by Bob Shaw
"That's what Professor Phair tried to put across on me." Hepworth gave a reminiscent little smile. "Just before I punched him in the throat."
Montane made a faint sound of disapproval.
"I don't get this," Nicklin said. "Surely, if everything in the universe was reversed, including time, all processes and relationships would be unaltered, and you wouldn't be able to detect the change. If your electron beam was pointing at the lab door before the Big Jump, it would still be pointing at the lab door after the jump."
Hepworth's smile did not fade. "You're forgetting that parity is not conserved in the weak nuclear force."
"Am I?"
"Yes. Have you a nuclear physics degree?"
"All I've got is a degree of discomfort," Nicklin said. "From sitting on these steps."
"Enough said, I think."
Left with an uncomfortable feeling that he had failed to assimilate a vital point, Nicklin stared at Hepworth's chubby countenance. His thoughts became unfocused as he noticed that Hepworth had an enormous blackhead at the side of his nose. Located just where nose merged into cheek, the blackhead had a faint bluish umbra and was so big that it presented a visible disc. How can he go around with a thing like that on his face? Nicklin wondered, his mind surrendering to irrelevancy. Why doesn't he squeeze it out, for Christ's sake?
"Something still troubling you, Jim?" Hepworth enquired mildly.
"The time aspect has me stumped," Nicklin said, choosing not to make any offensive personal comment. He no longer had scruples about such things, especially since the day he had exploded three human beings in less than ten seconds, but he was loath to alienate someone who could turn out to be an interesting companion. Good conversationalists were a rare breed among the mission's workers, and the few who had something worthwhile to say had no wish to say it to him.
"Time is one of the great imponderables," Hepworth stated in the grand tones of an unemployed and unemployable actor. He drained his glass, then allowed his gaze to rest for a brief moment on Nicklin's untouched drink. Nicklin, who had almost forgotten the pleasures of rapport, at once handed him the glass.
"Imponderable is the right word," he said. "Where did you get the forty billion years from?"
"I can assure you that I didn't pluck them out of a hat." Hepworth, having got his throat warmed up for action, swallowed half his second drink in a single gulp. "Richard Gott's historic theory proposed that the Big Bang created two universes – the one we all used to inhabit, which went forwards in time; and the one we're in now, which is going backwards in time. The Region One universe, as Gott dubbed it, was about twenty billion years old; this one, Region Two, appears to be about the same age – so it's reasonable to assume that we have jumped back some forty billion years.
"The symmetry in that proposal also has a certain appeal to–"
"This is all very interesting," Montane cut in, the dryness in his voice showing that he had become bored, "but I'm afraid the work here calls for practical skills rather than … May I ask, by the way, if you're a believer? Do you accept my message that Orbitsville is a trap which the Devil has set for God's children?"
Hepworth snorted. "No more than I believe in that other great trinity – Goldilocks, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood."
Well said, Scott, Nicklin thought regretfully, but your job interview technique grows worse.
"In that case, I don't think we should take up any more of each other's time," Montane said. "Unless there are other considerations–"
"Considerations?"
"Corey wants to know if you have any money," Nicklin said helpfully.
"Not a penny!" Hepworth seemed as proud of being broke as he had of being fired from his job. "Not a red cent, not a brass farthing, not a sou!" He gave Nicklin a puzzled glance. "Do I look as if I've got money?"
Montane placed his hands on his knees with an air of finality and rose to his feet. "I'm sorry you've had a wasted journey, Scott."
Hepworth showed no inclination to move. "I used to design ramjet engines – the same kind that you have on that starship over there – and I can repair and maintain them. I can also, if called upon, serve as a pilot."
Looking ahead as he went up the slope, Nicklin could see Hepworth among the crowd waiting for their first glimpse of the Liscard's interior. The physicist had used most of his last stipend to buy a duvet coat, a garment which made him easily recognisable at a distance because of its violent shade of lime green. Montane, Kingsley and Affleck were there too, plus a number of people whose names Nicklin had yet to learn, but the one person he really wanted to see was missing.
Danea Farthing's absence was a direct consequence of the improvement in the mission's fortunes. First there had been the publicity. Not only did it come free, but the news agencies and television companies were prepared to pay substantial sums for interviews and pictorial rights.
The global exposure had brought in some moral and financial backing – then the enigmatic green lines had entered the headlines again, this time with the discovery that they were visible on the outside of the Orbitsville shell. Interest in and support for Montane's cause had promptly increased.
Nicklin was not sure why the reports had caused such a widespread frisson of public unease. It might have been due to the fact that a green luminosity had swept the exterior of Orbitsville shortly prior to the so-called Big Jump. Or, more likely, it had been because the force field associated with the lines was known to weaken any material it passed through. If it could slice a building into pieces, the thinking was, perhaps it was doing the same thing to Orbitsville itself.
It mattered not that ylem, the shell material, had for two centuries resisted technology's fiercest efforts even to scratch it. There was a human personality type, exemplified by Montane himself, which had always been susceptible to paranoia and pessimism, to which every unusual event was an omen. They were the kind of people who saw portents of doom in an increase in the bug population, in a portrait falling off the living-room wall, in the creepy twilight which can herald a bad storm.
They were a minority, and only a tiny fraction of that minority were sufficiently motivated to take action, but in comparison to the mission's previous scale of operations they made up an avalanche. Quite suddenly, Montane had been inundated with money and new obligations. He had found it necessary to open an office in Beachhead to deal with the flow of enquiries about the New Eden flight, and to handle legal work in connection with donations and bequests.
And, to Nicklin's annoyance, he had given Danea a special job – a roving assignment in which she made discreet checks on applicants and their families. Nicklin could not guess how someone was assessed as the potential founder of a new race, and even if such vetting were possible he very much doubted that Danea was the right person to do it. She had a gift for weighing strangers up at a glance – he could testify to that from bitter experience – but working out their Adam-and-Eve quotient…?
His principal source of discontent, though he could not voice it, was that his revised scheme for revenging himself on Danea was being impeded. He had been too direct, too brutal in his previous approach; now he wanted to go softly. If he could win her over by being Mr Nice Guy, by courting her with contrition, humour, consideration and gentleness he would do so. It could even go as far as marriage. And only then – when she was totally unprepared, when their relationship was a mirror image of the one they had started out with – would he let her see what it was like to be destroyed by the one person you had been unwary enough to love.
The new plan was superior to the old, it had a gratifying flavour of genuine evil to it, but it was nearly impossible to implement unless the victim was constantly at hand.
Nicklin tried to dismiss Danea from his mind as he reached the level at which the undisturbed surface gave way to mud, rubble and slippery duckboards. From that viewpoint the ship, fully a hundred metres in length, resembled a geological feature, something which had been in the earth for ever. It was impos
sible to imagine the vast outcrop of metal inching along highways on multi-wheel trailers, let alone ghosting through space at more than the speed of light.
He walked along the planks beside which the top of the left-engine cylinder was emerging through the protective sand. As he neared the group surrounding the cutter only one person, Gerl Kingsley, acknowledged his arrival. Kingsley had never doubted that Nicklin had done the right thing in killing the fleeing attacker, and had been overtly friendly ever since. He still had great difficulty in speaking, however, and his sociability was largely restricted to winks and salutes, plus occasional whispers of, "Sewage farm, eh, Jim!"
The cryptic greeting was a reference to the comment Nicklin once made when a woman, smarting because he had bested her in an argument, asked if he felt no remorse over having killed three fellow humans. Not the slightest – all I did was send three pieces of shit to the great sewage farm in the sky. He had been pleased by how quickly the remark had echoed through the mission's personnel. It had earned him renewed dislike from practically everybody except Christine McGivern, on whom it appeared to have acted as an aphrodisiac, stimulating her natural inventiveness when they were together in bed.
The incident now seemed unreal to Nicklin, especially as Petruzzicho, the local sheriff, had not even bothered to come out of town to view the bodies. "It sounds to me like you ran up against the Lucci brothers, and nobody around here is going to grieve much over those characters," he had said. "I'll make you a deal, Jim – you bury the evidence and I'll consider the case closed."
Nicklin had done as requested, and that part of the incident had not paled in his memory. During the bleak hour it had taken him to bury the remains he had retched so violently and frequently that towards the end he had been bringing up fresh blood. He had chosen to remain silent concerning the bout of squeamishness, feeling that it would not have squared too well with his public image.
On reaching the edge of the group he saw that the woman operating the cutter had almost completed the circuit of the door seam. Skilfully holding the gas nozzle at an acute angle to the line of work, she was melting the weld material and blowing it away in coruscating showers, with minimal damage to the ship's hull. When the last molten blob was gone she stepped back, her torch popping loudly as it was turned off, and Montane took her place.
He had his familiar brown greatcoat buttoned well up to the throat, and appeared quite untroubled by the coldness of the air, in spite of having stood by for a long time. It was obvious to Nicklin that he was trying to look calm, but his mouth kept twitching with repressed jubilation as, amid the congratulations of the onlookers, he grasped the recessed door handle in a gloved hand and pushed it down. The lever did not move. He leaned his weight on it, pushing and tugging, but in spite of all his efforts the door remained firmly in place.
Aw, how could you do such a thing, O Gaseous Vertebrate? Nicklin thought, grinning. You've gone and screwed up Corey's big moment!
Making no effort to conceal his amusement, he waited near the scene for twenty minutes during which obstinate fragments of metal were coaxed out of the door's seam and quantities of penetroil were pressure-sprayed into its mechanisms. Finally, under the combined efforts of three men, the door was pulled open to reveal a rectangular airlock.
Nicklin, without being obvious about it, had worked his way into the front line of spectators. He was ready to surge forward with them, but held back when he saw that only a slim gangplank led to the inner door, which was already slightly ajar. Two metres below it was a "floor", one which was oddly adorned with printed notices, communication sets and instrument panels, which showed that it laid equal claim to being a "wall". He was reminded that spaceships were designed to manufacture their own gravity by means of acceleration and deceleration. The Liscard's diaphragm decks were now perpendicular to the ground, and the narrow walkway – which facilitated reaching its interior – was there only because the ship had been land-docked at the time of Apryl Fugaccia's death.
Having appraised the situation, Montane turned to face the group and raised his arms. "My friends, we have waited a long time for this moment – for years in quite a few cases – and I want to thank you for all the hard work you have done on behalf of the mission. God has begun to reward you for all those efforts. At last we are about to enter the Ark he has seen fit to provide for us – but there is one thing I would ask you to remember.
"This ship is more than the instrument of our salvation. It is also a tomb, and while inside it we must conduct ourselves accordingly – as we would while treading any plot of consecrated ground." Montane paused and gave his audience a sombre stare.
"Our first duty is a harrowing one. We must remove the mortal remains of Apryl Fugaccia from the ship, and transfer them to the last resting place with all due respect and…"
Consecrated ground, mortal remains, last resting place. Nicklin, bored with the rhetoric, occupied his thoughts by trying to compose an aphorism. The art of religious oratory is stringing the maximum number of clichés together with the minimum of … let's see … fresh verbiage in between? No, the last bit is too stilted, not pithy enough. Virgin grammar? That's even worse. Now I know how Oscar Wilde must have felt when… Nicklin abandoned the composition, becoming apprehensive as he realised that Montane's eyes were drilling into his.
"Naturally, as God's appointed leader of the mission, I am taking it upon myself to move the body, but I will need the assistance of one other person," Montane said, his gaze still fixed on Nicklin's face. "Let's go, Jim."
He switched on a portable light and immediately started across the gangplank. Nicklin swore inwardly, acknowledging that the preacher had scored another point in their private duel. The very last thing he wanted to do was manhandle a seventy-year-old corpse, or even go near a seventy-year-old-corpse, but there was no way in which Killer Nicklin could evade the task with half the mission watching. He was, after all, the man of ice.
"I hope this won't take long," he said, shouldering forward through the spectators. "I'm dying for something to eat."
As he followed Montane out of the sunlight and into the shaded interior of the ship he was surprised to find that the air smelled of something like dead leaves. The earthy aroma, which perhaps also hinted of mushrooms, was not what he would have expected in a triple-sealed tomb. He forgot about it as Jock Craig, the electrician, who was carrying an armful of lights, crowded into him from the rear. Petra Davies, similarly burdened, was following close behind.
The group moved slowly forward through the ship, with the electricians extending the area of illumination by attaching the miniature suns to every convenient surface. Nicklin's first impressions of a starship's interior were distorted by his being at a right angle to the normal lines of every open space. The webwork of shipfitters' scaffolding and staging, looking as though it had been left in place during a temporary halt in the work, further complicated the alien environment.
Being in the lead, Montane must have found the going even more difficult, but Nicklin had trouble in pacing him as they went through deck after deck. He caught up at a place where the catwalk passed over a circular hatch whose location established that it led down to the pinnace. The two men lowered themselves on to the surrounding wall, which gravity now designated as a floor. Taking care not to tread on the indicator panels and controls, they swung the hatch up to reveal a short dark well. Light spilling into it showed that another circular door at the bottom was already open, a silent invitation to enter the pinnace…
Ves Fugaccia's money-wise heirs had been delighted at the chance to unload the Altamura estate, but some remnant of propriety had led them to put in a stipulation. The small family burial plot at the rear of the house was to remain in their name, and the body of Apryl Fugaccia was to be interred in it with all due respect. Although Corey Montane hardly qualified as a priest in their eyes, they had agreed to have him conduct the ceremony. The concession had gratified Montane, in spite of Nicklin's suggestion that things would have
been otherwise had the tragic young bride become a convert to the true faith of old Rome.
He would have further demonstrated his scepticism by not attending the burial ceremony – had it not been for an unexpected internal event. The sight of Apryl Fugaccia's small figure in the left-hand seat of the pinnace's cockpit, still clad in her custom-made vacuum suit, had inspired him with the sudden and unmanning idea that disturbing her was an act of genuine crassness.
All dressed up and nowhere to go, he had thought, but no amount of smart braintalk could allay his feeling that the Gaseous Vertebrate had played enough pranks on her, that one more was one too many. Since before he was born, through all the time he could remember, she had been sitting there in the silent blackness … flying her expensive toy spaceship into the Dawn of Nothing … and, by rights, the pointless, aimless, beautiful flight should have gone on for ever. She should not have been grounded by a manic preacher who had been led to her by his capering, morally clubfooted assistant.
So Nicklin had attended the burial ceremony, while the cold airs had drifted in from Orbitsville's endless savannahs, and afterwards he had drunk gin with Scott Hepworth until his ability to taste it had failed.
CHAPTER 14
It had taken almost a year for the starship to complete the journey from Altamura to Beachhead City, and at some stage in that painful, frustrating trek Nicklin had fallen in love with the huge and unprepossessing vessel.
Standing at the front window of the mission's Beachhead office, he had an excellent view of the Tara – as it had been renamed by Montane – and could see nothing in its appearance to explain his emotional involvement. The three-cylinder layout had been introduced more than two centuries earlier by the historic Starflight corporation, and had survived because of its efficiency, but even the most romantic of enthusiasts had to concede that it was ugly. Snow was caking on the Tara's upper surfaces, swirling around the scaffolding and gathering in soiled drifts beneath the drive cylinders, giving it the forlorn appearance of an abandoned civil engineering project. The pinnace, which might have added a touch of aerodynamic glamour to the ponderous structure, had been unslung from beneath the nose section and transported separately.
