It was this slow disintegration of the aluminum shells that made them visible—it had often been pointed out that the observer on the ground was looking, not at the actual capsule, but at a local field of vaporized aluminum and ionized hydrogen peroxide gas from the ruptured altitude jets now distributed within half a mile of each of the capsules. Woodward’s, the most recently in orbit, was a barely perceptible point of light. The hulks of the capsules, with their perfectly preserved human cargoes, were continually dissolving, and a wide fan of silver spray opened out in a phantom wake behind Merril and Pokrovski (1998 and 1999), like a double star transforming itself into a nova in the center of a constellation. As the mass of the capsules diminished they sank into a closer orbit around the earth, would soon touch the denser layers of the atmosphere and plummet to the ground.
Bridgman watched the satellites as they moved toward him, his irritation with Travis forgotten. As always, he felt himself moved by the eerie but strangely serene spectacle of the ghostly convoy endlessly circling the dark sea of the midnight sky, the long-dead astronauts converging for the ten-thousandth time upon their brief rendezvous and then setting off upon their lonely flight paths around the perimeter of the ionosphere, the tidal edge of the beachway into space which had reclaimed them.
How Louise Woodward could bear to look up at her husband he had never been able to understand. After her arrival he once invited her to the hotel, remarking that there was an excellent view of the beautiful sunsets, and she had snapped back bitterly: “Beautiful? Can you imagine what it’s like looking up at a sunset when your husband’s spinning around through it in his coffin?”
This reaction had been a common one when the first astronauts had died after failing to make contact with the launching platforms in fixed orbit. When these new stars rose in the west an attempt had been made to shoot them down—there was the unsettling prospect of the skies a thousand years hence, littered with orbiting refuse—but later they were left in this natural graveyard, forming their own monument.
Obscured by the clouds of dust carried up into the air by the sandstorm, the satellites shone with little more than the intensity of second-magnitude stars, winking as the reflected light was interrupted by the lanes of stratocirrus. The wake of diffusing light behind Merril and Pokrovski which usually screened the other capsules seemed to have diminished in size, and he could see both Maiakovski and Brodisnek clearly for the first time in several months. Wondering whether Merril or Pokrovski would be the first to fall from orbit, he looked toward the center of the cross as it passed overhead.
With a sharp intake of breath, he tilted his head back. In surprise he noticed that one of the familiar points of light was missing from the center of the group. What he had assumed to be an occlusion of the conjoint vapor trails by dust clouds was simply due to the fact that one of the capsules—Merril’s, he decided, the third of the line ahead—had fallen from its orbit.
Head raised, he sidestepped slowly across the roof, avoiding the pieces of rusting neon sign, following the convoy as it passed overhead and moved toward the eastern horizon. No longer over-layed by the wake of Merril’s capsule, Woodward’s shone with far greater clarity, and almost appeared to have taken the former’s place, although he was not due to fall from orbit for at least a century.
In the distance somewhere an engine growled. A moment later, from a different quarter, a woman’s voice cried out faintly. Bridgman moved to the rail, over the intervening rooftops saw two figures silhouetted against the sky on the elevator head of an apartment block, then heard Louise Woodward call out again. She was pointing up at the sky with both hands, her long hair blown about her face, Travis trying to restrain her. Bridgman realized that she had misconstrued Merril’s descent, assuming that the fallen astronaut was her husband. He climbed onto the edge of the balcony, watching the pathetic tableau on the distant roof.
Again, somewhere among the dunes, an engine moaned. Before Bridgman could turn around, a brilliant blade of light cleaved the sky in the southwest. Like a speeding comet, an immense train of vaporizing particles stretching behind it to the horizon, it soared toward them, the downward curve of its pathway clearly visible. Detached from the rest of the capsules, which were now disappearing among the stars along the eastern horizon, it was little more than a few miles off the ground.
Bridgman watched it approach, apparently on a collision course with the hotel. The expanding corona of white light, like a gigantic signal flare, illuminated the rooftops, etching the letters of the neon signs over the submerged motels on the outskirts of the town. He ran for the doorway, as he raced down the stairs saw the glow of the descending capsule fill the somber streets like a hundred moons. When he reached his room, sheltered by the massive weight of the hotel, he watched the dunes in front of the hotel light up like a stage set. Three hundred yards away the low camouflaged hull of the wardens’ beach car was revealed poised on a crest, its feeble spot light drowned by the glare.
With a deep metallic sigh, the burning catafalque of the dead astronaut soared overhead, a cascade of vaporizing metal pouring from its hull, filling the sky with incandescent light. Reflected below it, like an expressway illuminated by an aircraft’s spotlights, a long lane of light several hundred yards in width raced out into the desert toward the sea. As Bridgman shielded his eyes, it suddenly erupted in a tremendous explosion of detonating sand. A huge curtain of white dust lifted into the air and fell slowly to the ground. The sounds of the impact rolled against the hotel, mounting in a sustained crescendo that drummed against the windows. A series of smaller explosions flared up like opalescent fountains. All over the desert fires flickered briefly where fragments of the capsule had been scattered. Then the noise subsided, and an immense glistening pall of phosphorescing gas hung in the air like a silver veil, particles within it beading and winking.
Two hundred yards away across the sand was the running figure of Louise Woodward, Travis twenty paces behind her. Bridgman watched them dart in and out of the dunes, then abruptly felt the cold spotlight of the beach car hit his face and flood the room behind him. The vehicle was moving straight toward him, two of the wardens, nets and lassos in hand, riding the outboard.
Quickly Bridgman straddled the balcony, jumped down into the sand and raced toward the crest of the first dune. He crouched and ran on through the darkness as the beam probed the air. Above, the glistening pall was slowly fading, the particles of vaporized metal sifting toward the dark Martian sand. In the distance the last echoes of the impact were still reverberating among the hotels of the beach colonies further down the coast.
Five minutes later he caught up with Louise Woodward and Travis. The capsule’s impact had flattened a number of the dunes, forming a shallow basin some quarter of a mile in diameter, and the surrounding slopes were scattered with the still glowing particles, sparkling like fading eyes. The beach car growled somewhere four or five hundred yards behind him, and Bridgman broke off into an exhausted walk. He stopped beside Travis, who was kneeling on the ground, breath pumping into his lungs. Fifty yards away Louise Woodward was running up and down, distraughtly gazing at the fragments of smoldering metal. For a moment the spotlight of the approaching beach car illuminated her, and she ran away among the dunes. Bridgman caught a glimpse of the inconsolable anguish in her face.
Travis was still on his knees. He had picked up a piece of the oxidized metal and was pressing it together in his hands.
“Travis, for God’s sake tell her! This was Merril’s capsule, there’s no doubt about it! Woodward’s still up there.”
Travis looked up at him silently, his eyes searching Bridgman’s face. A spasm of pain tore his mouth, and Bridgman realized that the barb of steel he clasped reverently in his hands was still glowing with heat.
“Travis!” He tried to pull the man’s hands apart, the pungent stench of burning flesh gusting into his face, but Travis wrenched away from him. “Leave her alone, Bridgman! Go back with the wardens!”
Bri
dgman retreated from the approaching beach car. Only thirty yards away, its spotlight filled the basin. Louise Woodward was still searching the dunes. Travis held his ground as the wardens jumped down from the car and advanced toward him with their nets, his bloodied hands raised at his sides, the steel barb flashing like a dagger. At the head of the wardens, the only one unmasked, was a trim, neat-featured man with an intent, serious face. Bridgman guessed that this was Major Webster, and that the wardens had known of the impending impact and hoped to capture them, and Louise in particular, before it occurred.
Bridgman stumbled back toward the dunes at the edge of the basin. As he neared the crest he trapped his foot in a semicircular plate of metal, sat down, and freed his heel. Unmistakably it was part of a control panel, the circular instrument housings still intact.
Overhead the pall of glistening vapor had moved off to the northeast, and the reflected light was directly over the rusting gantries of the former launching site at Cape Kennedy. For a few fleeting seconds the gantries seemed to be enveloped in a sheen of silver, transfigured by the vaporized body of the dead astronaut, diffusing over them in a farewell gesture, his final return to the site from which he had set off to his death a century earlier. Then the gantries sank again into their craggy shadows, and the pall moved off like an immense wraith toward the sea, barely distinguishable from the star glow.
Down below Travis was sitting on the ground surrounded by the wardens. He scuttled about on his hands like a frantic crab, scooping handfuls of the virus-laden sand at them. Holding tight to their masks, the wardens maneuvered around him, their nets and lassos at the ready. Another group moved slowly toward Bridgman.
Bridgman picked up a handful of the dark Martian sand beside the instrument panel, felt the soft glowing crystals warm his palm. In his mind he could still see the silver-sheathed gantries of the launching site across the bay, by a curious illusion almost identical with the Martian city he had designed years earlier. He watched the pall disappear over the sea, then looked around at the other remnants of Merril's capsule scattered over the slopes. High in the western night, between Pegasus and Cygnus, shone the distant disk of the planet Mars, which for both himself and the dead astronaut had served for so long as a symbol of unattained ambition. The wind stirred softly through the sand, cooling this replica of the planet which lay passively around him, and at last he understood why he had come to the beach and been unable to leave it.
Twenty yards away Travis was being dragged off like a wild dog, his thrashing body pinioned in the center of a web of lassos. Louise Woodward had run away among the dunes toward the sea, following the vanished gas cloud.
In a sudden excess of refound confidence, Bridgman drove his fist into the dark sand, buried his forearm like a foundation pillar. A flange of hot metal from Merril’s capsule burned his wrist, bonding him to the spirit of the dead astronaut.
“Merrill” he cried exultantly as the wardens’ lassos stung his neck and shoulders. “We made it!”
Deep End
They always slept during the day. By dawn the last of the townsfolk had gone indoors and the houses would be silent, heat curtains locked across the windows, as the sun rose over the deliquescing salt banks, filling the streets with opaque fire. Most of them were old people and fell asleep quickly in their darkened chalets, but Granger, with his restless mind and his one lung, often lay awake through the afternoons, while the metal outer walls of the cabin creaked and hummed, trying pointlessly to read through the old log books Holliday had salvaged for him from the crashed space platforms.
By six o’clock the thermal fronts would begin to recede southward across the kelp flats, and one by one the air-conditioners in the bedrooms switched themselves off. While the town slowly came to life, its windows opening to the cool dusk air, Granger strode down to breakfast at the Neptune Bar, gallantly doffing his sunglasses to left and right at the elderly couples settling themselves out on their porches, staring at each other across the shadow-filled streets.
Five miles to the north, in the empty hotel at Idle End, Holliday usually rested quietly for another hour, and listened to the coral towers, gleaming in the distance like white pagodas, sing and whistle as the temperature gradients cut through them. Twenty miles away he could see the symmetrical peak of Hamilton, nearest of the Bermuda Islands, rising off the dry ocean floor like a flat-topped mountain, the narrow ring of white beach still visible in the sunset, a scum line left by sinking ocean.
* * *
That evening he felt even more reluctant than usual to drive down into the town. Not only would Granger be in his private booth at the Neptune, dispensing the same mixture of humor and homily—he was virtually the only person Holliday could talk to, and inevitably he had come to resent his dependence on the older man—but Holliday would have his final interview with the migration officer and make the decision which would determine his entire future.
In a sense the decision had already been made, as Bullen, the migration officer, had realized on his trip a month earlier. He did not bother to press Holliday, who had no special skills to offer, no qualities of character or leadership which would be of use on the new worlds. However, Bullen pointed out one small but relevant fact, which Holliday duly noted and thought over in the intervening month.
“Remember, Holliday,” he warned him at the end of the interview in the requisitioned office at the rear of the sheriff’s cabin, “the average age of the settlement is over sixty. In ten years’ time you and Granger may well be the only two left here, and if that lung of his goes you’ll be on your own.”
He paused to let this prospect sink in, then added quietly, “All the kids are leaving on the next trip—the Merryweathers’ two boys, Tom Juranda (That lout! Good riddance, Holliday thought to himself. Look out, Mars)—do you realize you’ll literally be the only one here under the age of fifty?”
“Katy Summers is staying,” Holliday pointed out quickly, the sudden vision of a white organdy dress and long straw hair giving him courage.
The migration officer had glanced at his application list and nodded grudgingly. “Yes, but she’s just looking after her grandmother. As soon as the old girl dies Katy will be off like a flash. After all, there’s nothing to keep her here, is there?”
“No,” Holliday had agreed automatically.
There wasn’t now. For a long while he had mistakenly believed there was. Katy was his own age, twenty-two, the only person, apart from Granger, who seemed to understand his determination to stay behind and keep watch over a forgotten Earth. But the grandmother died three days after the migration officer left, and the next day Katy had begun to pack. In some insane way Holliday had assumed that she would stay behind, and what worried him was that all his assumptions about himself might be based on equally false premises.
Climbing off the hammock, he went onto the terrace and looked out at the phosphorescent glitter of the trace minerals in the salt banks stretching away from the hotel. His quarters were in the penthouse suite on the tenth floor, the only heat-sealed unit in the building, but its steady settlement into the ocean bed had opened in the load walls wide cracks which would soon reach up to the roof. The ground floor had already disappeared. By the time the next floor went—six months at the outside—he would have been forced to leave the old pleasure resort and return to the town. Inevitably, that would mean sharing a chalet with Granger.
A mile away, an engine droned. Through the dusk Holliday saw the migration officer’s helicopter whirling along toward the hotel, the only local landmark, then veer off once Bullen identified the town and brake slowly toward the landing strip.
Eight o’clock, Holliday noted. His interview was at 8:30 the next morning. Bullen would rest the night with the sheriff, carry out his other duties as graves commissioner and justice of the peace, and then set off after seeing Holliday on the next leg of his journey. For twelve hours Holliday was free, still able to make absolute decisions (or, more accurately, not to make them) but after that
he would have committed himself. This was the migration officer’s last trip, his final circuit from the deserted cities near St. Helena up through the Azores and Bermudas around to the main Atlantic ferry site at the Canaries. Only two of the big launching platforms were still in navigable orbit—hundreds of others were continuously falling out of the sky—and once they came down Earth was, to all intents, abandoned. From then on the only people likely to be picked up would be a few military communications personnel.
Twice on his way into the town Holliday had to lower the salt plough fastened to the front bumper of the jeep and ram back the drifts which had melted across the wire roadway during the afternoon. Mutating kelp, their gene shifts accelerated by the radiophosphorus, reared up into the air on either side of the road like enormous cacti, turning the dark salt banks into a white lunar garden. But this evidence of the encroaching wilderness only served to strengthen Holliday’s need to stay behind on Earth. Most of the nights, when he wasn’t arguing with Granger at the Neptune, trying to explain his philosophy to him, he would drive around the ocean floor, climbing over the crashed launching platforms, or wander with Katy Summers through the kelp forests. Sometimes he would persuade Granger to come with them, hoping that the older man’s expertise—he had originally been a marine biologist—would help to sharpen his own awareness of the bathy-pelagic flora, but the original sea bed was buried under the endless salt hills and they might as well have been driving about the Sahara.
Chronopolis Page 37
