Orbitsville Departure o-1

by Bob Shaw

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

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

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

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

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

  Mathieu descended at once. "Are you hurt?"

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

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

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

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

  The paralysing shock stabbed clear through to his feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Is that what you call it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Chapter 17

  .The onset of weightlessness, gradual though it was, brought
problems for Da lien.

  In the early stages Cona had enjoyed her growing gymnastic ability, and had come dangerously close to hurting herself or Mikel during exuberant and ill-coordinated frolicking about the cabin. Then, as the Hawkshead’ s main drive neared total shutdown, the feeling of unnatural lightness progressed to become an outright falling sensation, and Cona's pleasure turned to fear. She clung to the frame of her bed, white-faced and whimpering, but resisted his efforts to secure her with the zero-G webbing. Mikel was more manageable, allowing himself to be tethered to his cot, and seemed less concerned with himself than with his toys' new tendency to float away in the air.

  Dallen was retrieving a favourite model truck for him when a single chime from the communications panel signalled that the ship was entering the state of free fall. An uneasy lifting sensation in Dallen's stomach was accompanied by the sound of Cona retching.

  Cursing himself for not having been prepared, he twisted towards her just in time to be caught in the skeins of yellowish fluid which had issued from her mouth. The acid smell of bile filled the cabin at once and Mikel began to sob.

  Fighting to keep the heaving of his own stomach in check, Dallen drew a suction cleaner pipe out of the wall and used it to hunt down every slow-drifting globule. It took him another five minutes to clean himself and change his clothes, by which time his thoughts were turning away from his domestic troubles and towards truly macroscopic issues. As soon as the flickerwing drive had been deactivated the Hawkshead would have been able to enter radio contact with Orbitsville and request some kind of official explanation for what had happened to the shell. Presumably Captain Lessen already had the information, but — disturbingly — there had been no general announcement.

  As one who had been born on Orbitsville, Dallen was anxious for that explanation. For him the sight of the inconceivable expanse of green fire, like a boundless ocean alive with noctilucence, had been the emotional equivalent of a severe earthquake. He had grown up on the Big O, had a primitive unquestioning faith in its permanence and immutability — and now the unthinkable was happening. Tendrils of new ideas were trying to worm their way into his mind and were making him afraid in a way that he had never known before, and it was a process he could not allow to continue. As the minutes dragged by without any word from Lessen his unease and impatience grew more intense. Finally, and not without a twinge of guilt, he took a double-dose hypopad from a locker and placed it on his thumb. He went to Cona and, while overtly trying to make her more comfortable, pressed his thumb against her wrist and fired a cloud of sedative into her bloodstream. As soon as the drug had begun to take effect, rendering her drowsy and passive, he clipped the zero-G webbing across the yielding plumpness of her body and with a reassuring word to Mikel left the cabin.

  The standard-issue magnetic stirrups he had fitted to his shoes made walking difficult at first, but by the time he reached the control deck he was moving with reasonable confidence. He found Lessen, Renard and a small group of the ship's officers gathered in front of the view panels, most of which showed luminous green horizons.

  "You are not permitted in here," Lessen said to him at once, puffing his chest.

  "Don't be ridiculous," Dallen said. "What the hell is going on down there?"

  "I must insist that you…"

  "Forget all that crap." Renard turned to Dallen with no sign of his former animosity. "This is really something, old son. We talked to Traffic Central and were told that the whole shell lit up like that about five hours ago. Before that, apparently, they had a lot of green meridians chasing each other round and round the surface, but now the illumination is general.

  "And you notice the pulsing? They say it started off at about one every five seconds, but now it's up to nearly one a second." Renard grinned at the discrete views of Orbitsville, excited but seemingly untroubled.

  It's all part of a process, Dallen thought, remembering his conversation with Peter Ezzati, his instinctive alarm feeding on Renard's lack of concern.

  "What did they say about landing?" he said. "How does it affect us?"

  "It doesn't. The word from the Science Commission is that the light doesn't affect anything. It's only light. Nothing is showing up on any kind of detector — except photometers, of course — so we just ignore it and go ahead with the landing. They say it's business as usual at all the other entrances."

  "I don't like it" Lessen said gloomily.

  Renard clapped a hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to like it, old son. All you have to do is fly my ship, so I suggest you get on with it without wasting any more valuable time. Okay?"

  "If you don't mind," Dallen said, "I'd like to stay here and watch."

  Renard made a sweeping gesture. "Be my guest."

  Lessen swelled visibly, looking as though he would protest, then shrugged and with a practised zero-G shuffle moved to a central console. He keyed an instruction to the snip's computer. A few seconds later Dallen felt a faint tremoring in the deck and glowing jade horizons changed their attitudes as the secondary drive came to life. A short time later Portal 36 showed up on the forward screen, visible at first as a short dark line floating in the green luminescence. The line grew longer and thicker, developing into a widening ellipse which quite abruptly became a yawning aperture in the Orbitsville shell.

  Dallen, in spite of knowing what to expect, felt a coolness coursing down his spine as he saw the blue — the impossible blue — of summer skies within the portal. For a moment he had an inkling of how Vance Garamond and his crew must have responded two centuries earlier when their flickerwing nosed its way into the shaft of sunlight radiating into space from the historic Portal 1. As the aperture became a perfect thousand-metre circle of azure, Orbitsville's interior sun swam into view and stayed at the centre.

  Without quite knowing why, Dallen found himself having to bunk to clear his vision. I should have been with Silvia for this, he thought, wondering if she was in the Deck 3 observation gallery.

  "We're locked on station at an altitude of two thousand metres," Lessen said, glancing at Dallen to see if he was absorbing the information. "Beginning our descent now."

  Dallen gave him a friendly nod, accepting the verbal peace offering, and watched the circle expand in a lateral screen. The descent was slow but continuous, and after fifteen minutes the separation between the ship and its destination had been reduced to tens of metres. Propelled and maintained in the docking attitude by computer-orchestrated thrusters, the Hawkshead was lowering itself towards one edge of the aperture. Sting-like grapples were projecting beneath the central hull, ready to clamp the ship in place. At any of Orbitsville's principal ports it would simply have been a matter of sliding into one of the huge docking cradles, but here it was necessary for the ship to find its own anchorage.

  The final step, Dallen knew, would be to extend a transfer tube from an airlock and drive it through the diaphragm field which kept Orbitsville's atmosphere from spewing into space. He estimated that unloading the grass and seed samples could take no more than a day, and from that point on Silvia and he would be free to…

  "I don't like this," Lessen announced, speaking with a studied calmness which had the effect of momentarily stopping Dallen's heart. "Something doesn't add up."

  As if to ratify the captain's statement, crimson and orange rectangles began to flash on the control console to the accompaniment of warning bleeps. Two of the ship's officers moved quickly to separate consoles and began tapping keys with quiet urgency. The deck stirred like an animal beneath Dallen's feet.

  Renard cleared his throat. "Would somebody care to tell me what's going on? I do own this thing, you know."

  "The thrusters are still delivering power," Lessen said. "But the ship has stopped moving."

  "But all that means is…" Renard broke off, his coppery eyebrows drawing together.

  "It means something is counteracting the thrust — and our sensors can't identify it. We have a separation of twenty eight metres between the sh
ell and the datum line of the hull, so there is no physical obstruction, but we can't detect any field-type forces. I don't like it. I'm going to back off."

  "There's no need for that," Renard said. "Push a bit harder."

  The officer at the smaller console to Dallen's left raised his head. "There's no indication of any threat to the ship."

  "I don't care," Lessen replied, strutting nervously like a dove. "Traffic Central said conditions were normal at all other portals, but they can't vouch for anything here. We'll have to dock somewhere else."

  "Lake hell we will," Renard said. "I've got an agricultural station and a team of bloody expensive research workers waiting for me down there. We’re going in right here."

  "You want to bet?" Lessen palmed a master control with showy vigour, asserting his authority.

  Watching him closely, Dallen saw a look of spiteful triumph which lasted only a few seconds and vanished as the patterns of red and orange on the console changed. New audio alarms began an insistent buzzing. Dallen felt vulnerable and totally helpless as he tried in vain to interpret the various information displays around him. it's all part of a process, came the fugue-thought. Orbitsville doesn't catch fire for nothing…

  "We're not gaining any altitude," the officer on his left said.

  "Don't tell me things I already know," Lessen snapped, specks of saliva floating away from his lips. "Get me an explanation."