from the confusion and were hastening towards the ship. The adults’ faces were distraught, but quite a few of the children with them—secure in their innocence—merely looked excited, with eyes for nothing but the gleaming contours of the Tara.

Nicklin ran past them, belatedly remembering that Cham and Nora White had no security passes and therefore would be denied entrance. By the time he reached the gate the struggle between the two spaceport guards and their captive was ending. They had glued the burly man’s wrists together behind him with restraint patches and were bundling him into the gatehouse.

One of them, a fair-skinned heavyweight, frowned at Nicklin. “You shouldn’t be carrying that weapon, mister.”

Nicklin glanced at the sky. “Do you want to run me in?”

“Take your people away, and do it fast” the guard said. “We just gotword that a mob of two or three thousand have come out of town through Garamond Park. They’re tearing holes in our north fence right now and they’ll be on top of you real soon.”

“Thanks,” Nicklin said.

“Don’t thank me—I don’t want to be in the middle of a war, that’s all.”

“Wise man.” Nicklin ran to Danea and grabbed her arm. “I want to take Zindee and her parents. They’ll need badges.”

She gave him a thoughtful stare, took three gold disks from her pocket and handed them over. “There isn’t much time—Megan is already on the ship.”

Nicklin had to think for a moment before remembering that Megan was the pilot. “What about the paying customers?” he said, controlling a new surge of panic. “Many to come?”

Danea glanced at her watch, which was in counting mode. “Four that I know of. They should be here at any sec—” She looked out through the bars of the main gate at the surging crowd. “I see them!”

Nicklin went out through the personnel gate and saw that the hard-pressed guards were already bringing a young man and woman, each carrying a child, into the cleared space. Raising himself on his toes, he scanned the crowd and felt a pang of relief as he picked out Cham White’s coppery hair and anxious face amid the leaven of heads.

“Only three more to come,” he told the nearest guard.

“Friggin’ good job,” the sweating man grunted. “We’re goin’ to go under in a minute.”

Nicklin threw his weight against the wall of bodies. For an instant he was surprised at how readily they parted for him, then he realised that the eyes of those in the forefront were on the rifle. He managed to grasp Cham’s outstretched hand and drag him out of the throng. Nora White and Zindee followed close behind, literally ejected by the human pressure from behind, though not without some resentful pushing and clawing from the individuals they left in their wake. They were wearing identical one-piece green daysuits, and both looked pale and bewildered. Nora’s gaze never left Nicklin’s face, as though it had become a source of wonder to her, but Zindee kept her eyes averted.

“Through there,” Nicklin said, urging Cham and the two women towards the narrow gate.

“Not so fast!” The speaker was a guard with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. “Nobody goes in without a pass.”

“It’s taken care of.” Nicklin handed each of the Whites a gold badge and bundled them into the gateway. The action had a galvanic effect on the crowd. Until that moment some vestige of regard for rules had held them in check, but the sight of three of their number being so arbitrarily favoured drove them forward in resentment. The guards were slammed back against the bars and there was a flurry of vicious in-fighting while they got themselves inside to safety and bolted the personnel gate.

“What are you waiting for?” The sergeant was wiping blood from his mouth as he shouted at Nicklin and Danea. “Get out of here!”

Nicklin ran with the others in the direction of the Tara. The adults were shepherding the children who were too big to be carried. As they neared the ship Nicklin saw that Montane and Kingsley were carrying the pewter oblong of Milly Montane’s coffin up the ramp. Emigrants were clustered at the foot of the long incline while others crowded up it behind the two slow-moving men. Other men, Scott Hepworth among them, were running towards the slideway control kiosk.

Nicklin barely had time to realise that the kiosk was the centre of some kind of disturbance when, without warning, his surroundings were plunged into blackness. There followed another frenzied sequence of alternations between sunlight and darkness. The changes were occurring two or three times a second, turning the entire scene into a vast stage with characters frozen in place by lightning flashes. Cries of alarm were heard as gravity underwent sickening fluctuations, creating the impression that the ground itself was rising and falling.

The stroboscopic nightmare went on for a subjective eternity—perhaps ten seconds—and then, as before, the sanity of continuous sunlight flooded back into the world.

The late arrivers, freed from paralysis, resumed the rush towards the ship, stumbling in their renewed anxiety. One man threw away a suitcase, gathered up his son and ran ahead with him. Danea and Zindee were together, urging children forward, but Nora White kept staring at Nicklin, as though somehow he were the author of all her troubles and the only one she could look to to pin everything right. A strong wind was springing up, probably in response to the contortions of the solar cage, and dust began streaming across the dry concrete.

Nicklin looked in the direction of the kiosk and saw that a confrontation seemed to be taking place between some of the mission’s workers and a man in the grey uniform of a port official. The man was framed in the doorway of the glazed booth, angrily brandishing his arms. Deducing what the argument was about, Nicklin broke away from his group and ran to the kiosk.

Hepworth turned to him as he arrived. “This character—he calls himself the slidemaster, would you believe?—is refusing to run the ship out.”

“Drag him out of there and we’ll do it ourselves.”

“He has a gun and he says he’s prepared to use it, and I think he’s the sort of schmuck that would do just that.” Hepworth’s plump lace was purple with rage and frustration. “Besides, the controls have a coded lock.”

“What about the locks on the slideway itself?”

“We burned them off.”

“Right!” Nicklin said, urislinging his rifle.

The half-dozen mission workers hastily moved out of the way, i rcating an avenue between Nicklin and the port official. He was a lung-faced man in his fifties, with cropped grey hair and a small geometrically exact moustache. His posture was severely upright and square-shouldered, and his uniform meticulously correct in every detail—except for the gun belt, which looked as though it had come from a militaria supplier. Nicklin guessed that it had been languishing in a drawer somewhere, held in reserve in the hope that the appropriate day of crisis would eventually arrive. Just my luck, he thought. A would-be Roman centurion staving off the collapse of civilisation with a book of regulations…

“There’s no time to play games,” he said. “You’re going to start the slide rolling—and you’re going to do it right now.”

The official looked him up and down, contemptuously, before shaking his head. “Nothing will move around here without the proper authorisation.”

“I’ve got the proper authorisation.” Nicklin made a show of activating the rifle. “It’s pointing at your navel.”

“That curious object!” The official placed a hand on the butt of his old-style revolver and smiled to show that he knew something about weaponry. “It isn’t even a good replica.”

“You’re right.” Nicklin elevated the rifle slightly and squeezed the trigger. A blue-white ray stabbed through the roof of the kiosk, explosively vaporising part of the gutter, eaves and plastic rafters, sending a swirl of sparks and smoke down the wind. Even Nicklin, who had good reason to appreciate the power of the weapon, was taken aback by the extent of the damage.

“It’s a fucking awful replica,” he said to the uniformed man, who had cringed back from the flash. “Now, about the slideway…”

“I don’t think you’d be stupid enough to use that thing on me.” The man straightened up and squared his shoulders as he spoke, but there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice.

Nicklin moved one step closer and gave him the full happy hayseed grin, while his eyes promised murder. “I’ve killed other men with this, and I’m fully prepared to blow you into two separate pieces—a top half and a bottom half.”

For a moment there was no sound but that of the wind, then there came distant shouting from the north side of the dock complex. Nicklin glanced towards it, in the direction of the park boundary, and saw moving flecks of colour which signalled the advance of the expected mob. He swung his gaze back to the official and immediately sensed that something had changed in him.

“I try to do what they pay me for, but there’s nothing in my contract about getting myself killed,” the man said with a shrug. “No hard feelings, eh?”

Nicklin blinked at him, giving away nothing. “No feelings of any kind. Are you going to roll the ship and stay alive?”

“I’m going to roll the ship. As soon as you get your party on board, away she goes!”

Hepworth moved close to Nicklin and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Jim, you can see what he’s up to. As soon as we go on board and seal the ship he’s going to run for cover and leave us high and dry. Even if we open the doors again it’ll be too late to—”

“I know what he’s up to,” Nicklin snapped, keeping the rifle steady on the man in the kiosk. “We’re all going on board now. I’ll be walking backwards, so keep a clear space behind me—especially on the ramp. Okay?”

“Okay, Jim.” Hepworth moved away towards the ship and the rest of the mission workers backed off with him.

“All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” Nicklin said to the witichful official. “I could easily pick you off at three kilometres with this imitation replica, so there’s no chance of me missing you inside two or three hundred metres. I’m going on board the ship now, but I’ll have the gun on you every step of the way. Even if you throw yourself down on the floor I’ll destroy your little hut and everything in it, including you. Is that clear?”

“I won’t do anything stupid.” The man glanced towards the north where, at the end of a long row of sheds, it was now possible in< discern individual running figures. “How will—?”

“As soon as I get to the top of the ramp you start the slide moving. Don’t wait for the door to close. As soon as you see me up there—roll the ship.”

The man almost smiled. “That could be dangerous.”

“For you,” Nicklin countered. “That’s when you’ll be in the biggest danger. You might get the idea that I’ll be too busy with the door locks to keep the cross-hairs on you—but I promise you I won’t. The door will stay open until I feel the ship’s nose going down, so—whatever you do—keep the machinery running.”

“I’ll be as nervous as hell by then,” Nicklin added, beginning to back away, “but the gun will still be on you, and you’d better pray there aren’t any power failures. If the slide sticks for even half a second I won’t be able to stop my finger from twitching.”

“Nothing will go wrong if I can help it,” the man said, turning to his control panel.

Keeping the rifle aimed, not daring to glance behind him, Nicklin moved towards the ramp as quickly as he could. He had spent more time than he liked in talking to the slidemaster, but it had been necessary for the man to be very clear about what was expected of him. His peripheral vision told Nicklin that he was being watched by a number of port workers. They had formed an intermittent ring at a discreet distance, nobody caring to move forward in case the crazy man should be tempted to unleash another bolt of lightning.

The expanse of concrete between the kiosk and the Tara had become a sunlit arena, with wind-borne scraps of litter tumbling in the dust. Nicklin had full control of the situation because each person there was thinking as an individual, and had an individual’s fear of being annihilated. But hundreds of new participants were racing towards the scene, and the formless sound which heralded their arrival told him they were thinking as a mob—and a mob knows itself to be collectively immortal. Were a few of its sub-units to blunder up the steps of the slideway control kiosk the Tara would never be able to take flight…

“The ramp is two steps behind you,” Hepworth said.

“Got it.” Nicklin moved on to the slope, thankful for its smooth anti-slip surface, and backed up it. As he gained height he got a more comprehensive view of his surroundings. The entire space port area seemed to be awash in a riptide of humanity. He reached the entrance to the ship and, keeping the blue cross-hairs centred on the slidemaster, carefully stepped backwards to stand on the interior gangplank.

The Tara began to move immediately, and the platform at the head of the ramp slipped away to his right.

“The door hydraulics are on full pressure, Jim.” Hepworth was hunkered down by the control panel. “Give the word when you want to close up.”

“We have to wait till the ship actually dips its nose,” Nicklin replied, while one part of his mind shrieked in disbelief at what was happening. “Our friend in the glass box knuckled under too easily He isn’t finished with us yet.”

“But it takes time for the door to close. If we drop through the diaphragm field while it’s still open—”

“Don’t touch that button till I tell you!” Nicklin made his voice hard, concealing the agonies of suspense and apprehension inspired in him by the ship’s almost imperceptible progress towards the rim of the aperture. The leaders of the crowd advancing from the park reached the dockside while he was speaking. Some of them came sprinting towards the ship, punching the air in their frustration, but others were surging around the kiosk.

Don’t go up the steps, Nicklin prayed, his brow prickling with cold sweat. Please don’t force me to kill you.

Far below him the slideway was squealing as its rollers pulverised a two-year accumulation of debris, material which would have been swept out before a routine launch. New fears invaded his mind. What if the debris contained a piece of scrap metal large enough to mm the slide? What if some of the protesters below had got the same idea and were already hurling scaffold tubes into the exposed mechanisms?

He ceased breathing as a pool of blackness began spreading in the lower half of his field of vision. That meant he was now moving out over the portal and, as the door was close to the centre of the ship, the whole ponderous structure should be on the point of tilting downwards. His heartbeats became internal hammer blows as the scene projected by the rifle’s smartscope began a slow rotation.

“I’m closing her up, Jim,” Hepworth said.

“No!” That’s what the centurion is waiting for. “Leave the door alone!”

“We can’t wait!”

The sunlit universe outside tilted further. Nicklin braced himself against the door coaming, keeping his aim. There came a loud whining sound from nearby hydraulic pumps and the door began to swing shut.

“Sorry, Jim—it had to be done.”

This is when it happens, Nicklin thought, keeping his eye on the slidemaster through the narowing aperture. The door was closing quickly, aided by the angle of tilt, shutting off Nicklin’s view of the world. He saw the man make a sudden movement and in the next instant the grinding squeal of the slideway stopped.

“You bastard,” Nicklin breathed, his finger tightening on the rifle’s trigger. Little more than a second remained in which to fire, but that was plenty of time for the act of retribution, for the games player to make his final score. He sent the necessary neural command—the execution order—to his finger, but there was no response. The slim rectangle of brilliance shrank into a line and vanished. The door bedded into the hull with a clunk and automatic bolts ran their radial courses into the surrounding structure.

What happened to me? Nicklin thought in wonderment. The centurion was a dead man—but I gave him back his life!

A moment later he had to let go of the rifle and grab hold of a stanchion to avoid sliding off the gangplanks, then it came to him that the ship was still rotating. And almost at once the balm of weightlessness flooded through his body.

The Tara had taken flight.

Chapter 17

Nicklin remained clinging to the gangplank railing while he adjusted to the idea that he—Jim Nicklin!—had become a space traveller. There was no physical evidence of what was happening to the ship, but in his mind’s eye he could see the Tara—having wallowed down through the Beachhead portal—drifting out and away from the Orbitsville shell with what little momentum it had. It was quite likely that the ship was slowly tumbling, presenting its pilot with control problems and delaying the moment when the drivers could be switched on.

The only way of getting hard information was from the astrogation screens, and as soon as the thought came to mind Nicklin felt a compulsion to go to the control deck without delay. A spectacular event was taking place, and here in the midship airlock he was blind to it. He looked about him, preparing for the small adventure of flying to the inner door, and encountered Hepworth’s scandalised gaze.

“He stopped the rollers!” Hepworth said hoarsely. “The swine nearly stopped us getting away, Jim. If the ship had settled backwards we’d have been stuck there for ever.”

But that was in our previous existence, Nicklin thought, wondering how Hepworth could still concern himself with the matter. “He was sticking to his post.”

“You should have stuck him to his post. You should have melted the bastard, Jim.”

“It’s all over. Do you want to go up front and find out what’s happening?”

Without waiting for a reply, Nicklin slung the rifle on his shoulder and launched himself towards the airlock’s inner door, feeling rather like a swimmer entrusting himself to invisible waters. He caught a handrail at the door’s edge and, gratified at how natural the movement felt, swung himself around it and on to the broad ladder which ran the length of the passenger cylinder.

It was only then that he became fully aware of the state of near-bedlam which existed throughout the serried decks. The gangplanks, which ran parallel to the ladder, had been crowded with people when the Tara made its ungainly dive into space. Now, suddenly disoriented and deprived of weight, they were in frantic pursuit of safer resting places. Some were clinging to the ladder, while others—with much shouting and waving of limbs—ventured towards targets between decks. Children seemed to be crying on every level, and the confusion was made greater by items of baggage and personal effects which drifted randomly in the cramped and cluttered perspectives of the companionway.

Nicklin went towards the prow of the ship with effortless speed, his progress aided by the fact that the engineered environment, so bewildering to others, was totally familiar to him. He knew every cleat, gusset plate and fastener so well that he could have located himself simply by remembering the irregularities in certain welds. He had negotiated his way past six decks when he became aware of a faint gravitational drag and realised that the ship’s ion drive had been activated. Almost at once there was a decrease in the ambient noise level as the Tara’s passengers found a degree of reassurance in the behaviour of everything around them.

The upper decks were quieter, the living space having been allocated to mission workers, many of whom had been left behind in Beachhead. On nearing 3 Deck, two below the control room, Nicklin heard Montane’s voice just above. He stepped off the ladder beside the circular hatch which led to the pinnace. That level was partly taken up by stores associated with the pinnace, and therefore had only two accommodation suites—one for Montane, the other for Voorsanger.

Montane and Nibs Affleck were standing at Voorsanger’s door, steadying themselves in the weak gravity by gripping the frame. From inside the room there came a dry choking sound. Nicklin’s first thought was that Voorsanger was being sick, then he realised the man was sobbing. The notion of the arid and stiff-necked accountant giving vent to tears was almost as strange to Nicklin as any event of the past hour.

“What’s the matter?” he said to Montane.

Ignoring the question, Montane turned on him with a look of outrage. “Is this your doing? The launch! Was it you?”

“I didn’t have much choice.”

“Choice! Who are you to talk about choice?” Montane’s lips were quivering with anger. “Have you any idea what you’ve done? Dozens of families were left behind! Ropp’s wife has been left behind!”

“That’s too bad,” Nicklin said, “but there was absolutely nothing I—”

“We can’t go on with this,” Montane cut in. “We have to go back.”

“Back! We can’t go back, Corey—we almost had the ship taken off us as it was.”

“Jim is right,” Scott Hepworth said, corning into view on the ladder.

“You!” Montane pointed at him with a trembling finger. “You’re as bad as he is—you’re both in this together.”

“You’ve got to calm down, Corey,” Nicklin said. “If we go back now and cradle the ship we’ll lose it for sure. The mob—”

“The Lord will confound my enemies.” Montane threw himself at the ladder and went up it towards the control deck with surprising agility. Affleck, who seemed to have taken on the role of Montane’s protector, gave the others a reproachful look and followed close behind him.

“We’d better go after them,” Nicklin said to Hepworth.

“You can’t use the rifle. It would probably vent the pressure hull.”

“I’ve no intention of using it,” Nicklin said, impatient with Hepworth’s new preoccupation with death-dealing. “Besides, this is Corey’s show. If he wants to take the ship back nobody has any right to stop him—and I suppose we might be able to keep everything under control back there for a few hours.”

Hepworth sniffed. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

“That’s why we’ve got to talk some sense into the man.” Nicklin got back on to the ladder and went up it at speed, doing most of the work with his hands. When he reached the control deck Montane was already standing beside Megan Fleischer, who was in the centre seat of the five which faced the master view screen. It was being fed by an aft-facing camera and the display on it had the effect of distracting Nicklin from his immediate purpose.

At the bottom edge were two copper-glowing segments, equally spaced, which represented the Tara’s drive cylinders as seen from a point at the rear of the passenger cylinder. They failed to hold the eye because most of the screen was taken up by the huge, sky-blue circle, with the Orbitsville sun close to its centre, which was the image of the Beachhead portal. Ribbons of a lighter blue, shifting like moire patterns, formed a background for streamers of milky cloud and the condensation trail of a lonely aircraft. The rest of the screen, dramatising a simple geometric design, was filled by the utter blackness of the Orbitsville shell.

It’s really happening, Nicklin thought, eyes and mind brimming. I’m in a spaceship—and it’s leaving the world behind…

“…hope you realise that it’s impossible for any ship to disengage itself from a docking cradle,” Fleischer was saying. “If we go back we won’t be able to get away again unless somebody in the Port Authority gives permission.” She was about fifty and, like many of Montane’s appointees, strictly religious. Her neat, regular features were unadorned by cosmetics and, although she was not required to be in uniform, she favoured dark grey suits which were almost military in style. She had abundant chestnut hair, long and flowing, which to Nicklin’s eye contrasted oddly with the general severity of her appearance.

“They can’t withhold permission,” Montane said. “Not now. There have been too many signs.”

“Corey, you didn’t see what it was like just before we got out,” Nicklin said. “The whole place was—”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Nicklin.” Montane’s voice was hard and his gaze openly hostile.

“I’m giving it to you just the same,” Nicklin replied, noting that Montane had, for the first time, addressed him by his surname. “It would be madness to go back.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? What happened to the great disbeliever? Why aren’t you back in Beachhead, scoffing and sneering, and telling everybody who’ll listen to you that Orbitsville will go on for ever?”

“I…” Nicklin looked away, vanquished by the preacher’s logic and contempt.

“Jim is right in what he says,” Hepworth put in. “If we go back we’ll lose the ship.”

Montane dismissed him with a gesture and spoke directly to the pilot. “I’ve given you your orders—take the ship back to the portal and put it into dock.”

For a moment Fleischer looked as though she was about to protest, then she nodded and turned her attention to the control console before her. She touched several command pads in rapid succession. Hepworth took a step towards her, but his way was immediately blocked by Affleck, whose ravaged face was stiff with the promise of violence.

Bemused, filled with conflicting emotions, Nicklin studied the brilliant blue disk of the portal. He guessed the Tara was some five kilometres out from the surface of Orbitsville. At that range the port’s docking cradles, massively clamped to the rim of the aperture, were visible as a cluster of tiny irregularities in an otherwise perfect circle. He tried to visualise the scenes that would occur in the dock area when it was discovered that the ship was returning, but his imagination balked. Human behaviour was unpredictable at the best of times, and when thousands of people were driven by primaeval terror…

But whatever happens, he told himself, I’ve done with killing.

Almost of its own accord his right hand dropped to the stock of the rifle and ejected the weapon’s power pack. He was slipping the massy little cylinder into his pocket when he became aware of a fundamental change taking place in the geometries of the view screen. The change was so radical, so contrary to all his expectations, that he had to stare at the image for several seconds before accepting its message.

The searingly bright blue disk of the portal was shrinking.

His first thought was that Fleischer had defied Montane by directing maximum power into the ion tubes, dramatically speeding up the ship’s flight away from Orbitsville. Then came the realisation that he was dealing in physical impossibilities—no star drive yet devised could produce the kind of acceleration which would be compatible with what he was seeing. He could feel no gravitational increase at ail, and yet the image of the portal was visibly contracting. The only possible explanation was that the view screen was depicting a real event.

The portal itself was becoming smaller.

All activity in the control room ceased. The power to move or speak, or even to think, was removed from the five watchers as the portal dwindled. In the span of less than a minute the huge circle shrank to the apparent size of an azure planet, a moon, a bright star.

It glimmered briefly, amid a haze of after-images, and then it was gone.

The Orbitsville trap had been sprung.