by Bob Shaw
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 it 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 Dallen.
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 Corn'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 ail 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 ship'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 flickering 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 steadied at the centre.
Without quite knowing why, Dallen found himself having to blink 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 docked 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 latera
l 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 shell 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."
"Like 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."
His subordinate's jaw sagged. "But…"
The protest was drowned in the clamour of yet another alarm, this time not the discreet warning emitted for the benefit of flight managers but a blood-freezing bellow which deliberately mimicked the obsolete klaxon to achieve maximum effect. Three blasts were followed by a recorded announcement:
"EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! THE PRESSURE HULL HAS BEEN BREACHED. ALL PERSONNEL MUST PUT ON SPACESUITS WITHOUT DELAY. EMERGENCY!"
The message was repeated until Lessen killed the control deck speakers, and even then it could still be heard booming through the ship's lower compartments.
Dallen watched in sluggish disbelief as Lessen and the other officers went purposefully to lockers and opened them to reveal the dark-mawed golem-figures of spacesuits. Renard, too, seemed unable to move. Looking exasperated rather than alarmed, he stood with gold-freckled arms folded across his chest and gaped at the men who were struggling into suits.
"This isn't a safety drill," Lessen called out, his gaze fixed on Dallen. "You'd better get down to your cabin and look after your family. You'll find two suits in the emergency locker and a pressure crib for the boy."
"I don't feel any pressure drop," Dallen said, unable to shake off a dull obtuseness.
"That's right," Renard put in. "What's all the panic?"
Lessen, now fully suited except for the helmet, said, "I don't know what's happening, but I can assure you this is a genuine emergency. Something kept us from making contact with the shell, and when we tried to back off something else pushed us back down again. Both those forces are still at work. We're in a vice and something is winding hard on the handle—that's what the strain monitors say—and the hull is beginning to split."
"You don't seem ail that worried to me," Renard accused.
"That's because I'm in my suit." Lessen gave Renard a malicious smile, refusing to cease feuding with him regardless of how dire he believed the situation to be.
Renard swore and ran towards the stairs in an ungainly slouch, his stirrups clacking noisily on the metal-cored deck. Dallen followed him as in a slow-motion dream. The emergency warning continued being broadcast on the lower decks, but he still had to contend with a sense of unreality.
Lessen had spoken of a mysterious "something" which, although invisible, was exerting a crushing force on the starship—but did it actually exist? Space was a sterile vacuum, not the habitat of mysterious entities who attacked ships. The Hawkshead was long past its best, and a more likely explanation for all that had occurred was that some of its systems had gone haywire. After all, the only evidence for the putative emergency was in information displays, and such devices could easily be…
Crang! Crip-crip-crip-crip-CRANG!
The sounds of a metal structure failing under stress came as Dallen was between Decks 4 and 5, and were followed by a slamming of unseen metal doors. This time his eardrums responded to a drop in air pressure, and now the emergency was real and now he was afraid. Truly afraid. Several people, Silvia among them, were gathered on Deck 5 helping each other with the unfamiliar task of putting on spacesuits. Giving Silvia a tense half-smile, Dallen slipped by them and went into his own cabin. Mikel, a toy vehicle clutched in each hand, was staring up at him uncertainly, but Cona was drowsing in her bed, oblivious to the disturbance.
"Everything is fine, son," Dallen said. "We're going to play a new game."
Keeping up a flow of reassuring patter, he opened a red-painted closet door and removed the pressure crib. It was an egg-shaped affair, with a transparency near one end, and had ample room for an infant. His hands trembling with haste, Dallen put Mikel inside it and closed the seals. Mikel gazed at him through the transparency, startled and reproachful, then began to cry. The sound reached Dallen by way of a speaker on the crib's life support control panel.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I promise it won't be for long."
He took an adult suit off its clips in the closet and began the more difficult task of getting Cona inside it. She was too drug-laden to offer any wilful resistance, but the sheer flaccidity and mass of her body, coupled with the lack of leverage due to zero gravity, hindered his every action. Within seconds he was sweating profusely. His co-ordination was impaired by anxiety, the constant aural battering from the PA system and Mikel's sobbing, plus the repetitious chanting in his head.
What's happening to the ship?
What's happening to Orbitsville?
When he finally got the suit closed around Cona and was reaching for the helmet she flung her head back in an involuntary spasm and struck him squarely on the bridge of the nose. Half-blinded by tears, he snorted out several quivering beads of blood and fitted Cona's helmet in place. She gave him a seraphic smile through its crystal curvatures, closed her eyes and lapsed back into sleep.
Grateful for the respite, he unz
ipped his own suit and was partially into it when the ear-punishing warning broadcast abruptly ceased. There was a moment of silence, then Lessen's voice was heard at a more tolerable volume. He spoke with irritating deliberation, either for clarity or in an effort to inspire confidence.
"This is Captain Lessen. The ship has suffered severe damage to its pressure hull. We have no alternative but to abandon the ship. Do not be alarmed. All crew and passengers should assemble immediately in the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4. I repeat—do not be alarmed. You have only thirty metres of open space to cross, and there will be ropes to prevent anyone from drifting free. Go immediately to the main airlock in the first quadrant of Deck 4."
Dallen finished donning his suit and fitted the helmet in place, an action which activated the oxygen generator and temperature control systems. He had never worn a spacesuit before, except in safety drills, and felt oddly self-conscious as he tethered the crib to his belt and went to the cabin door with Cona awkwardly in tow. The other passengers had already left the ring-shaped Deck 5, but a crewman on his way to the next level saw Dallen's difficulty and came to his aid, taking responsibility for getting Cona up the narrow stair.
"Thanks," Dallen said. "I had to give her some heavy sedation."
"Save some for me," the man replied, his voice made disturbingly intimate by Dallen's helmet radio.
They reached the airlock and were impatiently counted into it by another suited crewman. The square chamber was large enough to hold the entire ship's company, all of whom seemed to be present judging by the babble of sound transmitted into Dallen's helmet. With the crib in his left arm and with Cona's bulk clamped to him by his right, he forced his way into the throng as a metal door slid shut behind him. The noise level increased abruptly as red lights began to glow on the walls and ceiling to indicate that the chamber's air was being bled off. More tremors coursed through the deck.
