Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  "We can't wait!"

  The sunlit universe outside tilted further. Nicklin braced himself against the door roaming, keeping his aim. There came a loud whining sound from nearby hydraulic pumps and the door began to swing shut.

  "Sorry, Jim – it had to be done."

  This is when it happens, Nicklin thought, keeping his eye on the slidemaster through the narrowing aperture. The door was closing quickly, aided by the angle of tilt, shutting off Nicklin's view of the world. He saw the man make a sudden movement and in the next instant the grinding squeal of the slideway stopped.

  "You bastard," Nicklin breathed, his finger tightening on the rifle's trigger. Little more than a second remained in which to fire, but that was plenty of time for the act of retribution, for the games player to make his final score. He sent the necessary neural command – the execution order – to his finger, but there was no response. The slim rectangle of brilliance shrank into a line and vanished. The door bedded into the hull with a clunk and automatic bolts ran their radial courses into the surrounding structure.

  What happened to me? Nicklin thought in wonderment. The centurion was a dead man – but I gave him back his life!

  A moment later he had to let go of the rifle and grab hold of a stanchion to avoid sliding off the gangplanks, then it came to him that the ship was still rotating. And almost at once the balm of weightlessness flooded through his body.

  The Tara had taken flight.

  CHAPTER 17

  Nicklin remained clinging to the gangplank railing while he adjusted to the idea that he – Jim Nicklin! – had become a space traveller. There was no physical evidence of what was happening to the ship, but in his mind's eye he could see the Tara – having wallowed down through the Beachhead portal – drifting out and away from the Orbitsville shell with what little momentum it had. It was quite likely that the ship was slowly tumbling, presenting its pilot with control problems and delaying the moment when the drivers could be switched on.

  The only way of getting hard information was from the astrogation screens, and as soon as the thought came to mind Nicklin felt a compulsion to go to the control deck without delay. A spectacular event was taking place, and here in the midship airlock he was blind to it. He looked about him, preparing for the small adventure of flying to the inner door, and encountered Hepworth's scandalised gaze.

  "He stopped the rollers!" Hepworth said hoarsely. "The swine nearly stopped us getting away, Jim. If the ship had settled backwards we'd have been stuck there for ever."

  But that was in our previous existence, Nicklin thought, wondering how Hepworth could still concern himself with the matter. "He was sticking to his post."

  "You should have stuck him to his post. You should have melted the bastard, Jim."

  "It's all over. Do you want to go up front and find out what's happening?"

  Without waiting for a reply, Nicklin slung the rifle on his shoulder and launched himself towards the airlock's inner door, feeling rather like a swimmer entrusting himself to invisible waters. He caught a handrail at the door's edge and, gratified at how natural the movement felt, swung himself around it and on to the broad ladder which ran the length of the passenger cylinder.

  It was only then that he became fully aware of the state of near-bedlam which existed throughout the serried decks. The gangplanks, which ran parallel to the ladder, had been crowded with people when the Tara made its ungainly dive into space. Now, suddenly disoriented and deprived of weight, they were in frantic pursuit of safer resting places. Some were clinging to the ladder, while others – with much shouting and waving of limbs – ventured towards targets between decks. Children seemed to be crying on every level, and the confusion was made greater by items of baggage and personal effects which drifted randomly in the cramped and cluttered perspectives of the companionway.

  Nicklin went towards the prow of the ship with effortless speed, his progress aided by the fact that the engineered environment, so bewildering to others, was totally familiar to him. He knew every cleat, gusset plate and fastener so well that he could have located himself simply by remembering the irregularities in certain welds. He had negotiated his way past six decks when he became aware of a faint gravitational drag and realised that the ship's ion drive had been activated. Almost at once there was a decrease in the ambient noise level as the Tara's passengers found a degree of reassurance in the behaviour of everything around them.

  The upper decks were quieter, the living space having been allocated to mission workers, many of whom had been left behind in Beachhead. On nearing 3 Deck, two below the control room, Nicklin heard Montane's voice just above. He stepped off the ladder beside the circular hatch which led to the pinnace. That level was partly taken up by stores associated with the pinnace, and therefore had only two accommodation suites – one for Montane, the other for Voorsanger.

  Montane and Nibs Affleck were standing at Voorsanger's door, steadying themselves in the weak gravity by gripping the frame. From inside the room there came a dry choking sound. Nicklin's first thought was that Voorsanger was being sick, then he realised the man was sobbing. The notion of the arid and stiff-necked accountant giving vent to tears was almost as strange to Nicklin as any event of the past hour.

  "What's the matter?" he said to Montane.

  Ignoring the question, Montane turned on him with a look of outrage. "Is this your doing? The launch! Was it you?"

  "I didn't have much choice."

  "Choice! Who are you to talk about choice?" Montane's lips were quivering with anger. "Have you any idea what you've done? Dozens of families were left behind! Ropp's wife has been left behind!"

  "That's too bad," Nicklin said, "but there was absolutely nothing I–"

  "We can't go on with this," Montane cut in. "We have to go back."

  "Back! We can't go back, Corey – we almost had the ship taken off us as it was."

  "Jim is right," Scott Hepworth said, corning into view on the ladder.

  "You!" Montane pointed at him with a trembling finger. "You're as bad as he is – you're both in this together."

  "You've got to calm down, Corey," Nicklin said. "If we go back now and cradle the ship we'll lose it for sure. The mob–"

  "The Lord will confound my enemies." Montane threw himself at the ladder and went up it towards the control deck with surprising agility. Affleck, who seemed to have taken on the role of Montane's protector, gave the others a reproachful look and followed close behind him.

  "We'd better go after them," Nicklin said to Hepworth.

  "You can't use the rifle. It would probably vent the pressure hull."

  "I've no intention of using it," Nicklin said, impatient with Hepworth's new preoccupation with death-dealing. "Besides, this is Corey's show. If he wants to take the ship back nobody has any right to stop him – and I suppose we might be able to keep everything under control back there for a few hours."

  Hepworth sniffed. "You don't believe that any more than I do."

  "That's why we've got to talk some sense into the man." Nicklin got back on to the ladder and went up it at speed, doing most of the work with his hands. When he reached the control deck Montane was already standing beside Megan Fleischer, who was in the centre seat of the five which faced the master view screen. It was being fed by an aft-facing camera and the display on it had the effect of distracting Nicklin from his immediate purpose.

  At the bottom edge were two copper-glowing segments, equally spaced, which represented the Tara's drive cylinders as seen from a point at the rear of the passenger cylinder. They failed to hold the eye because most of the screen was taken up by the huge, sky-blue circle, with the Orbitsville sun close to its centre, which was the image of the Beachhead portal. Ribbons of a lighter blue, shifting like moiré patterns, formed a background for streamers of milky cloud and the condensation trail of a lonely aircraft. The rest of the screen, dramatising a simple geometric design, was filled by the utter blackness of the Orbitsville shell.

>   It's really happening, Nicklin thought, eyes and mind brimming. I'm in a spaceship – and it's leaving the world behind…

  "…hope you realise that it's impossible for any ship to disengage itself from a docking cradle," Fleischer was saying. "If we go back we won't be able to get away again unless somebody in the Port Authority gives permission." She was about fifty and, like many of Montane's appointees, strictly religious. Her neat, regular features were unadorned by cosmetics and, although she was not required to be in uniform, she favoured dark grey suits which were almost military in style. She had abundant chestnut hair, long and flowing, which to Nicklin's eye contrasted oddly with the general severity of her appearance.

  "They can't withhold permission," Montane said. "Not now. There have been too many signs."

  "Corey, you didn't see what it was like just before we got out," Nicklin said. "The whole place was–"

  "I didn't ask for your opinion, Nicklin." Montane's voice was hard and his gaze openly hostile.

  "I'm giving it to you just the same," Nicklin replied, noting that Montane had, for the first time, addressed him by his surname. "It would be madness to go back."

  "What are you doing here, anyway? What happened to the great disbeliever? Why aren't you back in Beachhead, scoffing and sneering, and telling everybody who'll listen to you that Orbitsville will go on for ever?"

  "I … " Nicklin looked away, vanquished by the preacher's logic and contempt.

  "Jim is right in what he says," Hepworth put in. "If we go back we'll lose the ship."

  Montane dismissed him with a gesture and spoke directly to the pilot. "I've given you your orders – take the ship back to the portal and put it into dock."

  For a moment Fleischer looked as though she was about to protest, then she nodded and turned her attention to the control console before her. She touched several command pads in rapid succession. Hepworth took a step towards her, but his way was immediately blocked by Affleck, whose ravaged face was stiff with the promise of violence.

  Bemused, filled with conflicting emotions, Nicklin studied the brilliant blue disk of the portal. He guessed the Tara was some five kilometres out from the surface of Orbitsville. At that range the port's docking cradles, massively clamped to the rim of the aperture, were visible as a cluster of tiny irregularities in an otherwise perfect circle. He tried to visualise the scenes that would occur in the dock area when it was discovered that the ship was returning, but his imagination balked. Human behaviour was unpredictable at the best of times, and when thousands of people were driven by primaeval terror…

  But whatever happens, he told himself, I've done with killing.

  Almost of its own accord his right hand dropped to the stock of the rifle and ejected the weapon's power pack. He was slipping the massy little cylinder into his pocket when he became aware of a fundamental change taking place in the geometries of the view screen. The change was so radical, so contrary to all his expectations, that he had to stare at the image for several seconds before accepting its message.

  The searingly bright blue disk of the portal was shrinking.

  His first thought was that Fleischer had defied Montane by directing maximum power into the ion tubes, dramatically speeding up the ship's flight away from Orbitsville. Then came the realisation that he was dealing in physical impossibilities – no star drive yet devised could produce the kind of acceleration which would be compatible with what he was seeing. He could feel no gravitational increase at ail, and yet the image of the portal was visibly contracting. The only possible explanation was that the view screen was depicting a real event.

  The portal itself was becoming smaller.

  All activity in the control room ceased. The power to move or speak, or even to think, was removed from the five watchers as the portal dwindled. In the span of less than a minute the huge circle shrank to the apparent size of an azure planet, a moon, a bright star.

  It glimmered briefly, amid a haze of after-images, and then it was gone.

  The Orbitsville trap had been sprung.

  PART THREE:

  THE SCHEME SHATTERS

  CHAPTER 18

  "Looks like we got out of there just in time."

  The speaker was Nibs Affleck, who normally maintained a deferent silence in the presence of senior personnel, and the sheer banality of his remark served to free the others from their mental and physical paralysis.

  "God, God, God," Montane whispered, sinking to his knees, hands steepled beneath his chin. "Do not abandon your children in their hour of need."

  "We should try the radio," Hepworth said to Fleischer, his voice surprisingly firm and clear.

  She twisted in her seat to look up at him. "Why?"

  "I want to know about the other portals. Perhaps what happened at Pi is an isolated phenomenon. We should try to get in touch."

  The pilot managed to smile. "Something tells me that would be a waste of time. Especially mine."

  "I could do it for you," Hepworth said. He glanced down at the adjacent seat and Nicklin realised that – even in this hour of astonishment, when reality itself seemed to be in a state of flux – he was observing shipboard protocol.

  "Be my guest," Fleischer said, turning back to her own area of the console.

  As Hepworth sank into the high-backed seat, his movement slowed by the minimal gravity, Nicklin returned his attention to the master screen. It was now uniformly black, the Tara's drive cylinders having become invisible when the rays from the Orbitsville sun were shut off. Several auxiliary screens, fed by cameras aimed ahead of the ship and to the side, were showing patterns of stars – but looking aft there appeared to be a universe without light. Nicklin knew the emptiness was illusory, that Orbitsville's vast non-reflective shell occupied half of the normal sphere of vision, but the sense of being a castaway in a totally sterile cosmos persisted.

  Mentally, he was similarly adrift. How was he to come to terms with the simple fact that Corey Montane had been right all along? Orbitsville was not eternal and changeless. He had always intuited that it was a product of nature, an object which had somehow evolved to the nth state of matter at which it could never be understood by the human mind. Now he was face-to-face with the concept of Orbitsville as an artefact, and that led to the great questions about who had built it and their purpose in doing so.

  His rejection of a religious scenario was instinctive, intellectual and complete – but what was left?

  As his mind rebounded from what it could not encompass he found himself turning to the more immediate question of what would happen next. Was it possible that, as Montane believed, the forces involved in Orbitsville's transformation were hostile to life? Not solely to humanity – that notion was paranoic to far beyond the point of absurdity – but to every form of animate matter. Could the central sun be extinguished, thus purging the globe of biological contamination? Could the Big O contract like a collapsing star and eventually disappear? Or could it explosively fly apart?

  The apocalyptic vision of Orbitsville's shell yielding to mechanical stresses led Nicklin, by association, to remember the green lines which had appeared in many places three years earlier. The force field connected with them was known to weaken the cohesion of steel and concrete – was it therefore having the same effect; on the shell material? There had been reports that the glowing lines were also visible on the outside of Orbitsville, which suggested that their influence was indeed able to penetrate ylem.

  Reluctant to regard the idea as anything but purest fantasy, Nicklin nevertheless scanned the dark screen more closely in search of radiant green threads. None was visible, but he realised at once that, as the lines had been hundreds of kilometres apart, the camera facing directly astern covered too little of Orbitsville's surface. He tried the lateral images, but in them the angle of sight was too acute to be of any value.

  "Nothing on the radio," Hepworth announced, getting out of his chair. "I had to check, but my guess is that Orbitsville has sealed itself up all
over. Tighter than the proverbial duck's ass."

  "I wouldn't have put it quite like that," Fleischer said, "but I'm in agreement."

  "That means we drop any proposal to go back." Hepworth turned to Nicklin. "What do you say, Jim?"

  "It seems to me we have no option but to go on with the flight, but – " Nicklin glanced down at Montane, who was still on his knees and praying silently with his eyes closed.

  "But what?"

  "We're talking like a management committee, but things were never set up that way. Corey is the man in charge."

  "Jim! What's the matter with you?" Hepworth's plump face showed exasperation. "Just look at him! The man obviously isn't capable of commanding a rowboat, let alone a – " He broke off and made a placating gesture as Nibs Affleck took a threatening step towards him.

  "All I can say, Monsignor Nicklin," Hepworth added in a low voice, moving closer to Nicklin, "Is that I never noticed you deferring much to Pope Corey in the past."

  "I know, I know." The emotional conflict Nicklin was experiencing made speech difficult. "But he laid it on the line a minute ago. I shouldn't even … I mean, if it hadn't been for Corey I would still be…"

  "It's all right, Jim." Montane had risen to his feet, his face set and unnaturally white. "There's no need for an argument here. A lot of people have been left behind, but that's my fault. I was warned some time ago that direct action was called for, and … well … I did nothing about it. One day I will have to answer to God for that, and I only hope I can face Him when my time comes."

  "In the mean time," Hepworth said impatiently, "we press on to Prospect One. Is that what you're saying?"

  Montane shrugged, something Nicklin had never seen him do before. "That's what I'm saying."

  Hepworth, looking triumphant, nodded to the pilot. "There you are, captain – do you want to spread your wings?"

  For a moment Nicklin thought that Hepworth was trying to sound poetic, then realised he had referred to the electromagnetic scoop fields which had to be deployed on each side of the Tara to gather reaction mass. On diagrams their curved shape looked like huge wings, causing interstellar ramjets to be popularly known as butterfly ships.