by Bob Shaw
"The rifle," Montane whispered. "Where's the rifle?"
"It's back in the house."
"You should have brought it." Montane's face was stern. "You were told to carry it everywhere."
Absurdly, Nicklin's fear was displaced by indignation. "You came out first! You and your pal should have–"
His words were lost in the sound of a new bullet strike. This time the slug, having glanced off a nearby rock, howled like a demented being as it flailed the warm air. Nicklin, who had never been close to a ricochet before, was appalled by its sheer ferocity.
"Go and get the rifle," Montane commanded, breaking the ensuing silence.
"But you can't stay up here," Nicklin said preparing to crawl away.
"I'll bring Gerl as fast as I – " Montane made an angrily impatient gesture. "For God's sake, man, get the rifle!"
Nicklin nodded and slithered down on to the bared expanse of fused earth. At the far side of it he rose to his feet and ran down the only clear path, bounding recklessly where there were flights of steps. In seconds he had reached level ground and was sprinting towards the colonnaded facade of the house.
Can this really be happening to me? he wondered, his mind distancing itself from bodily turmoil. Who's out there doing the shooting? Does somebody really want to kill us, or is it just a hunting trip gone wrong, a few drunks taking potshots at anything that moves for the pure bloody hell of it?
The thought reminded Nicklin that there had been no audible reports from the unseen weaponry. It meant that whoever was out there was using tail-burning ammunition – in effect, miniature rocket projectiles which in spite of dubious accuracy were favoured by some hunters because there was no muzzle blast to frighten off their prey.
Nicklin's mind seized on the new thought, somehow managing to find a glimmer of reassurance in it. The worst of the trouble might already be over if a couple of liquored-up hunters were responsible. Having had their bit of fun, they could easily have developed cold feet and retreated into the bush. The idea took on a life of its own, isolating Nicklin from normal time, expanding its solitary theme into a monotonous fugue. Oh yes, things were bad. There was no denying that things were bad – especially after what had happened to poor Gerl – but they weren't all that bad. After all, nobody had been killed. Gerl's face was in a hell of a mess, one had to admit that, but nobody had actually been killed…
A subjective aeon had passed by the time Nicklin lunged up the broad steps of the house, through the open doors and into the shade of the entrance hall. I probably won't even have to use this, he chanted to himself as he snatched the rifle out of the antique oak stand. Even in that moment of extremity the machine-lover in him appreciated the weapon's lightness.
He ran back outside to the sunshine, shaded his eyes and scanned the hillside, fully expecting to see Montane and Kingsley working their way down the slope. There was no sign of them, no movement anywhere. The scene had a slumbrous Sunday afternoon look about it, a Monet landscape quality which Nicklin found quite astonishing. Forcing his mind to deal with real time again, he was even more astonished to realise that only forty or fifty seconds could have passed since he began his dash from the hilltop.
That was a very brief period indeed, no time at all, for somebody who had to tend a wounded man, or for hunters moving tentatively under cover. He started running once more, seeming to swoop above the ground like a low-flying bird. The wilderness of the garden flicked past him, the contrived slope of the hill sank behind him – then he was back on the rubbled centre stage of the drama. Montane was kneeling beside Kingsley, helping him to wad a handkerchief into his mouth, but otherwise nothing had changed during Nicklin's absence. He bent as low as he could, scurried forward and threw himself into a prone position close to Montane.
"Well?" he breathed. "Well?"
"It's still going on."
"You're sure?"
"I saw dust." Montane gave Nicklin an expectant look, a look which ended his naive hopes of remaining little more than an observer.
"In that case … " He slid the rifle to the top of the low bank of earth and pebbles, then slowly raised his head behind the weapon, wondering how much he would know about the event if his brain were to be pulped by a miniature rocket. His life continued. The land lay silent beneath the high sun, a pulsing blaze of tall grass, brushwood and flat-topped trees, betraying no enemy presence.
He moved his head slightly, bringing his eyes into the focus zone of the rifle's smartscope, and at once the scene changed. There was no magnified but curtailed image, as would have been produced by a traditional lens system. Instead, as the scope analysed and edited a superhuman range of frequencies, projecting the result directly on to his retinas, Nicklin saw a glare-free representation of all that lay before him. In that strange, colour-adjusted universe – seen through bright blue cross-hairs – leafy matter was almost transparent. And clearly visible among gauzy stands of ghost-grass were two human figures, glowing with a neon pinkness. They were down on their stomachs, wriggling towards the hill with a snaky lateral motion, their breath feathering up like smoke signals. Not far behind them was a tree whose thick trunk, opaque to the smartscope, seemed to be emitting little smoke signals of its own.
The machine-lover, the game-player in Nicklin took immediate control of his mind and body. He moved the intersection of the cross-hairs on to the nearer of the crawling figures and squeezed the trigger. A breath of heat touched his forehead and the figure abruptly lost its human outlines, becoming a shapeless smear which was further blurred by swirls of luminous pink vapour. A second later, its arrival delayed by the intervening two hundred metres, came a dull, soggy thud-thud.
The knowledge that he had heard a man's internal organs and torso exploding would have appalled Nicklin had he been in a normal state of mind, but the game was on – and the cross-hairs were already centring themselves on the second figure. He squeezed the trigger again, and this time – amid the blotch of destruction – he actually glimpsed the target's ribcage snapping wide open like some spring-loaded mechanical device.
"Do you think you hit anything?" Montane had appeared at Nicklin's side, and his eyes – inefficient biological organs – were blindly scanning the innocent, sun-drenched scene.
"Oh, yes," Nicklin assured him. "I hit something."
Montane gave him a worried glance. "Maybe we should go down there and–"
"Wait!" Nicklin, still under the spell of the smartscope, had transferred all his attention to the vicinity of the tree. Flickers of pink brilliance informed him that the person who had been standing behind the trunk was now running away and attempting to keep the tree in between him and the dealer of death. But almost at once he was forced to detour around a shrub and, long hair streaming, came fully into Nicklin's inhuman view. The cross-hairs quartered his back on the instant and Nicklin's trigger finger made the appropriate response. The fleeing figure disintegrated, shedding an arm which spun off to one side like a broken propeller.
An unexpected blow on his shoulder startled Nicklin, recalling him to the real world.
"Why did you do that?" Montane's face was distorted, accusing. "There was no need for that."
"Why did I–!" Nicklin pointed at Gerl Kingsley, who had risen to his knees and was fingering a pronged whitish object which was emerging from the bloody hole in his cheek. "Ask him if there was any need for it!"
"For God's sake, the man was running away!"
"Yeah, to fetch the rest of his clan! What the fuck's the matter with you, Corey? Are you tired of living? Is it all getting too much for you?" The physical after-effects of Nicklin's sprint down the hill and back, seemingly held in abeyance to make him a steady gun platform, suddenly began to manifest themselves. His breathing became harsh and rapid, and a salty froth thickened in his mouth.
"You don't know what the man was going to do," Montane said, shaking his head.
"Perhaps he remembered he'd left the bath water running," Nicklin suggested, putting on his smile.
Did I kill three men? Did I really and truly vaporise three men?
"You can joke? How can you joke?"
"It's easy," Nicklin said, determined to brook no more questions – from without or within. "All you have to do is remember that everybody is a piece of shit."
"We have to get Gerl to a doctor," Montane said, after a pause.
He turned away, but before doing so he gave Nicklin a prolonged look. His eyes betrayed no hatred, which was something Nicklin had expected and could have savoured. Instead, they showed simple contempt.
CHAPTER 13
The coming of autumn had brought many changes, not least in the appearance of the hill itself. Once a perfect ovoid, it had been deprived of its entire upper half, like a gargantuan boiled egg which somebody had chosen to cut open from the side. The lower half was hidden beneath slopes of scree made up of masonry, rubble, clay and jagged fragments of the fused-earth shell. Projecting from the shambles was the entire main cylinder of the Liscard, complete with the toy-like pinnace slung under the nose section. The hull of the mother ship, copiously stained with ochreous mineral deposits, was obscured in places by scaffolding, plastic weather screens and banks of ladders.
Digging through to the ship had taken much longer than Montane or anybody else connected with the project had originally anticipated. On breaking through the outer shell they had quickly penetrated about a metre of compacted fill – only to encounter a second shell, also of vitrified earth. Montane had curbed his natural impatience with the consoling thought that his ship had been superbly protected during its seventy years of incarceration, but even he had been taken aback by the discovery of a third carapace.
It appeared that the disconsolate Ves Fugaccia had been determined to make his young bride's tomb as inviolable as that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The third shell had proved to be the innermost – with nothing inside it but clean sand – but even then there were further obstacles to entering the ship. All three doors on the upper surface of the cylinder were found to have been welded along the whole length of the seams. Unwilling to have them mutilated by cutting gear, Montane had waited until the side doors of the cylinder were uncovered – and those, too, had been welded.
As Nicklin climbed towards the ship, in the pale lemon sunlight of autumn, he could see that one of the side doors was finally being breached. A valency cutter would have been too fierce and indiscriminate in its action, therefore old-fashioned oxy-acetylene was being employed in the hope of persuading the weld metal to come away without excessive damage to the adjacent structure. Showers of yellow sparks were occasionally visible through the screen of men and women who had stopped work to watch the operation.
The size of the group of spectators was a reminder to Nicklin of another change that had come about, one that he had never envisaged. Soon after the upper section of the Liscard had been uncovered, journalists had taken an interest in the proceedings and had begun visiting the site by light aircraft and helicopter. The resultant publicity had attracted quite a few enquiries from people who, swayed by Montane's message, either wanted to work with him or to reserve places for themselves and their families on the flight to New Eden. A fair proportion of them had been prepared, as Nicklin had done, to liquidate all their assets to buy into the project.
One of the earliest had been Scott Hepworth, a physicist from the Garamond Institute, who had arrived at the site one morning on foot, having walked all the way out from Altamura. Montane and Nicklin had been sitting on the front steps of the mansion arguing about the purchase of laundry equipment, when the plump man in his sixties – red-faced and sweating – had approached them…
"Mr Montane?" the stranger said. "My name is Scott Hepworth, I'm a top-class physicist, and I want to work for you."
"Everybody calls me Corey," Montane replied, with the wry smile – now familiar to Nicklin – which established him as the humblest of democrats. "And this is Jim Nicklin. Would you like to sit with us for a while?"
"Thank you." Hepworth nodded to Nicklin as he seated himself, took out a handkerchief and began to wipe his neck. "I think I'm a bit too old for hiking around in this heat."
Montane looked sympathetic. "Would you like some tea?"
"Tea!" A look of distaste appeared on Hepworth's roundly padded face. "The kind of thirst I have can only be quenched with gin and tonic. Any lesser brew would be an insult to the taste buds which have served me loyally for more years than I care to remember. I don't suppose you–"
"I don't believe in strong liquor," Montane said.
Nicklin, who had been prepared to dislike the newcomer, largely because of his overbearing approach, decided not to be too hasty. Many another man – the former Jim Nicklin included – when courting a prospective employer would have pretended to love tea, but Hepworth had come straight out and said he was a boozer. Terrible interview technique, but it indicated that he was his own man.
Discreetly studying Hepworth, Nicklin was interested to note that he did not look anything like a senior scientist at a university which was famed for conservatism and stuffiness. His lightweight suit was cheap and ill-fitting. It was not a case of it being "well-worn but of good cut" – the hackneyed old novelistic phrase which showed that a character had the right sort of background but had "fallen into straitened circumstances". This suit had started out shoddy, and had not improved with time. It was complemented by a rumpled shirt and comprehensively scuffed sandals.
Scott Hepworth was something of an oddball, Nicklin decided, and as such ought to be encouraged. "I've got some gin in my room," he said, rising to his feet. "Ice and a slice of lime?"
"All the trimmings, my boy," Hepworth said, looking deeply grateful.
Rewarded by a disapproving glance from Montane, Nicklin hurried to his room to prepare the drink. He was not particularly fond of gin, having bought it because it was easier to transport from town than beer, but he mixed himself a large one as well, knowing that it would further annoy Montane. He returned to the front steps in time to hear Montane ask the visitor why he had quit the Garamond.
"It wasn't through choice," Hepworth replied easily. "I got thrown out." As if there might be some doubt about his meaning, he added, "I was forcibly ejected. Given the boot."
Now positively warming to the man, Nicklin winked as he handed him a dewed glass. Hepworth took it eagerly, but, instead of drinking immediately, held it under his nose and breathed deeply of the aroma.
"May I ask why the university saw fit to dispense with your services?" Montane said, the stilted wording and coolness of their delivery showing that he was far from being impressed by Hepworth.
"I had an argument – some might call it a stand-up fight – with the head of my department." Hepworth smiled into his drink as though enjoying pleasant memories. "He's been trying to show me the door for quite a long time, and I finally gave him a good excuse."
"What was the argument about?"
"I stumbled on some evidence that Orbitsville has jumped into a different universe, but Professor Phair disagreed with my interpretation."
"A different universe!" Montane stiffened visibly. "Is this something new? We've already been told that the whole globe has moved."
"Yes, but not so far." Hepworth took an appreciative sip of his gin before going on. "I'm not talking about some kind of warp-transfer into a distant part of the familiar old continuum. I'm saying we jumped into an entirely different continuum – an anti-matter universe where time is reversed."
"But – " Montane glanced helplessly at Nicklin.
"It's a beautiful idea," Nicklin said, vaguely aware of once having discussed a similar notion with Zindee White, "but what about these starships they're starting to use on interportal runs? Shouldn't the ions they scoop up just blow them apart?"
Hepworth shook his head. "I see you've already done some thinking on this, but in your scenario the ships wouldn't be able to operate at all. If they were familiar hadronic-matter starships which had been popped into an anti-matter uni
verse, their scoop fields would repel the surrounding anti-matter particles. What I'm saying is that our beloved Orbitsville and everything on it – present company included – has been flipped over in the process of being translated into a different universe. We have also been hurled about forty billion years backwards in time, but leave that aside for the moment. My main point is that we are composed of anti-matter now; our ships are composed of anti-matter now – so everything works exactly as before."
"In that case," Nicklin said, fighting off bemusement, "there wouldn't be any way to detect the change."
"That's what I would probably have said – before last week." Hepworth drank again, more deeply this time. "For the last three years, on and off, I've been trying to design an ultra-sensitive flow meter for use in liquid oxygen. It had to have a self-contained source of electrons, so I decided to use radioactive cobalt. There were all kinds of design complications, which I won't go into because they're so boring, but cobalt 60 was great for the job, because the nuclei spray more electrons out of their south poles than from their north pole's.
"Normally they cancel each other out, but if you cool the stuff right down you can use magnetism to align a lot of the atoms – and you get a blob of metal which shoots more electrons out of one end than out of the other."
Hepworth paused, eyes alert and twinkling, to scan his listeners' faces. "Does any of this ring a bell? A school bell, perhaps."
Nicklin, anxious to make Montane feel dim by comparison, ransacked his memory. "Wasn't there a famous experiment with cobalt 60…back on Earth … three or four hundred years ago?"
"There was indeed!" Hepworth said. "The one which proved that the universe is not symmetrical! Perhaps that gives you an inkling of how I felt last week when I hauled my flow meter out of a locker, where it had languished for the best part of a year, and discovered that my little electron beam was going the wrong way!"
Nicklin's mind balked at the implications of what he had just been told. "Perhaps you set the equipment up wrong."
