My hand gripped the release, and I knew I was squeezing. I couldn’t stop. My hand was frozen to the lever like the grip of a dead man. The muscles were hard, sealed. I could feel pain in the rigidly held joints. But I couldn’t relax the grip.
I was dreaming in flashes. Fully awake, but subject to ideas flitting through my mind as visual images. I dreamed that the lever jammed. I dreamed that my whole body was tight-frozen and that the count reached zero without my having pulled the release. I dreamed that the raft hit and exploded while the count was still descending, and I dreamed that my body was ripped apart in the crash, fragmenting in perfect time with the descent of the last few seconds.
All the dreams fitted into the interstices between the numbers that rolled so deadly off Charlot’s distant tongue. I could imagine him sitting rock-steady at his desk, eyes glued to the simulator, his mind chasing the calculations damn near as fast as the computer, his voice mesmerized by his commitment to and involvement with the programmed flight-path of the raft. We were the same, both frozen, both living through the numbers. The only difference was that he was living the simulation, and we knew that would be successful. Computers don’t argue. Satisfaction guaranteed. I was living the real thing, with a real life hanging on a theoretical error. I could die, while he was still counting out the measure of his computed success.
He couldn’t lose.
“Twenty,” he was saying, “nineteen....”
I needed a shot. I was dreaming I needed a shot. What I really needed was not to be so all alone. I needed to know that the shot was waiting just around the corner, that the shot was attached to a hand, that the hand was attached to Eve. I needed to know that the numbers were coming from a human voice and not from a machine. I needed to know that there was something else in the universe beside me—beside me. Alongside.
The wind didn’t say a word, but he let me feel him. How? I don’t know. He shuffled his feet or cracked his knuckles—something impossible, quite intangible. But enough.
Titus reached twelve, and he coughed. It was a good cough—a beautifully controlled cough. It knocked the first “e” off “eleven,” and joined the count with unhurried enthusiasm. I was grateful for that cough. I was grateful for Charlot’s age and poverty of health. I was grateful that my remote control wasn’t as remote as it might have been.
“Ten,” said Titus.
The sound of the deep, deep storm was fading in my ears. It should have been growing—the wind howling faster and harder, the lightning caging me, the hail raining down on me. But it was fading. All sound was fading. I was retreating from my senses. But Titus was still coming through. Not loud, not even clear, but measured. Tick, tick, tick....
“Four,” ticked away, “three, two, one….”
Zero, and I pulled the lever.
I never heard the zero. As soon as I had located it, as soon as I knew just when it was, in the time-space of my seclusion, I went to it myself. I found it, on my own (though I never would have, without pointers), and I pulled the lever dead on time.
And there it was again—the sudden loss of support in a moment of suspension and vertigo, the sudden renaissance of the storm just inches and fractions of inches away from me battering and howling like all the devils in hell at my implacable armor-nightmare. Still dreaming, still flashing across my mind in tiny packets of sensory energy. Quantum dreams, quantum nightmares.
There was light too, now. Colored light, dimmed by the smokiness of the thin transparency that served as a visor. It was four inches wide and an inch deep. No peripheral vision. No safety margin, on a heavy-duty suit. Nothing to see, except chaotic light, colored clouds lit by inconstant lightning.
Whirling. The colors whirled of their own volition, but I was turning too, turning in flight as I righted, as the power of the suit came into operation, holding me tight in arms of force, secure from harm, like bird’s wings, fluttered belatedly into action to arrest a fall, to snatch a thin body back from disaster, and land....
Safely.
There was a soft crunch as I came to ground. I felt its softness reverberate up through my bones, as the brittle power of impact was soothed by the suit into a gentle multiple wave.
I heard nothing of the fate of the life raft. I didn’t know which way it had gone. I saw nothing. Once I was free of it, it disappeared from my life. I went my own way, and landed my own way.
I landed on my feet, like a cat. I seemed to have nine lives, like a cat. Once more into hell. A cat in hell’s chance. But I was still winning. Cats have a way of surviving.
Only curiosity kills cats.
There was a silence. An utter silence.
“I’m down,” I said, in the fond hope that somewhere out there was someone who might be interested to know.
I heard Titus Charlot. He wasn’t answering—he was breathing. His mouth must have been very close to the microphone. I had the odd idea that I was hearing Titus Charlot, speechless. An unusual experience.
“Stay still,” he said, eventually. “I’m hooking the Hooded Swan back into the circuit.”
“What about Jacks?” I said, with commendable concern for the good of my fellow man. “Did he get the ship out all right?”
“We’ll know in a moment,” said Charlot. “He’s still in atmosphere. I’ll let him in for a moment, as soon as we know he’s clear. But only a moment. We have no time to waste.”
No, I thought. We never have.
For just the moment that Charlot promised, the circuit was connected four ways.
“I’m down,” I said again.
There was a crackle as Nick delArco said something both thankful and crude, while Jacks expressed his surprise and pleasure in like manner. Neither was talking to me, and the microphones failed to make their words clear. The meaning, however, was successfully conveyed.
“I’m a rich man,” said Jacks, just a second or two later. “Just don’t make any mistakes lifting that baby.”
I didn’t have to ask whether his part had come off all right. I could practically hear him counting his money. He was in clean space.
He cut out of the circuit.
“Right,” said Charlot. “Now we have to find out how far away you are and guide you in. Switch on your bleep.”
I substituted the signal for the sound of my voice, and I waited. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I could imagine it well enough. Titus was telling Nick how to use the ship’s sensors to fix the bleep. I gave them a good two minutes and switched myself back on.
“Where am I?” I said.
“Impatient,” said Nick. “Keep bleeping.”
I gave him another two minutes.
“How far?” I asked, just to vary the dialogue.
“Spot on,” he said. “Less than twenty miles.”
Mormyr is a big world, and she blows big winds. Twenty miles was, indeed, spot on. But we needed that accuracy. On full power, the suit could take me three, maybe four miles an hour. And depending on how much power had gone up the chute making sure I landed properly, I probably had no more than eight hours in hand. Twenty miles was a real bull’s-eye, and if it had been a competition we’d have won. But at the time, I could only feel that we’d brought it off according to plan, that we’d scraped home by a short head.
I still had those miles to walk.
It took me more than four hours, and it was very boring. I’ve walked the surfaces of some very strange worlds in my time—and some rather violent ones too. But for sheer hostility there was nothing to approach Mormyr. In a way, that long walk was a privileged experience. But I’m not one for telling barroom tales, and I have no grandchildren. I measure experiences by what they are, not what they’ll add to me in years to come. That twenty miles in the kaleidoscopic tempest was just twenty very uncomfortable miles. There was nothing much to look at—two minutes of chaos is quite enough to provide a lifetime’s memory.
The walking wasn’t particularly hard—the suit provided the power to move itself and some of the power t
o move me—but it was by no means easy. I was totally unused to the type of suit, and after a few minutes I found it increasingly difficult to keep in step with it. It rubbed me at several points—particularly around my waist and in my legs, and it grew progressively more painful. I began the trek with light conversation—mostly directed at Nick and Johnny but long before I was halfway I had degenerated to complaints—mostly directed at Charlot and providence—and simple but ingenious curses.
Nick volunteered to come and meet me, but I told him not to be a damned fool. We had no suit as heavy as mine on the Swan and he’d have been taking a hell of a risk coming out in something that the hailstones wouldn’t just bounce off.
I think the worst of the walk was that it interfered so much with the harsh beauty of the operation. If it had simply been a matter of that heartrending drop, followed by a smooth takeoff and return to safety, the whole rescue would have had a kind of elegance, even to my crude and matter-of-fact aesthetic sensibilities. But that walk destroyed all the fine feeling and triumph that I might have derived from the affair. By the time I reached the Swan I ached, I was sore, and I was in a thoroughly bad mood. Right back into the old Grainger groove. Without that long walk, I could almost have felt like a hero. I could have kidded myself, for a while at least. But there is something about having the insides of your thighs rubbed red raw that restores a somewhat callous perspective on life. There is something noble and heroic about a trickle of blood from the corner of one’s mouth, or a discreetly bloody wound. There is nothing subtly uplifting about a sore bum.
The welcome I got from Captain delArco was almost sufficient to restore my faith in heroic nature. He was just perfect. He was a big man with a deep voice, and never given to leaping about with lunatic enthusiasm, so he played the part with wonderful self-control. But every time I moved I reminded myself of the true facts of life, and I was able to play my part down to the last grunt and scowl. Nick had spent a lot of time being resentful of that grunt and scowl in the past, but at that moment he began to love them in spite of themselves. As for Johnny—well, I think Johnny had always had perfect faith in the fact that I would come knocking on the door to pull him out of the jaws of death. I was only living up to his expectations.
Between the two of them, they worked their way into the depths of the suit and pulled me out of it. They had to hold me up for a while so that proper circulation could be restored to my system. Then I went away and was unreasonably extravagant with the ship’s water supply by having a hot bath. There is, I admit, a ludicrous quality about taking time out for a bath in the middle of a rescue operation, but I really did not feel competent to lift the ship until I had soothed my more tender parts. I had every confidence in the ship’s anchors, and I thought that staying put for an extra half hour was less hazardous than lifting while I was in less-than-fit condition.
When I was good and ready, I put on clean clothes, had a cup of coffee, and went back to the control room. Johnny was already nursing the drive into a state of readiness. Nick took up a position beside me, ready with the needle, and I told him which shot to use, how much and when.
“OK, Titus,” I said without preamble, knowing that he would still be waiting at the call-circuit. “You can sign the check now. I’m bringing your bird back.”
Then I took off.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I honestly thought that was the end. I thought that it finished Titus Charlot, finished the Hooded Swan, finished delArco and Lapthorn’s sister and Herault’s grandson. I thought that I had placed a full stop at the end of a chapter in my life.
If anything, of course, it would have been a beginning rather than an end. It would have been the beginning of a new career as a space-tramp, and a dead-ender. I wasn’t afraid of such a career. I knew it was the way of all flesh. That was what I expected. But I was thinking “out” rather than “in.” I was thinking of all the nasty things I was getting well out of rather than all the nasty things I was heading for. I wasn’t blind—I’d made a real choice—and I thought I’d made the right decision.
I was simply wrong. I just couldn’t put an end to it. I’d overestimated myself. I don’t mean, of course, that I went back to Charlot and told him to burn his check because I couldn’t bear to part. I quit all right. I quit, I cleared my debt, and I went away—shipped out from Iniomi to Pallant and from Pallant just as soon and as far as I could go. I wrote an end to the story.
But the threads of the plot always go on beyond the end of the story. There is never any real ending. I couldn’t put an end to the plot. The threads were still going on, and they were still attached to me. There was no way out of the plot at all. It was going to catch up with me again. Someday.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD
Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations
The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales
Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica
Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales
Complications and Other Stories
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies
The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
The Eleventh Hour
The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)
Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future
Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)
The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels
Kiss the Goat
Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses
The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania
The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future
An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels
The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)
The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine
Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)
The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession
The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas
Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)
Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism
The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
The Fenris Device Page 15
