by Bob Shaw
He checked the rifle's power indicators, slung it on his shoulder mid hurried out of the room.
When Nicklin emerged from the office building with the rest of the mission's staff it was into daylight conditions. The sun had been shining without interruption for more than ten minutes, and the fact that to him it seemed quite a long time was an indication of how much his confidence in the natural order had deteriorated. He moved out from under the building's broad eaves, looked up at the sky and felt a pang of sick dismay.
All his life the alternating bands of azure and lighter shades of blue – representing day and night regions on the opposite side of Orbitsville – had possessed a geometric regularity and perfection. Now they were wildly distorted, and – the feature which brought a clamminess to Nicklin's brow – were visibly in motion. For the most part the movement was a slow writhing, but there were several small areas where the stripes narrowed into lines and ran together in seething agitation. Those patches were forming at random in parts of the sky, boiling and shimmering for a brief period before smoothing out and dissolving.
Looking up at them, Nicklin guessed that a similar convergence had caused the frenzied alternation of light and darkness in the Beachhead region. The shadow play also told him the solar cage was convulsing like an invisible heart in its death spasms. The end of the world is nigh.
Quelling a forceful upheaval in his stomach, he looked towards the ship and saw that about thirty people, many of them spaceport workers, had already clustered around the main ramp. They were not attempting to pass Kingsley and Winnick, who were blocking access to the ramp, but the tension in the air suggested it would not take much to start them surging forward. Glancing in the opposite direction, Nicklin saw that the main gates had been closed. A crowd was forming outside. Some of its members were pressing against the bars and arguing with the uniformed guards, who were nervously pacing within. The sections of Lindstrom Boulevard visible between buildings were thronged with cars.
Corey Montane, looking more assured now that the big decision had been forced upon him, ran towards his camper, accompanied by Nibs Affleck and Lan Huertas. A larger group went towards the ramp, headed by the spindle-legged figure of Voorsanger who, incongruously, was carrying a computer under one arm. Four men, Jock Craig among them, were running to the kiosk which housed the slideway controls. The mountainous bulk of the Tara, reflecting the sun in a coppery glare, provided a towering backdrop to the scene of complex activity.
Nicklin remained where he was, feeling isolated from all that was happening around him, then became aware of shouting from the crowd at the main gate. He looked in that direction and at once saw Danea Farthing ushering men, women and children through the adjoining personnel entrance. Some uniformed guards had moved outside and were clearing a small space by pushing back intruders, but they were in obvious danger of being overwhelmed. As Nicklin watched, a burly man penetrated the line by sheer force. He darted through the entrance and collided with two guards who had just emerged from the gatehouse. They grappled with him and the three began a lurching struggle which drew alarmed cries from women nearby.
Knots of migrants, some of them carrying suitcases, had already separated from the confusion and were hastening towards the ship. The adults' faces were distraught, but quite a few of the children with them – secure in their innocence – merely looked excited, with eyes for nothing but the gleaming contours of the Tara.
Nicklin ran past them, belatedly remembering that Cham and Nora White had no security passes and therefore would be denied entrance. By the time he reached the gate the struggle between the two spaceport guards and their captive was ending. They had glued the burly man's wrists together behind him with restraint patches and were bundling him into the gatehouse.
One of them, a fair-skinned heavyweight, frowned at Nicklin. "You shouldn't be carrying that weapon, mister."
Nicklin glanced at the sky. "Do you want to run me in?"
"Take your people away, and do it fast" the guard said. "We just got word that a mob of two or three thousand have come out of town through Garamond Park. They're tearing holes in our north fence right now and they'll be on top of you real soon."
"Thanks," Nicklin said.
"Don't thank me – I don't want to be in the middle of a war, that's all."
"Wise man." Nicklin ran to Danea and grabbed her arm. "I want to take Zindee and her parents. They'll need badges."
She gave him a thoughtful stare, took three gold disks from her pocket and handed them over. "There isn't much time – Megan is already on the ship."
Nicklin had to think for a moment before remembering that Megan was the pilot. "What about the paying customers?" he said, controlling a new surge of panic. "Many to come?"
Danea glanced at her watch, which was in counting mode. "Four that I know of. They should be here at any sec – " She looked out through the bars of the main gate at the surging crowd. "I see them!"
Nicklin went out through the personnel gate and saw that the hard-pressed guards were already bringing a young man and woman, each carrying a child, into the cleared space. Raising himself on his toes, he scanned the crowd and felt a pang of relief as he picked out Cham White's coppery hair and anxious face amid the leaven of heads.
"Only three more to come," he told the nearest guard.
"Friggin' good job," the sweating man grunted. "We're goin' to go under in a minute."
Nicklin threw his weight against the wall of bodies. For an instant he was surprised at how readily they parted for him, then he realised that the eyes of those in the forefront were on the rifle. He managed to grasp Cham's outstretched hand and drag him out of the throng. Nora White and Zindee followed close behind, literally ejected by the human pressure from behind, though not without some resentful pushing and clawing from the individuals they left in their wake. They were wearing identical one-piece green daysuits, and both looked pale and bewildered. Nora's gaze never left Nicklin's face, as though it had become a source of wonder to her, but Zindee kept her eyes averted.
"Through there," Nicklin said, urging Cham and the two women towards the narrow gate.
"Not so fast!" The speaker was a guard with sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve. "Nobody goes in without a pass."
"It's taken care of." Nicklin handed each of the Whites a gold badge and bundled them into the gateway. The action had a galvanic effect on the crowd. Until that moment some vestige of regard for rules had held them in check, but the sight of three of their number being so arbitrarily favoured drove them forward in resentment. The guards were slammed back against the bars and there was a flurry of vicious in-fighting while they got themselves inside to safety and bolted the personnel gate.
"What are you waiting for?" The sergeant was wiping blood from his mouth as he shouted at Nicklin and Danea. "Get out of here!"
Nicklin ran with the others in the direction of the Tara. The adults were shepherding the children who were too big to be carried. As they neared the ship Nicklin saw that Montane and Kingsley were carrying the pewter oblong of Milly Montane's coffin up the ramp. Emigrants were clustered at the foot of the long incline while others crowded up it behind the two slow-moving men. Other men, Scott Hepworth among them, were running towards the slideway control kiosk.
Nicklin barely had time to realise that the kiosk was the centre of some kind of disturbance when, without warning, his surroundings were plunged into blackness. There followed another frenzied sequence of alternations between sunlight and darkness. The changes were occurring two or three times a second, turning the entire scene into a vast stage with characters frozen in place by lightning flashes. Cries of alarm were heard as gravity underwent sickening fluctuations, creating the impression that the ground itself was rising and falling.
The stroboscopic nightmare went on for a subjective eternity – perhaps ten seconds – and then, as before, the sanity of continuous sunlight flooded back into the world.
The late arrivers, freed from paralysis, r
esumed the rush towards the ship, stumbling in their renewed anxiety. One man threw away a suitcase, gathered up his son and ran ahead with him. Danea and Zindee were together, urging children forward, but Nora White kept staring at Nicklin, as though somehow he were the author of all her troubles and the only one she could look to to pin everything right. A strong wind was springing up, probably in response to the contortions of the solar cage, and dust began streaming across the dry concrete.
Nicklin looked in the direction of the kiosk and saw that a confrontation seemed to be taking place between some of the mission's workers and a man in the grey uniform of a port official. The man was framed in the doorway of the glazed booth, angrily brandishing his arms. Deducing what the argument was about, Nicklin broke away from his group and ran to the kiosk.
Hepworth turned to him as he arrived. "This character – he calls himself the slidemaster, would you believe? – is refusing to run the ship out."
"Drag him out of there and we'll do it ourselves."
"He has a gun and he says he's prepared to use it, and I think he's the sort of schmuck that would do just that." Hepworth's plump lace was purple with rage and frustration. "Besides, the controls have a coded lock."
"What about the locks on the slideway itself?"
"We burned them off."
"Right!" Nicklin said, unslinging his rifle.
The half-dozen mission workers hastily moved out of the way, creating an avenue between Nicklin and the port official. He was a lung-faced man in his fifties, with cropped grey hair and a small geometrically exact moustache. His posture was severely upright and square-shouldered, and his uniform meticulously correct in every detail – except for the gun belt, which looked as though it had come from a military supplier. Nicklin guessed that it had been languishing in a drawer somewhere, held in reserve in the hope that the appropriate day of crisis would eventually arrive. Just my luck, he thought. A would-be Roman centurion staving off the collapse of civilisation with a book of regulations…
"There's no time to play games," he said. "You're going to start the slide rolling – and you're going to do it right now."
The official looked him up and down, contemptuously, before shaking his head. "Nothing will move around here without the proper authorisation."
"I've got the proper authorisation." Nicklin made a show of activating the rifle. "It's pointing at your navel."
"That curious object!" The official placed a hand on the butt of his old-style revolver and smiled to show that he knew something about weaponry. "It isn't even a good replica."
"You're right." Nicklin elevated the rifle slightly and squeezed the trigger. A blue-white ray stabbed through the roof of the kiosk, explosively vaporising part of the gutter, eaves and plastic rafters, sending a swirl of sparks and smoke down the wind. Even Nicklin, who had good reason to appreciate the power of the weapon, was taken aback by the extent of the damage.
"It's a fucking awful replica," he said to the uniformed man, who had cringed back from the flash. "Now, about the slideway…"
"I don't think you'd be stupid enough to use that thing on me." The man straightened up and squared his shoulders as he spoke, but there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice.
Nicklin moved one step closer and gave him the full happy hayseed grin, while his eyes promised murder. "I've killed other men with this, and I'm fully prepared to blow you into two separate pieces – a top half and a bottom half."
For a moment there was no sound but that of the wind, then there came distant shouting from the north side of the dock complex. Nicklin glanced towards it, in the direction of the park boundary, and saw moving flecks of colour which signalled the advance of the expected mob. He swung his gaze back to the official and immediately sensed that something had changed in him.
"I try to do what they pay me for, but there's nothing in my contract about getting myself killed," the man said with a shrug. "No hard feelings, eh?"
Nicklin blinked at him, giving away nothing. "No feelings of any kind. Are you going to roll the ship and stay alive?"
"I'm going to roll the ship. As soon as you get your party on board, away she goes!"
Hepworth moved close to Nicklin and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Jim, you can see what he's up to. As soon as we go on board and seal the ship he's going to run for cover and leave us high and dry. Even if we open the doors again it'll be too late to–"
"I know what he's up to," Nicklin snapped, keeping the rifle steady on the man in the kiosk. "We're all going on board now. I'll be walking backwards, so keep a clear space behind me – especially on the ramp. Okay?"
"Okay, Jim." Hepworth moved away towards the ship and the rest of the mission workers backed off with him.
"All right, here's what we're going to do," Nicklin said to the watchful official. "I could easily pick you off at three kilometres with this imitation replica, so there's no chance of me missing you inside two or three hundred metres. I'm going on board the ship now, but I'll have the gun on you every step of the way. Even if you throw yourself down on the floor I'll destroy your little hut and everything in it, including you. Is that clear?"
"I won't do anything stupid." The man glanced towards the north where, at the end of a long row of sheds, it was now possible in< discern individual running figures. "How will–?"
"As soon as I get to the top of the ramp you start the slide moving. Don't wait for the door to close. As soon as you see me up there – roll the ship."
The man almost smiled. "That could be dangerous."
"For you," Nicklin countered. "That's when you'll be in the biggest danger. You might get the idea that I'll be too busy with the door locks to keep the cross-hairs on you – but I promise you I won't. The door will stay open until I feel the ship's nose going down, so – whatever you do – keep the machinery running."
"I'll be as nervous as hell by then," Nicklin added, beginning to back away, "but the gun will still be on you, and you'd better pray there aren't any power failures. If the slide sticks for even half a second I won't be able to stop my finger from twitching."
"Nothing will go wrong if I can help it," the man said, turning to his control panel.
Keeping the rifle aimed, not daring to glance behind him, Nicklin moved towards the ramp as quickly as he could. He had spent more time than he liked in talking to the slidemaster, but it had been necessary for the man to be very clear about what was expected of him. His peripheral vision told Nicklin that he was being watched by a number of port workers. They had formed an intermittent ring at a discreet distance, nobody caring to move forward in case the crazy man should be tempted to unleash another bolt of lightning.
The expanse of concrete between the kiosk and the Tara had become a sunlit arena, with wind-borne scraps of litter tumbling in the dust. Nicklin had full control of the situation because each person there was thinking as an individual, and had an individual's fear of being annihilated. But hundreds of new participants were racing towards the scene, and the formless sound which heralded their arrival told him they were thinking as a mob – and a mob knows itself to be collectively immortal. Were a few of its sub-units to blunder up the steps of the slideway control kiosk the Tara would never be able to take flight…
"The ramp is two steps behind you," Hepworth said.
"Got it." Nicklin moved on to the slope, thankful for its smooth anti-slip surface, and backed up it. As he gained height he got a more comprehensive view of his surroundings. The entire space port area seemed to be awash in a riptide of humanity. He reached the entrance to the ship and, keeping the blue cross-hairs centred on the slidemaster, carefully stepped backwards to stand on the interior gangplank.
The Tara began to move immediately, and the platform at the head of the ramp slipped away to his right.
"The door hydraulics are on full pressure, Jim." Hepworth was hunkered down by the control panel. "Give the word when you want to close up."
"We have to wait till the ship actually dips its nos
e," Nicklin replied, while one part of his mind shrieked in disbelief at what was happening. "Our friend in the glass box knuckled under too easily He isn't finished with us yet."
"But it takes time for the door to close. If we drop through the diaphragm field while it's still open–"
"Don't touch that button till I tell you!" Nicklin made his voice hard, concealing the agonies of suspense and apprehension inspired in him by the ship's almost imperceptible progress towards the rim of the aperture. The leaders of the crowd advancing from the park reached the dockside while he was speaking. Some of them came sprinting towards the ship, punching the air in their frustration, but others were surging around the kiosk.
Don't go up the steps, Nicklin prayed, his brow prickling with cold sweat. Please don't force me to kill you.
Far below him the slideway was squealing as its rollers pulverised a two-year accumulation of debris, material which would have been swept out before a routine launch. New fears invaded his mind. What if the debris contained a piece of scrap metal large enough to mm the slide? What if some of the protesters below had got the same idea and were already hurling scaffold tubes into the exposed mechanisms?
He ceased breathing as a pool of blackness began spreading in the lower half of his field of vision. That meant he was now moving out over the portal and, as the door was close to the centre of the ship, the whole ponderous structure should be on the point of tilting downwards. His heartbeats became internal hammer blows as the scene projected by the rifle's smartscope began a slow rotation.
"I'm closing her up, Jim," Hepworth said.
"No!" That's what the centurion is waiting for. "Leave the door alone!"
