by Bob Shaw
Nicklin, still recovering his mental equilibrium, was not quite ready for the question. "I … I suppose I ought to congratulate you."
"Congratulate me?" Montane looked puzzled but very much at his ease. "On what?"
"On the neat and highly professional way you and one of your prostitutes stripped me of everything I owned." Nicklin was surprised to see the preacher's bright, penetrating eyes become cloudy and vague. He had not expected that much of a reaction from a professional.
"You're talking in riddles, son."
"I'm talking about the excellent job done on me by you and your prostitute."
Montane glanced uneasily at his wife's coffin. "We don't like that kind of talk in here."
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Nicklin said, unable to resist the kind of sarcasm he normally disdained. "Pardon me for not measuring up to your high standards of behaviour."
"I gather," Montane said stonily, "that something has gone wrong between you and Danea."
"You gather correctly."
Montane sighed and shook his head, the picture of a man saddened by news he had expected but had hoped against the odds not to hear. "I'm really sorry about that, Jim – and, naturally, I'll give you what counsel I can – but you must understand that my workers' interpersonal relationships have nothing to do with me. And I made it clear to you, right at the outset, that any donation you chose to–"
"There's no need for you to worry yourself about that side of things," Nicklin cut in. "I fully accept the consequences of my own stupidity, and all I want to do now is get far away from here as fast as I can. I presume you won't mind letting me have a couple of hundred, just to get me started."
Montane frowned. "I can't do that, Jim."
Nicklin's jaw tried to sag. "All I'm asking is the rail fare to Beachhead City, and a bit more for a room!"
"I'm sorry," Montane replied, "I just don't have that kind of money."
"I know you don't have that kind of money." Nicklin was hardly able to believe what was happening. "My 82,000 orbs – that's the kind of money you have."
Montane gave him a patient little smile. "You don't seem to understand, Jim. It is God who owns that money now. You gave it to Him – and I could no more think of taking some of it back than I could of taking a life."
"Beautiful," Nicklin said bitterly. "That's really beautiful, Corey. You and Danea make a great team."
Montane appeared not to notice the insult. "What I could do – in fact, I'd be neglecting my Christian duty if I didn't do it – is let you have something out of my own pocket. Out of the housekeeping. I only have about thirty orbs, but you're welcome to all of it."
Too fucking kind, Nicklin thought, watching in disbelief as Montane stood up, set his cup aside and took a reproduction lacquered tea caddy down from the shelf over his cooking area. He opened the box, brought out three ten-orb bills and – with the air of a monarch conferring a knighthood – handed them to Nicklin.
"I'll always remember you for this," Nicklin said as he stood up and shoved the photo-pulsing rectangles into his hip pocket. Abruptly turning his back on Montane, he ducked out through the camper's door and stepped down on to the trampled grass. The group by the marquee had grown quite a bit larger, and it seemed to him that every face in it was turned in his direction. They were all set to gawp at him while he went to retrieve his few belongings from his locker, and no doubt when he reappeared with them everybody in the mission would be assembled to watch his departure.
He hesitated, his face throbbing hotly in tune with his heartbeat, and for a moment he actually considered walking straight on out of the field and away from the whole sorry mess. It might be worth abandoning his meagre possessions if doing so spared him any extra embarrassment. The pounding in his chest intensified, causing him to feel a little nauseated and light in the head, and there came a real fear that for the first time in his life he could be about to faint. He fought to regulate his breathing, to use the yoga technique for inducing serenity, and it was while he was standing there in the intrusive light of the morning sun that he became aware of something strange.
Behind him – in the shaded solitude of the camper – Corey Montane was speaking to someone.
"I'm sorry, my dear," Montane was saying. "As you heard, that young man had got himself worked up into quite an emotional state. The only way I could get rid of him was to give him some of your housekeeping money, but I'll see to it that you don't go short. I promise you he won't disturb us again, so let's finish our tea in peace, and then perhaps we'll pray together for a few minutes. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Nicklin inhaled deeply, blinked at his surroundings as though seeing them for the first time, and began to smile.
A wearisome psychogenic burden was being lifted from his shoulders. He could feel mental fetters dissolving, chains falling away, prison doors opening … Metaphors abounded. The air he had drawn into his lungs retained all the pastel colours of dawn, and those colours were diffusing through his system, creating a nacreous glow, sparkling in his mind.
It's all a joke, he told himself. Thank you, O Gaseous Vertebrate, for reminding me that everything is just one big joke. Conceits such as embarrassment and humiliation are no longer valid as far as I am concerned. I repudiate them! Montane has my money, and there's nothing much I can do about it, but he can no longer simply face me down. Nobody can do that any more – especially not some silly old cool who lugs his belter half around in a tin box and chats to her over his corn flakes; especially not a bunch of heliumheads who believe the world is going to end next Tuesday…
Remembering he had an attentive audience in the group who were supposed to be erecting the marquee, Nicklin raised one hand and gave them a cheerful wave. His smile grew wider as he noted the uncertainty with which several of them returned the salute. He spun on the ball of his foot and went back into the camper. Montane, who had resumed his seat, looked up in some surprise – teacup in hand – and a look of priestly displeasure appeared on his face.
"Jim, I've been as generous to you as I possibly could," he said. "Is there any point in spinning this thing out?"
"I've been thinking the whole business over," Nicklin replied. "I've been thinking about what you said yesterday. You know – about how the mission could make good use of all my technical skills and that kind of stuff. What I've been thinking is that it's my Christian duty to stay on here with you … and Danea … and the rest of the gang."
Nicklin took the three ten-orb notes out of his pocket and, with a meaningful wink, placed them on top of the silver coffin.
"After all," he added, maintaining his cheerful smile, "I still have so much to give…"
CHAPTER 10
As soon as possible after the transit entered Beachhead City's central area Nicklin got out on to the crowded footpath. He knew by the route diagram that he was still three stages short of his actual destination – which was Garamond Park – but this was his first visit to Beachhead and he wanted to get the feel of the place, something which could best be done on foot. He fanned his sun-hat into a circle, placed it squarely on his head and began to walk.
The first thing he noticed, apart from the seemingly endless throng, was that the environment was much cleaner than he had expected. The shops and small offices on each side of the street looked fresh and well maintained, and the pavement was remarkably free of litter considering the number of people at large. Nicklin allowed himself a wry smile. As a dweller in a small town he had shared the common belief that all big cities were filthy, garbage-strewn places. Another Orangefield illusion which did not travel well!
After walking for only a few minutes he was also struck by the degree of specialisation that was possible for various retail outlets. There were stores which sold nothing but garden tools, or picture frames, or equipment for a single sport such as archery or subaquatics. That fact alone gave Nicklin the sense of being in a metropolis where the consumer population ran into millions. Another exotic note, to him, was the way in which
prices were prefixed by the letter M, standing for monits or monetary units. Metagov had long ago decreed that a global economy – one which embraced every one of the cities strung out along Orbitsville's billion-kilometre equatorial band – could only operate on the basis of a universal currency which had a fixed value at all portals. The monit was therefore the city dwellers' exchange medium, while rural communities used the more homely orb, whose value fluctuated in accordance with local conditions. Notices displayed in the windows of some of the shops he passed informed Nicklin that Portal One hinterland orbs were worth 83.23 per cent of a monit, but as he had only a few bills in his pocket the pecuniary disadvantage meant little to him.
Attracted by the aromatic coolness wafting out of a bar, he went inside to quench his growing thirst with a glass of beer. The dim interior was devoid of clientele at that time of the morning. He went to the counter, behind which a young man and a woman were engrossed in a game of stacks, a simplified form of 3D chess. The man's gaze flicked towards Nicklin for an instant, but otherwise the pair did not acknowledge his presence.
It was a situation in which the old Jim Nicklin would have waited timidly for many minutes, scarcely daring to clear his throat in a bid for attention, but the new liberated Jim Nicklin was not so easily put off.
"Take a good look at me," he said in a loud voice. "I am what's known as a customer. You two are what's known as barkeeps, and – this may come as a great surprise to you – your function in this establishment is to serve customers with any drink they ask for, which in my case happens to be a beer."
The young man looked up from the game, dull-eyed, still digesting what Nicklin had said. "A beer?"
Nicklin nodded. "Yes, you must have heard of beer – it's that yellow frothy stuff that comes out of those pumps. Or perhaps you missed the relevant lecture at Barkeep Academy."
The man's brow wrinkled and he turned for enlightenment to his companion, who appeared to be the older and brighter of the pair. Lips compressed with resentment, she drew a beer and clumped it down in front of Nicklin. The head rocked and some of it slopped over the rim of the glass.
"Eighty cents," she said in a cold voice.
As Nicklin was setting a one-orb note on the counter he remembered with malicious satisfaction that it was worth only three cents above the price of the drink. "Keep the change," he said grandly. "Buy yourself something extra nice."
Feeling well pleased with himself, he carried his glass to the most distant corner of the room and sat at a table. It had taken the mission ten days to reach Beachhead, with stops at two intervening towns, and he had been pleasantly surprised when Montane had announced a short break. The arrival of the caravan at a small town usually generated enough interest to guarantee an audience, but it had scarcely been noticed by the incurious citizens of Beachhead, and Montane needed some time in which to advertise his presence.
Grateful for the chance to be his own master for a while, Nicklin had grabbed his twenty-orb allowance – quaintly described by Montane as a stipend – and had bolted into the city. Visiting the famous Portal One to view the stars for the first time was at the top of his list of priorities, but he also had to have a period of quiet contemplation. The cool, deserted bar was ideal for that purpose, and as he sipped his beer – freed of the continuous pressure of other personalities – he could feel himself beginning to relax. So much had happened in such a short time that he felt rather like a curio collector who had acquired many pieces on a single buying trip and now desperately wanted a lull in which to study and catalogue them.
There was Danea Farthing, for instance – one of the most curious curios of the lot…
Nicklin's mouth quirked into its U-shaped smile as in his mind he went over the first encounter with her after his road-to-Damascus brainstorm outside Montane's camper.
He strolled towards the group by the marquee, enjoying being the focus of their attention, and Danea – as though sensing some vital change in him – drew closer to her tall friend, Christine McGivern. He gave Christine an amiable and salacious wink, then addressed himself to Danea.
"I'm sorry about getting a bit prickly a while ago," he said. "You see, I never paid so much to get laid before, and I was sort of expecting – for that kind of money – to get a few repeat performances."
Christine gave a delighted gasp, but the colour drained from Danea's face.
"I see now that it wouldn't be good business for you to issue season tickets – not when you're humping for the Lord," Nicklin went on. "But I would like some more. Nothing too fancy, you understand – just straight stuff. How much would you charge a regular customer?"
Danea's mouth opened silently several times, then she pushed her way through the circle of listeners and ran off in the direction of her camper.
"Would a hundred orbs a shot be all right?" Nicklin called after her. "I don't mind saving up my stipend." Putting on a look of honest puzzlement, he faced his audience, most of whom were gazing at him with shock or growing resentment. "Is Danea upset about something? I wonder what could have upset her. I hope it wasn't something I said."
"You shouldn't ought've talked to Danea like that," Nibs Affleck muttered. His blue-red dipso's nose was gleaming with sweat, and he appeared to be full of righteous anger, the most dangerous kind.
"Really?" Nicklin enquired mildly. "What's so awful about having a little business discussion?"
Affleck moved towards him, his breastbone thrusting forward like the prow of a boat, but those next to him grabbed his arms and pulled him back. With a reproachful glance at Nicklin, he shrugged off his restraints, walked to the flat expanse of the marquee and began tugging on the guy ropes. The rest of the erection crew eagerly joined in the work, and in a few seconds Nicklin found himself alone with Christine.
"Well, hello," she said warmly, with a look that was both amused and speculative.
He met her gaze directly. "Are you doing anything special tonight?"
"I don't know – how special can you make it?"
"We'll get away from here for an hour or two and have a few drinks," he said. "Then I'll show you my prospectus."
The incident had been a definite high point in his brand-new life, Nicklin decided, marred only by the odd way in which Danea had caved in so easily. Corey Montane had spoken to him about it afterwards, trying to make the point that the mission observed certain standards of propriety, but in spite of much frowning and piercing with the eyes he had appeared ineffectual. That was because his position was basically untenable – like that of someone who was trying to-run a genteel brothel and had no contingency plans for dealing with the unpleasant customers who were bound to show up now and again. What he should have done was to employ a couple of his largest disciples to work Nicklin over with iron bars and dump him in a convenient alley. But Montane, having branched out into a line of business for which he had no vocation, was caught in a trap of his own making.
Now that Nicklin was considering the matter, he could see that Montane had not even been much shakes in his former role as a simple roving evangelist. Lacking the personal flair for attracting large sums of money, he had compounded his problem by surrounding himself with a bunch of society's drop-outs, most of whom were liabilities rather than assets. About the only thing they had in common was the belief that Orbitsville was the Devil's lobster pot, and that Montane was going to get them out of it and lead them to a new Eden.
Nicklin smiled again as he toyed with the notion. It was his ingrained scepticism which had created a barrier between him and the other members of the mission in the first place. Quite a few of them, Christine being a good example, were only vaguely religious in their outlook, but their unshakable faith in Montane's word tended to distance them from unbelievers. The barrier had rapidly solidified itself into a rampart after Nicklin had adopted his new persona – or had it adopted him? – but he had no complaints on that score. He had never been accepted by society in general; now the non-acceptance was under his own terms, and that wa
s a much better arrangement.
Suddenly impatient to get on with the business of the day, he finished his beer and walked towards the door. "I'm leaving you now," he called out to the couple behind the bar, giving them a genial wave. The venomous look it drew from the woman gladdened his heart as he went out to join the crowds in the street.
Although he was seeing Garamond Park in person for the first time, the place had an air of familiarity to Nicklin. The wandering groups of sightseers, the vivid botanical displays, the trees which partially screened the lustrous city buildings – television had turned all of these into visual clichés. Nevertheless, Nicklin felt a pang of excitement as he came in view of the portal itself.
It registered on the eye as a circular black lake, about a kilometre in diameter, which was surrounded by sloping lime-green lawns. Clustered on its nearer edge were low mounds of masonry which were all that remained of fortifications built by the enigmatic Primers, who had dominated Orbitsville many thousands of years before mankind's arrival. At the far side of the aperture were the passenger buildings and warehouses of the space terminal. In the distance they still looked fully functional, even though the great starship docking cradles – which should have projected into the void beneath them – had been conjured out of existence.
The single new element in the scene was a group of mobile laboratories at the eastern side of the portal, close to the old Metagov observation post. They had been cordoned off from the public and the immediate area was a profusion of cables, crates, trolleys and gantries. Metal frameworks were clamped on the rim of the aperture, their lower halves extending down into the black, making it easy for spacesuited technicians to force their way in and out through the diaphragm field which retained Orbitsville's air.
